Neural Volume Rendering for Dynamic Scenes

NeRF has shown incredible view synthesis results, but it requires multi-view captures for STATIC scenes.

How can we achieve view synthesis for DYNAMIC scenes from a single video? Here is what I learned from several recent efforts.

Instead of presenting Video-NeRF, Nerfie, NR-NeRF, D-NeRF, NeRFlow, NSFF (and many others!) as individual algorithms, here I try to view them from a unifying perspective and understand the pros/cons of various design choices.

Okay, here we go.

*Background*

NeRF represents the scene as a 5D continuous volumetric scene function that maps the spatial position and viewing direction to color and density. It then projects the colors/densities to form an image with volume rendering.

Volumetric + Implicit -> Awesome!

*Model*

Building on NeRF, one can extend it for handling dynamic scenes with two types of approaches.

A) 4D (or 6D with views) function.

One direct approach is to include TIME as an additional input to learn a DYNAMIC radiance field.

e.g., Video-NeRF, NSFF, NeRFlow

B) 3D Template with Deformation.

Inspired by non-rigid reconstruction methods, this type of approach learns a radiance field in a canonical frame (template) and predicts deformation for each frame to account for dynamics over time.

e.g., Nerfie, NR-NeRF, D-NeRF

One segment I have been absolutely upbeat is IT/Tech. Tech has always been the hidden moat for many companies - AP/BFL to name a few. Tech is no longer a vertical in market. It has become horizontal that cuts across every single vertical.

Be it Pharma/API, Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, CD, or any other segment, Tech is going to give you edge over peers.

The spend on IT/Tech is going to increase stupendously in coming 4/5 years to levels we haven't even imagined. The investment in tech is going to help big get even bigger and put very hard survival barriers to new entrants.

BFL/HDFC Life from Fin/Insurance segment have one of the best tech platforms. IndiaMart relies on customer data monetization, Dmart has a very small but extremely strong team of data scientists

Even Nestle has very strong data scientist pool, Asian Paints story is well knows to everyone now. Not investing in IT/Tech is going to be your biggest mistake in investing journey.

The Elon Musk BS about indentured servitude on Mars, this was bothering me the other day before I read that quote and I didn’t tweet about it, but yeah I have thoughts about capitalists planning to “save humanity” by leaving earth...

The idea that it is somehow an easier feat of engineering to leave our planet and terraform another planet, than it is to fight climate change on Earth is a load of horseshit. So why is it billed that way? Why convince people that space travel is “our only hope as a species”?

When I played Horizon Zero Dawn, one thing that really, really upset me was the quest where you discover the classrooms intended to educate future humans, and there is a Faro logo on *everything*.

It’s not about saving humanity, it’s about being acknowledged as a “saviour”

You can’t save “humanity” by fleeing the Earth, leaving billions to die and the biosphere to collapse. And you can’t create a utopian society elsewhere by exporting the same sociocultural mindset and capitalist ideology that destroyed our planet, you can only delay the inevitable

It’s one big fucking vanity project entirely devoid of merit, and a society with a literal saviour is not going to be one where shit like equality is possible. Without dissenters, it’s going to be a perfect distillation of everything already wrong with our present society

The Discourse on the post-coup tech platform rejection of violent fascism is giving me hives so I just have to get my ~hot take~ in here.

Sorry for the massive thread; Pascal’s apology applies.

Everybody loves to talk about “precedent” when a decision is made like kicking tr*mp off Twitter or pa*ler off of AWS, usually when making some fallacious slippery slope argument about what this “precedent” will mean for some completely non-comparable follow-up situation.

In some narrow colloquial sense, I admit there’s a precedent being set, in that when an analogous situation arises, the decision makers in that situation might do their research and look at this preceding (hence: “precedent”) event, and base some reasoning on it.

But this is a rhetorical trick—maybe one that those making the argument are playing on themselves as much as they’re playing it on you—because they’re trying to get you to consider the word in its legal-jargon sense: that future decision makers *must* consider these events.

