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The Best Subscription-Free Home Security Cameras I've Tried

WIRED

You don't have to upload your video to the cloud or pay a monthly fee to secure your home. In the age of state surveillance, with big tech trampling our data privacy rights and gouging us for every penny, there are plenty of reasons to keep your security camera footage local. Whether you want to save money or ensure your video doesn't end up in the hands of persons (or AI) unknown, subscription-free security cameras are the way to go. The good news is that locally recording security cameras are better than ever. I've been testing security cameras for a decade, and the gap between the best cloud-connected and local cameras is closing. You don't necessarily have to give up the best features to shirk that subscription anymore.


Gamers Hate Nvidia's DLSS 5. Developers Aren't Crazy About It, Either

WIRED

Nvidia's new AI upscaling gaming technology struck gamers as uncanny and off-putting. Developers don't seem to like it, either, but it could be "the default" in a few years. Nvidia announced a new version of its DLSS AI upscaling technology for its graphics cards earlier this week at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which it calls the Super Bowl of AI . But unlike previous versions of DLSS that used AI to improve frame rates in video games, DLSS 5 has a much more ambitious calling: using generative AI to make character faces in games look more realistic and detailed. The demonstration received sharp blowback on social media, with many finding the effect off-putting, reacting with outright disgust, and calling it yet another example of AI slop .


GPyTorch: Blackbox Matrix-Matrix Gaussian Process Inference with GPU Acceleration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite advances in scalable models, the inference tools used for Gaussian processes (GPs) have yet to fully capitalize on developments in computing hardware. We present an efficient and general approach to GP inference based on Blackbox Matrix-Matrix multiplication (BBMM). BBMM inference uses a modified batched version of the conjugate gradients algorithm to derive all terms for training and inference in a single call. BBMM reduces the asymptotic complexity of exact GP inference from O(n^3) to O(n^2). Adapting this algorithm to scalable approximations and complex GP models simply requires a routine for efficient matrix-matrix multiplication with the kernel and its derivative. In addition, BBMM uses a specialized preconditioner to substantially speed up convergence. In experiments we show that BBMM effectively uses GPU hardware to dramatically accelerate both exact GP inference and scalable approximations. Additionally, we provide GPyTorch, a software platform for scalable GP inference via BBMM, built on PyTorch.


A 10K Bounty Awaits Anyone Who Can Hack Ring Cameras to Stop Sharing Data With Amazon

WIRED

The Fulu Foundation, a nonprofit that pays out bounties for removing user-hostile features, is hunting for a way to keep Ring cameras from sending data to Amazon--without breaking the hardware. Usually, when you see a feel-good story about finding a lost dog, you don't immediately react with fear and revulsion. But that was indeed the case in response to a Super Bowl commercial from Amazon-owned security camera company Ring. There's now a group offering to dole out a $10,000 bounty to wrest back control of the user data Ring controls. The ad showed off a new feature from Ring called Search Party.


Spiking Token Mixer: An Event-Driven Friendly Former Structure for Spiking Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Compared to the clock-driven synchronous chip, the event-driven asynchronous chip achieves much lower energy consumption but only supports some specific network operations. Recently, a series of SNN projects have achieved tremendous success, significantly improving the SNN's performance. However, event-driven asynchronous chips do not support some of the proposed structures, making it impossible to integrate these SNNs into asynchronous hardware.