Edwards in the Fall

Within walking distance from where I live resides a 200+ acre treasure, a resource visited by this rube almost every day. Awesome says it all. Enjoy. :)

They're everywhere ...

Rats are intense. Smart, relentless and above all else, survivors to the max as they're everywhere, including NYC as seen by a resource all New Yorkers are capping on known as transitapp.com/rats.

You got a problem, New York. A big rat problem. But just how many MTA-riding rodents are out there? And where? We enlisted thousands of rodent spotters across the five boroughs to rank the rattiest stations.

More than 1.2 million New Yorkers use Transit every month to get around, relying on features like GO, our step-by-step navigator.

GO tells you when to leave for your stop, when to transfer, and more. When we detect that you’ve arrived at a subway station? We ask if you see any rats.

The results are in. And the rats? 

They’re everywhere.

& the best three stations to see them are ...

Any questions? :)

3D-GPT

Although not photorealistic at this time, but will be, one can produce sophisticated 3D environments by  using text to drive Blender, a well respected open source 3D rendering engine. 

The significance of 3D asset modeling is undeniable in the metaverse era. Traditional methods for 3D modeling of realistic synthetic scenes involve the painstaking tasks of complex design, refinement, and client communication.

To reduce workload, we introduce 3D-GPT, a framework utilizing large language models (LLMs) for instruction-driven 3D modeling. In this context, 3D-GPT empowers LLMs as adept problem-solvers, breaking down the 3D modeling task into manageable segments and determining the appropriate agent for each.

3D-GPT comprises three pivotal agents: task dispatch agent, conceptualization agent, and modeling agent. Together, they collaboratively pursue two essential goals. First, it systematically enhances concise initial scene descriptions, evolving them into intricate forms while dynamically adapting the text based on subsequent instructions. Second, it seamlessly integrates procedural generation, extracting parameter values from enriched text to effortlessly interface with 3D software for asset creation.

We show that 3D-GPT provides trustworthy results and collaborate effectively with human designers. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with Blender, unlocking expanded manipulation possibilities. Our work underscores the vast potential of LLMs in 3D modeling, laying the groundwork for future advancements in scene generation and animation.

Back in the day, yours truly created high res 3D fine art using Magi/Synthavision's FORTRAN based ray tracing software to create work back in the early 1980s as seen by the art below. Needless to say, the code generated by yours truly was rudimentary to say the least but getting said code to generate said art was anything but. :)

Primitives of a different kind - 1980

Deepfakes ...

What is a Video? details the inevitability of AI driven digital video, complete with synthetic actors, scripts and CG so good, one will not be able to discern the difference from the real thing. While this inevitability remains a few years off, current tech, developed by the Adobes of the world, is now being used to generate deepfakes whereby a person's face is mapped onto another's, something most disconcerting as to how this new "reality" pertains to truth as man moves further into the 21st century.

FOR TAYLOR KLEIN, it starts with a weird Facebook message from a friend. A Pornhub link. She doesn’t open it. Must be spam, she figures. “I think you’ve been hacked?” she replies. Nope. Her pal insists the link is real. She clicks, and her nightmare begins.

This rise in deepfake porn is made possible by a new wave of AI editing tools available online—tools that Compton and Hamlyn incorporate into their documentary. We won't reveal how here, but suffice it to say: Another Body does an excellent job of underlining how deepfake technology can distort our perceptions of each other. The point is to put a human face on something many try to dismiss as not “real.”

Various images of face CGI illustrious: Guardian Design/AFB/Washington Post via Getty Images

How it's done ...

It takes a few steps to make a face-swap video. First, you run thousands of face shots of the two people through an AI algorithm called an encoder. The encoder finds and learns similarities between the two faces, and reduces them to their shared common features, compressing the images in the process. A second AI algorithm called a decoder is then taught to recover the faces from the compressed images. Because the faces are different, you train one decoder to recover the first person’s face, and another decoder to recover the second person’s face. To perform the face swap, you simply feed encoded images into the “wrong” decoder. For example, a compressed image of person A’s face is fed into the decoder trained on person B. The decoder then reconstructs the face of person B with the expressions and orientation of face A. For a convincing video, this has to be done on every frame.

Out of control says it all as truth begins to go away in realtime. 

What is a video?

GIF: Adobe

Look closely at this gif as yours truly was right about AI generated video and the emergence of synthetic actors. Timeframe for the real thing: 2025/6. IMHO, every screen writer, director & actor should be puckered.

