Wavic

wavic

Calling all cool cats and kittens, we are pleased to announce the luckiest addition to the NFT space, . Hailing from the land of Luckeania, not much is known about the true origins of Lucky Maneki. The Lucky Manekis have deep ties to the spirit of creativity, luck, and good fortune. 40 Epic one-of-one Manekis were first discovered in Luckeania and they are known for bringing exceptional luck to the collector. Since then, more Manekis came to Luckeania and inherited some of the lucky properties of the original Epic Manekis. Lucky Maneki 14,159 Manekis will be launched onto the blockchain, a historically lucky number. Owners of Manekis will be able to name their furry friend, which will be stored on the blockchain for eternity, allowing the owner to make their stamp in the history of the blockchain. Of course, that is not all. Lucky Maneki have also incorporated giveaway mechanics to reward the most loyal Maneki owners. One of which is the Lucky Bank, a crypto wallet which will store a percentage of each sale. Once a minimum balance is reached, the funds will be donated to a charity of the communities' choice. You’ll be able to vote on your favourite charity and chat with the artists directly on their . Discord server In order to look after the environment of Luckeania and the rest of the world, Lucky Maneki are committed to making sure all their cats are taken care of and have a beautiful place to live by ensuring the project's carbon paw print is offset. The exclusive Lucky Manekis will be released to the blockchain before the end of June,  there’s lots to prepare, trimming fur, clipping claws and practicing the perfect purr. Until then, you can keep up to date with them on , , and . Twitter Telegram Instagram There are multiple layers of rarity embedded in the Lucky Maneki collection. First comes the explicit rarity. These are the broad groupings of Maneki properties that are indicated on each and every NFT and viewable by the collectors. The elements that have an assigned explicit rarity are background, body type, head type, left-paw item, and right-paw item. For example, a Podium background appears in 20.16% of all Manekis and a Space background in 6.92%. However, within each of these categories, there are many sub-categories.Owning a Lucky Maneki benefits the holder in many ways, not just a cute addition to their NFT collection, if the feline friend is especially lucky then their value can appreciate! Purchasing a Lucky Maneki also allows you access to the Lucky Chest; where a cheeky Pirate Maneki has hidden some treasure in a chest, Maneki fans will have to solve clues and answer questions to unlock and obtain its contents. There are also activities, challenges and competitions running on their community Discord channel which you can join here. Lucky Maneki collectibles project is a brainchild of a fully decentralized team of artists, copywriters, blockchain developers and NFT enthusiasts.

Purr-fect New NFT Collection Who Keeps Waving Good Luck Back to its Collector

Hi All! Here is my weekly letter discussing mental models, performance, business, and entrepreneurship. If you love this content (please share it), but also… Connect with me on YouTube/Twitter, or subscribe to my daily business newsletter here. What’s in today’s newsletter? Networking is a skill. But it's not one they teach you in school. They don't give you lessons on how to build genuine connections, how to give before you ask, or how to curate a personal board of directors. So, here's the playbook I developed to network better: (1) Become a Talent Scout, (2) Curate Your Personal Board of Directors, and (3) Become a "Reverse Mentor." Your entire career can change the moment you stop seeing networking as a chore and start seeing it as a strategic advantage. Your Network, Your Net Worth Ever heard the saying, "Don't call me unless you need something?" That's the exact opposite of how to build a powerful network. Here's a thought: The strongest relationships are forged in the fires of mutual support, not the desperation of last-minute asks. Let me share a story. Back when I was first starting out, hustling to get my podcast off the ground, I had this mentor, Sarah. She was a powerhouse in the industry, someone I deeply admired. But here's the thing: I didn't just reach out to Sarah when I needed funding advice or a warm intro. I grabbed coffee with her when I didn’t need anything at all. We’d catch up, I'd share my small wins and setbacks, just to get her perspective. Over time, a real friendship blossomed. It turns out, I didn’t need anything at all for about 3 years. And guess what? When the time came that I did need something – a crucial connection, a sounding board for a tough decision – Sarah was there in a heartbeat. Not out of obligation, but because we had built a genuine bond. Think about it. When you reach out to someone only when you're in need, it's like waving a giant flag that says, "I'm using you!" It feels transactional, desperate even. Nobody likes to feel used. But when you reach out genuinely, to offer support, share insights, or just say hello, you're building something far more valuable: trust. You're signaling that you value the relationship for its own sake, not just for what you can get out of it. Trust is worth its weight in gold. It's the currency of a powerful network; one that will have your back when you need it most. Don't be that person who only shows up when they want something. Be the person who invests in relationships before they need them. The Networking Blindside: Think about it. Have you ever been caught off guard by a professional setback? Maybe a dream job fell through, a project got derailed, or a client suddenly went dark. In those moments, it's easy to feel isolated and overwhelmed. That’s when you NEED people. That’s also when you CAN’T reach out to people. It’s happened to the best of us. We wish we had a network of people we could turn to for support, advice, or even a new lead. That's the power of strategic networking. You have to build that network of people who can support you before you need it. So, how do you do that? Here’s the system I developed to network better - build relationships before you need them, so you're never starting from scratch when the unexpected happens. The Networking System: 3 Strategies To Built True Ties 1. Become a Talent Scout: The saying goes, "Bet on the jockey, not the horse." The same goes for your network. Don't just collect business cards – invest in people. Scout out the rising stars; the ones with that fire in their eyes. They're the future CEOs, the disruptors, the game-changers. Spot the talent, the drive, the vision. Be their champion. Mentor them. Share your hard-won wisdom. Open doors they didn't even know existed. As they rise, so do you. Building a network isn't about quantity, it's about quality. Bet on the jockey, and you'll win the race. 2. Become a "Reverse Mentor": You just scouted new talent; now, it’s time to tap into wisdom and experience. Mentorship isn't a one-way street; it's a two-way exchange of knowledge and perspective. Flip the script and become a "reverse mentor." Don't just seek wisdom; offer yours in return (before you need it). Your fresh perspective on emerging tech, digital trends, or innovative solutions is GOLD to those in power. Pinpoint Your Power: What unique skills or insights do you have that a senior leader could benefit from?
Target the Right Players: Look for open-minded leaders who value diverse perspectives.
Make Your Pitch: Show them how your knowledge can solve their problems or drive their goals.
Start the Conversation: Don't be afraid to reach out and offer your expertise. Become a trusted advisor, build cross-generational bridges, and accelerate your own career. Remember: The student can become the teacher. 3. Build Your "Personal Board of Directors": Jim Rohn famously said, "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." Elevate your average. Hand-pick your board of directors. Not just mentors or colleagues, but your trusted advisors. Seek diversity – experience, skills, perspectives. Surround yourself with those who've "been there, done that" and those who challenge you to think differently. Invest in these relationships. Be present. Be supportive. Be the kind of friend you wish you had. When failure strikes, this is your A-team. They'll offer guidance, diverse perspectives, and unwavering support. Your board of directors isn't just a network; it's your lifeline. Your Network, Your Net Worth: Stop chasing connections; start cultivating relationships. Ditch the transactional mindset and embrace genuine connection. Invest in people, not just business cards. Remember, the strongest networks aren't built on desperation; they're built on mutual support, trust, and shared ambition. This isn't just about climbing the ladder faster; it's about building a community that will catch you if you fall, push you when you hesitate, and celebrate with you when you win. Your network isn't just a safety net; it's your launchpad. This is how you network, properly. Scott Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox, every week. My Links Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast)
Newsletter (321k Subs)
10 Minute MBA (Daily Podcast)
10 Minute MBA (Daily Newsletter)
Social Media Hi All! Here is my weekly letter discussing mental models, performance, business, and entrepreneurship. If you love this content (please share it), but also… Connect with me on YouTube / Twitter, or subscribe to my daily business newsletter here. YouTube YouTube Twitter , Twitter daily business newsletter here. daily business newsletter here. What’s in today’s newsletter? What’s in today’s newsletter? Networking is a skill. But it's not one they teach you in school. They don't give you lessons on how to build genuine connections, how to give before you ask, or how to curate a personal board of directors. Networking is a skill. But it's not one they teach you in school. They don't give you lessons on how to build genuine connections, how to give before you ask, or how to curate a personal board of directors. So, here's the playbook I developed to network better: (1) Become a Talent Scout, (2) Curate Your Personal Board of Directors, and (3) Become a "Reverse Mentor." So, here's the playbook I developed to network better: (1) Become a Talent Scout, (2) Curate Your Personal Board of Directors, and (3) Become a "Reverse Mentor." Your entire career can change the moment you stop seeing networking as a chore and start seeing it as a strategic advantage. Your entire career can change the moment you stop seeing networking as a chore and start seeing it as a strategic advantage. Your Network, Your Net Worth Ever heard the saying, "Don't call me unless you need something?" That's the exact opposite of how to build a powerful network. exact opposite Here's a thought: The strongest relationships are forged in the fires of mutual support, not the desperation of last-minute asks. The strongest relationships are forged in the fires of mutual support, not the desperation of last-minute asks. Let me share a story. Back when I was first starting out, hustling to get my podcast off the ground, I had this mentor, Sarah. She was a powerhouse in the industry, someone I deeply admired. But here's the thing: I didn't just reach out to Sarah when I needed funding advice or a warm intro. I grabbed coffee with her when I didn’t need anything at all. We’d catch up, I'd share my small wins and setbacks, just to get her perspective. Over time, a real friendship blossomed. It turns out, I didn’t need anything at all for about 3 years. And guess what? When the time came that I did need something – a crucial connection, a sounding board for a tough decision – Sarah was there in a heartbeat. did Not out of obligation, but because we had built a genuine bond. Think about it. When you reach out to someone only when you're in need, it's like waving a giant flag that says, "I'm using you!" It feels transactional, desperate even. Nobody likes to feel used. But when you reach out genuinely, to offer support, share insights, or just say hello, you're building something far more valuable: trust. You're signaling that you value the relationship for its own sake, not just for what you can get out of it. Trust is worth its weight in gold. It's the currency of a powerful network; one that will have your back when you need it most. Don't be that person who only shows up when they want something. Be the person who invests in relationships before they need them. before The Networking Blindside: The Networking Blindside: Think about it. Have you ever been caught off guard by a professional setback? Maybe a dream job fell through, a project got derailed, or a client suddenly went dark. In those moments, it's easy to feel isolated and overwhelmed. That’s when you NEED people. That’s also when you CAN’T reach out to people. It’s happened to the best of us. We wish we had a network of people we could turn to for support, advice, or even a new lead. That's the power of strategic networking. You have to build that network of people who can support you before you need it. So, how do you do that? Here’s the system I developed to network better - build relationships before you need them, so you're never starting from scratch when the unexpected happens. before The Networking System: 3 Strategies To Built True Ties 1. Become a Talent Scout: 1. Become a Talent Scout: The saying goes, "Bet on the jockey, not the horse." The same goes for your network. Don't just collect business cards – invest in people. Scout out the rising stars; the ones with that fire in their eyes. They're the future CEOs, the disruptors, the game-changers. Spot the talent, the drive, the vision. Be their champion. Mentor them. Share your hard-won wisdom. Open doors they didn't even know existed. As they rise, so do you. Building a network isn't about quantity, it's about quality. Bet on the jockey, and you'll win the race. 2. Become a "Reverse Mentor": 2. Become a "Reverse Mentor": You just scouted new talent; now, it’s time to tap into wisdom and experience. Mentorship isn't a one-way street; it's a two-way exchange of knowledge and perspective. Flip the script and become a "reverse mentor." Don't just seek wisdom; offer yours in return (before you need it). Your fresh perspective on emerging tech, digital trends, or innovative solutions is GOLD to those in power. Pinpoint Your Power: What unique skills or insights do you have that a senior leader could benefit from? Target the Right Players: Look for open-minded leaders who value diverse perspectives. Make Your Pitch: Show them how your knowledge can solve their problems or drive their goals. Start the Conversation: Don't be afraid to reach out and offer your expertise. Pinpoint Your Power: What unique skills or insights do you have that a senior leader could benefit from? Pinpoint Your Power: Target the Right Players: Look for open-minded leaders who value diverse perspectives. Target the Right Players: Make Your Pitch: Show them how your knowledge can solve their problems or drive their goals. Make Your Pitch: Start the Conversation: Don't be afraid to reach out and offer your expertise. Start the Conversation: Become a trusted advisor, build cross-generational bridges, and accelerate your own career. Remember: The student can become the teacher. 3. Build Your "Personal Board of Directors": 3. Build Your "Personal Board of Directors": Jim Rohn famously said, "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." Elevate your average. Hand-pick your board of directors. Not just mentors or colleagues, but your trusted advisors. Seek diversity – experience, skills, perspectives. Surround yourself with those who've "been there, done that" and those who challenge you to think differently. Invest in these relationships. Be present. Be supportive. Be the kind of friend you wish you had. When failure strikes, this is your A-team. They'll offer guidance, diverse perspectives, and unwavering support. Your board of directors isn't just a network; it's your lifeline. Your Network, Your Net Worth: Stop chasing connections; start cultivating relationships. Ditch the transactional mindset and embrace genuine connection. Invest in people, not just business cards. Remember, the strongest networks aren't built on desperation; they're built on mutual support, trust, and shared ambition. This isn't just about climbing the ladder faster; it's about building a community that will catch you if you fall, push you when you hesitate, and celebrate with you when you win. Your network isn't just a safety net; it's your launchpad. This is how you network, properly. Scott Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox, every week. Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox, every week. Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox, every week. My Links My Links Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast) Newsletter (321k Subs) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Podcast) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Newsletter) Social Media Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast) Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast) Success Story (Top 10 Business Podcast) Newsletter (321k Subs) Newsletter (321k Subs) Newsletter (321k Subs) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Podcast) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Podcast) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Podcast) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Newsletter) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Newsletter) 10 Minute MBA (Daily Newsletter) Social Media Social Media Social Media

