How does it compare in difficulty and scope to the original Adventure? I guess actually known as Colossal Cave Adventure? When I played it on my uncle's terminal in the 70s it was just called Adventure.
I stayed up all night and didn't get very far. I finally saw a solution online and I wasn't even close.
Can you put "Gaussing splats" in some kind of real world metaphor so I can understand what it means? Either that or explain why "Gaussian" and why "splat".
I am vaguely aware of stuff like Gaussian blur on Photoshop. But I never really knew what it does.
Gaussian splatting is a bit like photogrammetry. That is, you can record video or take photos of an object or environment from many angles and reproduce it in 3D. Gaussians have the capability to "fade" their opacity based on a Gaussian distribution. This allows them to blend together in a seamless fashion.
The splatting process is achieved by using gradient descent from each camera/image pair to optimize these ellipsoids (Gaussians) such that the reproduce the original inputs as closely as possible. Given enough imagery and sufficient camera alignment, performed using Structure from Motion, you can faithfully reproduce the entire space.
I think this means that you could produce more versions of this music video from other points of view without having to shoot the video again. For example, the drone-like effects could take a different path through the scene. Or you could move people/objects around and still get the lighting right.
Given where this technology is today, you could imagine 5-10 years from now people will watch live sports on TV, but with their own individual virtual drone that lets them view the field from almost any point.
> I am vaguely aware of stuff like Gaussian blur on Photoshop. But I never really knew what it does.
Blurring is a convolution or filter operation. You take a small patch of image (5x5 pixels) and you convolve it with another fixed matrix, called a kernel. Convolution says multiply element-wise and sum. You replace the center pixel with the result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_blur is the simplest kernel - all ones, and divide by the kernel size. Every pixel becomes the average of itself and its neighbors, which looks blurry. Gaussian blur is calculated in an identical way, but the matrix elements follow the "height" of a 2D Gaussian with some amplitude. It results in a bit more smoothing as farther pixels have less influence. Bigger the kernel, more blurrier the result.There are a lot of these basic operations:
Happily. Gaussian splats are a technique for 3D images, related to point clouds. They do the same job (take a 3D capture of reality and generate pictures later from any point of view "close enough" to the original).
The key idea is that instead of a bunch of points, it stores a bunch of semi-transparent blobs - or "splats". The transparency increases quickly with distance, following a normal distribution- also known as the "Gaussian distribution."
How can you expect someone to tailor a custom explanation, when they don’t know your level of mathematical understanding, or even your level of curiosity. You don’t know what a Gaussian blur does; do you know what a Gaussian is? How deeply do you want to understand?
If you’re curious start with the Wikipedia article and use an LLM to help you understand the parts that don’t make sense. Or just ask the LLM to provide a summary at the desired level of detail.
> How can you expect someone to tailor a custom explanation, when they don’t know your level of mathematical understanding, or even your level of curiosity.
A NOVA episode on dogs showed a Russian study where they bred the most friendly foxes with each other and did the same with the most aggressive (so extremes in both directions). The aggressive-bred animals were like that scene in I Am Legend where he checks on his infected rats. They were being fed, and they still wanted to kill their feeders. Kind of terrifying.
"Improve anything you can find" is like going to your mechanic and saying "I'm going on a long road trip, can you tell me anything that needs to be fixed?"
Doing a vehicle check-up is a pretty normal thing to do, although in my case the mandatory (EU law) periodic ones are happening often enough that I generally don’t have to schedule something out of turn.
The few times I did go to a shop and ask for a check-up they didn’t find anything. Just an anecdote.
I've hand-rolled my own ultra-light ORM because the off-the-shelf ones always do 100 things you don't need.*
And of course the open source ones get abandoned pretty regularly. Type ORM, which a 3rd party vendor used on an app we farmed out to them, mutates/garbles your input array on a multi-line insert. That was a fun one to debug. The issue has been open forever and no one cares. https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/issues/9058
So yeah, if I ever need an ORM again, I'm probably rolling my own.
*(I know you weren't complaining about the idea of rolling your own ORM, I just wanted to vent about Type ORM. Thanks for listening.)
This is the thing that will be changing the open source and small/medium SaaS world a lot.
Why use a 3rd party dependency that might have features you don't need when you can write a hyper-specific solution in a day with an LLM and then you control the full codebase.
Or why pay €€€ for a SaaS every month when you can replicate the relevant bits yourself?
Yeah this article lays it out much better than the verge.
> “On the other hand, LLMs are weapons of mass fabrication,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, co-author of the Indicator, a newsletter about digital deception. “Fabulists can now bog down reporters with evidence credible enough that it warrants review at a scale not possible before. The time you spent engaging with this made up story is time you did not spend on real leads. I have no idea of the motive of the poster — my assumption is it was just a prank — but distracting and bogging down media with bogus leads is also a tactic of Russian influence operations (see Operation Overload).”
I stayed up all night and didn't get very far. I finally saw a solution online and I wasn't even close.
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