In my spare time I do stage acting. And there is almost no better feeling having performed a play really well. But to do so, you need to learn your lines. Preferably you learn your text well in advance, so you also have time to play with it. Memorizing things Read more
Have you heard about text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney? These are AI algorithms that take in text (the “prompt”) that describes what kind of picture you want as input and as output the algorithm creates that picture, based on billions of images.
An example could be “an astronaut on a bicycle on the moon by Van Gogh”. And this would be one of the results:
I got access to DALL-E 2 in July this year. DALL-E 2 is a closed source algorithm made by OpenAI. You can sign up to request access to DALL-E 2. Once you get access you can use it for free for a limited of runs. After that you have to pay to use it more.
(more…)Last week my OAK-D Lite from Luxonis arrived. I can imagine you’ve never heard from it. Basically it is a camera that can do all kinds of AI tasks on the device itself. I got mine via Kickstarter. And where I say camera, I actually mean it has multiple cameras. That’s how it can see depth for example.
It can do much more. Load an algorithm, point it at the street next to your house and it starts detecting cars, cyclists and pedestrians. Load the human posture algorithm and it starts showing your posture. Or gestures, sign language, face recognition or COVID-19 mask detection.
I tried Lion’s Mane from Four Sigmatic, which is branded as a cognitive enhancer. I’ve used it while studying Deep Neural Networks, amongst other things. I’ve done alternate weeks with and without Lion’s Mane and in my experience the effect is indiscernable.
I often listen to Tim Ferriss’ podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show). In it he often advertizes the wares of a company called Four Sigmatic. Apparently some of their mushroom coffees enhance cognitive abilities. That is of interest of me, because I’ve been studying a data science course on Coursera.org which had quite a lot of math and later I got a new assignment as a consultant to dive rather deep in the (Hadoop/Big Data related) Apache Atlas and Ranger products.
I’m 47 years old and math is certainly not part of my daily life. In fact I haven’t seen math that much since my bachelor study twenty years ago (besides Coursera courses). I’m also learning a lot of new open source products as data engineer. I can use all the cognitive abilities I can get. (more…)