Your Network, Your Net Worth: 3 Tips to Network Better

A plant is a living thing. Humans are living too. Humans have consciousness.Might plants too be somewhat conscious? There are animals that have consciousness ascribed to them that do not have human language, reasoning and several other qualities. Might there be deductions to the extent that plants might be fairly conscious? All matter has molecules and atoms, including all organisms and non-organisms. Panpsychism says there is a mind-like quality to matter—or that objects might have some form of consciousness. What is the difference between molecules and atoms in living organisms and those in non-organisms? All organisms have cells. Non-organisms do not. So, the mechanism of atoms and molecules in the presence of cells carries a quality of mind, consciousness, and life, aside from atoms and molecules everywhere else, conceptually. Large language models appear to have some reasoning. If compared with human consciousness, they appear to have some form of language consciousness or sentience, in aspects of memory [appearing to know about things], but they do not have emotions and feelings. Humans can show their consciousness digitally, through texts, audio, images, or videos. This consciousness is a fraction of what was produced in the brain. If AI can do the same on digital, does it not have expressions of human consciousness, relative to the production in the brain? Candidates for consciousness, according to the action potentials—neurotransmitter theory of consciousness, include living organisms, and just one non-living organism, AI—with respect to language and displays. Consciousness is defined as the grading of the functions of the mind. Experiences result from the qualification of functions. Simply, functions are memory, feelings, emotions, and regulation of internal senses. Consciousness is a collection of features that grade those functions, conceptually. Features include attention, awareness, subjectivity, self, and intent, or free will. There is no subjective experience without attention or at least awareness. There is a recent feature on Aeon, Do plants have minds?, stating that, "In 2006, 30 years after The Secret Life of Plants, a bold group of scientists published an article calling to establish the field of ‘plant neurobiology’ with the goal of ‘understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion’. In other words, how plants might have something like minds. [Plants] delight in the sun as we might delight in a wholesome meal. Panpsychism, which holds that all things have a mind or mind-like quality, is an ancient theory." There is a recent interview in Scientific American, Do Plants ‘Think’? We Might Not Know Enough about Consciousness to Be Certain, stating that, "What we’re really talking about is whether or not plants are far more active and responsive to their environments. Plants—in terms of, like, hierarchy of complexity and responsiveness—as somewhere, like, above rocks but below most animals. You can etherize a plant—diethyl ether works on plants. So in general, plants are moving around all the time, slower than we mostly can see. But in time-lapse, like, a little pea plant will be, like, waving its tendrils around all the time and curling and uncurling them. And if you put a pea plant under a bell jar with diethyl ether, they will, like, grind to a halt when researchers remove ether, within 15 minutes, they kind of go back to dancing around again. And what’s happening there, they found in other plants, like Venus flytraps, is that their electrical pulses are reducing, which is also what we see in ourselves: the electrical activity in our bodies also goes down when we’re under the influence of anesthetics." A plant is a living thing. Humans are living too. Humans have consciousness. Might plants too be somewhat conscious? There are animals that have consciousness ascribed to them that do not have human language, reasoning and several other qualities. Might there be deductions to the extent that plants might be fairly conscious? consciousness. All matter has molecules and atoms, including all organisms and non-organisms. Panpsychism says there is a mind-like quality to matter—or that objects might have some form of consciousness. What is the difference between molecules and atoms in living organisms and those in non-organisms? All organisms have cells. Non-organisms do not. So, the mechanism of atoms and molecules in the presence of cells carries a quality of mind , consciousness, and life, aside from atoms and molecules everywhere else, conceptually. the mechanism of atoms and molecules in the presence of cells carries a quality of mind Large language models appear to have some reasoning. If compared with human consciousness, they appear to have some form of language consciousness or sentience, in aspects of memory [appearing to know about things], but they do not have emotions and feelings. Humans can show their consciousness digitally, through texts, audio, images, or videos. This consciousness is a fraction of what was produced in the brain. If AI can do the same on digital, does it not have expressions of human consciousness, relative to the production in the brain? Candidates for consciousness, according to the action potentials—neurotransmitter theory of consciousness , include living organisms, and just one non-living organism, AI—with respect to language and displays. Consciousness is defined as the grading of the functions of the mind. Experiences result from the qualification of functions. Simply, functions are memory, feelings, emotions, and regulation of internal senses. Consciousness is a collection of features that grade those functions, conceptually. Features include attention, awareness, subjectivity, self, and intent, or free will. There is no subjective experience without attention or at least awareness. the action potentials—neurotransmitter theory of consciousness There is a recent feature on Aeon , Do plants have minds? , stating that, "In 2006, 30 years after The Secret Life of Plants, a bold group of scientists published an article calling to establish the field of ‘plant neurobiology’ with the goal of ‘understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion’. In other words, how plants might have something like minds. [Plants] delight in the sun as we might delight in a wholesome meal. Panpsychism, which holds that all things have a mind or mind-like quality, is an ancient theory." Aeon Do plants have minds? There is a recent interview in Scientific American , Do Plants ‘Think’? We Might Not Know Enough about Consciousness to Be Certain , stating that, "What we’re really talking about is whether or not plants are far more active and responsive to their environments. Plants—in terms of, like, hierarchy of complexity and responsiveness—as somewhere, like, above rocks but below most animals. You can etherize a plant—diethyl ether works on plants. So in general, plants are moving around all the time, slower than we mostly can see. But in time-lapse, like, a little pea plant will be, like, waving its tendrils around all the time and curling and uncurling them. And if you put a pea plant under a bell jar with diethyl ether, they will, like, grind to a halt when researchers remove ether, within 15 minutes, they kind of go back to dancing around again. And what’s happening there, they found in other plants, like Venus flytraps, is that their electrical pulses are reducing, which is also what we see in ourselves: the electrical activity in our bodies also goes down when we’re under the influence of anesthetics." Scientific American Do Plants ‘Think’? We Might Not Know Enough about Consciousness to Be Certain

