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It’s July! I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
I’m back from a lively few days at Config. Marcin Wichary’s talk on pixel fonts was an instant classic; being there live was electric.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me over the past week…
I often hear from people that they feel better, happier, and calmer after using Midjourney. It's interesting, and I can see why. It engages our dopamine system without the toxic elements of social media.
– Tatiana Tsiguleva on X, June 22, 2024. The 22 responses are worth reading, too—from “The feeling of serendipity combined with a sense of achievement is both calming and motiving” (1) to “The issue is, and I have been guilty, so many feel a need to share it on social media ASAP to keep that dopamine hitting. We indeed are complex and odd creatures.” (2)
SMPL is a statistical distribution, and the most compact representation of humans. Using SMPL in the encoding gives us the control over the encoding so we can drive the generated video with human motion. It’s like having a joystick to control your character in the game-world of video diffusion models.
– Naureen Mahmood, “Building Human Foundation Models with SMPL,” June 25, 2024. The Meshcapade team has been on a roll publishing lately.
The widely different degrees of sparsity represent a novel machine learning challenge in and of themselves, as the model is expected to learn from sparse data, but produce a dense forecast.
– “Deep Learning for Day Forecasts from Sparse Observations,” June 2023, Marcin Andrychowicz, Lasse Espeholt, Di Li, Samier Merchant, Alexander Merose, Fred Zyda, Shreya Agrawal, and Nal Kalchbrenner. “Sparse data to dense forecast” is a puzzle for the ages.
Although the building needed many improvements, Oppenheimer couldn't afford to make the changes, and decided to allow the public to come and watch exhibits being built and changes being made as part of the participatory ethos of the institution.
– “Exploratorium” article on Wikipedia, accessed on July 1, 2024. The Exploratorium here in San Francisco has been on my list to learn more about for a while. I’m glad I finally did; I didn’t know it was founded by Frank Oppenheimer (the other Oppenheimer’s brother). Makes me think of startups “building in public.”
I had by then met many brilliant professors with eclectic interests, but [Will] Wright's bookshelves and belongings boggled me. My job was to make software toys for, as I saw it, the world’s most talented toy maker. I was in Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. To my delight, Wright opened a closet, dusted off some old computers, and we plugged them in. He proudly showed me SimEarth code, and I pored over the source for SimCity 2000, SimAnt, and more, blueprints of childhood playthings that had once utterly transformed my sense of the world.
– Chaim Gingold, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, 2024. Gingold interned for Will Wright in the early days of the Spore project and this scene is straight out of a movie. The brings to mind the potential for mutuality in apprenticeship: as good as it feels to be invited behind the scenes, it can almost feel better to be understood.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com