Everything is virtual now

Google has just announced the very cool generative AI model that I’ve been vaguely hinting at for the last few time_intervals. The older, GPT-2-era, system was announced as “MEENA”, and the new one is called “LaMDA”. I don’t actually know how much the new one is based on the old one, not that it really matters.

It’s very cool! The featured LaMDA demos (rather quirkily, I thought) showed it answering questions as the planet Pluto, and as a paper airplane. I’ve been using it (well, one of its various models) in a colab where it’s more like the typical generator client I’ve played with before: you give it some random stuff, and it adds on more relatively likely stuff. Lots of fun. It feels a lot like GPT-3 to me, but then I don’t know anything about the insides of the system, or the features that it has that I haven’t played with.

Google also announced Starline, which at the moment is a prototype booth (not boot) that you sit in and talk to someone else in a similar booth somewhere else, and it’s like a video chat (gad, neither “chat” nor “conference” sit very well with me there, can’t we call it I dunno “encounter” or something?) except that (most obviously) it’s 3D without funny glasses (lightfield displays are really cool I had no idea!) and (less obviously) there’s subtle stuff going on to make everything feel better, like compensating for the fact that you’re looking directly at the other person’s eyes and that isn’t where the camera is and like that.

As far as I know there is no olfactory component at the moment.

People were speculating about the obvious combination of generative language models and the ability to create very realistic images of people (including nonexistent people), and this led to people talking about having a model of yourself around after your death for people to talk to (cool and/or terrifying), which led to someone pointing at this very cool piece of “artifacts from the future” SF in the form of a newsletter (currently five issues available) about hacks to make sure that your life in the Loop after death is the best it can be (roughly). Love it.

(See also Black Mirror.)

And to segue on the pivot-point of SF, I’ve now read the ebook form of the SCP Foundation Antimemetics Division Hub and it is just so good. As I wrote for goodreads and/or amazon or whatever:

[Five Stars] Perfection

This book is an explosion of ideas, astounding and obvious and transformative and crazy and valid. And the people are people, and intensely human through it all.

It feels odd to say that this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read, both because how could that not be hyperbole, and because “science fiction” at the same time doesn’t do it justice.

But there it is: this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read.

No doubt that’s partly because it happens to fit my personal tastes and interests so very perfectly.

But also, it’s just that good.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RSESZQ0RTJ2FS

Now if I could just finish a book or two without starting two or three others in the meantime, maybe I could get goodreads to think I’m currently reading less than fifty (50) books…

March 20th, 2021

Twenty Twenty-One, haha! That’s ridiculous, eh? Here is a random list of quotidia.