AI, Plants, and Panpsychism: Interrogating the Meaning of Consciousness 

এআই, উদ্ভিদ এবং প্যানসাইকিজম: চেতনার অর্থ জিজ্ঞাসাবাদ করা 

KI, Pflanzen und Panpsychismus: Die Bedeutung des Bewusstseins hinterfragen

IA, plantas y panpsiquismo: interrogando el significado de la conciencia 

IA, plantes et panpsychisme : interroger le sens de la conscience 

एआई, पौधे और पैनसाइकिज्म: चेतना के अर्थ पर सवाल उठाना

AI、植物、汎心論：意識の意味を問う

AI, 식물, 그리고 범심론: 의식의 의미에 대한 질문 

IA, plantas e panpsiquismo: interrogando o significado da consciência 

ИИ, растения и панпсихизм: вопрос о значении сознания 

Yapay Zeka, Bitkiler ve Panpsişizm: Bilincin Anlamını Sorgulamak 

AI, Thực vật và Thuyết Panpsychism: Truy vấn ý nghĩa của ý thức 

人工智能、植物和泛心论：探究意识的意义

Quantum Computing Needs More Software Engineers

কোয়ান্টাম কম্পিউটিং এর জন্য আরও সফটওয়্যার ইঞ্জিনিয়ার প্রয়োজন

Quantencomputing braucht mehr Softwareentwickler

La computación cuántica necesita más ingenieros de software

L'informatique quantique a besoin de plus d'ingénieurs logiciels

क्वांटम कंप्यूटिंग को अधिक सॉफ्टवेयर इंजीनियरों की आवश्यकता है

量子コンピューティングにはより多くのソフトウェアエンジニアが必要

양자 컴퓨팅에는 더 많은 소프트웨어 엔지니어가 필요합니다

A computação quântica precisa de mais engenheiros de software

Квантовым вычислениям нужно больше инженеров-программистов

Kuantum Bilişimin Daha Fazla Yazılım Mühendisine İhtiyacı Var

Máy tính lượng tử cần nhiều kỹ sư phần mềm hơn

量子计算需要更多软件工程师

The Opt Out Writing Contest: Round 1 Results Announced!

Authors:
(1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA;
(2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Related Works Virtual Audience Framework Conclusions & References III. VIRTUAL AUDIENCE FRAMEWORK In this section, we present the proposed virtual audience framework. We focus on online events where a single client provides the content for all other participants in the session. This single presenting client interacts with the audience based on their reactions and uses this as feedback for their future behavior. Such feedback is especially relevant for performing artists that rely on live shows. A. Concept In the scenario we focus on, the presenter depends on the reaction of the entire audience rather than detailed feedback by individuals. In case of multiple participants talking or the entire audience sending feedback at the same time, noise can accumulate and drown out valuable feedback. To avoid accumulating noise, the audio of multiple participants in an online meeting typically needs to be synchronized. Since nonverbal acoustic feedback information such as clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter is less complex than speech, we propose to avoid requiring complex synchronization schemes. We only require an abstract representation of the current audience state denoting which participant is actively clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter. This abstract audience state can then be shared with all participants. The acoustic feedback can then be synthesized locally from the received audience state. This way, each participant can be played the overall acoustic feedback without having to synchronize raw audio. B. Implementation To implement the proposed concept, we share the abstract audience state information with all participants via a central server. We define the audience state as a vector of binary variables for each participant, with each variable representing whether the user is exhibiting a particular reaction. Whenever a client changes their reaction state, the updated state information is sent to the central virtual audience server. The central virtual audience server merges all information and broadcasts the updated current audience state information to every client. Finally, every client synthesises the audience feedback locally for the current audience state. The transmission of such abstract state information results in an additional transmission rate of a few bytes which is fundamentally less compared to the transmission of an audio or video stream. Figure 2 summarizes the concept for the virtual audience framework. On the client side, we define an input interface that collects the abstract state information from the users and an output interface that converts the current audience state information into an audio stream. For synthesizing the audio, any state-ofthe-art technique such as AudioGen [8] or MusicGen [26] can be used. The input interface enables a flexible implementation due to the simplicity of the abstract state information that will be transmitted to the virtual audience server. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a simple way for allowing audience contributions. Similar to hand waving in Zoom, participants can share feedback via their GUI. This feedback is collected on the sever and the resulting audience state will be synthesized on every client into an acoustic audience signal. We obtain the abstract state information from the clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter of the user using a GUI or detection methods such as [34]. The transmission of the abstract state information instead of the actual audio signal avoids audio synchronization issues and comes with a negligible transmission overhead as small as a few bytes. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA; (2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Authors: Authors: (1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA; (2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Abstract & Introduction Related Works Related Works Virtual Audience Framework Virtual Audience Framework Conclusions & References Conclusions & References III. VIRTUAL AUDIENCE FRAMEWORK In this section, we present the proposed virtual audience framework. We focus on online events where a single client provides the content for all other participants in the session. This single presenting client interacts with the audience based on their reactions and uses this as feedback for their future behavior. Such feedback is especially relevant for performing artists that rely on live shows. A. Concept A. Concept In the scenario we focus on, the presenter depends on the reaction of the entire audience rather than detailed feedback by individuals. In case of multiple participants talking or the entire audience sending feedback at the same time, noise can accumulate and drown out valuable feedback. To avoid accumulating noise, the audio of multiple participants in an online meeting typically needs to be synchronized. Since nonverbal acoustic feedback information such as clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter is less complex than speech, we propose to avoid requiring complex synchronization schemes. We only require an abstract representation of the current audience state denoting which participant is actively clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter. This abstract audience state can then be shared with all participants. The acoustic feedback can then be synthesized locally from the received audience state. This way, each participant can be played the overall acoustic feedback without having to synchronize raw audio. B. Implementation B. Implementation To implement the proposed concept, we share the abstract audience state information with all participants via a central server. We define the audience state as a vector of binary variables for each participant, with each variable representing whether the user is exhibiting a particular reaction. Whenever a client changes their reaction state, the updated state information is sent to the central virtual audience server. The central virtual audience server merges all information and broadcasts the updated current audience state information to every client. Finally, every client synthesises the audience feedback locally for the current audience state. The transmission of such abstract state information results in an additional transmission rate of a few bytes which is fundamentally less compared to the transmission of an audio or video stream. Figure 2 summarizes the concept for the virtual audience framework. On the client side, we define an input interface that collects the abstract state information from the users and an output interface that converts the current audience state information into an audio stream. For synthesizing the audio, any state-ofthe-art technique such as AudioGen [8] or MusicGen [26] can be used. The input interface enables a flexible implementation due to the simplicity of the abstract state information that will be transmitted to the virtual audience server. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a simple way for allowing audience contributions. Similar to hand waving in Zoom, participants can share feedback via their GUI. This feedback is collected on the sever and the resulting audience state will be synthesized on every client into an acoustic audience signal. We obtain the abstract state information from the clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter of the user using a GUI or detection methods such as [34]. The transmission of the abstract state information instead of the actual audio signal avoids audio synchronization issues and comes with a negligible transmission overhead as small as a few bytes. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv

