Earlier this year, A Book Apart wound back book sales. As I explore future distribution options for "Better #Onboarding", I'm selling some 1st edition copies from my personal collection, and you can choose to have yours signed! etsy.com/listing/1744304352/… Available until Aug 28th

Brisbane landlords will need to apply for a permit before they can list their home for short-term accommodation, including Airbnb, the city's lord mayor has announced. ab.co/45nUIVo

We now have a total of 62 co-sponsors—Democrats & Republicans—for the Kids Online Safety Act. This overwhelming bipartisan support mirrors the powerful calls from young people & parents who want Congress to take action & finally hold Big Tech accountable.

If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths. I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be! Let's breakdown the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee." - The simulator instantiates two exquisite 3D assets: pirate ships with different decorations. Sora has to solve text-to-3D implicitly in its latent space. - The 3D objects are consistently animated as they sail and avoid each other's paths. - Fluid dynamics of the coffee, even the foams that form around the ships. Fluid simulation is an entire sub-field of computer graphics, which traditionally requires very complex algorithms and equations. - Photorealism, almost like rendering with raytracing. - The simulator takes into account the small size of the cup compared to oceans, and applies tilt-shift photography to give a "minuscule" vibe. - The semantics of the scene does not exist in the real world, but the engine still implements the correct physical rules that we expect. Next up: add more modalities and conditioning, then we have a full data-driven UE that will replace all the hand-engineered graphics pipelines. openai.com/sora