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Showing posts from January, 2018

Deep Fakes

Recently someone revealed that he managed to use deep learning libraries to generate fake videos after training with celebrity images. A few days ago, there were multiple stories mentioning how there is now ready-to-go apps that can do this, and even come with pre-trained neural nets for specific celebrities. And groups on Reddit dedicated for the resulting videos. While this was obviously going to come sooner or later, it means that very soon video evidence is going to become meaningless. There are already other papers about how to sync mouth movement to generate audio, and how to create audio that matches a voice. That is pretty much all that is needed for very high quality fake videos. The ones generated by the app are not that convincing yet, but I'm pretty sure that is just a matter of time, and probably not a lot of it, either...

The Owner Trilogy - Series Reread

I recently felt like re-reading The Owner's trilogy - The Departure, Zero Point and Jupiter War, by Neal Asher. I had read these back in 2013, and for whatever reason it stuck on my mind. They were pretty much as good as I remembered. The story is about Alan Saul - a man that was awoken by an AI, without memory, while being sent alive to an incinerator. From this, he goes and messes up a probably slight exaggerated evil dystopic socialist world government, meanwhile stealing a space station made in a large asteroid in Earth orbit. Very enjoyable.

It (2017)

I saw It (2017) recently. I really liked the mini-series and the book, and with all the good reviews I expected a lot from the movie. Thankfully, it pretty much delivered. There seems to be quite a few changes, but it's been a while since I read the book, and anyway, they seemed to work well. Everyone's acting was pretty good. As some have complained, some characters were really, really skipped over, though. Can't wait for the sequel!

Prison Architect - Game Review

Prison Architect is an interesting PC prison management sim.  I actually got it in a Humble Bundle way back in 2014, but it was on sale last week, and there were so many comments praising it that I checked Steam for opinions, and realized I had it. Many said it can easily take hours of your time, and that is certainly true. I've played the whole campaign in 11 hours (I'm sure it can be done much faster, but I wanted to complete some of the optional quests, too). You can also just create prisons as you want to, outside the campaign. I found it quite entertaining. There are many possible things to build and control, many with important consequences. It is a bit buggy, too, but usually not too serious (mostly things like having to enclose areas for them to be recognized, even though it isn't a requirement). The game clearly states it is for prison reform, through both the mechanics and the cut scenes, which I think is a useful thing. Clearly it makes no point to use