#misc. technology

[ochajima]

🌳🐮 Tried making a screen! 🐮🌳

[relaxingifs]

Spamton stimboard for anon!

x x x | x x x | x x x

[musubiki]

lime lime lime lime lime (and his m34th weapon that can turn into many things)

[lockwood-fic-recs]

status update

by menina123 on ao3

Rating: T | Category: F/M, Gen | Relationship: Lockwood/Lucy

LinkedIn: You have 1 notification. Congratulate Lucy Carlyle for starting a new position as Consultant Psychic Investigation Agent (Aural phenomena specialty)

Everything's the same, except everyone has an iPhone—a slight canon AU where technology has advanced to the present day. The story of the Black Winter through social media posts, texts, Google searches, playlists, and (sent & unsent) emails. Starts at the end of The Hollow Boy and goes through The Creeping Shadow.

[werebutch]

Figuring out what music my characters like always cures my issue with not knowing enough about them. My baby eliud may be getting his well deserved fleshing out ^__^ listen to folder btw and recommend me similar artists i beg..

[zytes]

I know that the average person’s opinion of AI is in a very tumultuous spot right now - partly due to misinformation and misrepresentation of how AI systems actually function, and partly because of the genuine risk of abuse that comes with powerful new technologies being thrust into the public sector before we’ve had a chance to understand the effects; and I’m not necessarily talking about generative AI and data-scraping, although I think that conversation is also important to have right now. Additionally, the blanket term of “AI” is really very insufficient and only vaguely serves to ballpark a topic which includes many diverse areas of research - many of these developments are quite beneficial for human life, such as potentially designing new antibodies or determining where cancer cells originated within a patient that presents complications. When you hear about artificial intelligence, don’t let your mind instantly gravitate towards a specific application or interpretation of the tech - you’ll miss the most important and impactful developments.

Notably, NVIDIA is holding a keynote presentation from March 18-21st to talk about their recent developments in the field of AI - a 16 minute video summarizing the “everything-so-far” detailed in that keynote can be found here - or in the full 2 hour format here. It’s very, very jargon-y, but includes information spanning a wide range of topics: healthcare, human-like robotics, “digital-twin” simulations that mirror real-world physics and allow robots to virtually train to interact and navigate particular environments — these simulated environments are built on a system called the Omniverse, and can also be displayed to Apple Vision Pro, allowing designers to interact and navigate the virtual environments as though standing within them. Notably, they’ve also created a digital sim of our entire planet for the purpose of advanced weather forecasting. It almost feels like the plot of a science-fiction novel, and seems like a great way to get more data pertinent to the effects of global warming.

It was only a few years ago that NVIDIA pivoted from being a ���GPU company” to putting a focus on developing AI-forward features and technology. A few very short years; showing accelerating rates of progress. This is whenever we began seeing things like DLSS and ray-tracing/path-tracing make their way onto NVIDIA GPUs; which all use AI-driven features in some form or another. DLSS, or Deep-Learning Super Sampling, is used to generate and interpolate between frames in a game to boost framerate, performance, visual detail, etc - basically, your system only has to actually render a handful of frames and AI generates everything between those traditionally-rendered frames, freeing up resources in your system. Many game developers are making use of DLSS to essentially bypass optimization to an increasing degree; see Remnant II as a great example of this - runs beautifully on a range of machines with DLSS on, but it runs like shit on even the beefiest machines with DLSS off; though there are some wonky cloth physics, clipping issues, and objects or textures “ghosting” whenever you’re not in-motion; all seem to be a side effect of AI-generation as the effect is visible in other games which make use of DLSS or the AMD-equivalent, FSR.

Now, NVIDIA wants to redefine what the average data center consists of internally, showing how Blackwell GPUs can be combined into racks that process information at exascale speeds — which is very, very fucking fast — speeds like that have only ever actually been achieved on some 4 or 5 machines on the planet, and I think they’ve all been quantum-based machines until now; not totally certain. The first exascale computer came into existence in 2022, called Frontier, it was deemed the fastest supercomputer in existence in June 2023 - operating at some 1.19 exaFLOPS. Notably, this computer is around 7,300 sq ft in size; reminding me of the space-race era supercomputers which were entire rooms. NVIDIA’s Blackwell DGX SuperPOD consists of around 576 GPUs and operates at 11.5 exaFLOPS, and is about the size of standard row of server racks - much smaller than an entire room, but still quite large. NVIDIA is also working with AWS to produce Project Ceiba, another supercomputer consisting of some 20,000GPUs, promising 400 exaFLOPS of AI-driven computation - it doesn’t exist yet.

