In the winter, if the conditions are right, you can get a wonderful adventure through some lake-side ice caves. Unfortunately, due to non-existent or unstable ice conditions, the last time you could visit these caves safely was 2015.
The National Park Service, however, has a wonderful website for checking status and learning more about them.
MiniMuseum has a collection of small rare and unusual clippings and samples from all manner of historical and technological tidbits.
Patrick Walsh talks about interesting hidden risks in LLM’s and RAG workflows. He demonstrates how to extract sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information and social security numbers these systems were trained on, with real-world attacks.
Once your car gets about 10 years old, one of the most annoying things is that headlights dim and yellow. This is due to a number of reasons – but primarily due to the degradation of the UV coating. You can buff it off, but it often quickly returns and you’re stuck with an annoying chore almost every year.
Another option is to buy replacement headlights. In the old days, you simply unscrewed the old bulbs and put in the new ones. Now you need to remove the assemblies – which often involves removing the bumper and surrounding shrouds – as is the case with mid 2010 Subarus.
The Crosstrek/Impreza’s in the 2015 era were actually not that bad to replace. TRQ does a great job showing you how to do the job yourself – including how to re-aim the headlights. It’s a great video.
Engineers at Intel released an open-source tool that tries to quantify the issues from increasing amounts of upscalers, frame generators, and AI rendering techniques. Ironically, the tool itself is an AI trained on large datasets. Their paper about the methodology is located here.
CGVQM is a video quality metric that predicts perceptual differences between pairs of videos.
Like PSNR and SSIM, it compares a ground-truth reference to a distorted version (e.g. blurry, noisy, aliased).What sets CGVQM apart is that it is the first metric calibrated for distortions from advanced rendering techniques, accounting for both spatial and temporal artifacts.
CGVQM is available for free on github and uses PyTorch optimized for CUDA GPUs though it does work on CPUs.
Other links:
I love the movie A Christmas Story. It was one man’s reflection on the traditions and experiences of being a kid at Christmas time in the 50’s. They say that nostalgia runs in waves every 20 years. I think another round comes when you hit 40 years.
I ran across this video of actual 1970’s Christmas music that was played in K-mart stores (I wrote about Mark Davis and his collection of retail store music before).
This music hit me like a truck. I remember being a sub-10 year old kid and being taken to a K-mart just like this around Christmas in the Midwest. I remember buying my first Stomper there, getting clothes, shoes, and school supplies before each school year.
But one of the biggest feelings I had was sadness as to something lost – and a warning. The founder, S.S. Kresge was an incredibly hard worker and a penny-pincher that wore cheap suits until they fell apart and put paper in his shoes when the soles wore thin. At the age of 34 in 1899, he opened a chain of 5 and 10 cent stores. He soon became the second largest retailer in the country. By1924 he was worth equivalent of $3.8 billion. By the 1950’s he had 694 stores. In 1962, he saw retail changing and innovated tons of new ideas with K-mart – like making big stores that carried just about everything one needed in one stop. They also innovated a food court, shopping carts that encouraged browsing and shopping, and being located in suburbs with plenty of free parking that wasn’t available in downtown stores.
And that’s what is fascinating and sad. By the late 80’s, the store started to fall to Walmart that focused on even bigger selection at even lower prices, and Target that focused on higher quality goods. K-mart was left in a strange middle ground and floundered as poor leadership couldn’t figure out their brand message.
It’s the story of a man that worked incredibly hard, pinched every penny, and put in untold hours. Yet, the company he founded in 1962 and drove to the 2nd biggest retailer barely lasted 43 years.
It’s a reminder that everything is passing. No matter what you built, how successful you are, how much power and money you accumulate, it all goes to someone else. And based on how many people under 20 I asked if they even heard of K-mart, how quickly a billionaire (equivalent) and his company is forgotten.
It also reminded me of how important I thought having the new lunch box, new school clothes, new shoes, and the toys was to me, but how unimportant those things are now. Instead, what I really remember and valued are the memories of my family and time we spent shopping together.
It made me think of this section from Introduction to the Devout Life – Fifth Meditation – On Death – Part I, Chapter 13 by St Francis De Sales:
Consider that then the world is at end as far as you are concerned, there will be no more of it for you, it will be altogether overthrown for you, since all pleasures, vanities, worldly joys, empty delights will be as a mere fantastic vision to you. Woe is me, for what mere trifles and unrealities I have ventured to offend my God? Then you will see that what we preferred to Him was nought. But, on the other hand, all devotion and good works will then seem so precious and so sweet –Why did I not tread that pleasant path? Then what you thought to be little sins will look like huge mountains, and your devotion will seem but a very little thing.
Consider how the survivors will hasten to put that body away, and hide it beneath the earth–and then the world will scarce give you another thought, or remember you, any more than you have done to those already gone. “God rest his soul!” men will say, and that is all. O death, how pitiless, how hard thou art!
Back in 2016, The Art Institute of Chicago built a life-size rendition of his popular painting Bedroom in Arles to promote an exhibition called Van Gogh’s Bedrooms. The room was available for rent on Airbnb.
It was only offered a very short time and was immediately completely sold out for the whole run, but if you’re interested in an alternative, how about a version in the actual Arles, France?
Railroad maintenance carts were replaced by trucks years ago, but a group of people have saved these rail little carts and still have events to ride the rails.
At Christmas they now make a run between small coastal towns to deliver presents.
Beware. Some day your kids may start treating you the way you treated them when they were younger.
After all, they’ll do what you teach them by your actions – not your words.