BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Alan Friedman Takes Stunning Hi-Res Photographs of the Sun in His Backyard
https://www.boredpanda.com/high-resolution-sun-pictures-alan-friedman/
https://avertedimagination.squarespace.com/
He uses a small (3 ½” aperture) telescope with a Hydrogen Alpha filter and an industrial webcam to capture the surface of the Sun, which looks surprisingly calm and fluffy in the incredible photos.
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AI and the Law – This Vox article is OpenAI training data – How AI is holding the internet hostage and media is no exception
- Pros of AI Chatbots:
- Efficiency and Accessibility: AI chatbots can handle a large volume of queries simultaneously, providing quick and consistent responses, which is beneficial for customer service and support.
- 24/7 Availability: Unlike human operators, chatbots are available around the clock, ensuring that users can get assistance at any time.
- Cost-Effective: Implementing chatbots can reduce operational costs for businesses by minimizing the need for large customer service teams.
- Personalization and Scalability: Advanced AI can offer personalized responses and scale effortlessly to meet demand.
- Cons of AI Chatbots:
- Bias and Misinformation: AI chatbots can inadvertently propagate biases present in their training data, leading to inaccurate or offensive responses.
- Lack of Human Touch: Chatbots may struggle to understand and respond appropriately to nuanced human emotions and complex queries, potentially frustrating users.
- Technical Limitations: While AI is advancing, chatbots can still make errors and provide incorrect information, which can undermine user trust.
- Environmental Impact: Training and running large AI models consume significant energy, contributing to carbon emissions and environmental concerns.
The deployment of AI chatbots raises significant ethical concerns. Biases in training data can lead to the generation of skewed or harmful content, posing risks to users and undermining trust in AI systems. Additionally, the potential misuse of AI chatbots for spreading misinformation and the environmental impact of training large AI models are critical issues that require attention.
The trajectory of AI chatbot development points towards increasingly sophisticated and generalized AI capabilities. As research progresses towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the potential applications of AI chatbots are expected to expand further, encompassing more complex and nuanced tasks. However, achieving AGI will require addressing current ethical and technical challenges to ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies.
- Pros of AI Chatbots:
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Elon Musk on the universe being the answer
“The real problem is trying to formulate a question for something we do not know already”
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CupiX Vista – reconstruct environments from off the shelf 360 cameras
CupixVista is a new Al that can convert 360° video footage into the 3D map and virtual tour.
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The Hollywood VFX Jobs Most At-Risk From AI
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-hollywood-workers-job-cuts-1235811009/
Over the next three years, it estimates that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected.
In November, former Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said the tech will replace 90 percent of jobs on animated films.
Roughly a third of respondents surveyed predicted that AI will displace sound editors, 3D modelers, re-recording mixers and audio and video technicians within three years, while a quarter said that sound designers, compositors and graphic designers are likely to be affected.
Roughly a third of respondents surveyed predicted that AI will displace sound editors, 3D modelers, re-recording mixers and audio and video technicians within three years, while a quarter said that sound designers, compositors and graphic designers are likely to be affected.
AI tools may increasingly be used to help create images that can streamline character design and storyboarding process, lowering demand for concept artists, illustrators and animators.
According to the study, the job tasks most likely to be impacted by AI in the film and TV industry are 3-D modeling, character and environment design, voice generation and cloning and compositing, followed by sound design, tools programming, script writing, animation and rigging, concept art/visual development and light/texture generation.
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THOMAS MANSENCAL – The Apparent Simplicity of RGB Rendering
https://thomasmansencal.substack.com/p/the-apparent-simplicity-of-rgb-rendering
The primary goal of physically-based rendering (PBR) is to create a simulation that accurately reproduces the imaging process of electro-magnetic spectrum radiation incident to an observer. This simulation should be indistinguishable from reality for a similar observer.
Because a camera is not sensitive to incident light the same way than a human observer, the images it captures are transformed to be colorimetric. A project might require infrared imaging simulation, a portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum that is invisible to us. Radically different observers might image the same scene but the act of observing does not change the intrinsic properties of the objects being imaged. Consequently, the physical modelling of the virtual scene should be independent of the observer.
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THE THEORY THAT CONSCIOUSNESS IS A QUANTUM SYSTEM
https://mindmatters.ai/2024/01/the-theory-that-consciousness-is-a-quantum-system-gains-support/
In short, it says that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions in tiny structures called microtubules that are found inside neurons – and, in fact, in all complex cells.
In quantum theory, a particle does not really exist as a tiny bit of matter located somewhere but rather as a cloud of probabilities. If observed, it collapses into the state in which it was observed. Penrose has postulated that “each time a quantum wave function collapses in this way in the brain, it gives rise to a moment of conscious experience.”
Hameroff has been studying proteins known as tubulins inside the microtubules of neurons. He postulates that “microtubules inside neurons could be exploiting quantum effects, somehow translating gravitationally induced wave function collapse into consciousness, as Penrose had suggested.” Thus was born a collaboration, though their seminal 1996 paper failed to gain much traction.
FEATURED POSTS
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Unity – HDRI processing
The goal is to clean the initial individual brackets before or at merging time as much as possible.
This means:- keeping original shooting metadata
- de-fringing
- removing aberration (through camera lens data or automatically)
- at 32 bit
- in ACEScg (or ACES) wherever possible
Local copy
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Photography basics: Color Temperature and White Balance
Color Temperature of a light source describes the spectrum of light which is radiated from a theoretical “blackbody” (an ideal physical body that absorbs all radiation and incident light – neither reflecting it nor allowing it to pass through) with a given surface temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature
Or. Most simply it is a method of describing the color characteristics of light through a numerical value that corresponds to the color emitted by a light source, measured in degrees of Kelvin (K) on a scale from 1,000 to 10,000.
More accurately. The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal backbody that radiates light of comparable hue to that of the light source.
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Black Body color aka the Planckian Locus curve for white point eye perception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
Black-body radiation is the type of electromagnetic radiation within or surrounding a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, or emitted by a black body (an opaque and non-reflective body) held at constant, uniform temperature. The radiation has a specific spectrum and intensity that depends only on the temperature of the body.
A black-body at room temperature appears black, as most of the energy it radiates is infra-red and cannot be perceived by the human eye. At higher temperatures, black bodies glow with increasing intensity and colors that range from dull red to blindingly brilliant blue-white as the temperature increases.
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