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 origin story


Provocative book sets out to solve the hard problem of consciousness

New Scientist

One Hand Clapping covers a lot of ground, which can make it seem like an entertaining lecture series, with amusing sketches. Some may find Kukushkin's playfulness a bit much.


Toys 'R' Us uses OpenAI's Sora to make a brand film about its origin story and it's horrifying

Engadget

The rise of artificial intelligence in our media and entertainment industries has raised a lot of concerns about programs like Open Al's text-to-video maker Sora replacing the artistic endeavors and aspirations of humans. If those AI made movies are anything like a new brand film about the Toys'R' Us toy store chain's origin story, the only thing we'll have to fear is watching them. Toys'R' Us's current owner WHP Global worked with the Emmy nominated creative agency Native Foreign to create a short brand film called The Origin of Toys'R' Us using OpenAI's text-to-video creator Sora. The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and can currently be viewed on the toy retailer's website. The Origin of Toys'R' Us is only a little over a minute long but it's a mix of confusing and eerie.


What is a Godzilla anyway? The 70-year-old monster behind the movies

Al Jazeera

This is the second time Godzilla and King Kong have made a film appearance together in recent times with 2021's Godzilla vs Kong being the first instalment. Both films were directed by Adam Wingard. Godzilla x Kong made back its budget of 135m in the first weekend when it took in 195m at cinemas, according to figures from Box Office Mojo. In total, it has sold 209m in tickets so far and has scored a very respectable 92 percent Rotten Tomatoes audience rating. The origins of Godzilla go back 70 years to the first 1954 film release in Tokyo, Japan – Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda.


The Origin Story of "Stop Making Sense"

The New Yorker

When it first opened in theatres, in the fall of 1984, "Stop Making Sense," directed by Jonathan Demme and starring the rock group Talking Heads, was quickly recognized as one of the finest concert films ever made. Reviewer after reviewer settled on the word "exhilarating" to describe the experience of watching an expanded nine-member iteration of the four-piece group perform sixteen of their best-known songs in an uninterrupted sequence of dynamically staged and photographed musical vignettes. In the pages of this magazine, Pauline Kael praised the film as "close to perfection," and described the Heads front man, David Byrne, as "a stupefying performer." "He's so white he's almost mock-white," Kael wrote, "and so are his jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. He seems fleshless, bloodless; he might almost be a Black man's parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve."


How Queer Is "Frankenstein"?

The New Yorker

When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in "A Room of One's Own," her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future--that of queer literary criticism. Do not blush," Woolf cautioned her audience. "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women." Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be ...


'The Last of Us' recap: 'Left Behind' is Ellie's origin story

Washington Post - Technology News

The next wonder is a quick stop at a mall photo booth. The third is an arcade, or to Ellie, the "most beautiful thing" she's ever seen. This is the HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery brand universe at work; Warner also owns the Mortal Kombat franchise. Here we see Riley play as Mileena and successfully pull off her Fatality finishing move (which probably counts as yet another miracle). How the hell did a 17-year-old girl in a fungal post-apocalypse learn this move?


Chapter 11: The AI Story

#artificialintelligence

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. When looms weave by themselves, man's slavery will end. Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Today we are entirely dependent on machines.


Machines that learn: The origin story of artificial intelligence

#artificialintelligence

Lee Sedol, a world champion in the Chinese strategy board game Go, faced a new kind of adversary at a 2016 match in Seoul. Developers at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup acquired by Google, had fed 30 million Go moves into a deep neural network. Their creation, dubbed AlphaGo, then figured out which moves worked by playing millions of games against itself, learning at a faster rate than any human ever could. The match, which AlphaGo won 4 to 1, "was the moment when the new movement in artificial intelligence exploded into the public consciousness," technology journalist Cade Metz writes in his engaging new book, "Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World." Metz, who covers AI for The New York Times and previously wrote for Wired magazine, is well positioned to chart the decades-long effort to build artificially intelligent machines.


Machines that learn: The origin story of artificial intelligence

#artificialintelligence

Developers at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup acquired by Google, had fed 30 million Go moves into a deep neural network.


What is time-series data, and why are we building a time-series database (TSDB)?

#artificialintelligence

Like all good superheroes, every company has its own origin story explaining why they were created and how they grew over time. This article covers the origin story of QuestDB and frames it with an introduction to time series databases to show where we sit in that landscape today. Time series is a succession of data points ordered by time. These data points could be a succession of events from an application's users, the state of CPU and memory usage over time, financial trades recorded every microsecond, or sensors from a car emitting data about the vehicle acceleration and velocity. For that reason, time-series is synonymous with large amounts of data.