To make my point, things are probably only going to get weirder from here. It may feel somewhat like living in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, only with fewer years in between each new step. Advances in generative-AI are only a very, very small part of that — and many people have already begun to bury their heads in the sand as a response to this emerging technology - citing the death of authenticity and skill among artists who choose to engage with new and emerging means of creation. Interestingly, the Industrial Revolution is what gave birth to modernism, and modern art, as well as photography, and many of the concerns around the quality of art in this coming age-of-AI and in the post-industrial 1800s largely consist of the same talking points — history is a fucking circle, etc — but historians largely agree that the outcome of the Industrial Revolution was remarkably positive for art and culture; even though it took 100 years and a world war for the changes to really become really accepted among the artists of that era. The Industrial Revolution allowed art to become detached from the aristocratic class and indirectly made art accessible for people who weren’t filthy rich or affluent - new technologies and industrialization widened the horizons for new artistic movements and cultural exchanges to occur. It also allowed capitalist exploitation to ingratiate itself into the western model of society and paved the way for destructive levels of globalization, so: win some, lose some.

It isn’t a stretch to think that AI is going to touch upon nearly every existing industry and change it in some significant way, and the events that are happening right now are the basis of those sweeping changes, and it’s all clearly moving very fast - the next level of individual creative freedom is probably only a few years away. I tend to like the idea that it may soon be possible for an individual or small team to create compelling artistic works and experiences without being at the mercy of an idiot investor or a studio or a clump of illiterate shareholders who have no real interest in the development of compelling and engaging art outside of the perceived financial value that it has once it exists.

If you’re of voting age and not paying very much attention to the climate of technology, I really recommend you start keeping an eye on the news for how these advancements are altering existing industries and systems. It’s probably going to affect everyone, and we have the ability to remain uniquely informed about the world through our existing connection with technology; something the last Industrial Revolution did not have the benefit of. If anything, you should be worried about KOSA, a proposed bill you may have heard about which would limit what you can access on the internet under the guise of making the internet more “kid-friendly and safe”, but will more than likely be used to limit what information can be accessed to only pre-approved sources - limiting access to resources for LGBTQ+ and trans youth. It will be hard to stay reliably informed in a world where any system of authority or government gets to spoon-feed you their version of world events.

[stonelions]

ah jeez I was gonna try to upload a new chapter of the neighbour fellas today but it looks like ao3 is down??? shoot

[ravenkings]

[charlies-stims]

🎤⭐️ BBNO$ 🎤⭐️

Updating refs...

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[pinoytiktok]

(support the original tiktok: @/odashaflop!)

[pizzaqueen]

Ughhhhh. Tumblr (app) has been so shit lately! I can’t go more than two minutes without it crapping out and acting like I have no internet connection but pretty much everything else is fine 🙃🙃🙃

And reblogging and sending DMs and doing literally anything is a nightmare

[relaxingifs]

Oliver from Purgatory stimboard for anon!

x x x | x x x | x x x

[hypn0tw1st]

Edgenuity how I loathe you

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

@watasemasaru GREEN INNARDS

[zytes]

OpenAI has made a big step in generative text-to-video. The linked page is the homepage for Sora, and features unmodified AI-gen video clips throughout. The results are surprising, concerning, and also a bit disturbing as the implications settle in. This is realistic (and stylized) video with consistency that looks reasonably good in-motion. Regardless of how anyone feels about the ethics of AI in their current state, this is a significant change in potential and will almost certainly continue to improve. For obvious reasons, it’s not available publicly yet.

I’m not sharing this in support of the tools, nor am I necessarily against them. I’m habitually cautious and just trying to remain aware of what’s emerging in technology. This is a scary one, lots of risk for abuse. I feel like the potential for a tool like this to become a state sanctioned propaganda-generator or psychological torture device isn’t that far-fetched. How long until we reach a point where you can mix, modify, and extend real-footage using AI? We very very badly need some kind of standardized metadata or other hard-solution to the problem of provenance verification; or everyone will simply need to grow more skeptical of the things they see.

[archiethinking]

What will yall do when everything crumbles as all of the sudden you cant trust anything on the internet because the best and newest technology available to us somehow always turns increasingly hostile to human life and the working class?

Im gonna make a good ribeye and go out the old fashioned way.