San Francisco's official calendar is a little more heavily booked than other cities — Bay to Breakers, opening day of crab season and festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass all come to mind.
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Tuesday, March 14th, 2023
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Links of the Day
The little-known origin story of the science that won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
This old school instructional video still imparts some essential photographic knowledge.
Patrick McGee and Tim Bradshaw, reporting for The Financial Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Bets on Apple’s Mixed-Reality Headset to Secure His Legacy” (archive link, just in case your FT login credentials aren’t working):
Americans’ favorite lunch is a ‘heart bomb’ of salt, preservatives and sugar. But doctors say there’s a way to build a healthier sandwich—here’s how.
Ramen Champ and the ultra-rich, toppings-laden cult of ‘Jiro-style’ ramen.
Monday, March 13th, 2023
Blog Posts
Reverse Engineering Read Later Data from the Apple News App
As we navigate the digital world, we often come across articles we don't have time to read but still want to save for later. One way to accomplish this is by using the Read Later feature in Apple News. But what if you want to access those articles outside the Apple News app, such as on a different device or with someone who doesn't use Apple News? Or what if you want to automatically post links to those articles on your blog? That's where the nerd powers come in.
Photos
Links of the Day
Microsoft says it connected tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 chips and reworked server racks to build the hardware behind ChatGPT and its own Bing AI bot.
Artificial enzymes could fight viruses like COVID and other tough diseases
Yearslong examination of thousands of boot drives provides unique perspective.
A rich diversity of snails in north-west Western Australia is sublime evidence of evolution in action.
Thanks to Meta LLaMA, AI text models may have their "Stable Diffusion moment."
If you’ve spent much time looking through a microscope, you know that their narrow depth of field can be a bit challenging to deal with. Most microscopes are designed to only have a very thin slice of the specimen in focus, so looking at anything above or below that plane requires a focus adjustment. It’s tedious and fussy, and that makes it a perfect target for automation.
Microsoft announced a mysterious AI event for March 16th, and it looks like we’re getting a big ChatGPT upgrade this week in the form of GPT-4, which comes with multimodal support. That might mean nothing to most people, given that ChatGPT stormed the tech landscape just three months ago, and we’re still learning what it can do and how it can disrupt tech as we know it.
Sunday, March 12th, 2023
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Links of the Day
A group of local investors and business owners is pushing an ambitious plan to redevelop parts of San Francisco’s iconic Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood into a seafood-focused attraction spotlighting the area’s historic identity as a working port, complete with a food hall, seafood processing center and fish market.
Regulators take control of a second bank and race to roll out emergency measures
March 18, 1965 was an ordinary Thursday for the majority of people located on planet Earth. But for 30-year-old cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, one of two people who happened to be off-world at the time, it was all about making history and cheating death. Exactly 52 years ago this Saturday, Leonov and mission commander Pavel Belyayev blasted into space aboard the Soviet spacecraft Voskhod (“Sunrise”) 2. Several crews, both Russian and American, had already orbited Earth, so Voskhod 2 had been tasked
Russia is investigating the possibility that a manufacturing defect caused two of its spacecraft to spring coolant leaks in a two-month span recently.
Officials at the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation discussed the idea to backstop all deposits this weekend, the people said, with only hours to go before financial markets opened in Asia.
Saturday, March 11th, 2023
Links of the Day
There are major privacy risks.
Deep learning based semi-supervised learning algorithms have shown promising results in recent years. However, they are not yet practical in real semi-supervised learning scenarios, such as medical image processing, hyper-spectral image classification, network traffic recognition, and document recognition. In these types of scenarios, the labeled data is scarce for hyper-parameter search, because they introduce multiple tunable hyper-parameters. A research team has proposed a novel meta-learning
They set out to save rainforests — and stumbled upon a way to help prevent the world’s next deadly pandemic.
This week researchers claimed to have discovered a superconducting material that can shuttle electricity with no loss of energy under near-real-world conditions. But drama and controversy behind the scenes have many worried that the breakthrough may not hold up to scientific scrutiny.
Friday, March 10th, 2023
Links of the Day
Medical technology company Ondine’s photodisinfection process kills pathogens in a person’s nostrils.
Fungi are some of the strangest living things on Earth. Some are single-celled organisms like bacteria, other are multicellular beings akin to plants and animals. Some can even shapeshift between these forms of life. However they look, they’re an integral part of the environment: Many fungi act as nature’s recyclers, breaking down dead organic matter into something that can be reused by others. And we regularly rely on fungi in a variety of ways, including as food.
For over a century, scientists have sought a holy grail of materials: a room-temperature superconductor, a material that can carry electrical charges without resistance, which would revolutionize the energy landscape as we know it.
Thursday, March 9th, 2023
Blog Posts
AI and The Potential Risks of Autonomous War Bots
In 2008, I had the opportunity to tour SPAWAR, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, now known as NAVWAR. SPA/NAVWAR is a research and development laboratory for the U.S. Navy. During my visit, I was fascinated by the various autonomous military robots that were being developed and tested there. I photographed the tour and wrote about it for WIRED News.
Fast-forward to 2023, and with the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT and Bing AI, it's possible to imagine how these robots could be controlled using AI in ways that are frankly somewhat terrifying. With great power comes great responsibility, and we must consider the potential risks of relying on AI-powered machines in warfare.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
Blog Posts
Explosive Experience: How Illegal Fireworks Almost Blasted Me Out of My 20th-Floor Apartment (And Why My Cats Are Still Hiding Under the Bed)
On the night of July 4th, 2018, I was in my apartment at The Vermont in Koreatown when illegal firework mortars started exploding right outside my window on the 20th floor. The massive amount of explosive materials being set off on the street below was almost too much for my apartment to handle. My cats were less than impressed with the spectacle, and I can't blame them. Despite the danger, I couldn't resist capturing the colorful chaos with my camera. And let's just say, it was an explosive experience!
Links of the Day
Results come from a lab that had an earlier superconductivity paper retracted.
The Fast and Furious franchise would be jealous of this 2:29-long short. A user on Reddit shared a stop-motion video of an epic Hot Wheels battle using only an iPhone. The trama is full of plot twists, and the Redditor uses several different toys from the Hot Wheels franchise to tell the story.
Twitter CEO and supreme overlord Elon Musk apologized to former employee Haraldur Thorleifsson for mocking his disability, proving that even tech’s biggest villain has a heart, or at the very least the sense to smell a huge incoming lawsuit.
Tuesday, March 7th, 2023
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Monday, March 6th, 2023
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Sunday, March 5th, 2023
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Saturday, March 4th, 2023
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Friday, March 3rd, 2023
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Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2023
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Monday, February 27th, 2023
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Sunday, February 26th, 2023
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Saturday, February 25th, 2023
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Friday, February 24th, 2023
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Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
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Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Blog Posts
Photographing The Deep Space Network at Goldstone
The Deep Space Network (DSN) is one of the most critical components of space exploration and communication. The network comprises a series of antennas that are used to communicate with interplanetary spacecrafts, such as the Mars rovers and the Voyager spacecrafts, as they travel through the solar system.
Monday, February 20th, 2023
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Sunday, February 19th, 2023
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Saturday, February 18th, 2023
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Friday, February 17th, 2023
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Thursday, February 16th, 2023
Blog Posts
Extracting Celebrity and Object Information from Photos: An Overview of Amazon Rekognition's Capabilities
Have you ever stumbled upon a photo and found yourself wondering who that celebrity is, or what kind of object is in the background? Enter Amazon Rekognition, a powerful deep learning-based image and video analysis service that can help answer those questions.
Photos
Wednesday, February 15th, 2023
Blog Posts
Using GPT-3 to Write Captions Based on Image Keywords, People, Albums, and Locations
Have you ever wanted to caption your photos automatically? With the GPT-3 Davinci model from OpenAI, you can do just that! By using image keywords, people, locations, and the album name, you can use AI/ML to generate captions that are not only descriptive, but also entertaining (and frequently hilariously wrong).
In this post, I’ll explore the capabilities of GPT-3 for writing captions based on image data, and how it can add a new dimension to your photos.
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Tuesday, February 14th, 2023
Blog Posts
Extracting Data from Apple Photos: The Power of Organization
I have a massive archive of photos from the last 20+ years of shooting. I have hundreds of shoots and hundreds of thousands of images that I have never published because it’s so time-consuming to sort through them, choose the best shots, caption, and tag them.
Monday, February 13th, 2023
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Sunday, February 12th, 2023
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Saturday, February 11th, 2023
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Friday, February 10th, 2023
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Thursday, February 9th, 2023
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Wednesday, February 8th, 2023
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Monday, February 6th, 2023
Blog Posts
Back in the Blogging Game: A Decade Later
It's been over a decade since I last wrote a blog post, but I'm excited to be back. I started blogging in 1998, and it's been a wild journey ever since. So much has changed in my life, and I'm eager to share it all with you.
Sunday, February 5th, 2023
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Saturday, February 4th, 2023
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Friday, February 3rd, 2023
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Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
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Sunday, January 29th, 2023
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Thursday, January 26th, 2023
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2023
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Saturday, January 21st, 2023
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Thursday, January 19th, 2023
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Monday, January 16th, 2023
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Sunday, January 15th, 2023
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Saturday, January 14th, 2023
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Friday, January 13th, 2023
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Wednesday, January 11th, 2023
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Monday, January 9th, 2023
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