Skip Navigation
Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Embryo Found Inside Fossilized Egg
  • That reminds me of a joke.

    A museum guide is talking to a group about the dinosaur fossils on exhibit.
    "This one," he says, "Is 6 million and 2 years old."
    "Wow," says a patron, "How do you know the age so accurately?"
    "Well," says the guide, "It was 6 million years old when I started here 2 years ago."

  • Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

    Achieves SOTA on quality AND on training time AND renders in real-time (60fps+)

    1
    Divide & Bind technique for generative image models
    sites.google.com Divide & Bind

    Our Divide & Bind can significantly improve a pretrained text-to-image model, faithfully generate multiple objects based on detailed textual description. Compared to prior state-of-the-art semantic nursing technique for text-to-image synthesis, Attend & Excite, our approach exhibits superior

    Greatly improves Stable Diffusion's issues of missing objects and mixing up attributes

    0
    Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature
  • From Wikipedia: this is only a 1-sigma result compared to theory using lattice calculations. It would have been 5.1-sigma if the calculation method had not been improved.
    Many calculations in the standard model are mathematically intractable with current methods, so improving approximate solutions is not trivial and not surprising that we've found improvements.

  • 'Barbie' Makes Greta Gerwig 1st Female Director with Billion-Dollar Movie
  • This seems like more of an achievement for the Barbie brand than for the individual director.

  • Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    When you ask someone to check your code
    7
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    The midpoint of the debugging journey
    2
    RT-2: DeepMind robotic research based on PaLM visual language models
    www.deepmind.com RT-2: New model translates vision and language into action

    Introducing Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a novel vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data, and translates this knowledge into generalised instructions for robotic control, while retaining web-scale capabilities. This work builds upon Robotic Transformer 1 (RT-1...

    RT-2: New model translates vision and language into action

    Up to 100% improvement on unseen tasks, environments, and backgrounds

    0
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Looking at the code for a legacy project
    1
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    The scope creep is coming from inside the house
    2
    The Plastic Feminism of Barbie - VerilyBitchie [27:17]
  • This is an essay about the Barbie brand and its relationship to feminism and capitalism through history and the modern day. The Barbie movie is discussed but it's not the primary focus.

  • Massive galaxy with no dark matter is a cosmic puzzle
  • NGC 1277 is unusual among galaxies because it has had little interaction with other surrounding galaxies.

    I wonder if interactions between galaxies somehow converts regular matter to dark matter.

  • Sci-fi you couldn’t get into?
  • Oh certainly, that series took quite a risk on writing style and it's quite divisive.
    If you enjoy fantasy, you could try her other series as an alternative. The Inheritance Trilogy is a more standard writing style.

  • Sci-fi you couldn’t get into?
  • I almost put The Fifth Season down after the first chapter, I remember thinking: "This author has a chip on their shoulder". I'm glad I persevered though, and I definitely recommend the series to people as it is quite different. I'd suggest giving it another shot.

  • Someone Used ChatGPT to Finish the Game of Thrones Book Series - IGN
  • Claude 2 would have a much better chance at this because of the longer context window.
    Though there are plenty of alternate/theorised/critiqued endings for Game of Thrones online, so current chatbots should have a better shot at doing a good job vs other writers who haven't finished their series in over a decade.

  • Babylon 5 Creator Says a Single Warner Bros. Executive Stopped the Show’s Comeback for Close to 20 Years
  • As a counterpoint to other comments here, I didn't like Babylon 5. I gave up in the first season on the episode about religions, where each alien race shows a single religion but then humanity shows an enormous number of them.

    Showing planets in sci fi as homogenous is a common trope, but such a simplistic take. This resonated poorly with me as I felt the aliens all behaved exactly like humans as well, to the point where you have stand-ins for Jehovah's witnesses. That episode cemented for me the feeling I had when watching. Babylon 5 is racist against aliens.

  • Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Die with dignity, for goodness sake
    0
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    C, can we have closures?
    0
    How a plan to recognize Australia's indigenous people became the country's latest culture war
  • Why do you say they have no representation? There are a lot of specific bodies operating in the government, advisory and otherwise, with the sole focus of indigenous affairs. And of course, currently, indigenous Australians are over represented in terms of parliamentarian race (more than 4% if parliamentarians are of indigenous descent).

  • Johnson & Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer
  • While in general, I'd agree, look at the damage a single false paper on vaccination had. There were a lot of follow up studies showing that the paper is wrong, and yet we still have an antivax movement going on.

