Oh, yeah, I didn’t see those. I think my point still stands though, really those specular highlights shouldn’t be that bright, but the AI can figure out that it’s plausible for them to be brighter and that it would fit the target style better.

Yeah, probably the main reason it’s getting the little bit of praise that it does is that they’re showing it off on games with fairly flat-looking skin shaders. Unfortunately a problem with this sort of thing is that getting that “2023” image is the result of giving a whole team a huge amount of time to model one man’s face. If you’re Bethesda and you just want to get NPCs into Starfield, it would be a similar amount of work. A bit less, since the first people already gave a talk on it, but still much more work then just getting a diffuse BRDF with some subsurface scattering and calling it good. But you also need a process that can be applied to every single NPC…

And looking at Striking Distance Studios, the company where that 2023 image is from:

In February 2025, it was reported that most of the studio’s developers had been laid off.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the work those people put in will never be directly reused.

Another reason the DLSS version looks a bit more realistic there is because of the specular highlights on the eyes, for example. They probably aren’t reflecting anything real, or else they would be there in the original. But the AI knows that specular highlights add realism and are plausible in this scene, so it puts them there. That’s something that an artist could do if given a specific shot and camera angle, but in the general case they can’t really do that without causing problems.

Fun fact that you may or may not have heard before: the light flicker animation in Half Life Alyx is actually the exact same one used in the original Quake. Half Life 1 was built on the Quake engine, and the same animation was carried over into Source and then Source 2.

https://www.alanzucconi.com/2021/06/15/valve-flickering-lights/

I think with the straight/gay labels, you’re not going to be not attracted to someone just because they say that they’re a guy or girl. So really there’s just some appearances that you find attractive, and some not. For most people, those line up pretty well with femininity and masculinity, with maybe a few other restrictions on top. Any label is going to be a simplification, you can’t describe with one word the whole range of people you are attracted to.

For reference

It does seem still very impressive against other top laptop CPUs.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Ryzen-AI-9-HX-PRO-375-vs-Ultra-X9-388H-vs-A18-Pro_19565_20016_18006.247596.0.html

Although I heard from Jeff Geerling’s review that the neo often noticably throttles after a few seconds.

It also has pretty terrible IO.

I think the biggest attraction is the build quality, screen, etc. Most cheap laptops seem to cheap out on those a lot in my experience, and Apple did not. If you’re not stressing the CPU or GPU, it’ll still feel almost as high quality as any other MacBook.

I have a 2 core, 2 thread, 4gb RAM 3855u Chromebook that I installed Plasma on, and it’s usually pretty responsive.

sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet

Sodium ion is generally much more stable.

big in music performance, composition, physical instrument design, etc as well

i would be surprised if there are more than a few musicians above a typical high school level that don’t have at least a surface level understanding of overtones

at least in wind/percussion instruments, i have no idea about vocal people as i’ve never done any of that

ROCM still barely works on Windows and it’s only recently been supported at all IIRC.

I heavily dislike them locking down their cameras. Idk if that was a particularly recent move or not, but I would never consider the hardware as open if it has built in vendor locking functions.

Not an LLM or a Pi Pico but I think this project is pretty cool regardless

https://github.com/traviszech/RPI-ZERO-2-OnnxStream

A few years ago I installed Linux on a $40 used Chromebook with 4gb RAM. It runs Blender, Freecad, Minecraft, Celeste, Portal, Kdenlive, etc perfectly acceptably. It has CPU performance a tiny bit worse than the Pi 5, but is x86 and comes with a mouse, keyboard, battery, etc.

I don’t think comparing performance over used PCs is ever going to be favorable for a pi, I think the reasons to get one are reliability, gpio, and the small form factor.

Yes, it works out to a ton of power and money, but on the other hand, 2x the computation could be like a few percent better in results. so it’s often a thing of orders of magnitude, because that’s what is needed for a sufficiently noticeable difference in use.

basing things on theoretical tops is also not particularly equivalent to performance in actual use, it just gives a very general idea of a perfect workload.

At the datacenter scale Gaudi 3 was pretty good, at least when it came out.

Intel GPU support?

ZLUDA previously supported Intel GPUs, but not currently. It is possible to revive the Intel backend. The development team is focusing on high‑quality AMD GPU support and welcomes contributions.

Anyways, no actual AI company is going to buy $100M of AI cards just to run all of their software through an unfinished community made translation layer, no matter how good it becomes.

OneAPI is decent, but apparently usually fairly cumbersome to work with and people prefer to write software in cuda as it’s the industry standard (and the standard in academia)

Intel’s Gaudi 3 datacenter GPU from late 2024 advertises about 1800 tops in fp8, at 3.1 tops/w. Google’s mid 2025 TPU v7 advertises 4600 tops fp8, at 4.7 tops/w. Which is a difference, but not that dramatic of one. The reason it is so small is that GPUs are basically TPUs already; almost as much die space as is allocated to actual shader units is allocated to matrix accelerators. I have heard anecdotally.

It’s not even a pivot. They’ve been focusing on AI already. I’m sure they want it to seem like a pivot (and build up hype); the times before apparently just having the hardware and software wasn’t enough. nobody cared when the gaudi cards came out, nobody uses sycl or onednn, etc

although I like a lot of what Valve does (I have a lot of Steam games, valve games, have a steam deck oled, use steamvr, etc) they are a fairly flawed company. sweeney is so great at shooting himself in the foot though that any opinion he has people will by default believe the opposite of (and probably should)