@davemark @RachYall Thank you. Now I’m even less inclined to play it because I get to emotionally invested in stuff…. I just spent days thinking about the end of “Uncharted 4” and that was a happy ending 🙂

@davemark Please lemme know what you think when you do 🙂 I probably won’t get to it this year. I’m slowing down on the gaming and we just got back to playing “Rise of the Tomb Raider” after like 4 or 5 years?

And then “Diablo IV” is coming soon so probably that first …

@BobWilliams Definitely, not just you 🙂 I feel the same way and make a conscious effort to reduce the number of people I follow when my timeline starts becoming too busy …

I hit a point where I’ll feel as if I’m just drowning trying to keep up and that I’m mostly reading but not interacting. Then I try to cut down on the timeline (or move some people over to lists so that they don’t hit the main timeline) so that I have less stuff to deal with. Seems to improve things … at least for me …

@matthras I’m curious about the “too smart” part too. Are you simply saying that ChatGPT is not very smart? Or something that I’m not getting?

@vicki

@davemark Only tangentially related to your question (and no, not an answer 😛) I’ve been debating over playing the game for years now …. Given what I’ve seen written about the game, it sounds as if it’s got a lot of emotional pull, but it also feels to me (partly based on the TV show but I felt the same way before) that it could be emotionally draining — that you’d get to care about the characters but then be devastated at what they go through …

So I stil keep going back and forth about actually playing ,… I have the original (and possibly the new remake) in my library as part of PlayStation Plus (or whatever they are calling it) but I don’t know if I want to play …

Call me contrary, but when I see people saying “I want to work at <Apple/Google/Microsoft>”, I ask, “Why?”

Somebody at work told me recently that Apple would want to hire me because I did/knew something only like 10 people in the world could do and 7 of them worked at Apple. So I was like, “If 7 of them are at Apple, why would Apple want to hire me?”

Plus, I don’t want to work at Apple 😛

I’ve been at Apple as a visitor and seen what the culture is like, and I really don’t want to work at that kind of place. Plus, I really like working from home and based on what I saw (and what I’ve read since the pandemic) Apple really does not seem to like people working from home. Based on what I saw, that tallies.

So why would I work for a company which has diametrically opposed viewpoints to mine? Just because it says “something” about me? Or because I think they might pay me a lot better and money fixes everything?

I do think that if I did that, it would say something about me, but not the same “something” that others are thinking of. Personally, I’d think that I put other people’s opinion of what I am over my own comfort. And I don’t want to do that …

#Work #Companies #Opinions

Boosted 3 papers in the cs.CV category (and one outside) out of a total of 49 new and updated papers on arXiv.org today.

On to other things now …

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

"In What Languages are Generative Language Models the Most Formal? Analyzing Formality Distribution across Languages" — Measuring the formality of the generated text for different languages using multilingual generative language models.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12299

#AI #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning #Language

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Differences between formal and …

"ISS: Image as Stepping Stone for Text-Guided 3D Shape Generation. (arXiv:2209.04145v6 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — Using 2D images as a stepping stone for creating 3D shapes and eliminating the need for paired text-shape data.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04145
Code: https://github.com/liuzhengzhe/ISS-Image-as-Stepping-Stone-for-Text-Guided-3D-Shape-Generation

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Our novel “Image as Stepping St…

"Modulating Pretrained Diffusion Models for Multimodal Image Synthesis. (arXiv:2302.12764v1 [cs.CV])" — Multimodal Conditioning Modules (MCM) for enabling conditional image synthesis using pretrained diffusion models so that you can generate images using not just a text prompt, but additional input such as a segmentation map or a sketch.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12764

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Multimodal conditioning modules…

"Surface Recognition for e-Scooter Using Smartphone IMU Sensor. (arXiv:2302.12720v1 [eess.SP])" — Detecting whether an e-scooter is on a paved road or a sidewalk using the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors on a smartphone.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12720

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Left: an example of a street wi…

We (the wife and I) like playing console games — we especially like co-op games that we can both play at once. But we hate split-screen co-op since we get confused as to who is on which part of the screen 😛

So we are kind of limited on the games we can play. Because of that, when we have nothing else to play, we do try single-player games …

Yesterday was one such day where we tried a bunch of single-player games on PS5 to see if we can find something that we liked.