Understanding the Virtual Audience Framework

Authors:
(1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA;
(2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany;
(5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Related Works Virtual Audience Framework Conclusions & References Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many events in our daily lives into the virtual domain. While virtual conference systems provide an alternative to physical meetings, larger events require a muted audience to avoid an accumulation of background noise and distorted audio. However, performing artists strongly rely on the feedback of their audience. We propose a concept for a virtual audience framework which supports all participants with the ambience of a real audience. Audience feedback is collected locally, allowing users to express enthusiasm or discontent by selecting means such as clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter. This feedback is sent as abstract information to a virtual audience server. We broadcast the combined virtual audience feedback information to all participants, which can be synthesized as a single acoustic feedback by the client. The synthesis can be done by turning the collective audience feedback into a prompt that is fed to state-of-the-art models such as AudioGen. This way, each user hears a single acoustic feedback sound of the entire virtual event, without requiring to unmute or risk hearing distorted, unsynchronized feedback. Index Terms—Audio Synthesis, Multimedia Conference System, Virtual Audience I. INTRODUCTION Since COVID-19 first hit, many live performances moved to the virtual domain in addition to in-person events. While initially a necessary subpar substitute, virtual events are now a unique new opportunity for performing artists such as comedians, actors, and musicians. However, performing such events without instantaneous feedback is challenging and not comparable with on-site shows. The audience in larger online meeting needs to be muted to avoid disturbing background noise. Interactive audience feedback such as applause or laughter is therefore not possible. So far, virtual conference systems do not offer the functionality to share acoustic audience feedback across the session. Feedback by multiple participants at once is currently restricted to using text chat or signs such as hand waving. This lack of audience interaction poses a significant challenge for performing artists who report that Zoom shows cannot replace in-person performances [1]. It has been shown that integrating laughter into virtual meetings significantly improves the social experience of the participants [2]. Without collective feedback of the audience such as laughter, a core part of human interaction in large events is missing. Integrating acoustic audience feedback into an online conference faces several challenges. Due to network lag, different feedback sounds need to be synchronized and normalized before playing them. Raw audio data from many participants containing feedback such as laughter contains accumulating background noise. An alternative to transmitting raw audio data is to synthesize it. While the field of audio synthesis is mostly focused on speech synthesis [3], [4], [5], nonverbal audio sounds such as laughter can be synthesized as well [6], [7]. More recently, Meta’s Audiocraft [8] further increased the capabilities of audio generation based on abstract information in the form of text prompts. In this paper, we propose to leverage recent advances in audio synthesis of acoustic audience feedback to integrate collective audience sound into virtual events. In contrast to speech, information about the audience feedback such as laughter or clapping can be compressed efficiently into abstract state information. We propose a virtual audience framework that allows audience interaction without the transmission of the actual audio information. The concept of the proposed framework is shown in Figure 1. On the client input side, every participant shares abstract information about their reactions which we merge at a central virtual audience server. We then use the abstract feedback state to synthesize a single joint audience sound, for example by turning the feedback state into a prompt and using text-tosound generative models to obtain the audio. The joint audio sound is then sent back to each user, allowing each user to hear the feedback of the entire audience without overlays or distortion. By continuously updating the feedback state, the audio played for each user can be updated repeatedly to enable an audience sound that fits the current events. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II summarizes related work in the field of audience audio synthesis. We propose a joint acoustic audience framework for large virtual events in Section III. Then, we present a potential implementation of synthesizing joint audio sounds using stateof-the-art generative AI. Section IV concludes the paper. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA; (2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Authors: Authors: (1) Tamay Aykut, Sureel, Palo Alto, California, USA; (2) Markus Hofbauer, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (3) Christopher Kuhn, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (4) Eckehard Steinbach, Technical University of Munich, Germany; (5) Bernd Girod, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Abstract & Introduction Related Works Related Works Virtual Audience Framework Virtual Audience Framework Conclusions & References Conclusions & References Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many events in our daily lives into the virtual domain. While virtual conference systems provide an alternative to physical meetings, larger events require a muted audience to avoid an accumulation of background noise and distorted audio. However, performing artists strongly rely on the feedback of their audience. We propose a concept for a virtual audience framework which supports all participants with the ambience of a real audience. Audience feedback is collected locally, allowing users to express enthusiasm or discontent by selecting means such as clapping, whistling, booing, and laughter. This feedback is sent as abstract information to a virtual audience server. We broadcast the combined virtual audience feedback information to all participants, which can be synthesized as a single acoustic feedback by the client. The synthesis can be done by turning the collective audience feedback into a prompt that is fed to state-of-the-art models such as AudioGen. This way, each user hears a single acoustic feedback sound of the entire virtual event, without requiring to unmute or risk hearing distorted, unsynchronized feedback. Index Terms —Audio Synthesis, Multimedia Conference System, Virtual Audience Index Terms I. INTRODUCTION Since COVID-19 first hit, many live performances moved to the virtual domain in addition to in-person events. While initially a necessary subpar substitute, virtual events are now a unique new opportunity for performing artists such as comedians, actors, and musicians. However, performing such events without instantaneous feedback is challenging and not comparable with on-site shows. The audience in larger online meeting needs to be muted to avoid disturbing background noise. Interactive audience feedback such as applause or laughter is therefore not possible. So far, virtual conference systems do not offer the functionality to share acoustic audience feedback across the session. Feedback by multiple participants at once is currently restricted to using text chat or signs such as hand waving. This lack of audience interaction poses a significant challenge for performing artists who report that Zoom shows cannot replace in-person performances [1]. It has been shown that integrating laughter into virtual meetings significantly improves the social experience of the participants [2]. Without collective feedback of the audience such as laughter, a core part of human interaction in large events is missing. Integrating acoustic audience feedback into an online conference faces several challenges. Due to network lag, different feedback sounds need to be synchronized and normalized before playing them. Raw audio data from many participants containing feedback such as laughter contains accumulating background noise. An alternative to transmitting raw audio data is to synthesize it. While the field of audio synthesis is mostly focused on speech synthesis [3], [4], [5], nonverbal audio sounds such as laughter can be synthesized as well [6], [7]. More recently, Meta’s Audiocraft [8] further increased the capabilities of audio generation based on abstract information in the form of text prompts. In this paper, we propose to leverage recent advances in audio synthesis of acoustic audience feedback to integrate collective audience sound into virtual events. In contrast to speech, information about the audience feedback such as laughter or clapping can be compressed efficiently into abstract state information. We propose a virtual audience framework that allows audience interaction without the transmission of the actual audio information. The concept of the proposed framework is shown in Figure 1. On the client input side, every participant shares abstract information about their reactions which we merge at a central virtual audience server. We then use the abstract feedback state to synthesize a single joint audience sound, for example by turning the feedback state into a prompt and using text-tosound generative models to obtain the audio. The joint audio sound is then sent back to each user, allowing each user to hear the feedback of the entire audience without overlays or distortion. By continuously updating the feedback state, the audio played for each user can be updated repeatedly to enable an audience sound that fits the current events. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II summarizes related work in the field of audience audio synthesis. We propose a joint acoustic audience framework for large virtual events in Section III. Then, we present a potential implementation of synthesizing joint audio sounds using stateof-the-art generative AI. Section IV concludes the paper. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv

Enabling Acoustic Audience Feedback in Large Virtual Events

If you stop and ask the average person on the street whether they think that politicians, banksters, and CEOs have their best interests at heart, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who says yes. Even the most statist, war-promoting, tax-paying, flag-waving people out there can no longer miss the obvious fact that "society" as we know it is simply a planet-sized human cattle farm, run by a small contingent of socio-/psychopaths. They probably still go along with it, and they vote for a new president or prime minister every few years, and they listen to the propaganda on the tele-screens... Depending on which half of the Duopoly party they support, there are probably different issues that they most notice: Team Red can easily see human trafficking, child mutilation, Authoritarian Socialism, and the attempted destruction of morality as a whole... While Team Blue can easily see the corporate greed, the immorality of "War," and the push for one "chosen" supreme "race" to control the whole planet... But for some reason, both sides are only capable of seeing some of these issues, specifically, they each seem to only be capable of holding awareness for the "problems" that the team they root for calls out as problems. This isn't their fault though, because this is just how the human brain works. The human experience is a hyper-personalized one, wherein our sense organs feed our brains terabytes of information every second, and our conscious mind receives a fraction of a percent of that information after it's all been filtered through currently existing beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. The human experience is, simply put, confirmation bias. The story you tell yourself in your mind is the story you will live out in the physical world. The game(s) you are playing decide what the "rules" are in your world, what "success" is, and what your relationships with others will look like... Competitive? Cooperative? Are your relationships & connections open, loving, trusting & intimate? Or simply quid-pro-quo exchanges... The Games We Play... or Don't Play Imagine you are with a group of friends, and everyone is playing a game. You notice that the rules & goals of the game tend to lead to people lying to each other, taking advantage of each other, and maybe even dehumanizing each other. Now, this is an established game, with rules that m/billions of people know. A game that has been played in more or less the exact same way for thousands of years. Do you think it's going to be possible to re-define that game? To get people to play it in a completely different way? To change what "winning" is and what acceptable behavior is to get there? Obviously, attempting to change the game being played, while it's being played, with most of the people playing it thinking that it is simply "Reality" is a non-starter. Unless you plan to dose the planet with aerosolized LSD or DMT, that sort of 90-degree turn for so many is just not going to happen. Play a Different Game - Opt Out The beautiful thing about this Reality we live in and our personalized experiences of it, is that each of us gets to choose the life we live. At any time, one can simply choose to replace an old belief, to play a different game, to tell a different story. As soon as they make that choice, the Universe begins re-aligning their life to match up to the new story. The game of Statist Capitalism is just ONE, of many many games, that we can each play every day. Every single part of the Statist structure is purely voluntary. If you don't want to play that game, you don't have to. The Exit & Build game, the Agorism game, the Off-Grid game... there are so many other options. Just choosing not to play the "banks" game, and instead using non-custodial, non-governmental, not debt-based, private currencies like Monero, or physical metals/barter, removes you from most of the games the psychopaths have set up. https://youtu.be/MDnnQt8AKNo?si=ezLeAJ-X26cborfI&embedable=true How I Opt Out I haven't had a bank account since 2009/10. Never had a credit card. Never registered to vote, much less voted. Never paid taxes. Only filed for two years when I was a student. I live out of two backpacks, and have since 2015. I have my tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, laptop, herbal medicine, books, journals, survival gear, sewing kit, and everything else needed besides water & food... all coming in at less than 50 pounds of equipment... You may think that means I probably live like a hobo... which is almost true in a way, but I also rent fancy houses around the world to bring friends together, help produce festivals & conferences, work with a variety of projects in the Freedom Movement, etc. I've had no money since last spring - the last of my crypto is staked away in $CULT that I won't be unstaking anytime soon... but I threw a conference called "Be Empowered" in Colorado in September, rented a retreat center in Morelia for the month of January, did a little US tour, and am currently writing on the train from Chicago to Denver, where I'm heading to host an Ethereum Denver after-party. Now, the best part of my story is that how I live now, totally free (financially, spiritually, physically) is not because I grew up wealthy, or on a commune, or anything like that... My family moved every 6-12 months when I was a kid; on top of that, I was bounced between parents more than once and kicked out of a few schools. We lived in small apartments or tiny houses until I was in high school. I struggled with suicidal depression for more than a decade, became addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and other chemicals, worked corporate jobs & general labor gigs, and was a full-time drug dealer for a good while. 12 years ago, a psychedelic experience woke me up to the fact that I didn't like the game I was living in, AND I could change it if I wanted to. It took me years of disciplined eating & sleeping, of brain-reprogramming practices, retreats, and books, and releasing everything that I thought I knew about reality (I was a physicalist reductionist atheist back then - a big part of my depression.) In Summary Basically, my message is simple. You are the AUTHORity of your own story, of your life. The only way for someone else to have authority over you is if you give it to them. At any time, you can simply take that authority back. No paperwork, no court, no battles. Just a choice to reclaim your sovereignty & personal responsibility. If you'd like to dig deeper into these concepts, I highly recommend looking into the work of folks like: Abraham-Hicks Derrick Broze James Redfield Alan Watts and so many others! Thanks for tuning in beautiful humans! You Are Beautiful
You Are Powerful
You Are Free You can find all my links at , including my Odysee channel, Twitter profile, privacy-centric crypto course, affiliate links, and much more. https://linktr.ee/palurintano

