Hello from mid-April! I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
Two personal updates:
I had the best time on the Supra Insider podcast last week—we covered lots of my most frequently-shared career insight and a few of my more niche favorite topics as well.
I wrote up my thoughts on ten weeks with the Vision Pro
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
With all of these techniques combined, there are seemingly endless parameters that can be animated and modulated (quite like in modular audio production). It can either be “scheduled” with keyframes and graphed in something like Parseq, or linked to audio and music, allowing many audio-reactive results. You can make Stable Diffusion dance for you just like that.
– Aulerius Vandenukas, “overview of generative AI animation techniques,” Diffusion Pilot. One of the more rewarding rabbit holes I’ve fallen down recently: I went looking for an overview of the generative AI animation landscape, found this Reddit post covering exactly that, then traced it back to the blog post and its author—“Restless Animotionizer and art Enjoyer from Lithuania, currently doing their MA in Animation at EKA, Estonia, developing the graduation short animated film.” Their Twitter/X feed further pointed me to this AI filmmaking archive—a near-endless gallery of links to videos I can’t wait to watch.
Regarding complex poses, where the camera first moves left front and then forward, VideoComposer can mimic the reference video’s camera motion using extracted motion vectors. However, the dense motion vectors inadvertently capture object shapes, such as a door’s outline in the reference video (frame 12), resulting in an unnatural-looking Eiffel Tower. MotionCtrl, guided by rotation and translation matrices, generates more natural-looking videos with camera motion close to the reference.
– Zhouxia Wang, Ziyang Yuan1, Xintao Wang, Q Tianshui Chen, Menghan Xia, Ping Luo, Q Ying Shan, “MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation,” December 6, 2023. I arrived here by way of a link from Aulerius’s overview post.
After setting up TripoSR locally a week ago and getting inspired by dough monsters, I got an idea to generate a 2d representation of a figurine in SD [Stable Diffusion], turn it into 3d model using TripoSR and 3d print it. I tried it out today, finally giving my 3d printer a job after it's been collecting dust for months. I always see SD as this thing that is crazy cool and should be impactful, but if generations never leave my drive, it doesn't really have a lasting impact on the world around me. Getting to touch an AI generated object that has quite an intricate detail is pretty cool.
– Reddit user on the Stable Diffusion subreddit, April 13, 2024. Found it fascinating to see the “two wrongs make a right” rationalization here—mashing together two technologies that hadn’t had the expected impact in their life, 3D printing + Stable Diffusion.
The rear bedroom and family room of Harp’s house had been converted into a production line for memory boards and board kits. Boxes of chips and parts were stacked on the floor, while the table was covered in fruit bowls into which the correct chips for each board had been carefully sorted, ready to be packaged.
– Gareth Edwards, “She Built a Microcomputer Empire
From Her Suburban Home: The untold story of Lore Harp McGovern,” The Crazy Ones on Every, April 8, 2024. A good piece overall, and I especially liked this golden detail.
Adults also gravitate toward art, architecture, nature and nostalgia, said Capa Cruz. Lego recently added working replicas of an old Pac-Man arcade game and a Polaroid camera to its 18+ range, for example, alongside a 2,316-brick rendition of Van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” and a $160 replica of Japan’s Himeji Castle.
– Trefor Moss, “$850 Millennium Falcons and $680 Titanics: Grown-Ups Are Now a Gold Mine for Lego,” The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2024. Thanks to Jake for sending—you know me well! Beyond tapping into my general love for LEGO, I found the summary of “art, architecture, nature and nostalgia” as “grownup interests” to be a too-true distillation.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com