Category: Uncategorized

Movies Within Games

Creating a tool for designing well-sculpted, appealing protagonists who fit into the same consistent art style is surprisingly complex. However, the number of people out there who want to play an AAA computer game is massive – easily enough to justify the investment in a tool capable of churning out almost infinite numbers of beautifully sculpted, world-consistent protagonists. And so, suddenly, for an independent storyteller, the projected costs of any independent animated project plummet if they’re willing to use a “Machinima” approach.

It would be possible to tell almost any low to mid-fantasy story using Skyrim or World of Warcraft, with some minor modifications. The genre of science fiction, at least in its mainstream film-friendly incarnation, is similarly well-covered by EVE Online, Half-Life 2, Dead Space and 10s of other games. (It would take some thinking, but I could probably make a fair stab at adapting any of Charlie’s SF works using one, another, or a combination of game engines.) And of course, modern-day stories are thoroughly covered by everything from The Sims to Call of Duty.

Coelacanth

The long story of sequencing the coelacanth genome, the fish most closely related to us (but not our direct ancestor)

When it turned up unexpectedly, the coelacanth was the biological find of the century. And now it is showing why. Its biographer tells the best fish story in 380 ma

Robot learning

scientists have developed an online platform where robots can learn new skills from each other worldwide — a kind of “Wikipedia for robots.” The objective is to help develop robots better at helping elders with caring and household tasks.

2024-01-22: Large-scale collaboration to share training data

The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains 1m robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market. The robots in this dataset perform a huge range of behaviors, including picking and placing objects, assembly, and specialized tasks like cable routing. There are 500 different skills and interactions with 1000s of different objects. It’s the largest open-source dataset of real robotic actions in existence.
To test the capabilities of our model, 5 of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot. Each lab’s test involved the tasks it was using for its own research, which included things like picking up and moving objects, opening doors, and routing cables through clips. Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory’s own best method, succeeding at the tasks 50% more often on average.
Our early results hint at how large cross-embodiment robotics models could transform the field. Much as large language models have mastered a wide range of language-based tasks, in the future we might use the same foundation model as the basis for many real-world robotic tasks. Perhaps new robotic skills could be enabled by fine-tuning or even prompting a pretrained foundation model. In a similar way to how you can prompt ChatGPT to tell a story without first training it on that particular story, you could ask a robot to write “Happy Birthday” on a cake without having to tell it how to use a piping bag or what handwritten text looks like. Of course, much more research is needed for these models to take on that kind of general capability, as our experiments have focused on single arms with 2-finger grippers doing simple manipulation tasks.

Most metal goat

Biquette spent the first half of her life in a milking factory, and was then handed over to the farm, where she immediately started to hang out at the shows. “Seeing as the barn floor where we throw the concerts is wooden, I think that she felt the vibrations in her hooves”. Flo added that the goat really enjoyed any settings with lots of people, and would hang out whenever there was a gathering. Biquette was very tame, and followed the Malaysian grindcore band around like a dog. “When it was Wormrot’s turn to play, the goat suddenly went in front of the crowd and watched them play the whole set. It was just chilling around the corner when other bands were playing.” And grindcore wasn’t Biquette’s only vice. She loved tobacco and alcohol, which might have even contributed to her early demise.

Nanobiopsies

using a 50nm pipette to repeatedly sample from a living cell without killing it.

robotic nanobiopsy can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. Single-cell nanobiopsy is a powerful tool for scientists working to understand the dynamic processes that occur within living cells

Buttcoin 2.0

Of course this will catch a lot of people off guard. Some combination of DACs, distributed contracts, software, non-BTC asset transfers and higher protocol layers will render more trusted third-party intermediaries of the paleoeconomy (and their handlers) irrelevant. Large portions of the economy invested in centralized stock and bond exchanges, asset and derivatives markets, and even legal provision could become redundant sooner than many know. Should these ventures succeed, the Bitcoin community will face another round of public scrutiny and pressures to justify or amend their existence. Someday, they might be able to just ignore them. The implications are unclear but uncomfortable.

vi Moria

vi: Moria
Like Fangorn, ancient and deep, with hints of the long labor of a great people. There is, supposedly, a monumental city of stone down here somewhere but it’s so dark I can’t see a damn thing. No, wait! A shaft of light illuminates some runes! They read as follows:

^C^C^X^X^X^Xquit
qQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;
:xwhat