Life is a Collection of Games; We Each Choose Which Ones We Play. Choose Wisely

This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Zhouqiang Jiang, Meetyou AI Lab, (2) Bowen Wang, Institute for Datability Science, Osaka University, (3) Tong Xiang, Meetyou AI Lab, (4) Zhaofeng Niu, Department of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University, (5) Hong Tang, Department of Information Engineering, East China Jiaotong University, (6) Guangshun Li, Department of Computer Science, Qufu Normal University, (7) Liangzhi Li, Meetyou AI Lab. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Related Work Method Experiments Conclusion & References IV. EXPERIMENTS A. Pre-training By default, we use ViT-S/16 as the encoder, with a depth of 12 and a width of 384, which is similar to ResNet-50 [46] in terms of the number of parameters (21M vs. 23M). We use a small decoder with a width of 256 and a depth of 4. The effectiveness of this setup is demonstrated in Table IIIb and IIIc. Architecture. . We conduct self-supervised pre-training on the Kinetics-400 [7] action recognition dataset, which encompasses a total of 400 classes, comprising 240k training videos and 20k validation videos, and we only conduct pretraining on the training set. Considering the cost of training, we default to sampling three frames (224x224) from each video at certain frame intervals, and employ two image augmentation methods: RandomResizeCrop and horizontal flipping. A large portion (95%) of the patches in the last two frames are randomly masked, and the batch size is 2048. The base learning rate is initialized to 1e-4 and follows a cosine schedule decay. We use the AdamW [47] optimizer, and the reconstruction losses for the second and 3rd frames are scaled by 0.8 and 1.0, respectively. We adopt a repetition sampling [4], [48] factor of 2 and finally conduct pre-training for 800 effective epochs. Settings B. Evaluation Method We conduct two downstream experiments, video segmentation and action recognition, to evaluate the correspondence and motion information of the obtained representations. We use the semi supervised video segmentation dataset DAVIS-2017 [9] to evaluate the quality of representations in fine-grained correspondence tasks. We adopt the label propagation method used in [49], [4] to implement semi-supervised video segmentation. Given the ground truth labels of the first frame, we obtain k-nearest neighbor results through a similarity function between frames. Afterward, the ground truth labels of the first frame are propagated to subsequent frames as pixel labels, based on the k-nearest neighbors’ results. Fine-grained Correspondence Task. Action Recognition Task. We followed the evaluation protocol of VideoMAE [2] for the motion evaluation on action recognition task by Kinetics-400 [7]. In order to avoid a variety of meticulously crafted fine-tuning settings obstructing fair comparisons between different pre-training methods, we used the same pipeline to uniformly fine-tune all pre-trained models on the training set for 150 epochs and report the results on the validation set. To fairly compare with video MAEs [2], [3], we also will extend the 2D patch embedding layer to a 3D embedding layer following the approach proposed in [7]. C. Main Results and Analysis Table I demonstrates all the methods using 480x880 images. We find that CatMAE-ViT-S/8 surpasses all other self-supervised or supervised methods, and its performance is further enhanced when ViRe is applied. This demonstrates that using reversed videos as reconstruction targets can further enhance the model’s ability to match correspondences. As analyzed before, the cube masking recovery strategy cannot learn the inter-frame correspondence, resulting in MAE-ST and VideoMAE being significantly lower than CatMAE. In addition, CatMAE also outperforms SiamMAE by a large margin, owning a better segmentation performance with larger frame intervals (Table IIIa), proving that using the concatenated information channel masking strategy can capture longer and more accurate correspondences in videos. Fine-grained Correspondence Task. We implement this experiment with two competitive video representation methods VideoMAE and SiamMAE. All methods undergo 800 epochs pretraining. In Table II, it is observed that during the early stage of fine-tuning, CatMAE exhibits a significantly stronger transfer capability than SiamMAE, with an enhancement in top-1 accuracy by 5.73%. This indicates that our proposed concatenated information channel masking reconstruction pre-training strategy can capture more motion information than the asymmetric mask reconstruction strategy of SiamMAE. Even when the fine-tuning saturates, CatMAE still leads SiamMAE by 2.08% in top-1 accuracy. However, the gap between CatMAE and VideoMAE widen, which we believe mainly stems from the method of modeling tokens. VideoMAE directly models token embedding using a 3D cube, which essentially makes VideoMAE a type of 3D network. VideoMAE naturally contains more motion information than CatMAE which encodes 2D patch as tokens. Yet, in the initial stage of fine-tuning, CatMAE manages to maintain comparable transfer ability to VideoMAE (only 1.29% lower in top-1 accuracy), performing far better than the SiamMAE (7.02% lower). Our CatMAE maximally exploits the motion information on the 2D patch. Action Recognition Task. D. Ablation Experiments We conduct an ablation experiment to understand each component’s contribution. Details can be found in Table III. Number of Reconstructions. Fig. 1 shows the model’s reconstruction results for future frames. As can be seen, the model is highly sensitive to motion elements in video frames. In Fig. 1a, the model can distinguish between static backgrounds and accurately reconstruct the motion of waving hammers. Beyond its motion modeling capability, the model can copy the background from the first frame and paste it into future frames when dealing with static backgrounds (such as the static woodpile). As shown in Table IIIa, the video segmentation performance steadily improves with the increase in the number of reconstructions. When the number of reconstructions is 4, the performance is higher in comparison with the number being 1 (↑3.9%). This validates the benefits of using a concatenated information channel masking strategy to extend multi-frame reconstruction. In Table IIIb and IIIc, we respectively examine the width and depth of the decoder. We found that relative to the encoder (384-d, 12-block), a smaller decoder (192-d, 4-block) is critically important for fine-grained correspondence tasks. This can be explained by the relationship between pixel reconstruction and fine-grained feature correspondence: during pixel reconstruction, the encoder is sensitive to motion offsets, thus obtaining a more reasonable correspondence representation. However, when the decoder capacity is too large, it weakens the encoder’s sensitivity to motion. Therefore, in terms of the width and depth settings for the decoder, an optimal width of 256 is 4.3% better than the maximum width of 1024 (59.9% vs. 55.6%). Additionally, an optimal depth of 4 is 2.6% better than the depth of 8 (60.0% vs. 57.4%). These optimal decoder capacities are much smaller than the encoder, underscoring the importance of utilizing a smaller decoder. Decoder Capacity. In Table IIId, we compare different mask ratio. Based on previous experience with video MAEs, we default to ablating from a high mask ratio (90%), but under such a high mask ratio, increasing the mask ratio of the last two frames to 95% still shows performance improvement (54.5% vs. 56.0%). However, when using an extreme mask ratio of 99% (Only one patch is visible), the performance drops sharply. An information channel with limited capacity is crucial for the model to learn correspondences. However, when the channel capacity is reduced to its extreme limit, it becomes difficult for the model to match correspondences. Hence, we default to using a mask ratio of 95%. Mask Ratio. In Table IIIe, we compared the reconstruction loss scale between the second and third frames. We found that slightly emphasizing the reconstruction of the third frame is better than that of the second (compare the second and third rows in Table IIIe). We believe that focusing more on the third frame’s reconstruction facilitates the progressive transmission of continuous motion information to the final frame. However, neglecting the reconstruction of the second frame by reducing its loss scale to 0.5 leads to performance degradation. This might weaken the model’s capability to capture the intermediate motion, thus affecting the propagation of continuous motion information. Loss Scale. In Table IIIf, we compare different frame gaps. While a larger frame gap sampling can encompass richer motion information, reconstructing two frames with large gaps does not bring performance improvement to the model (compare the first and fourth rows). This may be because when the frame gap becomes too large, the scene changes are too dramatic, which hinders the model’s ability to model motion information. Additionally, we found that having a smaller gap between the first and second frames and a larger gap between the second and third frames (see the third row in Table) performs better than the reverse configuration (see the second row in Table) (56.8% vs. 55.2%). This observation can also be interpreted as the propagation of continuous motion being hindered: a large gap between the first and second frames makes capturing intermediate motion difficult, thereby blocking the transmission of continuous motion information within the information channels. Frame Gap. In Fig. 3, we analyze the impact of training epochs and propagation FPS on video segmentation, discovering that optimal performance is achieved at pre-training 400 epochs, after which the performance gradually declines, possibly due to overfitting caused by small decoder. We observe that under various low FPS conditions, CatMAE consistently outperforms SiamMAE, demonstrating that CatMAE possesses a stronger ability to match long-term correspondences. Additionally, we delve into the influence of fine-tuning epochs. CatMAE initially exhibits robust transferability but the gap widens with VideoMAE over time due to differences in token embedding. Simplistically speaking, CatMAE can be seen as a ”additional frame reconstruction” version of SiamMAE. Therefore, according to Action Recognition figure, we estimate that using CatMAE to pre-train weights for reconstructing future four frames holds promise for reaching the fine-tuning performance of VideoMAE. Training Epochs and Propagation FPS. E. Motion and Correspondence Analysis In Fig. 4, we visualize the cross-attention map averaged across different heads in the final layer of the ViT-S/16 decoder. Specifically, we input the first frame and the subsequent two frames with masks, followed by reconstructing the third frame. We collect the cross-attention from the mask patch in the third frame towards the visible patches in the first and second frames and then visualize this attention map. We find that the model is sensitive to motion, focusing on the correspondence between patches under continuous motion. For instance (Fig. 4a), when calculating the correspondence of the horse’s head patch in the third frame, the model can clearly distinguish the semantics of the brown region and attention accurately focused on the head of the horse in previous frames. Even when the background color is similar to the possible corresponding area (such as the white head of the water bird and the reflective water surface Fig. 4b), the model’s corresponding capability remains robust. Certainly, the model can also establish correspondences by leveraging unique color features (such as the red bill of a swan Fig. 4c) or specific semantic structures (such as the fin of an Orca Fig. 4d). These provide direct evidence of the model’s ability to estimate motion and learn correspondences.

