#Garden in Winter

How many native plants to plant? Consider:

Mass plantings better attract and serve pollinators, which are losing habitat where you live.
Pollinators are beautiful and calming to watch, which you need more of in your life.
The cheap seeds can be sown directly in the ground and pots for those unmotivated due to lack of experience with multicolored butterflies fluttering around.

Help yourself and the #environment. Plant a bunch.

More in alt text.

#Nature #Gardening #Flowers

Short #introduction post.

I work as a #data scientist / data science consultant mostly on natural language processing #nlproc and tabular data (though getting more into the #mlops space lately).

My passion is #running, primarily #trailrunning and #ultrarunning. Also a beginner in #mountaineering, #scifi reader and interested in all things #climate.

#datascience #machinelearning
#maths #mathematics #fieldhockey #python

#FotoMontag
#PhotoMonday
#Photography
#NaturePhotography
Pedraforca, #Spain

Aargh!!! Haven’t watched YouTube videos for a while but I think they actually make you even dumber now 😛

In the space of like 10 minutes, I saw two videos — the first tells me that servers are designed to run only one service at a time (e-mail, web server etc.) and you can’t really run more than one on one server and that you have to add more servers if you want other services …

Then I have somebody telling me that you don’t need to look at videos or follow courses but you can have ChatGPT teach you how to program! That it will go on the Internet and pull the information (this is absolutely false as far as I know …).

Sure, ChatGPT will teach you programming, but it’ll also put in a healthy amount of imagined commands whenever it feels like it and if you don’t know anything about programming, you would have no clue as to what you’re learning is accurate info or if it’s BS.

I think it’s time for me to retreat from the world …

#YouTube #Stupidity #RelianceOnAI #Misinformation

Is Ralf Little leaving “Death in Paradise”? Will we get our first female inspector on the show?

Haven’t done any checking online about these, but just random thoughts floating through my head after the latest “Death in Paradise” (hopefully, the above are not considered spoilers since they haven’t happened yet …) and seeing Ralf on “Would I Lie to You?” this week …

I think Ardal O’Hanlon appeared on “QI” or “Would I Lie to You?” after he stepped down as the inspector …. (as opposed to the Dr.) Is it just me who feels as if “Death in Paradise” is following “Dr. Who” a little bit too closely? 😛

#TV #DeathInParadise #Theories

It was a quicker run through than normal, but boosted 7 papers in the cs.CV category on arXiv.org that I found interesting out of a total of 94 new and updated papers today.

On to other stuff …

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

""Help Me Help the AI": Understanding How Explainability Can Support Human-AI Interaction. (arXiv:2210.03735v2 [cs.HC] UPDATED)" — A study of how explainability can support human-AI interaction using a real-world AI applicaiton.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03735

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Screenshots of Merlin, our stu…

"Which country is this picture from? New data and methods for DNN-based country recognition. (arXiv:2209.02429v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — A framework to identify the country where an image was taken, which could be useful in debunking fake news and many other applications.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02429

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Three sample photos taken from …

"Consistent Diffusion Models: Mitigating Sampling Drift by Learning to be Consistent. (arXiv:2302.09057v1 [cs.LG])" — A possible solution to fix the sampling iterations drifting away from the training distribution when generating images using diffusion models.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09057
Code: https://github.com/giannisdaras/cdm

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>
Visual comparison of EDM model …

"LayoutDiffuse: Adapting Foundational Diffusion Models for Layout-to-Image Generation. (arXiv:2302.08908v1 [cs.CV])" — A method for generating images based on a semantic layout which describes the positioning of the various component elements in the final image.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08908

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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LayoutDiffuse is able to genera…

"Paint it Black: Generating paintings from text descriptions. (arXiv:2302.08808v1 [cs.CV])" — Explores generating paintings based on text input.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08808

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Examples of paintings generated…

Talking about “Sim” games has brought up a lot of old memories 🙂

@mairhart reminded me about “SimTower” — I still remember the cover that a British gaming mag ran for it, but I don’t remember the name of the magazine 😛 It was a rather interesting entrant in the “Sim” series and got you to do a lot of the city management stuff on a more smaller (but not quite microscopic vs. Macroscopic) level.

