The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good […]
You may not have noticed, but so-called “artificial intelligence” is slightly controversial in the arts world. Illustrators, graphics artists, visual effects (VFX) professionals — anybody who pushes pixels around are the sort of people you’d expect to hate and fear the machines that trained on stolen work to replace them. So, when we heard in […]
[Teddy Warner]’s GPenT (Generative Pen-trained Transformer) project is a wall-mounted polargraph that makes plotter art, but there’s a whole lot more going on than one might think. This project was partly born from [Teddy]’s ideas about how to use aspects of machine learning in ways that were really never intended. What resulted is a wall-mounted […]
Most of us choose our own outfits on a daily basis. [NeuroForge] decided that he’d instead offload this duty to artificial intelligence — perhaps more for the sake of a class project than outright fashion. The concept involved first using an AI model to predict the weather. Those predictions would then be fed to a large […]
The basic concept of human intelligence entails self-awareness alongside the ability to reason and apply logic to one’s actions and daily life. Despite the very fuzzy definition of ‘human intelligence‘, and despite many aspects of said human intelligence (HI) also being observed among other animals, like crows and orcas, humans over the ages have always […]
When AI is being touted as the latest tool to replace writers, filmmakers, and other creative talent it can be a bit depressing staring down the barrel of a future dystopia — especially since most LLMs just parrot their training data and aren’t actually creative. But AI can have some legitimate strengths when it’s taken […]
There are many incredible open-source robotic arm projects out there, but there’s a dearth of affordable, stable, and mobile robotic platforms with arms. That’s where XLeRobot comes in. It builds on the fantastic LeRobot framework to make a unit that can be trained for autonomous tasks via machine learning, as well as operated remotely. XLeRobot, […]
Gaussian Splats is a term you have likely come across, probably in relation to 3D scenery. But what are they, exactly? This blog post explains precisely that in no time at all, complete with great interactive examples and highlights of their strengths and relative weaknesses. Gaussian splats excel at making colorful, organic subject matter look […]
If you’re a hacker you may well have a passing interest in math, and if you have an interest in math you might like to hear about the direction of mathematical research. In a talk on this topic [Kevin Buzzard], professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, asks the question: Where is Mathematics Going? […]
You can use large language models for all sorts of things these days, from writing terrible college papers to bungling legal cases. Or, you can employ them to more interesting ends, such as porting Macintosh System 7 to the x86 architecture, like [Kelsi Davis] did. When Apple created the Macintosh lineup in the 1980s, it […]