People face overwhelming information during work activities, necessitating effective organization and management strategies. Even in personal lives, individuals must keep, annotate, organize, and retrieve knowledge from daily routines. The collection of records for future reference is known as a personal knowledge base. Note-taking applications are valuable tools for building and maintaining these bases, often called a ''second brain''. This paper presents a case study on how people build and explore personal knowledge bases for various purposes. We selected the note-taking tool Obsidian and researchers from a Brazilian lab for an in-depth investigation. Our investigation reveals interesting findings about how researchers build and explore their personal knowledge bases. A key finding is that participants' knowledge retrieval strategy influences how they build and maintain their content. We suggest potential features for an AI system to support this process.

As the video games industry continues to face massive layoffs, narrative jobs are taking the biggest hit. The industry's job cuts over the past couple of years--more than 30,000 roles were eliminated in 2023 and 2024--disproportionately affected narrative designers, the creative professionals who craft the story elements of the game and give a title its emotional punch. Even the director of the game Avowed, Carrie Patel--a successful author and narrative developer with over a decade of experience at the game studio Obsidian Entertainment--feels lucky she was able to start her career years ago. She can't imagine trying to break into the industry under today's conditions. "It just seems to be harder and harder to find a path in," Patel says. "I've heard colleagues hired within the last three or five years say essentially the same thing."

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) for machine learning accelerators are indispensable in secure and efficient ML inference. Optimizing workloads through state-space exploration for the accelerator architectures improves performance and energy consumption. However, such explorations are expensive and slow due to the large search space. Current research has to use fast analytical models that forego critical hardware details and cross-layer opportunities unique to the hardware security primitives. While cycle-accurate models can theoretically reach better designs, their high runtime cost restricts them to a smaller state space. We present Obsidian, an optimization framework for finding the optimal mapping from ML kernels to a secure ML accelerator. Obsidian addresses the above challenge by exploring the state space using analytical and cycle-accurate models cooperatively. The two main exploration components include: (1) A secure accelerator analytical model, that includes the effect of secure hardware while traversing the large mapping state space and produce the best m model mappings; (2) A compiler profiling step on a cycle-accurate model, that captures runtime bottlenecks to further improve execution runtime, energy and resource utilization and find the optimal model mapping. We compare our results to a baseline secure accelerator, comprising of the state-of-the-art security schemes obtained from guardnn [ 33 ] and sesame [11]. The analytical model reduces the inference latency by 20.5% for a cloud and 8.4% for an edge deployment with an energy improvement of 24% and 19% respectively. The cycle-accurate model, further reduces the latency by 9.1% for a cloud and 12.2% for an edge with an energy improvement of 13.8% and 13.1%.

This digital garden is a collection of notes and resources that I started to compile a couple of years ago as my best attempt to become a somewhat functional information junkie. It's where I curate, organize and catalog the stuff I r e a d skim over everyday. "second brain", has been around for quite some time and is related to that of personal knowledge management. Digital gardens build upon note-taking methodologies such as Zettelkasten or Evergreen. In short, a digital garden is something in between a blog and a wiki; a way to accumulate personal knowledge over time in an explorable space and in a non-linear fashion, while benefiting from fancy features such as (bidirectional) links between different topics, and visual graphs or mind maps.

Old-school CRPGs are experiencing a modern-day renaissance, and if you're a fan, don't miss out on the pair of fantastic freebies being given away by the Epic Games Store this week. Pillars of Eternity helped kick off the current CRPG reemergence, earning a spot on our best games of 2015 list in the process. "Obsidian has a reputation for crafting fantastic RPGs, and deservedly so. Pillars of Eternity is, as far as I'm concerned, Obsidian at its best ever," we said in our review at the time. "With Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian once again proves that it is the foremost RPG studio in the world, with an understanding of its mechanics, its lore, and (most importantly) its story on a level most games don't even aspire to."

More and more, it is becoming necessary to consider working collaboratively, not only for questions regarding skills or because of the very quick evolution of engineering skills, and devices in particular, but also because working alone in a studio or a laboratory will be less and less viable. Interlocution is also essential in artistic practice. After having developed most of my projects alone for a long time, I understand how sharing this experience and competences gives meaning to this activity. You have worked in Brazil for many years. Is it a good place for new media art?

It might be set in space rather than on an Earth ravaged by nuclear war, but there is a strong argument that The Outer Worlds, a forthcoming first-person role-playing game (RPG) by storied developers Obsidian, is spiritually a Fallout game. Not only is it directed by Fallout creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, it shares a lot of DNA with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas – a spin-off with a reputation as the best in the series. New Vegas earned particular praise for its dialogue, and a world-building background that makes it feel like more than a thin justification for firing mini-nukes at super-mutants. New Vegas was Obsidian's first and last game set in the Fallout universe, but The Outer Worlds places similar importance on freedom of choice in dialogue and gameplay. In this world, where mega corporations are starting to take over alien planets, you can act like a hero, an opportunistic mercenary, or a total idiot.

WIRE)--Obsidian Security, the intelligent identity protection company, has raised $20 million in a Series B financing round, bringing the company's total funding to $30 million. Wing led the Series B with participation from GV and Series A investor Greylock Partners. With the unabated growth in adoption of cloud services, security teams are dealing with poor visibility of users and activities across SaaS and the cloud. Administrators do not have visibility into what users do after logging on to these services. Managing user privileges across disparate applications is siloed, burdensome and error-prone.

The rigorous quantification of uncertainty in geophysical inversions is a challenging problem. Inversions are often ill-posed and the likelihood surface may be multi-modal; properties of any single mode become inadequate uncertainty measures, and sampling methods become inefficient for irregular posteriors or high-dimensional parameter spaces. We explore the influences of different choices made by the practitioner on the efficiency and accuracy of Bayesian geophysical inversion methods that rely on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling to assess uncertainty, using a multi-sensor inversion of the three-dimensional structure and composition of a region in the Cooper Basin of South Australia as a case study. The inversion is performed using an updated version of the Obsidian distributed inversion software. We find that the posterior for this inversion has complex local covariance structure, hindering the efficiency of adaptive sampling methods that adjust the proposal based on the chain history. Within the context of a parallel-tempered Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for exploring high-dimensional multi-modal posteriors, a preconditioned Crank-Nicholson proposal outperforms more conventional forms of random walk. Aspects of the problem setup, such as priors on petrophysics or on 3-D geological structure, affect the shape and separation of posterior modes, influencing sampling performance as well as the inversion results. Use of uninformative priors on sensor noise can improve inversion results by enabling optimal weighting among multiple sensors even if noise levels are uncertain. Efficiency could be further increased by using posterior gradient information within proposals, which Obsidian does not currently support, but which could be emulated using posterior surrogates.

The groundwork was laid for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire to be a spectacular sequel. Its predecessor, 2015's Pillars of Eternity, did the heavy lifting. It proved Obsidian could resurrect the spirit of the old Infinity Engine RPGs for modern times, underpinned by modern technology. Flawed, sure--the original Pillars of Eternity had its problems. But with the engine developed and the underlying rules in place, the stage seemed set for a daring sequel, if not Baldur's Gate II-sized at least one that felt that grand in scope.