    Clearly, scientists need to be able to publish without fear of reprisal. But to have no recourse when damage is done by a person acting in bad faith is also a problem.

    Though I'd argue we have the same issue with the media, where they need to be able to operate freely, but are able to cause a lot of harm.

    Perhaps there could be some set of rules which absolve scientists of legal liability. And hopefully those rules are what would ordinarily be followed anyway, and this be no burden to your average researcher.

  • The frame rate needed to completely eliminate all the artifacts associated with discrete frame rates

    0
    Elon Musk’s new AI company is staffed entirely by men
  • Taking 89.3% men from your source at face value, and selecting 12 people at random, that gives a 12.2% chance (1 in 8) that the company of that size would be all male.
    Add in network effects, risk tolerance for startups, and the hiring practices of larger companies, and that number likely gets even larger.

    What's the p-value for a news story? Unless this is some trend from other companies run by Musk, there doesn't seem to be anything newsworthy here.

  • Memes @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    But if that's not the solution, then what is?
    0
    Memes @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    It's the only logical explanation
    0
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Macros have only ever made my life easier
    1
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Just finishing up a PR
    0
    Artificial Muscles Flex for the First Time: Ferroelectric Polymer Innovation in Robotics
  • So, taking the average bicep volume as 1000cm3, this muscle could: exert 1 tonne of force, contact 8% (1.6cm for a 20cm long bicep), and require 400kV and must be above 29 degrees Celcius.

    Maybe someone with access to the paper can double check the math and get the conversion efficiency from electrical to mechanical.

    I expect there's a good trade-off to be made to lower the force but increase the contraction and lower the voltage. Possibly some kind of ratcheting mechanism with tiny cells could be used to overcome the crazy high voltage requirement.

  • What AI developments have surprised you the most?
  • DALL-E was the first development which shocked me. AlphaGo was very impressive on a technical level, and much earlier than anticipated, but it didn't feel different.
    GANs existed, but they never seemed to have the creativity, nor understanding of prompts, which was demonstrated by DALL-E. Of all things, the image of an avocado-themed chair is still baked into my mind. I remember being gobsmacked by the imagery, and when I'd recovered from that, just how "simple" the step from what we had before to DALL-E was.
    The other thing which surprised me was the step from image diffusion models to 3D and video. We certainly haven't gotten anywhere near the quality in those domains yet, but they felt so far from the image domain that we'd need some major revolution in the way we approached the problem. The thing which surprised me the most was just how fast the transition from images to video happened.

  • Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Antsi C
    0
    When the junior starts playing with atomics
  • If this is a real question, this talk explains the fundamental concepts of atomic operations in a couple of minutes.

    The talk itself is over an hour long, as the use of atomic operations has a large number of pitfalls. The joke in the meme leans on a specific type of memory ordering guarantee, known as "relaxed" in C++ parlance, which can be a lot faster, but which is much more likely to violate the default assumptions a programmer may make about order of operations and visibility across threads.

  • ChatGPT's language model fails entirely in the scenario that a man is a nurse
  • I asked the same question of GPT3.5 and got the response "The former chancellor of Germany has the book." And also: "The nurse has the book. In the scenario you described, the nurse is the one who grabs the book and gives it to the former chancellor of Germany." and a bunch of other variations.

    Anyone doing these experiments who does not understand the concept of a "temperature" parameter for the model, and who is not controlling for that, is giving bad information.

    Either you can say: At 0 temperature, the model outputs XYZ. Or, you can say that at a certain temperature value, the model's outputs follow some distribution (much harder to do).

    Yes, there's a statistical bias in the training data that "nurses" are female. And at high temperatures, this prior is over-represented. I guess that's useful to know for people just blindly using the free chat tool from openAI. But it doesn't necessarily represent a problem with the model itself. And to say it "fails entirely" is just completely wrong.

  • Pointers are great
  • The greatest fix to all your pointer issues are to use references.

  • Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Compiletime metaprogramming used to be a challenge
    0
    Programmer Humor @kbin.social Lenguador @kbin.social
    Too many side projects?
    8
    [Discussion Thread] How can we grow the /m/scifi community?
  • None of the related magazines in this community are listing this community in their related magazine section.

    I'd advise expanding (and trimming) the related magazine section, plus messaging mods to ask if they'd like to add your magazine to their related section.

  • Lenguador Lenguador @kbin.social
    Posts 36
    Comments 50