Concatenated Masked Autoencoders as Spatial-Temporal Learner: Experiments

Ever wondered why some companies thrive despite high turnover rates, while others struggle to recover from the departure of a single team member? Talent retention is not the only must-have for building strong tech teams. A poorly performed employee offboarding process puts tech projects off the track. I have dealt with tech teams of different sizes and structures, and can say that there are some offboarding rules, which tech businesses cannot afford to break. I am to provide you with IT offboarding tips based on a decade of my experience in tech hiring at Outstaff Your Team. Business Value of the IT Offboarding Process: Why To Prepare in Advance? Offboarding is not merely about waving goodbye to a departing team member. It's a strategic process that impacts the entire company. Having a well-defined offboarding process, you can: Transfer the knowledge, skills, and responsibilities of the departing team member seamlessly; Prevent any disruptions in ongoing projects; Maintain a positive company culture and team morale. HR routine associated with offboarding includes a bunch of tasks, which could seem not time-consuming or complex at first. Yet, any missed offboarding task may turn into a serious concern in the long run, including the loss of sensitive data and even clients. The average price for one ineffective offboarding was calculated as of nearly $7,5K due to the at the beginning of 2023. survey Practice Tips for Successful Offboarding: How to Prepare in Advance? The first offboarding step begins during onboarding, when an HR specialist or an onboarding specialist notifies newcomers about a leave notice period for their roles and the ways to inform the team in case of leaving. Yet, companies should not wait for day X when they get a leave notice to create a leaving roadmap. Ideally, plans for onboarding and offboarding should both exist before you hire someone. A clear offboarding plan is related to an onboarding program for new employees, where you sign documents and add your newcomer to the corporate systems and chats, linking a specialist to the company step by step. This plan should document “mirror actions” to help you break all the chain links backwards without causing errors. Let’s take a closer look at the actions. Decide on Tooling You’ll need some software where you can visualize a progress bar for your IT offboarding process. It’s perfect if you already have an HRIS (human resources information system) containing all the specialists’ profiles. Some of such systems offer pre-built settings for organizing HR processes like onboarding and offboarding. If you don’t have an HRIS yet, another option would be to fix the task performance in task trackers like Asana or Trello. Prepare Employee Offboarding Checklist Here are the must-haves of a successful offboarding checklist. Communication ✅ Notify stakeholders. Together with the leaving specialist, agree on the last working day and decide when it’s better to inform the team. Try to reveal that fact as soon as possible. Thus, you can avoid gossip and reassign responsibilities in a more stress-free way. Knowledge transfer All the processes from this section go smoothly if you practice ongoing knowledge sharing within your team. Then, you’ll need to adjust instructions rather than create them from scratch. It’s a great approach not only for offboarding, it’s . the main secret of easy team scaling and upskilling ✅ Prepare future hiring and training processes. To do that, evaluate the performance and contributions of the departing IT specialist. Typically, a specialist’s project manager is aware of a team member’s outstanding tasks. To make sure 100% of the tasks were completed or reassigned to other people, direct managers also may gather feedback from team members who worked closely with the departing IT specialist. ✅ Code Repositories. Ensure access to code repositories is revoked, and ownership is transferred. ✅ Update and organize technical documentation for a smooth handover. ✅ Review and update standard operating procedures (SOPs). Your goal is to replace the task performer with another team member. In case you don’t have any SOPs yet, I strongly recommend you consider documenting business operations, as they and help newcomers sort everything out. debunk potential misunderstandings ✅ Culture Integration. When explaining the reasons for a team-mate's leaving to the entire team, frame them in a positive light. Reassure the team about the company's commitment to the specialist's well-being. Fill the vacant position quickly to reduce the workload on the rest of team members. When a new team member joins, celebrate the new beginning. Security Measures 76% of business leaders say that offboarding is a serious security threat. ✅ Account Deactivation. Disable access to company systems, emails, and other digital platforms. ✅ Revoke API Tokens. Secure APIs by revoking tokens associated with the departing employee. ✅ Data Leakage Prevention. Remind leaving specialists about NDA compliance. If you didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement with your (almost ex-) team members, you can still stay safe by deploying data loss prevention solutions that can monitor, detect, and prevent unauthorized data transfers. ✅ Return Company Assets. Ensure the return of all company-owned equipment and assets if you have provided any. Administrative busywork (exit documentation) ✅ Benefits and Final Payments. Provide information about benefits continuation and process final payments promptly. ✅ Offboarding documents. Complete all necessary legal paperwork related to contract termination. Feedback ✅ Exit Interview. Conduct a meaningful exit interview (not a survey) to gather insights into the employee's experience and reasons for leaving. Thus, you will be able to analyze it and identify areas for improvement in workflows and team collaboration. ✅ Alumni Program. Introduce departing employees to an alumni program if you have any. That fosters a positive relationship after departure. Track the Offboarding Progress Even the perfect offboarding strategy can misfire if there are no people personally responsible for its execution. I recommend you develop an employee offboarding checklist covering all the necessary steps, and then divide it into separate to-do lists for all the involved people so that they can focus on their parts. I’d set a deadline for each task and assign it to people who will actually cover it (even if it’s me). Ensuring compliance with legal timelines and a specialist’s comfort is essential. To measure the efficacy of the offboarding process, I’d assess the time from resignation submission to the last working day. Status change processing should not take longer than planned. During this period, 99% of offboarding tasks should be completed. The typical exception is the last payment. It’s absolutely okay to send it on the usual payment date for your company if you’ve agreed so beforehand. Offboarding Matters for Both a Company and Departing Specialists Implementing an effective offboarding checklist not only mitigates potential risks, but also: Transforms departures into opportunities for growth and improvement; Helps tech teams keep their knowledge base updated all the time. So, should you have a process in place for tech team offboarding? The answer is a resounding yes. Create a working employee offboarding checklist and stick to it. Some in-house HR teams can manage employee offboarding successfully if a team manager asks them to keep such a focus. In other situations, additional expertise is needed. For instance, companies may consider professional tech team onboarding services when they: Don’t have an HR department and need a team which can take over all the HR-related administrative busywork and well-being checks; Don’t have/lack specialists proficient in tech hiring, which typically is more complicated and needs more interview rounds; Hire in foreign countries and require local expertise; Face high retention rates or/and other weak points in their tech teams and want to get an independent and professional teamwork’s audit. Regardless of which specialists are responsible to offboard team members, in-house or third-party ones, the checklist provided in this article will help them organize successful offboarding. Each part of this basic checklist is crucial. Offboarding team or a specialist should track the tasks related to 5 aspects: ethical and on-time communication, well-documented knowledge transfer, security measures, completed administrative paperwork, and gathering feedback not for show but for improvement. I encourage you to think of offboarding as the counterpart of onboarding and prepare both parts in advance!

Tech Team Offboarding: Should You Have a Process in Place?

Mark Twain's Speeches by Mark Twain, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY here SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY COLONEL GEORGE HARVEY AT
          DELMONICO’S, DECEMBER 5, 1905, TO CELEBRATE THE SEVENTIETH
          ANNIVERSARY OF MR. CLEMENS’ BIRTH

          Mr. Howells introduced Mr. Clemens:

          “Now, ladies and gentlemen, and Colonel Harvey, I will try not
          to be greedy on your behalf in wishing the health of our
          honored and, in view of his great age, our revered guest.  I
          will not say, ‘Oh King, live forever!’ but ‘Oh King, live as
          long as you like!’” [Amid great applause and waving of napkins
          all rise and drink to Mark Twain.] Well, if I made that joke, it is the best one I ever made, and it is in the prettiest language, too.—I never can get quite to that height. But I appreciate that joke, and I shall remember it—and I shall use it when occasion requires. I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like this at all. No proper appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready. Now, for a person born with high and delicate instincts—why, even the cradle wasn’t whitewashed—nothing ready at all. I hadn’t any hair, I hadn’t any teeth, I hadn’t any clothes, I had to go to my first banquet just like that. Well, everybody came swarming in. It was the merest little bit of a village—hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was anything fresh in my line. Why, nothing ever happened in that village—I—why, I was the only thing that had really happened there for months and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn’t, I came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village in more than two years. Well, those people came, they came with that curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion. Nobody asked them, and I shouldn’t have minded if anybody had paid me a compliment, but nobody did. Their opinions were all just green with prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day. Well, I stood that as long as—well, you know I was born courteous, and I stood it to the limit. I stood it an hour, and then the worm turned. I was the worm; it was my turn to turn, and I turned. I knew very well the strength of my position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person in that whole town, and I came out and said so: And they could not say a word. It was so true: They blushed; they were embarrassed. Well, that was the first after-dinner speech I ever made: I think it was after dinner. It’s a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one. That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose. I am used to swan-songs; I have sung them several times. This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach—unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road. I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach. We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up—and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person. In the matter of diet—which is another main thing—I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn’t loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this—which I think is wisdom—that if you find you can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there’s a cemetery. I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and—not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn’t answer for everybody that’s trying to get to be seventy. I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you’ve got—meaning the chairman—if you’ve got one: I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds. To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars—reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it’s seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are different. You let it alone. Since I was seven years old I have seldom taken a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don’t think I did; it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and there has never been much the matter with me since. But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start for seventy on that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me, but that was merely an accident; it couldn’t happen again in a century. I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to repeat and emphasise that maxim: We can’t reach old age by another man’s road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you. I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed: you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can’t get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box. Morals are an acquirement—like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis—no man is born with them. I wasn’t myself, I started poor. I hadn’t a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that—the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the—I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn’t fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World’s Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn’t any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her—ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was—I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she’s a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian—I mean, you take the sterilized Christian, for there’s only one. Dear sir, I wish you wouldn’t look at me like that. Threescore years and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling’s military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer—and without prejudice—for they are not legally collectable. The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter through the deserted streets—a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more—if you shrink at thought of these things, you need only reply, “Your invitation honors me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Mark Twain (2004). Mark Twain's Speeches. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3188/pg3188-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

Now—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end?

