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Sharp (apple.github.io)
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Enhance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhF_56SxrGk
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Impressive but something doesn't feel right to me.. Possibly too much sharpness, possibly a mix of cliches, all amplified at once.
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TMPI looks just as good if not better.
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Disagree - look at the sky in the seaweed shot. It doesn't quite get the depth right in anything, and the edges of things look off.
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"Unsplash > Gen3C > The fly video" is nightmare fuel. View at your own risk: https://apple.github.io/ml-sharp/video_selections/Unsplash/gen3c_aligned/-6ebJNtXtWs_0000-0001.mp4
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Seth Brundle has entered the chat.
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See also Spaitial[0] which announced today full 3D environment generation from a single image [0] https://www.spaitial.ai/
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I'm confused, does it actually generate environments from photographs? I can't view the galleries since I didn't sign up for emails but all of the gallery thumbnails are AI, not photos.
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Requires email to view anything, that’s sad
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Why are all their examples of rooms? Why no landscape or underwater scenes or something in space, etc.?
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That is really impressive. However, it was a bit confusing at first because in the koala example at the top, the zoomed in area is only slightly bigger than the source area. I wonder why they didn't make it 2-3x as big in both axes like they did with the others.
This is great for turning a photo into a dynamic-IPD stereo pair + allows some head movement in VR.
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Ah and the dynamic IPD component preserves scale?
As well as their "Spatial Scene" mode for lock screen images, which synthesizes a mild parallax effect as you move the phone.
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you can also press the button while viewing a photo in the Photos app to see this.
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It's available for everyday photos, portraits, everything, not just lock screens.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling (bbc.com)
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I agree that Carney should use Canadian English. However, this does not seem like a major enough issue to me, to worry about much, nor is it important enough to fine or sue anyone or anything else like that.
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I've never heard anything about a change to British spelling. Sounds like nonsense. Carney is the most popular politician Canada has had in decades. The opposition party is starting to fall apart (two members defected, which means Carney's party is one seat away from a majority). Whole thing sounds like an attempt to manufacture an 'Obama beige suit' moment.
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> "So far, bless him, he has not resorted to 'gaol' for 'jail.'" Some parts of Canada inexplicably used "gaol" for "jail" until fairly recently. For example, the "Headingley Gaol" near Winnipeg. The jail has been renamed to Headingley Correctional Center, but the road to it is still Gaol Road, preserving the linguistic curiosity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headingley_Correctional_Institution [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gaol+Rd,+Headingley,+MB,+Canada/
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Canadian English is what you get when a country moves out of England’s attic to attend university and ends up with America as a roommate.
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Related: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/the-ize-have-it
8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions (koi.ai)
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> This means a human at Google reviewed Urban VPN Proxy and concluded it met their standards. Or that the review happened before the code harvested all the LLM conversations and never got reviewed after it was updated.
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8 million users on sketchy VPN extensions. 70 thousand users on what I would actually call "privacy" extensions. Bit of a misleading title then.
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> A "Featured" badge from Google, meaning it had passed manual review and met what Google describes as "a high standard of user experience and design." Trusting Google with your privacy is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
> Urban VPN is operated by Urban Cyber Security Inc., which is affiliated with BiScience (B.I Science (2009) Ltd.), a data broker company. And BiScience is an Israeli company based in Tel Aviv. Case closed.
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Download Valley strikes again!
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I would figure state actors don’t need to go through the trouble of a browser extension. But, yeah.
I stick to extensions that Mozilla has manually vetted as part of the Firefox recommended extensions program. > Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-program I know that Google hates to pay human beings, but this is an area that needs human eyes on code, not just automated scans.
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Yeah IT pros and tech aware "power" users can always take these measures but the very availability of poor or maliciously coded extensions and apps in popular app stores makes it a problem considering normies will get swayed by the swanky features the software promises and will click past all misgivings and warnings. Social engineering attacks are impossible to prevent using technical means alone. Either a critical mass of ordinary people need to become more safety/privacy conscious or general purpose computing devices will become more & more niche as the very industry which creates these problems in the first place by poor review will also sell the solution of universal thin-clients and locked down devices, of course with the very happy cooperation of govts everywhere.