Beginning in 2007, yours truly penned several blurbs regarding the emergence of digital actors and what it will mean to Hollywood and the art of film. Fast forward to 2023 and the path to synthetic video, complete with AI driven scripts and CG environments, including digital actors, is taking shape as we speak. IMHO, it doesn't matter who the star is if the script and film work as a viable entertainment medium, what does matter is how a movie is produced because if you can do it cheaper with the same results, the move to AI generated video becomes inevitable and ... there's no egos involved unless the AI entities in said films become self aware, complete with all the baggage us humans possess in great abundance. :) RM

Adobe is showing off a new generative fill feature, Project Fast Fill, that can easily add or remove objects in videos with the power of AI. It’s one of several new, wild, experimental AI features announced today at the company’s MAX conference. Project Fast Fill has the ability to swap in clothing accessories on people in motion or remove tourists from the background of a landscape pan.

Adobe’s working on its AI editing tech for video, audio, and 3D design in other ways, too. The company’s Project Dub Dub Dub can translate voices into different languages. Scene Change can move subjects to a new location in another clip. Res Up uses diffusion to upsample lo-res video. And Project Poseable can pose 3D objects based on photos of real people and can generate 3D renderings using text input.

As more AI generative tools for photos become more accessible to users, like Google Pixel 8’s Magic Editor, we were already at the stage of wondering, What is a photo? Now, Adobe’s AI video-manipulating Fast Fill could bring that same ability to more people soon, and we will have to ask: What is a video?

GIF: Adobe

Two scorpions in a bottle ...

An injured woman and her child after an Israeli bombing near their house in the Gaza Strip.

Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Tragic says it all as occupation and dominance over a people's existence costs, something Israel has done to Palestine beginning in 1948 when 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their land with the end result of hatred emerging from said eviction of a different kind. Truman blew it in not insisting on a one state solution where Jews and Palestinians had to learn to live with one another whether they liked it or not instead of proposing a two state "solution" existing as two scorpions residing in a tiny bottle where peace is but an illusion while extremest groups hold sway like Hamas and far right Jews working hand in hand with Bibi, Israel's version of Agent Orange writ large.

As long as the US plays a partial judge in this disaster, the tragedy of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict will continue unabated while civilians of both entities suffer. One can only hope this catastrophie doesn't metastasize into something truly existential, a notion most disquieting to comtemplate without question.

The bomb exploded a few hundred feet from where I was sitting with my wife, Safa, and my three children, Ali, Karam and Adam. Ali, 13, screamed; Karam, 10, buried his face in my chest; and Adam, 5, burst into tears.

We were in the outdoor area at the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt on Tuesday morning. I had been lucky enough to obtain permits for my wife and kids to cross into Egypt so they could wait out the terrifying violence raining down on Gaza in safety. But before their names were called, Israel bombed the crossing, at that point the only way in or out of the strip.

We quickly ushered the kids into the crossing’s hall, but a policeman started shouting for everyone to evacuate immediately; the crossing was being closed.

We were just one family, experiencing one terrifying close call. More than two million Palestinians are trapped inside Gaza, about half under the age of 18, as Israel pounds us in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack on Saturday, with the United States promising “surging” military support.

Endgame ...

No electricity means no internet or connection to the outside world. Raw sewage is seeping into Gaza’s streets; waste treatment facilities require electricity. The water supply has been cut. Driving south on Monday, I passed five United Nations schools-turned-shelters, so jampacked with displaced people that families spilled out into the yards. Dread grows inside me, as I know the worst is yet to come.

The Warsaw Ghetto comes to mind here does it not?

Jewish police at a barricaded entrance to the Warsaw ghetto. Poland, February 1941.

“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” - Mark Twain

Addendum ... 

A man reacts outside a burning collapsed building following
Israeli bombardment in Gaza City on October 11.

The United Nations and several humanitarian groups
have sharply criticized Israel’s evacuation order.

“After days of airstrikes, the Israeli Defense Forces have ordered the Palestinians in Gaza City and its surroundings to move to the south of the territory,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Friday, ahead of a Security Council meeting about the conflict.

“Moving more than one million people across a densely populated warzone to a place with no food, water, or accommodation, when the entire territory is under siege, is extremely dangerous – and in some cases, simply not possible,” he said.

Graphic: Lou Robinson and Rachel Wilson, CNN

This will not end well.

Feckless

From The Princess Bride

Feckless says it all regarding US foreign policy and the lack of understanding why The Art of War matters. In every way, this once great nation has floundered as the endless pursuit of money and it's connect to the military industrial complex had tossed aside the notion of common sense and competence when it comes to understanding the great game and the significance of the World Island as explained by Alfred W. McCoy, complete with an illustration by Sir Halford Mackinder.

To whit ...

