Look Sharp, Feel Sharp 🪒
TechCrunch: Presti uses generative AI to improve product photography in the furniture industry
If you’ve ever bought a sofa on an online store, have you thought about the homes that you can see in the background? When it’s time to release a new collection, furniture brands usually spend a small fortune on photo shoots. It’s a cumbersome and expensive process as it’s not easy to move furniture around.
That’s why a French startup called Presti is using generative AI to turn a single product image into a realistic photo. The company has already raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Partech with several business angels also participating.
Guardian: ‘Lo and behold’: world’s rarest whale may have washed up on New Zealand beach
Spade-toothed whales are a type of beaked whale named for their teeth resembling the spade-like “flensing” blade once used to strip whales of their blubber. Knowledge of their existence is mostly based on a series of bones and tissue discovered decades apart and later sequenced, showing a new, shared DNA.
But scientists in New Zealand believe that a whole specimen may just have been found in Taiari Mouth, Otago. It is the proverbial white whale of whale species, and it looks a lot like a very big dolphin.
“Spade-toothed whales are one of the most poorly known large mammalian species of modern times,” Gabe Davies, operations manager at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), said in a press release. He said the finding was “huge”.
BBC: Second homes: Gwynedd council playing Russian roulette - claim
Second home owners in Gwynedd already pay a 250% council tax rate.
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To try to manage the impact of second homes and holiday lets on communities, planning changes have been introduced in Wales.
This means planning authorities like councils and national parks can introduce what is known as an Article 4 direction to manage housing.
In Gwynedd, if means a homeowner will need planning permission to use a main home as a second home or short-term holiday let; to use a second home as a holiday let; or to use a holiday let as a second home.
OK magazine: ‘I Am Mortified’: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Issues Apology After Phone Call With Donald Trump Was Leaked
In the clip, which was a phone call that took place after Trump’s attempted assassination attempt, Trump spoke to Kennedy about vaccines, how he’s going to win the election and how President Joe Biden called him and asked him how he knew to turn his head as he was being shot. Trump also described that the bullet that hit his ear was like “the world’s largest mosquito.” This morning, Kennedy issued an apology for the video being shared on X: “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”
I wonder where that “in-house videographer” is working now?
Axios: Taboola to sell ads for Apple
Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboolafounder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.
Why it matters: The deal provides new validation for Taboola’s business, which has ballooned to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue as of 2023.
Apple is starting to get desperate to grow revenues. Will they go the route of Google and sell their soul?
Fast Company: The chumbox is still the dirty design secret of the internet
These chumbox advertisements — so-called for the way they lure in curious readers, akin to dumping junk bait into the ocean to capture bigger fish — are, of course, a form of clickbait. The outlandish headlines, which once seemed the highest form of absurdity, have given way to a visual language that borders on the abstract, and one that is wholly native to the internet.
Like most things, chumboxes were designed to sell a product, either directly or indirectly. The scale of the “native advertising” industry, the preferred term for advertising that mimics the look and feel of the traditional media outlets where it’s placed, is immense. One of the biggest purveyors, Taboola, boasts 9,000 “digital property partners” and 400 billion content recommendations every month. MGID, which claims the title of “the first platform to introduce content discovery through a native widget,” reaches more than 32,000 publishers and serves up an excess of 185 billion monthly impressions.
Ars Technica: YouTube creators surprised to find Apple and others trained AI on their videos
AI models at Apple, Salesforce, Anthropic, and other major technology players were trained on tens of thousands of YouTube videos without the creators' consent and potentially in violation of YouTube’s terms, according to a new report appearing in both Proof News and Wired.
The companies trained their models in part by using “the Pile,” a collection by nonprofit EleutherAI that was put together as a way to offer a useful dataset to individuals or companies that don’t have the resources to compete with Big Tech, though it has also since been used by those bigger companies.
The Pile includes books, Wikipedia articles, and much more. That includes YouTube captions collected by YouTube’s captions API, scraped from 173,536 YouTube videos across more than 48,000 channels. That includes videos from big YouTubers like MrBeast, PewDiePie, and popular tech commentator Marques Brownlee. On X, Brownlee called out Apple’s usage of the dataset, but acknowledged that assigning blame is complex when Apple did not collect the data itself.
Last Updated: 16.Jul.2024 23:58 EDT