CSS animations are a powerful way to create captivating user experiences online, and their simple API makes the barrier of entry low, allowing beginners to leverage the power of animations with just a few lines of . code In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to create facial expression animations in CSS visualized as an old CRT monitor. As a result, we’ll gain a better understanding of how to use CSS to create animations and use different to get the desired result. At the end of this tutorial, we’ll end up with the following: @keyframes CSS properties You can find the source code for this tutorial in one piece on . GitHub The HTML Layout The first thing we need to do is create the HTML layout for the animation. We’ll only need the following three elements: <!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
        <title>🧑 Facial Expression Animations in CSS</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles.css" />
    </head>
    <body>
        <div class="face">
            <div class="screen">
                <div class="expression"></div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html> Notice that the document references styles.css. Create this file next to the HTML file. : The entire monitor that encapsulates the screen and the facial expression. We’ll use and elements to add extra visual elements. .face ::before ::after . : The screen where we’ll add the expression. screen : The expression element will hold the eyes and mouth for the animation. We’ll use and elements to create three different elements visually out of one DOM node. .expression ::before ::after Styling the Element Now that we have the layout in place, let’s take a look at the CSS. To style the element, add the following rules to the CSS file: .face body {
    background: #333;
    font-family: 'Lucida Sans', 'Lucida Sans Regular', 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;
}

.face {
    position: absolute;
    top: 50%;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
    width: 300px;
    height: 300px;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
    background: #CAA277;
    border: 5px solid #2B1607;
    user-select: none;
    cursor: pointer;
} At this stage, we’ll have a simple brown box at the middle of the page. To align it to the middle, we can use positioning combined with and set to . Note that we offset the element by on both the x and y-axis to center align the anchor. absolute top left 50% -50% To align the screen to the center inside the monitor, we also need to set the to with these two alignments set to the center: display flex : Set the vertical alignment. align-items : Set the horizontal alignment. justify-content To add the back of the monitor, we’ll use the and element of the element. Extend the CSS with the following rules: ::before ::after .face .face::before,
.face::after {
    content: '';
    position: absolute;
    top: -5px;
    right: -60px;
    width: 50px;
    background: #44595E;
    border: 5px solid #2B1607;
    height: 100%;
}

.face::after {
    top: 50%;
    right: -115px;
    transform: translateY(-50%);
    width: 50px;
    height: 90%;
} This will position the and elements on the right side of the monitor. For the correct position, we need to take the width of the element plus the borders from each side: ::before ::after right 50px (width) + 2 * 5px (borders) -> 60px We can follow the same calculation for the element, but this time, we have to take the element into account, so we have to adjust by another . This is because we want the right border of the element to overlap with the left border of the element. Otherwise, we would end up with a border between the two elements. ::after ::before 60px 60px - 5px ::before ::after 10px Adding the screen Now that we have the base element styled, let’s also add the . For this, all we have to do is set a and along with some background and border colors. Append the following to the CSS: .screen width height .screen {
    position: relative;
    width: 220px;
    height: 220px;
    background: #4D3A29;
    border: 5px solid #2B1607;
    overflow: hidden;
} Make sure you set to , as we’ll have cases where we animate elements outside the screen. overflow hidden The element will be automatically aligned to the middle. This is because we used for the element with and set to . We also need the inner edge of the monitor, which we can achieve with another element: flex .face align-items flex-direction center ::before .screen::before {
    content: '';
    width: 10px;
    height: 100%;
    display: block;
    background: #CAA277;
    border-right: 5px solid #2B1607;
} Adding Expressions Now that we have the base elements sorted out, we can start looking into adding expressions. First, let’s make the monitor sleep. For the mouth, we’re going to use a circle, and for the eyes, we’ll use a crescent that we’ll generate through borders. For the mouth, add the following to the CSS: .expression {
    position: absolute;
    top: 75%;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translateX(-50%);
    width: 30px;
    height: 30px;
    border-radius: 100%;
    background: #FFF;
} What this will do is it’ll create a circle at from the top of the screen, horizontally in the middle (using and ) with a white background. By setting to , we can change the appearance of a square to a circle. To also add the styles for the eyes, add the following lines of code after the block: 30px 75% left: 50% translateX(-50%) border-radius 100% .expression .expression::before,
.expression::after {
    content: '';
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    width: 20px;
    height: 20px;
    border-radius: 100%;
    top: -20px;
    left: -30px;
    border-bottom: 3px solid #FFF;
    transition: all .3s cubic-bezier(.55, 0, .1, 1);
}

.expression::after {
    left: auto;
    right: -30px;
} This will generate two additional elements: one to the left from the mouth, and one to the right. The crescent is achieved through the property. Here, we use a as well, and by using a single border, we can essentially generate a crescent. 30px 30px border-bottom 100% border-radius As we want to animate these elements, make sure you define a rule. transition The sleep animation We want to complement the current expression with a sleeping animation to demonstrate the power of . We’ll add the following animation: CSS animations Let’s create the element first, and then we create the animation for it. For the element, we’ll use the of our element. Add the following to your CSS to introduce the “Z“: ::after .screen .face:not(.awake):not(.angry) .screen::after {
    content: 'Z';
    position: absolute;
    top: 45px;
    right: 50px;
    color: #FFF;
    font-weight: bold;
    letter-spacing: 6px;
    transform: rotate(-27deg);
    opacity: 0;
    animation: sleep 4s ease-in-out infinite;
} First, we want to make sure that this element only appears on the screen when none of the other states are active. This can be achieved using the CSS selector. For additional states, we’ll simply use additional classes. We’ll have the following states: :not : The default state after waking up the monitor from its sleep. We’ll see how we can create a blinking animation. awake : We’ll look into CSS rotation to see how we can make the element shake. angry We have this element absolutely positioned at the top-right part of the screen, with some rotating applied. It calls the animation that we haven’t created yet. The animation property itself has four different values: sleep : The name of the animation that we’ll build in a minute. sleep : The time it’ll take for our animation to play. We’ll complete the animation in four seconds. 4s : The easing to use for the animation. Different easings play the animation at a different rate of change. To experiment with easing, I recommend checking out . ease-in-out easings.net : The number of times we want to place this animation. To play it indefinitely, we can use . infinite infinite To create an animation in CSS, we need to use the keyword with the name of the animation: @keyframes @keyframes sleep {
    0% { opacity: 0%; }
    30% {
        opacity: 100%;
        right: 30px;
        content: 'Z.'
    }
    60% {
        right: 50px;
        content: 'Z..'
    }
    90% {
        right: 30px;
    }
    100% {
        top: -30px;
    }
} This will animate different properties at different stages of the animation. : Initially, we’ll start with a 0% and slowly fade in the element over 30% of the animation. 0% opacity : At 30%, the element is fully faded in, and we also shift it to the right by . We can also change the content. 30% 20px (50px - 30px) : At 60%, we change the content again and pull the element back to its initial position ( from the right). 60% 50px : We reiterate the same steps for the right position to pull and push the element back and forth, creating a waving animation. 90% 100%: We want the element to move upwards, outside of the screen. We can achieve this by animating the property to a negative value. Note that there are no stops in between for this property. We go from the initial position ( ) to its final position in one step ( ). top top: 45px top: -35px Awake As we have the waving sorted, let’s create two more states to get the hang of CSS animations. In the awake state, we want our element to blink intermittently. To add the awake state, expand the CSS with the following lines: /* Mouth */
.awake .expression {
    width: 30px;
    height: 15px;
    border-bottom: 5px solid #FFF;
    background: transparent;
}

/* Eyes */
.awake .expression::before,
.awake .expression::after {
    width: 15px;
    height: 15px;
    background: #FFF;
    border: 0;
    animation: blink 4s cubic-bezier(.55, 0, .1, 1) infinite;
} We used the same border solution we had for the eyes for the mouth this time. As it originally had a background color, we need to set it to . For the eyes, we just need to change their size and add a background color to make them round (as we already have a 100% applied for the element). transparent border-radius For the blinking animation, we’ll need to create a new . This time, it’s using a custom for the easing, which creates a more natural transition. Now, let’s take a look at the animation: @keyframes cubic-bezier blink @keyframes blink {
    0% { transform: scaleY(1); }
    2% { transform: scaleY(.1); }
    4% { transform: scaleY(1); }
    50% { transform: scaleY(1); }
    52% { transform: scaleY(.1); }
    54% { transform: scaleY(1); }
    56% { transform: scaleY(.1); }
    58% { transform: scaleY(1); }
    100% { transform: scaleY(1); }
} The animation is simply an iteration of scaling the eyes back and forth from to . To make the blinking natural and fast, the transition takes place over 2% of the animation. To make the blinking intermittent, we can create one blink from 0% to 4% (close from 0% to 2%, then open from 2% to 4%) and two others from 50% to 58%. To create a seamless transition, make sure you return to the initial state at 100%. blink 1 .1 Angry To finish CSS animations, we’ll create another angry state that will make the monitor shake. But first, let’s turn the eyes inwards with some extra styles to better convey the expression. This can be done with simple rotation rules: .angry .expression::before,
.angry .expression::after {
    top: -30px;
    width: 25px;
    height: 10px;
}