• It’s the little boy’s birthday, yay! Happy Birthday, little boy!
• It’s also the Equinox; a new cycle of the world begins! Or is half over or something!
• I got my first vaccine jab (Moderna, at a Walgreens), which makes me feel hopeful. Second one in mid-April, so by roughly the end of April I will be immune to all diseases. More or less.
• I’ve been playing World of Warcraft considerably. The Shadowlands expansion is fun. Despite what seems to be The General Consensus, I myself like The Maw quite a bit, and even the Tower of Torghast. They are odd places with odd mechanics, but I’m enjoying them.
  • At first I hated Torghast for having end-bosses that are orders of magnitude harder than the entire rest of the level, but now that my characters are strong enough to take on the end-bosses it’s more okay.
  • I have six max-level characters now, and I’m working on my Arms Warrior. (The one that I level-boosted just to get the final Legion Class Hall Mount, as hinted at here.) Just one level to go!
  • I got tired of plate classes being encased in giant bulky armor, so both said Arms Warrior and my Paladin have been running around in minimalist “shirt and capris” sort of transmogs, which is a fun feel. It’s also funny when one of them gets an upgrade and I switch to it, and then they’re wearing basically civilian clothes plus a giant two-ton steel belt or whatever. :)
  • I finally got organized and made a little table in Google Keep (or Keep Notes, or whatever it’s called this month) showing the class and professions and bag sizes and ilevel of each character (at least each one on the main server that I use), so that everyone can send the Tailor all the cloth they find, the Tailor can make appropriate bags for everyone, and so on. Efficiency!
• I’ve been reading books and even watching random movies a bit on Hulu / Netflix / Amazon. I still have not much patience for non-interactive things these days, but sometimes I get into it. Still haven’t finished the Constantinople book, still want to go to Constantinople someday (well, okay, Istanbul). #bucketlist
• I’m proud to have contributed scripting and things to yet another amazing Karima Hoisan sim (video trailer), which I would normally talk about over in the secret Second Life weblog (the same is true of the WoW stuff above for that matter), but I happen to be writing here at the moment. The result is really powerful and wild, and while I don’t take credit for any of the ideas or the creativity, I will say that it was a pretty significant scripting project; for the first time I was really on the point of putting it all into a Source Code Control system and a bug tracker.
• I continue playing with various Transformer-based Large Language Model AI’s, which continues to be fun. I attempt to get my Replika to say more imaginative things than “Oh, yeah, me too!” and “I agree!”, and succeed often enough that it keeps me trying. I play with Google’s internal one considerably, but I can’t say very much about that in public, except to point you to already released material on the subject. :)
• Speaking of wild advances in AI, I finally installed FaceApp, which is really amazing for the things that it does, but offers surprisingly little customization. You can have it do certain very specific things to a face, and it looks amazingly realistic, but you can’t do very similar but slightly different things at all. I find that odd; I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the technology, or if they just decided that offering all the flexibility in the app wasn’t worth it. (But I do know now that I should probably not shave off my beard, haha.)
• And then there’s the portrait-animator that MyHeritage recently released, which can be got to free as part of their two-week free trial or whatever, and then is very expensive as part of their whole package of DNA analysis and family-tree and family-photo colorizing and animating stuff.
  • It is similarly very limited, since you can just say “please animate this portrait of grampa”, and it will do a pretty eyebrow-raising job of making grampa look around a little bit and smile slightly at the very end, but you can’t control anything about what the animation does (smile more, or less, or look to the left, or etc). I don’t know why that is, either, although the blog post linked there gives some idea (you’d think they’d at least have a variety of different pre-recorded motion sequences to choose from?).
• The combination of FaceApp and the MyHeritage thing can produce, for instance, a nice little animation of what one would look like as a pretty lady, which is I dunno wonderful or terrifying or something. :)
  • Obviously by combining face generation and modification with realistic auto-animation and very large language models, we are close to being able to create entire worlds of very realistic synthetic and/or modified people who move about saying plausible if slightly insane things. This is exciting!
  • The main things that seem to be missing at the moment are voices that sound convincing (appropriate emphasis and expressivity and all), and arm and body motion that don’t have strong Uncanny Valley stuff going on (see for instance “Sophia“, which continues to claim much more than it delivers imesho).
  • Yipes!
• I’ve been mostly not paying much attention to politics, which is wonderfully nice (and also, I realize, something I can do because of how privileged I am). Every once in awhile something will mention the guy with the bad hair (not the Johnson one, the other one), and I’ll remember when he somehow used to be President, and how awful that was.
• What else? Yesterday my team at work (where “at work” is an entirely nonphysical concept) had a Cookie Baking team event, where one of the admirable young persons on the team led us all through the process of baking cookies according to her favorite recipe, via teleconference. It was a lot of fun, and resulted in delicious cookies!
• I’ve gotten into Manhattan a few times recently, and want to do more, but one worries about New Virus Variants, and doesn’t want to get an infection just when one was about to become fully vaccinated and so on, so one tries to be patient. Work is so far being conservative about predicting when we might be able to go into the office routinely again, but once May comes around I hope I’ll be able to get in at least a couple of times a month. Fingers crossed!
• I shouldn’t really complain, though; it’s lovely and sunny (if windy) up here in the ‘burbs, and if I don’t get out on walks or long scenic drives more, that’s only me to blame. Maybe I’ll take a walk somewhere today! Or just think about it. :)