BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Neuralink rival Synchron’s brain implant now lets people control Apple’s Vision Pro with their minds
Synchron is building a brain-computer interface, or a BCI, designed to help patients with paralysis operate technology like smartphones and computers with their minds.
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Canva acquires Leonardo.ai
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/29/canva-acquires-leonardo-ai-to-boost-its-generative-ai-efforts
The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it’s a mix of cash and stock. All of Leonardo.ai’s 120 employees will be joining Canva, including the executive team.
“Leonardo will continue to run independently of Canva with a focus on rapid innovation, research and development, now backed by Canva’s resources,” Adams told TechCrunch. “We’ll keep offering all of Leonardo’s existing tools and solutions. This acquisition aims to help Leonardo develop its platform and deepen their user growth with our investment, including by expanding their API business and investing in foundational model R&D.”
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Autodesk acquires Wonder Dynamics
This strategic move supports Autodesk’s goal to democratize creative tools and foster innovation in the media and entertainment industry. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Free fonts
https://fontlibrary.org
https://fontsource.orgOpen-source fonts packaged into individual NPM packages for self-hosting in web applications. Self-hosting fonts can significantly improve website performance, remain version-locked, work offline, and offer more privacy.
https://www.awwwards.com/awwwards/collections/free-fonts
http://www.fontspace.com/popular/fonts
https://www.urbanfonts.com/free-fonts.htm
http://www.1001fonts.com/poster-fonts.html
How to use @font-face in CSS
The
@font-facerule allows custom fonts to be loaded on a webpage: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/using-font-face-in-css/ -
Daniel Wee – Free Automate Render Output Setup for Blender
https://danielicious615.gumroad.com/l/wtbtrx
Link all your passes and aovs into the output node automatically. It can works with EEVEE and CYCLES. The default output for Blender is really bad, but after use this script can really save your life and make your life easier!
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Ridley Scott Wants to ‘Embrace’ AI for Post-Production
Despite embracing technology, the “Blade Runner” and “Alien” director has long incorporated the fear of AI in his stories onscreen and knows better than most about its ramifications. Scott previously told Rolling Stone in November 2023 that when it came to his concerns about artificial intelligence broadly, he said that AI was “dangerous” and akin to a “technical hydrogen bomb.”
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What are you really selling? Smart ADs
https://www.demandcurve.com/newsletters/growth-newsletter-199
Look at the “benefit of a benefit.”
Step 1:
Write a list of your product’s benefits AND its downsides.
Step 2:
Analyze each and ask, “what’s a unexpected / obvious / helpful / interesting / funny / convenient / comforting / amazing / wild / beautiful / exciting / weird… benefit of this benefit/downside?”
In other words, what’s a second-order benefit of that benefit/downside?
It can either be directly for the user (kids on a trampoline) or for the real buyer/user (relaxed parent).
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3D Printer Filament Types: Overview
https://help.prusa3d.com/materials
https://www.simplify3d.com/resources/materials-guide/properties-table/
https://kingroon.com/blogs/3d-printing-guides/3d-printer-filament-types
https://www.wevolver.com/article/3d-printer-filament-types-functional-filaments
https://ultimate3dprintingstore.com/blogs/ultimate-3d-printing-guide/3d-printing-filament-guide
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David Cahn – AI’s $600B Question, is it a sustainable bubble?
https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question
The expanding economic impact of AI, highlights a significant gap between AI infrastructure investments and actual revenue generation. Despite easing GPU shortages and increased investments by cloud providers, AI-related revenue, particularly dominated by OpenAI, remains insufficient to justify the massive capital expenditures. The analysis reveals that this gap has grown from $125 billion to $500 billion, posing challenges for the AI industry while emphasizing the need for realistic expectations and sustainable value creation.
OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024, AI startup set to lose $5bn – report
AI: Are we in another dot-com bubble?
The power of AI will transform every facet of our society, from the micro changes in our day-to-day lives to the macro changes in global geopolitics. It will challenge our values and assumptions and make us reconsider what it means to be human. It is inevitable that some capital will be wasted getting there. We may even experience a bubble or two. But this is part of the growing pains of advancing humankind. Society, like our individual lives, seldom take the shortest route. As to the argument that we are in a bubble right now, we think it deserves some reconsidering.
https://kelvinmu.substack.com/p/ai-are-we-in-another-dot-com-bubble
FEATURED POSTS
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Ross Pettit on The Agile Manager – How tech firms went for prioritizing cash flow instead of talent (and artists)
For years, tech firms were fighting a war for talent. Now they are waging war on talent.
This shift has led to a weakening of the social contract between employees and employers, with culture and employee values being sidelined in favor of financial discipline and free cash flow.
The operating environment has changed from a high tolerance for failure (where cheap capital and willing spenders accepted slipped dates and feature lag) to a very low – if not zero – tolerance for failure (fiscal discipline is in vogue again).
While preventing and containing mistakes staves off shocks to the income statement, it doesn’t fundamentally reduce costs. Years of payroll bloat – aggressive hiring, aggressive comp packages to attract and retain people – make labor the biggest cost in tech.
…Of course, companies can reduce their labor force through natural attrition. Other labor policy changes – return to office mandates, contraction of fringe benefits, reduction of job promotions, suspension of bonuses and comp freezes – encourage more people to exit voluntarily. It’s cheaper to let somebody self-select out than it is to lay them off.
…Employees recruited in more recent years from outside the ranks of tech were given the expectation that we’ll teach you what you need to know, we want you to join because we value what you bring to the table. That is no longer applicable. Runway for individual growth is very short in zero-tolerance-for-failure operating conditions. Job preservation, at least in the short term for this cohort, comes from completing corporate training and acquiring professional certifications. Training through community or experience is not in the cards.
…The ability to perform competently in multiple roles, the extra-curriculars, the self-directed enrichment, the ex-company leadership – all these things make no matter. The calculus is what you got paid versus how you performed on objective criteria relative to your cohort. Nothing more.
…Here is where the change in the social contract is perhaps the most blatant. In the “destination employer” years, the employee invested in the community and its values, and the employer rewarded the loyalty of its employees through things like runway for growth (stretch roles and sponsored work innovation) and tolerance for error (valuing demonstrable learning over perfection in execution). No longer.
…http://www.rosspettit.com/2024/08/for-years-tech-was-fighting-war-for.html