.angry .expression::before {
    transform: rotate(10deg);
}

.angry .expression::after {
    transform: rotate(-10deg);
}

.angry {
    animation: shake 1s linear infinite;
} We want the shake animation to play smoothly, so this time, we’ll use a easing. Let’s take a look at what the shake animation looks like: linear @keyframes shake {
    0% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(0deg); }
    10% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(15deg); }
    20% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(-15deg); }
    30% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(15deg); }
    40% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(-15deg); }
    50% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(15deg); }
    60% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(-15deg); }
    70% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(15deg); }
    80% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(-15deg); }
    90% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(15deg); }
    100% { transform: translate(-50%, -50%) rotate(0deg); }
} As the entire element has a default property set to on both the x and y-axis, we need to pass it alongside the rule to prevent the element from losing the rule. All that happens here is that the element is rotated back and forth between and , creating the shaking effect. By increasing or decreasing the degree amount, we can make the effect more subtle or amplify it. translate -50% rotate translate -15° 15° Don’t forget to always return to the initial state at 100% to create a smooth loop. Switching Between States with JavaScript Now that we have all states created in CSS, there’s only one thing missing, and that is to actually change the states interactively. For this, we’ll use a simple click event listener in JavaScript. To change between states, add the following script tag after the body inside : index.html <script>
    const states = [
        'awake',
        'angry',
        ''
    ]

    let i = 0

    document.querySelector('.face').addEventListener('click', (e) => {
        e.currentTarget.className = `face ${states[i]}`

        if (i === states.length - 1) {
            i = 0
        } else {
            i++
        }
    })
</script> This will change the facial expression on each click. This is done by appending the appropriate class in the states array to the element on click. Using a variable ( ) for keeping track of the current index, we can start over again when we get to the end of the array. This will basically do the following: i Add the class to the element on the first click. .awake Add the class to the element on the second click. .angry Remove extra classes from the element on the third click. Once reaches , we reset it to to start from the beginning. i states.length -1 0 Summary In summary, CSS can be used to generate complex animations through positioning, transformation, and opacity. If you’d like to learn more about CSS animations, check out the following roadmap, which takes you through many examples of how to use transitions to animate from one state to the other. @keyframes https://webtips.dev/roadmaps/css-animations?embedable=true As mentioned in the beginning, you can find the in one piece for this tutorial on . Thank you for reading. Happy animating 🎨! source code GitHub

Creating Facial Expressions with CSS Animations

In the realm of machine learning, developers always faced a dilemma: how to share trained models without revealing the underlying code or risking the chaos of binary formats. It was a challenge that begged for a solution, and from this need, emerged as the Python package we had all been waiting for. PyMilo What is PyMilo? PyMilo is an open-source package providing a simple, efficient, and safe way to export trained machine-learning models. PyMilo adopts a fully transparent strategy by which the exported model, encapsulated in a human-readable format, invites exploration, allowing users to comprehend the intricacies of the model structure easily. Its transparency allows easy integration into diverse environments, smooth platform transfer, and collaboration without revealing underlying code or training data. Python PyMilo transportation is completely End-to-end, providing a seamless standalone process from exporting to importing and executing machine learning models. “End-to-end” here refers to a full process from exporting the trained model to importing and executing it in an inference mode without any additional dependencies. The user can export a model using PyMilo, and subsequently import the exported file into another environment, resulting in the exact model from the original library. The motivation behind PyMilo The motivation propelling PyMilo is to resolve the risks and inefficiencies in model-sharing methods. Developers often grapple with the dilemma of either limiting themselves to more dependencies or navigating unsafe formats when disseminating their models. PyMilo rises to this challenge by offering an efficient, secure, and transparent pathway for transporting trained models, serving as a conduit between training environments and deployment scenarios without the burden of additional dependencies. How PyMilo Works Using PyMilo is as simple as waving a wand. You can easily export your models with just a few lines of code, and the result is neatly packaged and ready for deployment or sharing. Here is a simple example of serializing and deserializing a Scikit-learn linear regression model. Model Preparation from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
import os

X, Y = datasets.load_diabetes(return_X_y=True)
threshold = 20
X_train, X_test = X[:-threshold], X[-threshold:]
Y_train, Y_test = Y[:-threshold], Y[-threshold:]
model = LinearRegression()
model.fit(X_train, Y_train) Save Model from pymilo import Export

PATH_TO_JSON_FILE = os.path.join(os.getcwd(),"test.json") 
exported_model.save(PATH_TO_JSON_FILE) Output >>> exported_model.to_json()

{
    "data": {
        "fit_intercept": true,
        "copy_X": true,
        "n_jobs": null,
        "positive": false,
        "n_features_in_": 10,
        "coef_": [
            0.30609424754267966,
            -237.63557011300716,
            510.53804765114097,
            327.7298779909887,
            -814.1119263534517,
            492.7995945034062,
            102.84123996793083,
            184.6034960903708,
            743.5093875957093,
            76.09664636971895
        ],
        "rank_": 10,
        "singular_": [
            1.9578051002417796,
            1.1797491126040702,
            1.0755406405377144,
            0.9579192686906345,
            0.7980638292867588,
            0.7594342409324799,
            0.7216957209064547,
            0.6459380350140406,
            0.27271507089040337,
            0.0915832239699
        ],
        "intercept_": 152.76429169049118
    },
    "sklearn_version": "1.3.0",
    "pymilo_version": "0.2",
    "model_type": "LinearRegression"
} Load Model from pymilo import Import
# Import the pymilo-exported model and get a real scikit model
imported_model = Import(PATH_TO_JSON_FILE) PyMilo vs. the others In the following, we name the most popular tools whose motivations are in line with PyMilo and point out their differences with PyMilo. ONNX ONNX is an open format that is built to represent machine learning models. ONNX defines a set of the building blocks of machine learning models. So, the models exported by ONNX are not exactly the same as the original model. In fact, before exporting, the models are reconstructed (approximately) by the building blocks provided by ONNX. SKOPS SKOPS is a Python library that helps you share your Scikit-learn-based models and put them into production. At the moment, it includes tools to easily integrate models on the Hugging Face Hub, which allows you to share your models, make them discoverable, and use the Hub’s API inference and widgets to get outputs of the model without having to download or load the model. However, its outputs are binary and have the risk of malicious code injection. Tensorflow.js TensorFlow.js is an open-source hardware-accelerated JavaScript library for training and deploying models trained with the TensorFlow library. It only supports TensorFlow models and is inefficient in dealing with heavy models. It’s an “All-in-one”! Charting the future PyMilo is still in its early stages of development and it currently supports only a limited number of machine learning models such as neural networks, trees, and linear models provided by Scikit-learn. However, in the near future, it will support other frameworks like PyTorch and Tensorflow as well. PyMilo plans to add two super major functionalities to its core facilities called, ML Streaming & Model Versioning. ML Streaming PyMilo server/client provides a novel and efficient way to utilize PyMilo exported models in web services. By utilizing PyMilo’s client, users can delegate calls to the PyMilo server, which hosts the trained model. This allows for easy interaction with the model, including prediction of data, retraining, and downloading for local use. This process is called “ML streaming”. ML streaming can provide the possibility of developing a marketplace-like platform for hosting pre-trained models, similar to Dockerhub. Model Versioning We intend to upgrade PyMilo with a new ML versioning mechanism. Users have the option to request a particular version of an ML model from their own application, which keeps track of the changes that happened through versions. Transparency in the model and the applied changes will be improved by this mechanism. GitHub Repo - https://github.com/openscilab/pymilo Wait for it! There is more to come! Also published here.

Introducing PyMilo: The Power of Transparency in Python ML Model Export

379 Stories To Learn About Data Privacy

Of the crucifixion of Jesus; and of his last words upon the cross.

The spirit of emigration crept in among the few survivors

Scaling PostgreSQL: How We Tamed 10 Billion Daily Records and 350 TB+ of Data

স্কেলিং PostgreSQL: কিভাবে আমরা 10 বিলিয়ন দৈনিক রেকর্ড এবং 350 TB+ ডেটা টেমড করেছি

Skalierung von PostgreSQL: Wie wir 10 Milliarden tägliche Datensätze und mehr als 350 TB Daten gezähmt haben

Escalado de PostgreSQL: cómo controlamos 10 mil millones de registros diarios y más de 350 TB de datos

Mise à l'échelle de PostgreSQL : comment nous avons maîtrisé 10 milliards d'enregistrements quotidiens et plus de 350 To de données

स्केलिंग पोस्टग्रेएसक्यूएल: हमने 10 बिलियन दैनिक रिकॉर्ड और 350 टीबी+ डेटा को कैसे नियंत्रित किया

PostgreSQL のスケーリング: 100 億の毎日のレコードと 350 TB 以上のデータをどのように管理したか

PostgreSQL 확장: 일일 기록 100억 개와 데이터 350TB 이상을 관리한 방법

Dimensionando o PostgreSQL: como controlamos 10 bilhões de registros diários e mais de 350 TB de dados

Масштабирование PostgreSQL: как мы укротили 10 миллиардов ежедневных записей и более 350 ТБ данных

PostgreSQL'i Ölçeklendirme: 10 Milyar Günlük Kaydı ve 350 TB+ Veriyi Nasıl Ele Geçirdik?

Mở rộng quy mô PostgreSQL: Cách chúng tôi thuần hóa 10 tỷ hồ sơ hàng ngày và hơn 350 TB dữ liệu

扩展 PostgreSQL：我们如何驯服 100 亿条每日记录和 350 TB 以上的数据

Stories, News & Mentions about WAVIC

Wavic’s Stories on HackerNoon