I don't understand why so many people are using / trusting VPNs "Let us handle all your internet traffic.. you can trust us.. we're free!" No thank you.
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For the same reason you trust your ISP? It handles all your internet traffic; and depending on where you live, probably has government-mandated back doors, or is willing to cooperate with arbitrary requests from law-enforcement agencies. That's why TLS exists, after all. All Internet traffic is wiretapped.
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I'd be significantly more suspicious by default of ISPs that charge no money. > That's why TLS exists, after all. That protects you if you're using standard methods to connect. Installed software gets to bypass it.
Does tls means certificate pinning ? Can't a vpn alter dns queries to return a proxy website to your bank, using a forged certificate ?
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TLS means “there’s a certificate”. Yeah, if a VPN/proxy can forge a certificate that the user’s browser would trust, it’s an issue. But considering those are browser extensions, I think they can just inspect any traffic they want on the client side (if they can get such broad permissions approved, which is probably not too hard).
I thought manifest v3 was supposed to make chrome extensions secure?
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Its the reason why they found it because the code was in extension. Before manifest v3, extensions could just load external scripts and there's no way you could tell what they were actually doing.
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> extensions could just load external scripts and there's no way you could tell what they were actually doing. I do think security researchers would be able to figure out what scripts are downloaded and run. Regardless, none of this seems to matter to end users whether the script is in the extension or external.
> Don't be rude. What, there's an issue because I'm not being underhanded about it like that swatcoder guy? > And also, why extension for vpn? Why are you asking me that?
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>> Don't be rude. > What, there's an issue because I'm not being underhanded about it like [that] guy? Wow you’ve put something into words here I never consciously realized is an unwritten rule. Sounds silly but yea you’re 100% right; that seems to be exactly the game we play. For better or for worse.
Ideas aren't getting harder to find (asteriskmag.com)
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The puzzle amounts to asking ourselves what is so special about 2%? And given the inevitable large swings in market theory fads, policy fads, generational changes, etc. why is the 2% so robust? Perhaps we should think of things that could be universal, like approximate age a person starts working, approximate age a person simply can no longer work, or how many times one can fundamentally fool a person before totally demotivating them. suppose we assume 15 till 65 years, a ~50 year career maximum (and some effective career length in between, ended either by age related problems or disillusionment): lets take one of many "scams" or "white lies" or whatever one wishes to call them, like pension funds, when you start working and you place money in the fund, but that money devalues, and by the time you are on your pension, the money has halved in value so to speak, suppose a rough inflation rate of 2% (whenever the nation as a whole was more productive, that productivity was printed away by the central bank issuing more money, devaluating everyone's savings). After 50 years 0.98^50 = ~0.36 At some point people just chug along satisfying themselves with minimum wage, because the effort for a marginal increase is not commensurate
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Why doesn't anyone pay attention to the elephant in the room: median age? It has increased by 10 years in those 50 years. And, money is now overwhelmingly concentrated in the older cohorts just simply because there were no significant "reset" events for a long time such as massive wealth expropriations, wars, destruction - last time government robbed people of their property on a massive scale, was in 1865. It means that people who consume things, are now risk averse and unlikely to break with their habits. See how different is the trajectory of electric cars in the US, EU, and China. In the US, average new car buyer is 50, in EU, 53, in China, it is 36. Plus, in China old people are dirt poor - peak income age is 35, in EU too, crushing taxes prevent wealth accumulation so old people are poorer than young who work more and are nimble enough to avoid taxes. This cannot be fixed, because it requires either a Lebensborn-style forced reproduction program, or mass confiscations/redistributions, or both. We better accept situation the way it is.
The puzzle referenced is why more innovation is no longer rewarded by the market. That’s relatively recent.
