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I'm a bit of an eclectic mess 🙂 I've been a programmer, journalist, editor, TV producer, and a few other things.

I'm currently working on my second novel which is complete, but is in the edit stage. I wrote my first novel over 20 years ago but then didn't write much till now.

I post about #Coding, #Flutter, #Writing, #Movies and #TV. I'll also talk about #Technology, #Gadgets, #MachineLearning, #DeepLearning and a few other things as the fancy strikes ...

Lived in: 🇱🇰🇸🇦🇺🇸🇳🇿🇸🇬🇲🇾🇦🇪🇫🇷🇪🇸🇵🇹🇶🇦🇨🇦

Fahim Farook

"Diffusion Models Generate Images Like Painters: an Analytical Theory of Outline First, Details Later. (arXiv:2303.02490v1 [cs.CV])" — An exploration of the the theory that diffusion models generate images like painters creating a painting: that it involves first committing to an outline, and then adding in finer details.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02490

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Characteristics of image genera…
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Fahim Farook

"All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2209.12152v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — A simple and general ViT-based architecture for image generation with diffusion models which is capable of unconditional and class-conditional image generation, as well as text-to-image generation tasks.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.12152

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Text-to-image generation on MS-…
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Imposter Syndrome is very real. I don't know about you guys, but I basically spend a large portion of my time thinking about it.

I think we as a society spend too much time considering and focusing on our transactions. "Am I enough?" "Do I deserve this nice thing?" "Someone liked my toot - will they figure out I don't have everything together?"

It's interesting when you think about it because if I were to ask you if you have those thoughts - most people would agree. "Sure, that happens sometimes" or "Of course, everyone feels like that sometimes..." right?

If we can agree that everyone feels like that, can we then begin to challenge if people have TIME to be that concerned about you? They are busy worried about their own problem and figuring out if you think THEY are enough.

You are enough. You might stumble, you might need to learn more. But that's okay. That's life. We're all out here doing our best. Some of us seem to be doing better or worse than you - but trust me, that is just the public facade.

Be kinder to yourself. You deserve it.

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I miss my nurse & science bird app communities. Still looking for me people on here

Help me find/follow you

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I was in search of some colour today, Glastonbury Abbey this morning.

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Fahim Farook

A little bit more on the Edge browser and all the interesting activities it has built-in …

It has this little page of activities that you can try. One of them was to solve a tile puzzle — an image split into tiles and mixed up that you have to arrange corectly.

Once you complete the image, you get more information about the image and hotspots on the image you can click to get more information. If you click on a hotspot, you are taken to a Bing page with photos, relevant links, and a sidebar with additional links that you can explore.

As somebody who loves learning esoteric things, this just feels like the first time I discovered an encyclopaedia, but a lot more fun 🙂

#Edge #Browser #Gamification #Bing
An image of a tile/card which s…
A beautiful image of a bay with…
A Bing page with information ab…
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Fahim Farook

I’ve been peripherally aware of the existence of the Edge browser, but I’ve not really used it till now. (Or, if I tried it originally, I just used it once and then uninstalled — that’s always possible since I try out a lot of stuff …)

I just installed the Edge browser (yes, it’s available on macOS) and was rather pleasantly surprised. It integrates a lot of tools I use all the time, has a better search interface, and has a bunch of game/activities which gives you that little endorphin rush while also helping you learn a lot more …

Showed it to my wife today and she seems to be really taken with it too. I think we’ll be playing around with this for a few more days at least!

And this kind of brings me to what I originally wanted to say. It’s rather interesting that Microsoft these days is going the “embrace all” route. Their stuff is not available just on Windows but is available on macOS too, while Apple generally sticks to their “we support (mostly) macOS” stance.

Reminds me a bit about the good (bad?) old days of Apple vs. Microsoft. Who will win this time around? (Not that I care about the winning or the losing of one over the other, but I do find these different strategies interesting …)

#Edge #Browser #Microsoft #Apple
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Fahim Farook

"Defending against Adversarial Audio via Diffusion Model" — Using diffusion models to purify/remove adversarial audio which can cause abnormal behaviour in acoustic systems.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01507
Code: https://github.com/cychomatica/AudioPure

#AI #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning #Sound #Security #Audio #Cryptograpy

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The architecture of the whole a…
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Fahim Farook

"Word-As-Image for Semantic Typography. (arXiv:2303.01818v1 [cs.CV])" — Automatically visualizing words by modifying the typography to depict the meaning/representation of the word.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01818
Note: No code or demo available (yet) at the linked locations.

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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A few examples of our word-as-i…
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Fahim Farook

"Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception. (arXiv:2303.02153v1 [cs.CV])" — Using the pre-trained autoencoder in a diffusion model for visual perception tasks such as segmentation or depth estimation.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02153
Code: https://github.com/wl-zhao/VPD

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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The main idea of the proposed V…
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Fahim Farook

I did some more work on my JavaScript Fedi client over the weekend:

https://github.com/FahimF/FediJS

I’m not progressing as fast as I had done with other Masto/Fedi clients in the past in terms of adding features, and yet, it’s so much easier (at least so far) to add new features for the JavaScript client 🙂

Now, I’m by no means a JavaScript guru. Sure, I’ve been using JavaScript since the early days of the web, but only as needed. It has never been one of my main programming languages. So I find it interesting that I can do a lot more with a lot less code in this particular instance.

I added the ability to boost, favourite, and bookmark posts in the timeline with relatively little effort.

I’m thinking of adding hashtag and lists support next weekend possibly. I guess we’ll see how it goes …

#FediClient #MastodonClient #JavaScript #Programming
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Fahim Farook

@joekjr Absolutely 🙂 What worries/annoys me is the fact that the more we use the term AI for these systems (however loosely it’s meant) people are going to believe that that is what it is and come to rely on totally unreliably misinformation generators.

We’re seeing this already where people think LLMs are going to replace search engines because they are attributing intelligence to these systems …

I often come back to the movie “Idiocracy” these days because it often feels as if we are there already 😛
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forever.

God dang it's so good.

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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
I’ve been guilty of throwing the words “AI” around myself, but the more I hear the term nowadays, the more annoyed I get because there is no “AI” in these systems. Sure, they might be “Artificial”, but they certainly aren’t “Intelligent”! Not by any stretch of the word ….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/

The actual story is worth reading to understand what kind of new scams and threats you can expect with these developing technologies, but I really do wish people would stop calling everything AI ….

#NotAI #Scams #TechHorrors
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Fahim Farook

“Diablo IV” is coming … soon 😛

We (my wife and I) are avid “Diablo III” players and we were sure we’d get the game, but what we weren’t sure about was whether we could play couch co-op on “Diablo IV” or not. The game listing on the PlayStation store does not mention couch co-op and that was what was keeping us from pre-ordering since if there was no couch co-op, we won’t enjoy the game as much since we want to play together 🙂

Since the first beta release will happen in a few weeks time, I decided to do some checking online yesterday. Found this Reddit post which seems to indicate that couch co-op is indeed there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/zh2yho/will_diablo_iv_on_console_have_couch_coop/

Of course, a post online by an unknown source is no guarantee that couch co-op will indeed be there, but we were hopeful enough to go ahead and pre-order. Now we wait and see if it is indeed as promised or we’re going to end up being disappointed 😛

#DiabloIV #CoopGaming #Gaming #PlayStation
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In the 18th and 19th centuries, some British smugglers left tubs of brandy on the beach for others to collect. One method of hiding the tubs was to cover them with plaster of Paris so that they looked like pieces of fallen cliff.

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