This often goes along with the frankly bananas implication that by “setting the precedent” the decision makers (tech platforms or whoever) are arrogating to themselves a power which they did not *already have*, and it is thus dangerous and opens the door for future abuses.

Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.

1/

2/

The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.

To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.

3/

Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.

These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).

4/

There's an interesting detail in one of the frames: glimpse of a facility worker observing an industrial robot moving a rack.

5/

What is interesting is that:

✅ Cell production facilities are Class 7 clean rooms, while the worker doesn't wear the usual "bunny suit" protective gear.
✅ There's a barrier between the worker and the robot: likely separating clean-room air from unprotected air.

The National Security Agency has just released an important set of rules and procedures for electronic surveillance by the DOD (of which NSA is a

It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2

These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3

FISA covers collection inside the US from a wire of coms w/ at least one end on domestic soil. So this is for all the other stuff, like collection abroad, certain satellite interceptions, & warrantless bulk collection of foreign-to-foreign coms as they transit the US network./4

The previous procedures date back to 1988 and were signed by then-AG Edwin Meese and then-deputy secretary of defense William Taft. (They were released in 2014 as part of the Snowden

Check out our last preprint- We use single-cell & spatial technologies to map the human uterus and inform organoids experiments

Mapping the temporal and spatial dynamics of the human endometrium in vivo and in vitro

We generate single-cell and spatial reference maps of the human uterus and dissect the signalling pathways that determine cell fate of the epithelial lineages in the lumenal and glandular microenvironments.

To study cell-signalling we use Cell2location (@vitaliikl) and develop CellPhoneDBv3 that considers cellular coordinates for the inference of cell-cell communication

We mapped 3D endometrial organoid cultures and benchmark the model to our uterine atlas. To do so, we develop a novel computational pipeline to align in vitro and in vivo datasets.

Our comparison highlights common pathways regulating the differentiation of secretory and ciliated lineage in vivo and in vitro.

Stephen, why are you so critical of Facebook and not the other big tech companies?

A 🧵 for well-intentioned engineers about how to navigate the complexities of big tech.

There's a simple inescapable truth about the distinction in kind between Facebook and the others.

Google could fix its content moderation and stop its military contracts and its business model would still be Google. (1/)

Apple could fix up its supply chain, raises the unit prices on its products for more sustainable and environmentally sound sourcing, and its business model would still be Apple. (2/)

Amazon could treat its workers better and stop self-dealing in adjacent markets with its own products, and its business model would still be Amazon. (3/)

Netflix could ... actually don't really have here to complain about here really. Maybe less Tiger King. (4/)

Microtest Test-Driven Development is a strategy for *change*. To understand the case, we need to answer two questions: 1) Why have a strategy for change? 2) How does TDD provide one? Let's take up the first question today.

(Before we begin, I remind you of the relative unimportance of geekery to me just now. This is just respite.

Please work for change and support the others who are doing so.

Black lives matter.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.)

Why is having a change strategy so urgent?

The TL;DR is dead simple:

Because continuous ongoing change is at the base of all software development, both before and after our software is in the field.

When I read old-school software ideas, or for that matter what is being taught in our colleges for the most part today, I'm struck over and over again by the "timeless" aspect of the material. It is concerned almost entirely with the static and atemporal aspects of software.

In these approaches, applications spring Athena-like from the heads of our pantheon-worthy programmers. The designs emerge in an instant and once emerged they are final. The process looks like 1) Nothing. 2) Everything. 3) Move on.

NEW INTERVIEW: Former Chairman of Sony Entertainment on Nintendo's Everlasting Intellectual Property

'Mario is probably impervious to extinction'

$NTDOY

https://t.co/MI0mMmSDsf

Nintendo has 100 years of experience in gaming.

'They are the masters in this field'

'As a platform holder, our job is to create a wider audience, continually.'

'I think Nintendo really understands the game design maxims for a handheld platform and then how to leverage their very powerful IP vault in that medium.'

It seems Fortnite and Roblox is additive to the industry and not exactly zero-sum vs AAA games?

