“We combine these two optical systems in a single camera by splitting the aperture: one half applies application-specific modulation using a diffractive optical element, and the other captures a conventional image. This co-design with a dual-pixel sensor allows simultaneous capture of coded and uncoded images — without increasing physical or computational footprint.”
The EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which went into effect on August 1, 2024.
This act implements a risk-based approach to AI regulation, categorizing AI systems based on the level of risk they pose. High-risk systems, such as those used in healthcare, transport, and law enforcement, face stringent requirements, including risk management, transparency, and human oversight.
Key provisions of the AI Act include:
Transparency and Safety Requirements: AI systems must be designed to be safe, transparent, and easily understandable to users. This includes labeling requirements for AI-generated content, such as deepfakes (Engadget).
Risk Management and Compliance: Companies must establish comprehensive governance frameworks to assess and manage the risks associated with their AI systems. This includes compliance programs that cover data privacy, ethical use, and geographical considerations (Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP) (Passle).
Copyright and Data Mining: Companies must adhere to copyright laws when training AI models, obtaining proper authorization from rights holders for text and data mining unless it is for research purposes (Engadget).
Prohibitions and Restrictions: AI systems that manipulate behavior, exploit vulnerabilities, or perform social scoring are prohibited. The act also sets out specific rules for high-risk AI applications and imposes fines for non-compliance (Passle).
For US tech firms, compliance with the EU AI Act is critical due to the EU’s significant market size
FLUX (or FLUX. 1) is a suite of text-to-image models from Black Forest Labs, a new company set up by some of the AI researchers behind innovations and models like VQGAN, Stable Diffusion, Latent Diffusion, and Adversarial Diffusion Distillation
Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.
There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”