First up was, “Outriders” — the graphics looked great, it was a science-fiction storyline and so we thought we might like it. Unfortunately, it’s a mostly “shooting” game. You have to keep shooting people to advance and we don’t like that kind of game much …

Sure, we don’t mind if there’s some combat, but we prefer a storyline, puzzles, exploration, that kind of thing …

So, we tried “ReadySet Heroes” next. This one was co-op, but split screen. Given that we didn’t have a lot of choices, we decided to give it a try. But unfortunately, it was just dungeon crawling. No story, nothing of interest unless you just like mindlessly bashing things. Next!

The last one we tried was “Omno” and here we hit the Goldilocks zone … almost 😛 It was single-player, but it wasn’t frantic shooting/button mashing. It had a gentle, explore-at-your-pace kind of gameplay and lots of puzzles. Sure, we had to pass the controller back and forth between us but we still enjoyed it way more than any of the others and that’s the one we stuck with for the rest of the day 🙂

#Gaming #PS5 #CoOpPlay

A total of 49 papers in the cs.CV category on arXiv.org today — 34 new, 15 updated.

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

One of the best consequences of my switch to #mastodon has been exposure to people with hobbies and interests different from mine. By following other instances or particular hashtags I get to learn about and learn from people and communities I would otherwise not have encountered.

American Robin loaf

#silentsunday

_____

@davemark This video shows how it’s done 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1PCE47jwng&t=15s

@at Till today I thought that Paw Paw was just a different spelling of papaw/papaya which is found all over Asia 🙂 I just realized that they were a totally different fruit …

The texture and the seed in the Wikipedia article does kind of remind me of soursop/custard apple, but the flesh of the soursop is usually white. I’m really curious now to see what the taste is like but probably not gonna happen 😛

@at It looked like several different fruits I knew of from Sri Lanka in different ways, but the fact that it is in the mulberry family makes sense since (after the fact) it does look like mulberry fruit 🙂

Cut open, it reminded me a bit of guava, probably because of the distinct inner/outer areas. But it also looked like breadfruit from the outside, though breadfruit has more distinctive spikes/rideges on the outside.

It also reminded me a bit of soursop/custard apple, but only in passing …

But all these similarities is what got me interested in looking it up. But given how it’s native range is so small, I’m now curious to see if these similarities are just visual or if there are indeed connections … This could be a rather deep rabbit hole 😀

When I was young I loved reading accounts of travel in far off, oft forgotten places. Things like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Travels with a Donkey”.

I loved learning about now gone places, the feel of the dust on the road, the texture of the food they ate, or just how a tuft of grass felt between your fingers. Anything that gave me a feel for a place that I’d never been to …

Later, when I was still young, I read “Destiny’s Road” by Larry Niven, which to me personally is one of the greatest #ScienceFiction novels ever because of the imagery and the feelings it evoked. It was like reading one of those travel novels, but for an alien planet. Niven gave me details about the flora and fauna of the planet that still paints vivid pictures in my mind 25+ years later …

So why am I talking about this now?

Well, today I heard about hedge apples from @at and @Fawn and that took me down a rabbit hole of reading to discover more about hedge apples. For some reason, reading the Wikipedia entry about hedge apples reminded me of “Destiny’s Raod” and led me down a twisted lane of memory pathways 🙂

A long, long time ago, I read this book by Yakov Perelman called “Fun with Mathematics” (I think?) The USSR put out a lot of books back then (mostly Progress Publishers) and there were a lot of interesting science and maths books from them. This book (or possibly something similar, the details are hazy in my mind since this was 40 years or so ago) talked about a greatest tall tale competition.

One guy comes in and tells a tale of Baron Manchausen (or maybe it was the baron himself) about some feat where he does something which sounds patently impossible. Then another guy comes in an tells a rather prosaic sounding story about an ordinary day where some perfectly ordinary sounding things happen with regards to fruit on a bush, birds singing etc.

The judges say that what the Baron talked about (possibly a journey to the moon) was possible but what the other guy talked about was impossible because that particular fruit did not grow in that season and those birds were not found in that area etc. They were trying to make you realize that perfectly ordinary things could be impossible and that things that sounded impossible could actually be fact.

So why am I dragging that hazy memory out, kicking and screming?

Because reading about the hedge apple made me wonder if you could perhaps combine all of these things, perfectly normal bits of information from our ordinary world, into a science fiction tale of travel in a far off planet with just a few changes in detail. Create a story like “Destiny’s Road” where strange plants and wondrous creatures are revealed and they are all based on things that we find right here on earth but don’t really know about, or do know about, but don’t really think are that strange to others from another part of the world?

This has got the gears in my brain turning extra hard … 😛

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny%27s_Road

#Writing #Stories #Memories #Books