South Korean carmaker Hyundai on Wednesday presented the first 7 hydrogen-powered trucks to customers in Switzerland, out of 50 such vehicles scheduled this year to bring zero-emission commercial vehicles to European roads


For long haul, proponents say hydrogen-powered trucks have an advantage over electric rivals as they have a greater range and require less charging times but their uptake and mass production has been slow because they are expensive

However, a McKinsey study in January said that once relative efficiencies of the power sources and lifetime costs of a truck are factored in, green hydrogen could reach cost parity with diesel by 2030

PARITY WITH DIESEL ???

Hyundai has been partnering with Swiss companies to build a value chain covering the production of green hydrogen from hydropower, hydrogen charging stations and the service and maintenance of the trucks

The customers, which include supermarket chain Migros, will be leasing the trucks from Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility HHM to transport goods around the country, backed by the new hydrogen infrastructure

Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution

A trend I'm excited for this year: DataOps & the Analytical Engineer

~10 years ago DevOps was born. The role of system admins and developers merged. Infrastructure became self-serve

Today the role of data engineers and business analysts are merging. Data is becoming self-serve

Data infrastructure is becoming so powerful that the tools today allow non-technical folks to carry out the once complicated / custom code/ huge backlog jobs of data engineers.

Before getting into what this means, let's first discuss how we got here

Before 2012 the data world was dominated by transactional (OLTP) databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc and analytical (OLAP) databases like Oracle, Netezza

Tools like Informatica / Talend were used to batch load (ETL) data into these databases, Tableau used to visualize

As you can imagine, there was heavy engineering work to manage the environment...

Then in 2013 AWS released their cloud data warehouse Redshift, and it was a game changer. Snowflake was founded in 2012, but didn't really pick up steam until a few years later (around 2016)

So why was Redshift a big deal?

1. It was the first cloud-native OLAP warehouse. It reduced the TCO of an OLAP database by orders of magnitude.

2. Speed of processing analytical queries increased dramatically

AT&T looks to sell DirecTV as investors question its huge bet on content.https://t.co/JZgjgHwUco business information up to date

AT&T is reportedly putting its DirecTV business up for auction just five years after buying it. The move raises momentous questions: Does this signal the unwinding of AT&T’s hugely ambitious program to become a media titan,

Soooo, I'm so exciting to present my own version of the magnetic connection for @UltHackKeyboard!

Inspired by https://t.co/xRG70VmsPk and https://t.co/koCfb4sRDv

So, I've used NetDot Gen10 Micro USB for the task.

I unwrapped one of the micro USB father part and get rid of the plastic in it.

I've decided to glue it on RJ10 socket, as far as I've found, this is the best place to put the second socket. Yep, I'm still have the default one miniusb!

To have an even surface, Ive cut a little bit the trails on RJ10

I've found it challenging to solder wires to the magnetic connector's pins, so made it in the another way.

I've made holes in wires with a needle. So then just put wires ON pins.

The next. Glueing a socket to the RJ10. Since the force profile will change, it's necessary to enforce the RJ socket. So I've glued it on the perimeter.

Then the mag-usb is put to the socket. It's the only fixing thing for wires on usb. Glue for the God Of Glue!!

@bitburner Here is the text version:

1/ Here is a description of what went down according to someone with far greater technical knowledge than me:

"so a group of developers latched onto the Press Release that Twilio put out at midnight last night. In that Press Release, Twilio

2/ accidentally revealed which services Parler was using. Turns out it was all of the security authentications that were used to register a user. This allowed anyone to create a user, and not have to verify an email address, and immediately have a logged-on account.

Well,

3/ because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to

deliver content -- ALL CONTENT (parleys, video, images, user profiles, user information, etc) -. But what it also did was revealed which USERS had "Administration" rights,

4/ "Moderation" rights.

Well, then what happened, those user accounts that had Administration rights to the entire platform... The hackers, internet warriors, call it what you will, was able to use the forgot password link to change the password. Why? Because Twilio was no

5/ longer authenticating emails. This meant, they'd get directly to the reset password screen of that Administration user.

This group of Internet Warriors then used that account, to create a handful of other ADMINISTRATION accounts, and then created a script that ended up