On a cold London evening in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, “entranced” an audience at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row with a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” This presentation evinced, said the society’s president, “a brilliancy of description… we have seldom had equaled in this room.”

Mackinder argued that the future of global power lay not, as most British then imagined, in controlling the global sea lanes, but in controlling a vast land mass he called “Euro-Asia.”  By turning the globe away from America to place central Asia at the planet’s epicenter, and then tilting the Earth’s axis northward just a bit beyond Mercator’s equatorial projection, Mackinder redrew and thus reconceptualized the world map.

Combine this with the stewardship of Ronnie to see why the word feckless applies ...

In The Princess Bride, a man playing a deadly game said, “Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’” I thought this was received wisdom, but apparently not. Today America is involved in not one, not two, but three land wars in Asia. A real blunderbuss.

America is involved in Korea (still going on), Ukraine (ongoing), and Taiwan (getting going). One frozen war, one hot, one they’re desperately trying to order. The United States is actively messing with three nuclear powers, two of them highly industrialized. America is encircling these countries with military bases, fomenting coups in and around them, imposing sanctions (white word for sieges), actively arming and training their enemies, and openly calling for them. While North Korea has been a supine punching bag for decades, Russia and China are in America’s weight class. The bully empire has finally picked on someone their own size, and they’re about to fuck around and find out.

Given that America has lost every war — for decades — to dudes in Toyota Hiluxes, they really shouldn’t be fucking around with China and Russia, let alone both at once. China makes trucks, Russia has oil, and neither of their explosive devices are improvised. Picking a fight with either would be real war, and America is really not ready for land war in Asia, let alone two.

The prerequisites to do war correctly involves having enough men & material to do the job let alone having an intelligent plan and enough logistics in hand to properly conduct the war in question.

Photo: (ADAMS Diagram) U.S. Marine Corps; (Crates) Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0); (M864 Diagram) U.S. Marine Corps

Men

The US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031. The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000. These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription. Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Material

The prime artificial resource required for war is matériel, ie hot shit to throw at each other. And America, which has deindustrialized both itself and now Europe, simply can’t make enough shit anymore. Don’t take my word for it. As the empire’s own Center for Strategic and International Studies says, “According to the results of a series of CSIS war games, the United States would likely run out of some munitions — such as long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.” America doesn’t have enough ammunition to last a week against China, and if they want to make more, they have to ask their Chinese suppliers.

& this

NYTimes - As a result of the push, Russia is now producing more ammunition than the United States and Europe. Overall, Kusti Salm, a senior Estonian defense ministry official, estimated that Russia’s current ammunition production is seven times greater than that of the West.

Russia’s production costs are also far lower than the West’s, in part because Moscow is sacrificing safety and quality in its effort to build weapons more cheaply, Mr. Salm said. For instance, it costs a Western country $5,000 to $6,000 to make a 155-millimeter artillery round, whereas it costs Russia about $600 to produce a comparable 152-millimeter artillery shell, he said.

It's all about the money ... yet again.

The ‘safety and quality’ bit is just sour grapes. Western artillery shells are not $5,000 better, they’re just produced in a more corrupt and inefficient way, outsourced to war profiteers. Western production lines cannot scale up, and cost 10x more if they do. It’s a losing proposition and it shows. Joe Biden himself said the US is running low on ammunition. This is why they released widely illegal cluster bombs, to poison supposedly Ukrainian soil for years. As the Chair of NATO’s military committee said, “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.”

Missing the point ...

Quantity is its own quality in war. When a tank ‘depreciates’ in days or hours, who gives a shit about the frills? In World War II, the Soviets were able to produce a much higher quantity of ‘good enough’ weaponry, and that (along with rivers of blood) won the thing. And in many cases, the Soviet weapons were higher quality as well. They invented the AK-47 after all, and the Katushya, the first multiple rocket launcher.

You can't make this shit up.

Russia is producing more than ever, whereas the West is at the bottom of the barrel, in their own words. And now the West is trying to open another front, against another industrialized power in China? This is nonsensical, especially since they need Chinese resources to attack China.

Don’t take my word for it, ask war profiteer Greg Hayes of RTX (née Raytheon). He said Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling… is impossible. More than 95% of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative.”

Stupidity as art form applies, does it not?

Greg Hayes: ‘If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries’ © Samuel Corum/Bloomberg

St. Ronnie strikes yet again.

The Lonetown Farmhouse Makeover

 

The Redding Historical Society did a major makeover on the Lonetown Farmhouse by cleaning out the house, finding valuable historical items long thought lost and rearranging spaces with elegance and grace. Without question, this video shows how hard work and design sensibilities combine to turn something once thought ordinary into something quite amazing. Enjoy.