Zeiss cinema lenses (in particular master primes) have the least distortion I’ve come across

I was talking to my parents the other day and surprised myself getting pretty chocked up remembering how my dad had shown me how to program an ascii animation on his 386, and how the wonder I felt at that in many ways led me to where I am today, so many years later. These things matter.

Do you still have the animation?

It was basically (no pun intended) this, though obviously not in bash:

  #!/bin/bash

  legs_out=(
  "                     "
  "        .'''.        "
  "       -     -       " 
  "       |  C  ^       "
  "        \    7       "
  "          | |        "
  "        /     \\     "
  "        |  \\ \\     "
  "        |   \\ \\    " 
  "      / |    \\ \\   "
  "     /  |     \\ \\  "
  "    /   |      \\ \\ "
  "   /    |      |\\  \\     "
  "        \\    \\          "
  "               \\         "
  "       /        \\        "
  "      /          \\       "
  "     /    / \\    \\      "
  "    /    /   \\    \\     "
  "   /    /     \\    \\    "
  "  /    \       \\    \\   "
  "   \\   \\       \\    \\...  "
  "     ____]         [    ]"
  )

  legs_cross=(
  "        .'''.        "
  "       -     -       "
  "       |  C  ^       "
  "        \    7       "
  "          | |        "
  "        /     \\     "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "      ( |  |  |       "
  "        |  |   )    "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |   )      "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        /  |          "
  "       /   |  |       "
  "      \\..]  /    /    " 
  )

  print_man() {
    local spaces=$1
    local man=("${!2}")
    for line in "${man[@]}"; do
      printf "%*s%s\n" $spaces "" "$line"
    done
  }

  spaces=0
  state=0

  while true; do
    clear
  
    if (( state % 4 < 2 )); then
      print_man $spaces legs_out[@]
    else
      print_man $spaces legs_cross[@]
    fi
  
    ((spaces++))
    ((state++))
  
    if (( spaces > $(tput cols) )); then
      spaces=0
    fi
   
    sleep 0.1
  done

This is really fun, thanks for sharing. May try to do similar with my niece.

I’m afraid not. It was incredibly simple, but I just remember being amazed that such a thing was even possible.

A video camera shooting at standard shutter speeds (ie if being used by a professional) would likely not show the bullet. If shooting 60fps for eg so 1/120 id guess the bullet wouldn’t show up. Quick Google suggests typical 3000km/h out the muzzle which would have a 7m motion blur trail? Not sure how fast and to what speed a bullet slows in air

Would plugging in your fastest external SSD and then using a hard drive read/write tester achieve some of the same ends? I've done that before with Blackmagic's disk speed test app and found it useful

Yes, or considered another way 1/25th shutter vs almost 1/2000th, ie a lot of motion blur vs. virtually nothing will be able to provoke blurring

Except a moving subject, of course.

At 1/2000th both a running cheetah and a running squirrel are completely frozen. I haven’t yet found anything that isn’t frozen with that setting. I suspect at that point you’re in the domain of bullets, very outstretched springs and the like.

Edit: yeah, a speeding bullet caught at 1/5000th: <https://flickr.com/photos/hoohaaphotos/5587502201/>

Stabilization doesn't help with subject movement, it only helps with the camera's shake.

So with this level of stabilization, you'll take a picture of a running cheetah at 1/25 as if it were 1/2000 only as far as the stability of the camera is concerned. So if you're not tracking the cheetah you'll get a sharp background because the shaking of your hands has been nullified, but the cheetah is still moving within the frame and still blurry.

I could see that being possible with a human language, but a non-human language? No way near enough context, I'd think.

I hope there are more models trained on more precise inputs going forward. I understand that natural language feels the most futuristic but while it has the lowest barrier to entry it’s not only imprecise but also slow. Visual approaches (for example control nets in stable diffusion, image as input in Chat GPT, though both of these are somewhat bolted on), 2D semi-natural languages all merit further inquiry.

Another (and perhaps the ultimate) possibility is to have some way —- perhaps through simulations —- to directly expose the model to the problem, rather than having a human/natural language intermediary.

I’m not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur than possessing mass or heat.

> Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence.

There are certainly many things, such as the specific patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" - features that exist, not for themselves, but because constraints on what is possible require them - but anything significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would be a matter of the greatest significance in biology.

But this is beside the point here, as there is no difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the utility of consciousness.

I have trouble seeing the definite utility of consciousness in terms of evolutionary fitness.

Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms, consciousness seems potentially less efficient than unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is often too slow.

Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is effective at doing this.

For example in ironic process theory trying to consciously will away a thought takes resources which increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."

Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary model are better outlined here.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

I will start with a quote from the article you link to: "But, in what ways do feelings and emotions improve fitness? An antelope escaping from a lion needs to run quickly and efficiently. Why, from an evolutionary point of view, does it also need to feel the terrible feeling of fear?"

At that point in its life, consciousness might not be much of a help to it, but here's a similar question: when an antelope first sees a pride of lions in the distance, could it be of evolutionary advantage for it to feel anxious? From there, we can step to an even more pertinent question: if an early human or close hominin ancestor contemplated the possibility of a pride of lions moving into their neighborhood, could it have been advantageous for them to feel anxious?

One response that does not seem far-fetched is that it might prompt the individual to think about how to defend against the threat. This would involve considering various scenarios and how they would play out. This is not just a matter of recalling past events, as these are hypothetical scenarios. Istead, it is a matter of synthesizing an imagined scenario from memories - but there is a phenomenal - 'what it is like' - aspect to memories, some combination of recalling the original phenomenal experience itself or the phenomenal experience of how one felt at the time. Any less direct association between what we experience in the world and how we think about it seems both unnecessarily complex and at risk of our imagination becoming completely detached from the world we live in.

I can't prove that this is how it works, but in this view, it is quite plausible that phenomenal consciousness was a key prerequisite for the route by which we acquired our higher mental abilities (including explicit self-awareness and a theory of mind about other people), and is necessary now. You can claim that all these abilities are possible without phenomenal experience, but even if that were so, it does not follow that phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent, as evolution can only work by small increments, so we do not see, for example, macroscopic organisms with wheels. It is not clear that there is a path to this allegedly superior mind even if it is possible.

Furthermore, if phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent and suboptimal, how did we get it, and why does it not atrophy (which is the fate of all other biological features once they are no longer advantageous)? Panpsychists want to summarily reject an incomplete hypothesis and substitute one that redefines the whole universe to make consciousness fundamental, while saying literally next to nothing about what that means, what consciousness is, and how it works.

Thanks for the reference by the way; I keep a small collection of these sorts of thing.

Or even shoot a documentary as you go. Netflix could end up paying for your time.

I agree.

I think one part of the problem is using English (or whatever natural language) for the prompts/training. Too much inherent ambiguity. I’m interested to see what tools (like control nets with SD) are developed to overcome this.