Nonlaser things that I think GFers will find interesting

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That’s really cool. Ever seen hero forge?

Hero Forge Previously.

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i hadn’t, that’s cool, too. i’d done some lego custom minifig research a couple of years ago for a work project, but we ended up not using my (really effing cool, if i do say so myself) design for our internal awards wall.

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I’m a software guy and only peripherally involved in any “AI”, a term that’s popular on Wall Street and thus applied with a broad brush. So this is opinion, but that’s all the experts can give you anyway.

The human brain is not a single system, rather it’s an assembly of many systems that cooperate. This village of systems supports our sentience. Any one such system might be an idiot on its own, but the whole village is elevated to higher function.

Currently we’re in the business of building idiot savants. They can train themselves to exceed human expertise in precise fields; they explore success and failure for “years” in a handful of seconds. But they are generally static, unable to learn once trained (no memory of post-training failure). In the future we’ll build villages and give them the gift of continuous training. They will make smart decisions with a memory of failure. Is that consciousness? We’ll have to ask. :wink:

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Keeping with the visual theme – more “AI” art than faked video: you have likely seen DALL-E 2 output all over the place lately but, have you seen Google’s Imagen?

https://imagen.research.google

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Don’t forget Midjourney!

Some astonishing stuff is going on.

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Wow, Midjourney is quite a thing.

What was your prompt to make that one?

I did “A dark cave with a pile of gold coins” and got this:

That’s really cool.

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Pure gold!

That’s one I snagged from the Midjourney subreddit, and I failed to save the prompt.

Interesting! Playing with that could get addictive.

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Here is one I did last week. “Movie Poster for the Thing”

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I mean, what can you say about midjourney. It’s just astounding. I just did one for a realistic carved wooden figurine of a dog on a desktop, and it did this:

I know this sort of thing is still in its infancy, this is going to get wild in the next 5 years.

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Anyone else love old-school flap displays?

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Pretty cool!

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Closer to @evansd2 's original post, text-to-video “AI” is coming soon, too:

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I’m in the stable diffusion beta, it’s pretty cool. It’s ridiculously fast compared to MidJourney, though I like the aesthetic of MJ’s output a bit better.

For comparison: MidJourney develops 4 concepts for a prompt in about 60 seconds. Stable diffusion just did 9 variations for me in under 14 seconds.

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Video of someone putting together a laser-cut hurdy gurdy kit. There is a great view of lovely interlocking pegs at the 9-minute mark, and a hand crank with rotating knob right after it. Lots of good ideas for mechanical joins, and LOTS of gears.

I haven’t finished watching, so i don’t know if they play. [edit: it is played at the end]

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My friend got that kit and says it was great but it doesn’t sound great :). Go figure.

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I agree with your friend. Kit looks great, but it has a whiny voice. I want to make 2-piece connections like the pegs; the mild flexibility of the cuts and the click of the locking nubs look very secure. Elegant, not fussy.

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Can it be tuned? Lots of instruments don’t sound great if they are not tuned properly.

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Damn, that’s an ambitious one! I have a couple simpler kits from the same company and they’re definitely full of interesting, complex joins.

Maybe swapping out higher quality strings and rosin on the wheel would improve the sound?

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