Director Karen X. Cheng just posted a cool video where she uses OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate different outfits and then applies them to a video of her walking down the street. DALL-E is designed for images, not video, so after generating the individual key frames she used the (currently free) program EbSynth to map those …
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) just announced that all publications and supporting data stemming from federally-funded research must be soon also be made available to all, without an embargo period or cost. The Open Access movement has made a lot of headway since Aaron Swartz‘s early activism, and since 2013 …
Best description I’ve heard so far about the FBI raid on Trump’s quarters at Mar-a-Lago: EmptyWheel has a nice write-up on how what we know so far lines up with the Espionage Act.
One of the things I loved about working at Loon was that we pulled together experts from a wide range of disciplines, so I was constantly learning about things well outside my usual wheelhouse. One of the more unusual things I learned came from Rob, our resident atmospheric scientist, who introduced us to the Quasi-Biennial …
Check out the first images from the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Folks have also put up some zoomable full-res versions, a slidable comparison of Hubble vs. James Webb images.
A few days ago Kevin Drum lamented that the conservative attacks on Roe vs. Wade are much easier to understand than liberal arguments defending it: Conservatives say, “Abortion isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution and it was illegal almost everywhere before 1973.” In response, liberals stutter and stammer and reel off a few hundred incomprehensible …
So now if Christian Scientists gain a supermajority in a state legislature, can they outlaw all medical procedures? Or is it only Catholic dogma that gets to do that?
Scott Alexander’s A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows has some great examples of both the stunning images that OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 system can produce and some of the issues it still has. Some of the problems are fairly straightforward (like text will often come out as well-rendered gibberish) but the most interesting …
Quick reminder that the House public hearings on the January 6th insurrection will be streaming live at january6th.house.gov starting today at 5pm PDT. You can also get your pick of full live hearings plus commentary from pretty much every national news outlet except Fox News (naturally), who says they’ll only the hearings “as news warrants.”
Pebble was an early smartwatch company that launched with a successful Kickstarter back in 2012, with a focus on providing a customizable wearable front-end for apps that ran on your phone. They had pretty good success for the first few years, but then started running into cash problems, and eventually ran out of money and …