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Synthetic imagery and VQGAN+CLIP
When it took social media by storm last year, I checked it out and was fascinated with how much machine learning techniques have progressed in the last ten years. I am talking about the VQGAN+CLIP, a text-to-image generation model released by Katherine Crowson as a Google Colab Notebook. Suddenly when reading an article I got reminded of this, and spend some time trying with various captions and I am sharing the images I got. VQGAN+CLIP is a text-to-image model that generates images, given a set of text prompts. The field is called synthetic imagery (“GAN Art”). Here, VQGAN is the image generator, CLIP is the “natural language steering wheel” that…
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Redmi 10 Prime
I was looking for a new phone to replace a Samsung M20 which had broken down and Samsung service was quoting a repair fee of INR 7000 – more than half of the price (INR 12,990) I had paid three years ago. Till now, my experience with Samsung mobiles has been good. My wife was having a Samsung Galaxy M31s, my sister and my son were using Samsung Galaxy M30s, and I have a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite as my second phone, which I am very happy with. But recently, apart from the problem with this one (M20) I had heard from a friend about a motherboard problem he was…
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Tamil voice typing now available on Windows 11
Windows 11 now supports five Indian languages for Voice typing: Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi & Telugu. Today, I stumbled on this when I accidentally pressed Windows key + H on my Windows PC. I was about to get rid of the window with a big microphone button that popped up, when I pressed the help (?) button to get a list of supported languages – there I was pleasantly surprised to find Tamil. Next, I gave this feature a spin. I spoke a few sentences in தமிழ் and it got most of what I said correctly (there are a few mistakes, I suppose I can get it to type right…
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My impressions of the Facebook’s metaverse presentation
My impressions of the #Facebook #Metaverse keynote: I have a #OculusQuest2, as a non-gamer I find the software & apps have potential but are not there yet, and I hardly wear it. Only the 360 videos are usable! Convenience & Ease of use has been missing in all VR & AR systems till now. Facebook has managed to deflect temporarily the focus from the leak of “Facebook Papers” by pre-announcing Meta by decades. As a futuristic trend what they showed are exciting but the underlying #VirtualReality #AugmentedReality tech needed is far far away. I felt the important item is the promise around #NFT & Digital Assets in the Metaverse. If…
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The future for Software Engineers by 2040
How latest trends will impact software engineering by 2040 and how developers can thrive. For the next three days, Azure Community Conference is happening online. With over 200+ talks across ten tracks, speakers from around the world, this is one of the largest technology conferences organized by Microsoft community enthusiasts. I was invited to deliver a talk on the future trends that are under way in the software industry. Titled “The future for Software Developers by 2040” I presented on four topics: First, the current job market, immediate changes expected post pandemic and long-term trends. Second, the changes that have in the last eighteen months around the practice “Work from…
