Don’t be fooled, these ‘babies’ are silicon dolls used for films and for therapy. 😃
Very realistic! 😃
Susan’s silicone dolls look so real, they’re often mistaken for real babies! 😳👶
Category: entertainment – Page 53
To those who saw it in its very first theatrical run, the opening crawl at the very top of the original 1977 “Star Wars” film automatically dispelled any notions about cosmic civilizations and a linear march of time. We all got the reference to a “galaxy far, far away” at the outset, but “a long time ago” was all at once brilliant and mind-blowing.
Inherent in that notion is the idea that civilizations outside our own solar system have been living and dying since time immemorial. And the civilizations depicted in this bit of space cinema also appear to have become masters of their own galactic quadrants, if not their whole galaxy.
Yet here on parochial Earth, we are wedded to the linear march of time in a way that is not likely to change until the very far future. Here, we are guided by our own history of technological advancement in a way that extraterrestrial civilizations may find antiquated. They may already be inured to the fact that they are mere technological babes in the woods when compared to much more advanced civilizations they, themselves, may have encountered.
By Christopher Sciacca
The first video games debuted in the1950s, later reaching mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 80s with arcades and home video systems like Atari and Commodore 64. Remember SpaceWar! and Pong? While limited by the capabilities of the hardware, they laid the foundation for the games we develop and play today, which by 2025 is expected to be a whopping $256 billion industry.
This history and the importance of these early video games was not lost on Qiskit’s James Wootton. In 2017, he created the world’s first video game for a quantum computer, Cat-Box-Scissors, based on Rock-Paper-Scissors. He continued creating other quantum games, in the process attracting quantum enthusiasts and video game developers who wanted to try something new. And soon, games incorporating quantum computing concepts will be available for anyone to play.
It’s a sad day. The observatory has not only been used to observe radio wave signals in deep space. It’s also become an iconic landmark over the decades after being featured in countless films and TV shows including the 1995 James Bond blockbuster “GoldenEye.”
The observatory has also made significant contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), spotting mysterious radio signals emanating from distant corners of the universe.
“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but safety of people is our number one priority,” Sean Jones, the assistant director for the mathematical and physical sciences directorate at NSF, told reporters today over a conference call, as quoted by The Verge.
Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said the system has dramatically reduced toxic chat and repeating offenses.
In April 2019, Blizzard shared some insights into how it was using machine learning to combat abusive chat in games like Overwatch. It’s a very complicated process, obviously, but it appears to be working out: Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a new Fireside Chat video that it has resulted in an “incredible decrease” in toxic behavior.
“Part of having a good game experience is finding ways to ensure that all are welcome within the worlds, no matter their background or identity,” Brack says in the video. “Something we’ve spoken about publicly a little bit in the past is our machine learning system that helps us verify player reports around offensive behavior and offensive language.”
Woah o,.o!
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including natural language processing (NLP) techniques, have become increasingly sophisticated, achieving exceptional results in a variety of tasks. NLP techniques are specifically designed to understand human language and produce suitable responses, thus enabling communication between humans and artificial agents.
Other studies also introduced goal-oriented agents that can autonomously navigate virtual or videogame environments. So far, NLP techniques and goal-oriented agents have typically been developed individually, rather than being combined into unified methods.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI Research have recently explored the possibility of equipping goal-driven agents with NLP capabilities so that they can speak with other characters and complete desirable actions within fantasy game environments. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, shows that combined, these two approaches achieve remarkable results, producing game characters that speak and act in ways that are consistent with their overall motivations.
SpaceX launched its first crewed mission to ISS in May this year. The company demonstrated its spacecraft is safe and reliable to carry humans to space and back. Axiom’s space tourist mission with SpaceX is scheduled to be a 10-day journey that will launch civilians aboard Crew Dragon to the space station atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The space tourists will stay at ISS for 8 days, where they will experience microgravity and amazing views of our planet.
SpaceX’s first private civilian flight will carry three Axiom customers who will fly alongside former NASA Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, he will be commander during the mission. Earlier this year, NASA and SpaceX announced Hollywood actor Tom Cruise will film a movie at the space station and fly aboard Crew Dragon. Then, reports surfaced about Cruise and his film production agency working with Axiom is responsible for providing ‘training, mission planning, hardware development, life support, medical support, crew provisions, hardware and safety certifications, on-orbit operations and overall mission management.’ However, Axiom has not officially disclosed who their private passengers will be on their first mission in collaboration with SpaceX.
Now there’s another feat to add to GPT-3’s list: it wrote a screenplay.
It’s short, and weird, and honestly not that good. But… it’s also not all that bad, especially given that it was written by a machine.
The three-and-half-minute short film shows a man knocking on a woman’s door and sharing a story about an accident he was in. It’s hard to tell where the storyline is going, but surprises viewers with what could be considered a twist ending.
A robot controlled by a neural network algorithm that was trained in a video game-like simulation is better able to navigate difficult terrain in real life.
Interesting…
The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is a gaming powerhouse, but that’s not all it can do. According to the makers of a popular password recovery application, the RTX 3090 is also good at brute-forcing passwords. That’s great if you forget an important password, but that’s probably not why people are using such tools. The latest Nvidia cards could make cracking someone else’s files almost trivially easy.
The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s latest top-of-the-line GPU with a GA102 graphics processor sporting 10,496 cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. It is monstrously, obscenely powerful by today’s gaming standards, and comes with a correspondingly high price of $1,500, give or take a few hundred depending on supply. With a focus on high core counts, GPUs are also great for parallel computing. That’s why you couldn’t even buy a GPU for several months when Bitcoin was at its peak. In the same vein, GPUs are very good at cracking passwords.
Passcovery recently updated to add support for RTX cards like the 3090, and it vastly increased the speed of brute force attacks. In the past, it wasn’t practical to guess every possible password until you hit on the right one — computers just weren’t fast enough. However, a GPU can do that quickly enough to find passwords in certain instances. With v20.09 of the Passcovery suite, a relatively modest GTX 1060 can go from 3.4 million guesses per second to 669 million per second. This version of the software added support for RTX 3000-series cards, which might be a problem for your weak passwords. The RTX 3090 is almost seven times faster in GPU compute benchmarks than the 1060 — that’s a lot of guesses per second.