Then there was “SimAnt” which I think was all about managing an ant colony? I know I played it but I remember very little about it now …

“SimLife” was what I was really excited about back then because I thought I could create new electronic life, run my own planet, etc. But in reality, if I remember now (30 years later) it was rather boring 😛

But there’s also all the “Civilization” spin-offs. I knew I was forgetting something, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember “Alpha Centauri” till I looked it up 🙂 I still don’t remember much.

And speaking of forgotten games, apparently there was also “Sid Meier's Starships” — despite being one of the newest in the series, I remember nothing about this either. I don’t know if I knew of it and forgot or if I’d just lost all interest in “Civ” games by then and simply didn’t care. But I think I’ll try to find a copy and play it just to see how it goes …

#Gaming #Civ #Sim #Reminiscences

"Fine-grained Cross-modal Fusion based Refinement for Text-to-Image Synthesis. (arXiv:2302.08706v1 [cs.CV])" — Another text-to-image generation approach where, instead of generating the final image from a noisy image, you generate an initial low-resolution image based on the input text and then use a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) during the second stage to generate the final output.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08706
Code: https://github.com/haoranhfut/FF-GAN

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Samples generated by Attn-GAN, …

"Foundation Models for Natural Language Processing -- Pre-trained Language Models Integrating Media. (arXiv:2302.08575v1 [cs.CL])" — An open access book about Natural Language Processing (NLP) models and how to build and improve them.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08575

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

<<Find this useful? Please boost so that others can benefit too 🙂>>

A total of 94 papers in the cs.CV category on arXiv.org today — 55 new, 39 updated.

I just want to work on my list filtering code for my Fedi client, but I guess I’ll have to go through papers first? 😛

#AI #CV #NewPapers #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

So … good news, bad news situation with yesterday’s experiment with putting some of the more high-volume people I follow on to lists and unfollowing them 😛

My hometimeline was so much leaner and cleaner today. There were very few replies and I just got posts that I was actually interested in and was through my home timeline in record time since I had like one third the normal volume of posts.

On the other hand, the list had not moved at all since I created it yesterday, except for one post 😀

Now if I’d stopped to think about this before I came up with my “brilliant” plan, I would have realized this — given the philosophy behind Mastodon/Fediverse, I don’t think anybody really wants you following people without the followee knowing/approving the action. So, creating lists the way Twitter allowed you to would not make much sense from a privacy standpoint.

Unfortunately, that makes lists a rather useless feature in the Fediverse since, as far as I know, there is no server-side filtering of posts from lists from your main timeline. If you just scroll through and read a bit and don’t care about duplicates, this is fine. But if you obsessively go through every post till you are caught up, like I do, then this becomes annoying pretty fast 😛

So my plan at the moment is to implement client-side filtering. When posts are fetched from the server for the home timeline, see if any of the fetched posts are authored by, replies to, or boosts by people on any of my lists. If they are, filter out those posts since they will be displayed on the lists.

I’m not sure how CPU intensive this will be and how smooth the experience will be. But I’m going to try and find out …

#Lists #Following #FediStuff #FediClients

Just a cottage by the water. Sometimes simple scenes are best. #aiart #midjourney

Some years ago the news that a new “Civilization” game was in development would have excited me to no end 🙂 I used to love “SimCity” and “Civilization” to no end and I think back in the day, I played every “Sim” game that I could get my had on … “SimEarth”, “SimLife”, “SimFarm”, “SimTown”, “SimCopter” … I think I played all of them … or at least got them and tried them …

But, I didn’t play “Civilization VI” and the new game brings me no excitement. I think I just can’t get excited by that kind of gameplay any longer. Sure, compared to the original “Civilization”, the graphics have come a long way and it looks gorgeous, but I just don’t have the time/energy for the game play.

Now if they come up with a new version of “Civilization: Beyond Earth” with a good storyline (not just the building and exploration), I might be up for that 🙂

#Games #Civilization
A new Civilization game is in d…

#silentsunday

In China there is a legend that if a carp is strong enough to swim upstream against strong currents, it can become a dragon.
#SwampSunday #ukiyoe #folklore #JapaneseArt @folklore
🎨'Carp' from an untitled series known as 'Large Fish' - Utagawa Hiroshige, 1842.