Braincell computers, Balenciaga's future and the Coinbase Menace

Welcome to Nahiko's Bookmarks, a careful curation of my favorite posts, straight to your inbox every Thursday !

GM,

This week is quite a disturbing but also refreshing newsletter I prepared for you,

Let's dive right in 👇

Braincell Computers

Alright, now that I've seen this video, I'm starting to think this has always been inevitable. The efficiency at which human braincells work seems so unatainable, why wouldn't we want to use braincells to power computers ? Well, the answer is obvious: ethics.

But do ethics really matter anymore in a globalized capitalist market ? Time will tell...

Lord ¥ayowam ⭕️

@yayowam

Can’t get hold of Nvidia GPUs?
I got u fam.
Introducing the organoid

Balenciaga's Future

Alright I'm kind of clickbaiting you here, this is not particularly about Balenciaga. But don't leave yet ! It's even more interesting...

I found this tweet by @dreamingtulpa which showcases ViViD an AI model capable of something quite stunning...

Dreaming Tulpa 🥓👑

@dreamingtulpa

ViViD can transfer a clothing item onto the video of a target person!

The method is able to capture garment details and human posture, resulting in more coherent and lifelike videos.

becauseimbatman0.github.io/ViViD

This is the (currently realistic !) scenario I envision:

Go to Balenciaga's website → turn on your webcam → See yourself wearing the clothing in realtime

Note: this is yet another model by Alibaba, which has been releasing many articles like such without releasing the actual code for months after that, so take it with a grain of salt.

Neuralink's Impossible Task

Maybe you have seen this new challenge launched by Neuralink ? They will reward anyone capable of compressing their sensor's data 200 times smaller.

Seems like a big number ? Well it is ! so much so that the global consensus right now is that it's simply impossible to do.

Felix

@felix_red_panda

Neuralink started a compression challenge. They're asking for people to find methods to losslessly (!!) compress files to 1/200th (!) the size but the files are extremely noisy so thats certainly not possible

(spectrogram of one randomly chosen file for illustration)

But I'd like to highlight this interesting answer by @HiSohan. A bit like the library of Babel, Pi (because it never ends) does contain every data possible.

Sohan Basak

@HiSohan

Here's how you solve this:

1. Find the first place in Pi's expansion where the bits are exactly those from neuralink's data.
2. Send that address.

At 20000Hz, you have 200 samples in 1 0ms. Which is 3200 bits, and you need to find it in the first bit of pi.

So an easy way to compress Neuralink's data would simply be to look for the data to compress in PI, and then return its starting point.

Doable ? Well, not really.

Theoretically ? Nope still not, the number would be too big.

But Philosophically ? Marvelous.

Make your own Disney Character

At this point idk what to say anymore, it seems like the AI frenzy is still going, and it'll never end. Every week this newsletter contains plenty of AI, and that's not even my niche.

For how long will this continue ? I'm not sure.

Anyway, for now let's enjoy the fruits of the community's labor:

Justine Moore

@venturetwins

Making my own cartoons on a Saturday morning

This is from ToonCrafter on @huggingface Spaces.

Used @fofrAI's character consistency model for the input images, and then upscaled the video on @krea_ai.

A few learnings

The Coinbase Menace

Alright, let me start with: I'm a coinbase user.

I use coinbase to on & off-ramp my crypto, and I've never been disappointed, their support seems decent and the services work.

But I'm scared.

Smart wallets are an amazing feat, probably the best way to onboard the next billion people in crypto, sure. And with Coinbase Wallet as its figurehead it seems the future will be blue.

But as I click the "create your smart wallet" button, I realize: Is it a good idea to let coinbase control yet another chunk of my onchain life ?

It feels like Google all-over again 🫣

Coinbase Wallet 🛡️

@CoinbaseWallet

The wait is over. Smart wallets are here.

As always, these last two posts I kept for my dear subscribers ❤

Thank you again for supporting me.

Someone cracked Midjourney

Have you seen these posts lately stating something like "my mother's facebook feed is filled with AI stuff and she doesn't even realize"

Well, I'm not sure you'll be able to tell much longer either.

Andrew Gao

@itsandrewgao

a redditor cracked the code for getting iphone-realistic photos from @midjourney (which is harder done than said!)

u/MagicJourknee

Bringing down every website ?

I know I know, a bit of a clickbait again. But actually, not so far off. This guy just found a way to literally take down the JS ecosystem. Almost every website/app/server that uses NPM (and that's a lot of them)...

Dependencies sure are a nightmare to deal with. And I feel like, as a civilization, we are accumulating a huge technical debt, and I'm not sure how we'll handle it.