Dec 21
Harmeet Dhillon hopes to unseat RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and is attacking the party’s consultants — despite raking in $1.3 million over the past four years.
Dec 21
Elon Says He'll Resign as Twitter CEO When He Finds a Successor 'Foolish Enough'
Posted in: Today's Chili
Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday night that he would resign as the CEO of Twitter… if he could find someone “foolish enough” to be his successor.
Dec 21
After Google announced Stadia’s shutdown earlier this year, Ubisoft said it would help users transfer their purchases to PC. We got more detail today, as the publisher says it will provide free PC versions of all Ubisoft games bought on Stadia. The publisher also has other perks to make the transition as smooth as possible for jilted users of Google’s platform.
Anyone who bought Ubisoft games on Stadia should see the PC versions of those games appear in their Ubisoft Connect accounts at no extra cost. If your Stadia and Ubisoft accounts aren’t yet linked, connect them before Stadia shuts down on January 18th to get the PC games. Additionally, if you played Ubisoft games with cross-progression (complete list), you can pick up your progress on PC where you left off on Stadia.
Ubisoft notes any unspent virtual currency won’t transfer. Still, if you use it in Stadia before January 18th, the purchased items will move to PC (but only for games supporting cross-progression). Meanwhile, Stadia gamers who subscribed to Ubisoft+ Multi-Access (the company’s plan that lets you play on multiple devices) will receive an email telling them how to sign up directly through the Ubisoft+ website. As a bonus, subscribers will also get a free month of Ubisoft+. The publisher notes that US residents can continue streaming Ubisoft+ games through Amazon Luna, and those living elsewhere will get a discount on Ubisoft+ Multi-Access for six months. Additionally, If you bought or subscribed to any Ubisoft content on Stadia, you’ll receive one free month of GeForce Now Priority.
The perks are on top of Google’s refunds for all game purchases, so Ubisoft’s PC games are a no-charge consolation prize. Investing in a cloud-gaming platform requires customers to trust that their purchases won’t be all for naught if the platform fails, but at least Google and its partners are doing what they can to make it right.
Dec 21
The billionaire posted a poll over the weekend asking Twitter users if he should step down. The majority voted “yes.”
Dec 21
Elon Musk has said that he will step down as CEO of Twitter once a suitable replacement can be found. On Sunday he ran a poll asking if he should step down, and the Twitter using public overwhelmingly told him to go. He didn’t immediately respond to the results of the poll, but by Tuesday he seemed to have accepted the will of the people, after originally suggesting that he might instead change it so that only paying users could vote in Twitter polls.
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022
Developing…
Dec 21
‘General Hospital’ Star Dies At 55
Posted in: Today's Chili“The world lost another creative angel,” friend Octavia Spencer said of the TV actor.
Dec 21
Congress attempts to ban TikTok on government devices as part of $1.7 trillion spending bill
Posted in: Today's ChiliAfter obtaining Senate approval last week, the No TikTok on Government Devices Act could become law thanks to the $1.7 trillion spending bill federal lawmakers unveiled early Tuesday morning. In addition to allocating more funding for Ukraine and earmarking $40 billion for natural disaster recovery efforts across the US, the sprawling 4,155-page bill includes provisions that would prohibit the use of TikTok on government-owned phones and other devices.
While some Republican lawmakers are pushing for a country-wide ban on TikTok, the spending bill stops short of prohibiting all government use of TikTok. If passed, the legislation would order the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget to create guidelines for staff at executive agencies to remove TikTok from government-owned devices by mid-February. The draft legislation allows congressional staff and elected officials to continue using the app. It also carves out some exceptions for law enforcement agents and officials.
The ban on TikTok on government devices has ended up in the omnibus.
This was a Josh Hawley bill. Pelosi pushed for it in the omni pic.twitter.com/gpBZ8zFC7Y
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 20, 2022
“We’re disappointed that Congress has moved to ban TikTok on government devices — a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests — rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Engadget.
“The agreement under review by [The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] will meaningfully address any security concerns that have been raised at both the federal and state level. These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies — plans that we are well underway in implementing — to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them.”
The proposed ban comes after at least 11 states, including Georgia and South Dakota, prohibited TikTok on government-owned devices. Political concerns over TikTok hit a high earlier this month after FBI Director Chris Wray said China could use the app to collect user data. TikTok has tried to address those concerns. As of June, the app began routing all domestic traffic through Oracle servers in the US. At the same time, TikTok and parent company ByteDance pledged to delete US user data from their own data servers in the US and Singapore.
Dec 21
OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts. Whereas existing systems like Google’s DreamFusion typically require multiple hours — and GPUs — to generate their images, Point-E only needs one GPU and a minute or two.
OpenAI
3D modeling is used across a variety industries and applications. The CGI effects of modern movie blockbusters, video games, VR and AR, NASA’s moon crater mapping missions, Google’s heritage site preservation projects, and Meta’s vision for the Metaverse all hinge on 3D modeling capabilities. However, creating photorealistic 3D images is still a resource and time consuming process, despite NVIDIA’s work to automate object generation and Epic Game’s RealityCapture mobile app, which allows anyone with an iOS phone to scan real-world objects as 3D images.
Text-to-Image systems like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Craiyon, DeepAI, Prisma Lab’s Lensa, or HuggingFace’s Stable Diffusion, have rapidly gained popularity, notoriety and infamy in recent years. Text-to-3D is an offshoot of that research. Point-E, unlike similar systems, “leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of (image, 3D) pairs,” the OpenAI research team led by Alex Nichol wrote in Point·E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts, published last week. “To produce a 3D object from a text prompt, we first sample an image using the text-to-image model, and then sample a 3D object conditioned on the sampled image. Both of these steps can be performed in a number of seconds, and do not require expensive optimization procedures.”
OpenAI
If you were to input a text prompt, say, “A cat eating a burrito,” Point-E will first generate a synthetic view 3D rendering of said burrito-eating cat. It will then run that generated image through a series of diffusion models to create the 3D, RGB point cloud of the initial image — first producing a coarse 1,024-point cloud model, then a finer 4,096-point. “In practice, we assume that the image contains the relevant information from the text, and do not explicitly condition the point clouds on the text,” the research team points out.
These diffusion models were each trained on “millions” of 3d models, all converted into a standardized format. “While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques,” the team concedes, “it produces samples in a small fraction of the time.” If you’d like to try it out for yourself, OpenAI has posted the projects open-source code on Github.
Dec 21
Millions of people who enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic could start to lose their insurance plans by April 1.
Dec 21
Sure the holiday season can be a little stressful, but the best way to break up that weird family energy is to play a fun tabletop game! Don’t make the same mistake I did when introducing my parents to Dungeons & Dragons, which was giving them opportunities to flirt with each other during the game. It was deeply…
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