Great now multiply that bullet point list by 1000, because everyone wants different things and has different hardware, and you'll see that even the current state of Linux is a miracle. We're at the point where 90% of the time you can install a modern Gnome distro on a laptop and it'll work. Completely for free.
Or any community that involves conspicuous consumption. There's always what feels like a majority of people who collect/buy/show off more than they use things
and that's fine in some sense if you're honest about what you're doing.
I have at least one guitar that I rarely play but I keep because I consider it a work of art and a collectible. But, I have others which are workhorses and I play daily.
It gets awkward when collecting is presented as a way to be a better musician, which is clearly false.
It also percolates into reviews, too. When a nontrivial fraction of the community is buying dreams and is about collecting as opposed to using whatever it is, some reviewers style their content towards that crowd and overlook issues or benefits that pop up when actually using the gear.
I don't have a problem with collecting, but I'd love for the distinction to be more upfront.
On that note I absolutely love Matt Johnson (Jamiroquai)'s youtube channel because you can tell he likes gear but spends a huge amount of time actually playing it and making his own patches. So much of the review market is just GAS-inducing paid promo stuff.
It's kind of easy to detect though. I usually read three/four paragraphs before I realize that the person reviewing doesn't actually make music and doesn't consider the music making parts of the hardware, and instead focuses on very generic stuff that basically the manufacturer handed to them and said "make sure this is included".
I'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium subscription, and their UI sucks.
If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is not that hard.
> Even if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations ...
No they are not. Hi there. We noticed you have been listening to Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Deftones. Why not have a listen of this Robbie Williams song too ... blasts out some pop song at extra high volume.
In my country you do not. No idea how they do it, but the plan and buying the phone separate (iPhone 16 pro Max) phone costs about 300 more than the phone and plan combined.
That implies you are paying too much for phones then, since the mobile providers can apparently get them significantly cheaper. They may also be selling your data and pre-installing apps, but every country does that.
I think it's a way for Phone OEMs to push their phones into the market as a marketing measure/to gain market shares without destroying their retail price because it never happens to very popular phones like the iPhone
The refusal is probably because OP said "100% written by AI" and didn't indicate an interest in actually reviewing or maintaining the code. In fact, a later PR comment suggests that the AI's approach was needlessly complicated.
Also because it's a large PR. Also because the maintainer has better things to do than taking longer and more energy to review than the author spent to write it, just to find that multiple optimisations will be requested, which the author may not be able to take on.
the creator of llama.cc can hardly be suspected to be reluctant or biased towards GenAI.
Absolutely -- it's perfectly understandable. I wanted to be completely upfront about AI usage and while I was willing and did start to break the PR down into parts, it's totally OK for the maintainers to reject that too.
I wanted to see if Claude Code could port the HF / MLX implementation to llama.cpp and it was successful -- in my mind that's wild!
I also learned a ton about GPU programming, how omni models work, and refined my approach to planning large projects with automated end to end integration tests.
The PR was mostly to let people know about the code and weights, since there are quite a few comments requesting support:
To be honest it looks like it was rendered in an old version of Unreal Engine. That may be an intentional choice - I wonder how realistic guassian splatting can look? Can you redo lights, shadows, remove or move parts of the scene, while preserving the original fidelity and realism?
The way TV/movie production is going (record 100s of hours of footage from multiple angles and edit it all in post) I wonder if this is the end state. Gaussian splatting for the humans and green screens for the rest?
The aesthetic here is at least partially an intentional choice to lean into the artifacts produced by Gaussian splatting, particularly dynamic (4DGS) splatting. There is temporal inconsistency when capturing performances like this, which are exacerbated by relighting.
That said, the technology is rapidly advancing and this type of volumetric capture is definitely sticking around.
Several of ASAP's video have a lo-fi retro vibe, or specific effects such as simulating stuff like a mpeg a/v corruption, check out A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w)
Knowing what I know about the artist in this video this was probably more about the novelty of the technology and the creative freedom it offers rather than it is budget.
For me it felt more like higher detail version of Teardown, the voxel-based 3d demolition game. Sure it's splats and not voxels, but the camera and the lighting give this strong voxel game vibe.
I guess the technology still has some quality limitations, otherwise we would already see it in mainstream movies, e.g. to simulate smooth camera motions beyond what is achievable with video stabilization. It's much more difficult to achieve 4K quality that holds up on a movie theater screen, without visible artifacts, than to do an artistic music video.
I would say Superman's quality didn't suffer for it.
I would say cost is probably the most expensive part it's also just like "why bother", it's not CG, it's not "2d filming" so it's just niche, like the scenarios you would actually need this are very low.
That's interesting. 192 cameras is certainly expensive. Though they are doing 4DGS, with movement, so they have to capture every frame from different angles at the same time. I assume 3DGS for static environments (locations) would be a lot easier in terms of hardware. E.g. a single drone could collect photos for an hour and then they could create arbitrary simulated camera movements that couldn't be filmed conventionally. But again, the quality would have to be high in most cases. The nature of the Superman scene (some sort of hologram) is more forgiving, as it is inherently fake-looking, which helps excuse artifacts slipping through.
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