Month: December 2022

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of musical notes exploding forth from a computer monitor. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Thursday, a pair of tech hobbyists released Riffusion, an AI model that generates music from text prompts by creating a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback. It uses a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model, applying visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel way.

Created as a hobby project by Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros, Riffusion works by generating sonograms, which store audio in a two-dimensional image. In a sonogram, the X-axis represents time (the order in which the frequencies get played, from left to right), and the Y-axis represents the frequency of the sounds. Meanwhile, the color of each pixel in the image represents the amplitude of the sound at that given moment in time.

Since a sonogram is a type of picture, Stable Diffusion can process it. Forsgren and Martiros trained a custom Stable Diffusion model with example sonograms linked to descriptions of the sounds or musical genres they represented. With that knowledge, Riffusion can generate new music on the fly based on text prompts that describe the type of music or sound you want to hear, such as "jazz," "rock," or even typing on a keyboard.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

A lawsuit says Twitter failed to pay a $1,092,000 invoice in a software contract that doesn't expire until late 2024, and that the Elon Musk-led company apparently intends to stiff the vendor on another $7 million worth of payments.

Imply Data, Inc. sued Twitter in California Superior Court in San Francisco County, alleging breach of contract. The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday (see complaint) and reported by Bloomberg today.

"For over four years, Imply has licensed its proprietary software to Twitter, and Twitter has paid Imply over $10 million," the lawsuit said. "Twitter has always been very pleased with Imply's product and its related maintenance and support services, so, in mid-2021, the parties extended the term of their software license and service agreement for an additional three years from October 1, 2021, through September 30, 2024."

Enlarge / Henry Cavill as Geralt from Netflix's The Witcher TV series. (credit: Netflix)

Amazon has signed a deal with Games Workshop to gain the intellectual property rights that will allow the tech and media giant to make films, TV series, and other content based on the popular Warhammer 40K franchise.

Warhammer 40K has been one of the most popular properties among gamers and others for almost 40 years. It started as a tabletop game but has also spawned numerous popular video games and books over the years.

This news might be interesting enough on its own, but fans of the franchise might also be interested to know that Henry Cavill—the actor who played Geralt in Netflix's The Witcher series and Superman in the Zack Snyder DC superhero films, among other things—is attached to the project as an actor and executive producer.

Enlarge / No word on whether the next Steam Deck will help protect the wood on your deck. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Now that Valve's Steam Deck has been technically available for about ten months (and widely available for about two months), customers are increasingly wondering what Valve might have in store for an inevitable "version 2.0" of the handy PC gaming portable. But while some players might be looking for a more powerful "Steam Deck Pro," hardware designers Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais say that battery life and screen quality are the more likely "pain points" they'd like to address in a new version.

That news comes from a wide-ranging interview with The Verge, where the pair of Valve designers hinted that keeping the same basic hardware spec target for future hardware could be valuable. “Right now, the fact that all the Steam Decks can play the same games and that we have one target for users to understand what kind of performance level to expect when you’re playing and for developers to understand what to target—there’s a lot of value in having that one spec," Griffais told The Verge.

"I think we’ll opt to keep the one performance level for a little bit longer and only look at changing the performance level when there is a significant gain to be had,” Griffais added.

Enlarge / The Overture Maps logo. (credit: Overture Maps Foundation)

Google Maps is getting some competition. The Linux Foundation has announced Overture Maps, a "new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide." It's an open source mapping effort that includes a list of heavy hitters: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, with the foundation adding that the project is "open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data."

The Linux Foundation has a press release about the project and a new website for the Overture Maps Foundation. The press release outlined the scope of the project, which aims to deliver:

• Collaborative Map Building: Overture aims to incorporate data from multiple sources including Overture Members, civic organizations, and open data sources.
• Global Entity Reference System: Overture will simplify interoperability with a system that links entities from different data sets to the same real-world entities.
• Quality Assurance Processes: Overture data will undergo validation to detect map errors, breakage, and vandalism to help ensure that map data can be used in production systems.
• Structured Data Schema: Overture will define and drive adoption of a common, structured, and documented data schema to create an easy-to-use ecosystem of map data.

If you're saying, "Wait! isn't there already an open source map community out there?"  There is, and it's called "OpenStreetMap," the Wikipedia of maps that anyone can edit. The Overture press release says, "The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques to create a living digital record of the physical world."

Enlarge / PCB for the prototype PineTab 2, a successor to a tablet that hit production at the worst possible point in 2020. (credit: Pine64)

Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages.

The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof." While Linux support was scarce early on, development for RK3566 is "booming," and it's now a prime candidate for mobile operating systems, Erecinski writes.

Inside a PineTab 2 prototype, with a battery and connectors that are far from hidden for a potential replacement.

The PineTab 2 is a complete redesign, Erecinski claims. It has a metal chassis that "is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair." The tablet comes apart with snap-in tabs, and Pine64 will offer replacement parts. The insides are modular, too, with the eMMC storage, camera, daughter-board, battery, and keyboard connector all removable "in under 5 minutes." The 10.1-inch IPS display, with "modern and reasonably thin bezels," should also be replaceable, albeit with more work.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nathan Stirk )

Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is now suspending some journalists who write about him, including reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. The journalist suspensions seem to be part of Musk's quest to erase references or links to the now-suspended ElonJet account that used publicly available data from ADS-B Exchange to track Musk's private jet.

Musk claimed the suspended journalists violated the new policy that bans sharing of live locations in most scenarios. Musk wrote that the "same doxxing rules apply to 'journalists' as to everyone else" and that the suspended journalists "posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service."

It appears that simply posting a link to the ElonJet account on other social networks is enough for a suspension.

Enlarge / Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has asked Valve to addres the prevalence of neo-Nazi accounts and content on its Steam platform.

US Congress members are once again turning their eyes toward the game industry. But this time the focus isn't on loot boxes, Hong Kong, or even video game violence. Instead, lawmakers want to know what gaming companies are doing about "player reports of harassment and extremism encounters in your online games."

That language comes from a letter that seven Democratic legislators plan to send later today, as reported by Axios yesterday evening. The lawmakers—including Reps. Lori Trahan (D-MA), Katie Porter (D-CA), and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—are asking for more information on how those reports are handled, what data is collected regarding them, and whether the companies have "safety measures pertaining to anti-harassment and anti-extremism."

Recipients of the congressional inquiry will reportedly include a veritable who's who of major video game publishers, including Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Epic, Microsoft, PUBG Corp, