Monthly Archives: September 2024

RIP Dikembe Mutombo

Miscellaneous

[I know this note seems supremely off topic, but bear with me.]

I’m sorry to hear of the passing of larger-than-life NBA star Dikembe Mutombo. He inspired the name of a “Project Mutombo” at Google, which was meant to block unintended sharing of content outside of one’s company. Unrelated (AFAIK he never knew of the project), back in 2015 I happened to see him biking around campus—dwarfing a hapless Google Bike & making its back tire cartoonishly flat.

RIP, big guy. Thanks for the memories, GIFs, and inspiration.

Zuck talks AR wearables & much more

AR/VR

I quite enjoyed the Verge’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg, discussing how they think about building a whole range of reality-augmenting devices, from no-display Wayfarers to big-ass goggles, and especially to “glasses that look like glasses”—the Holy Grail in between.

Links to some of the wide-ranging topics they covered:

00:00 Orion AR smart glasses
00:27 Platform shift from mobile to AR
02:15 The vision for Orion & AR glasses
03:55 Why people will upgrade to AR glasses
05:20 A range of options for smart glasses
07:32 Consumer ambitions for Orion
11:40 Reality Labs spending & the cost of AR
12:44 Ray-Ban partnership
17:11 Ray-Ban Meta sales & success
18:59 Bringing AI to the Ray-Ban Meta
21:54 Replacing phones with AR glasses
25:18 Influx of AI content on social media
28:32 The vision for AI-filled social media
34:04 Will AI lead to less human interaction?
35:24 Success of Threads
36:41 Competing with X & the role of news
40:04 Why politics can hurt social platforms
41:52 Mark’s shift away from politics
46:00 Cambridge Analytica, in hindsight
49:09 Link between teen mental health and social media
53:52 Disagreeing with EU regulation
56:06 Debate around AI training data & copyright
1:00:07 Responsibility around AR as a platform

Tangentially, I gave myself an unintended chuckle with this:

iPhone goes on safari

Photography

Austin Mann puts the new gear through its paces in Kenya:

Last week at the Apple keynote event, the iPhone camera features that stood out the most to me were the new Camera Control button, upgraded 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sensor, improved audio recording features (wind reduction and Audio Mix), and Photographic Styles. […]

Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into these camera systems and their features.

“Jurassic Park – 1950’s Super Panavision 70”

AI/ML

Chaos reigns!

I have no idea what AI and other tools were used here, but it’d be fun to get a peek behind the curtain. As a commenter notes,

The meandering strings in the soundtrack. The hard studio lighting of the close-ups. The midtone-heavy Technicolor grading. The macro-lens DOF for animation sequences. This is spot-on 50’s film aesthetic, bravo.

[Via Andy Russell]

Flux goes realtime with Krea

AI/ML, Typography

And if that headline makes no sense, it probably just means your not terminally AI-pilled, and I’m caught flipping a grunt. 😉 Anyway, the tiny but mighty crew at Krea have brought the new Flux text-to-image model—including its ability to spell—to their realtime creation tool:

iPhone 16 + AI: Quick helpful summaries

Mobile, Photography

Check out my friend Bilawal’s summary thread, which pairs quick demos from Apple with bits of useful context:

There are some great additional details in this thread from Halide Camera as well:

“Only Murders In The Building” titles

Illustration

Somehow, despite my wife being a huge fan of the show over the last couple of years, I hadn’t previously seen the delightful titles for Only Murders In The Building:

Salon has a great article that goes behind the scenes with Elastic, which previously created titles for “Game of Thrones,” “Watchmen” and “Captain Marvel,” among others.

“The brief was this idea of a love letter to New York in a way and true crime and true crime podcasts,” Lisa Bolan, a creative director at Elastic, told Salon. “John really wanted to capture this romantic illustrative approach to New York, building on the magic of Hirschfeld and The New Yorker – illustrators who have abstracted New York in a way that’s beautiful and also speaks to these little glimpses of magic in the urban landscape.

Behind the scenes: DIY Deadpool

AI/ML

I love seeing how scrappy creators combine tools in new ways, blazing trails that we may come to see as commonplace soon enough. Here Eric Solorio (enigmatic_e) shows how he used Viggle & other tools to create his viral Deadpool animation:

See also some of his luchador moves, plus more on his various feeds: