Controllable Video Sprites

Vid2Player is the coolest tech demo that I’ve seen this year. Using a generative adversarial neural network, players gain real-time control over deep fake tennis player “video sprites.”

While this research prototype is crude, it paints a picture of video gaming experiences on the horizon, indistinguishable from camera footage.

Whitepaper:
https://cs.stanford.edu/~haotianz/research/vid2player/

Demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnZUIuOzgQc

Personal Knowledge Management

I’ve tried several note-taking strategies over the years, from apps like Evernote and Bear to physical bullet journals. Nothing that I’ve tried so far has been as transformative as what Roam Research has recently cooked up as a reimagination of the note-taking process, combining the minimalist scaffold of markdown syntax with the mind-mapping organization offered by a dynamic graph database.

Website:
https://roamresearch.com

Video: The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3dA2GcAh8

A Roam Research Challenger

If you liked what you saw with Roam Research, check out the app, Obsidian. It leaves out some of the novel features from Roam, but it’s free while in beta and users maintain a local private copy of their data.

I’m still on the fence for whether I prefer the polish of the cloud-based Roam service or the local data model offered by Obsidian.

Website:
https://obsidian.md

Creating more value than you capture

Martin Kleppmann recently published an article titled “Writing a book: is it worth it?” – in short, Yes, it is.

In the post, he breaks down his monthly royalties from the sales and contributing factors to its success, then leaves the reader with a real gem of insight on “creating more value than you capture,” linking back to a 2009 article from Tim O’Reilly.

On a related note, James Traf (https://tr.af) recently published a blog post on earning “Six Figures in 6 days”, where he describes amassing $100k+ in a week’s sales for a small digital download.

Traf writes:

“They say that fortune favors the bold. In the internet age, the bold are those that aren’t afraid to publish their work for the world to see.”

We Jammin’

We Jammin

I’ve been using Luna for a solid month now and have found a cool nook in my day, just after dinner, where I can squeeze some music writing back into my life. Here are a couple of recent sketches from this new creative outlet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7xHrjEN8qM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaw9HUS8eHQ

If you’re in the market for a MIDI controller, I highly recommend the Native Instruments S61 mk2. The build construction on the keybed is fantastic. It doesn’t produce any sound on its own, but sings once wired up to virtual samplers/synthesizers.

That’s it for now!

Let’s do it again next month.