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You still misread the article: they observe the nearly constant 2% growth across the long timespan, regardless of the relative increases in researchers, regardless of all the policy changes, regardless of ... The article is NOT about some recent change. Please cite the article if you believe it is trying to solve a puzzle concerning a recent change. The whole point is that this 2% seems to be robust, regardless of investing or getting more ideas, invalidating the idea that the growth is a simple result of the production of ideas (say making blueprints for a new kind of factory, which can then be copied without having to make more blueprints).
Edward Tufte strikes again
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Edward Tufte is all about presenting complex information in novel and user-friendly visualizations.
Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders (quill-os.org)
I see their repo[0] mentions transitioning to the Pinenote. I'd like to run an ordinary distribution on my Pinenote. Does anyone know what the mainline support is like nowadays, and whether widely packaged software can make it usable as an ebook reader? 0. https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill
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The kernel has mainline support, but it looks a fork is used by most images. https://git.sr.ht/~hrdl/linux/log/v6.17-rc5_pinenote has many commits.
If you don't require an e-ink display, the least effort route might be the MS Surface Go 3 tablet running Windows or Linux ( https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup ). The Remarkable 2 has an e-ink display but is rather underpowered as an e-reader. It does have an SDK for building apps: https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/sdk
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Love my Remarkable 2, but my main use case for an e-reader is reading in bed at night, and it just doesn't work for that (form factor and lack of backlight, though the newer ones do have a backlight). However, for reading technical docs or workshop docs in daylight, it's great.
> They do not "buy more copies" to circulate. That is exactly how ebook licenses for libraries work.
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No, that is not how ebook licenses work. They buy more LICENSES not more COPIES.
JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet (reuters.com)
TIL Europe still has some presence in the Americas. Thought all of that was gone with the Monroe Doctrine
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The Monroe Doctrine was about preventing colonial powers from enacting NEW efforts to reach into the Americas, not about getting rid of previous control. "The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects FOR FUTURE COLONIZATION by any European powers." (emphasis mine) https://usinfo.org/PUBS/LivingDoc_e/monroe.htm
Not necessarily; the same remoteness that made cell signal sparse likely makes ADS-B ground stations unlikely. There has to be one in range for it to show up places like FlightAware. Plenty of dead spots; you can help expand the network! https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/
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I have an ADS-B receiver on a computer here, and am overhead a number of flight paths for JBLM. The above comment is accurate, plenty of local training helicopter flights will be fully or partly dark (lights and/or transponders off), looking at my receiver's raw output stream.
I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert. If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times. We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.
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I live near JBLM in Washington. I am routinely overflown by helicopters and planes (C-17s) often with their transponders off (I have an ADS-B receiver running on a VM). These are training flights that are not going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound region. For added fun, I'm also pretty close to several Sea-Tac approaches.
Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre. Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FORTE10/history/20230821/0203Z/L%2043.34248%2033.44616
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And they often deliberately have them off, even for training flights, at least looking at my ADS-B receivers raw output and correlating to FA/FR24/etc.
I find words in the same category as "country", "nation", "state", etc are increasingly used interchangeably. Largely because they tend to be far more specific than people mean to be... but also because generic terms like "polity" never caught on in the mainstream. A similar thing is how "nation-states" would appear to be the only type of place worth worrying about highly organized attacks from in infosec, until you ask them to define what they consider a nation-state. That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
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It's hard to use them consistently because there isn't a single universally accepted definition. Most people would consider the Netherlands a "country", but now we have a country within that country. Israel is a state, Japan is a state, but there are 50 states in the United States. "[People's] Republic of XYZ" generally refers to a sovereign state, but Russia has republics inside. You can't just call something what the locals call it and expect that your readers will get the picture. Even worse, people are often deeply divided as to what a given territory should be called. So I will generally forgive journalists for picking a neutral-sounding, ambiguous expression in cases like this. What matters here is that the Dutch control this airspace, regardless of Curaçao's status within their kingdom.
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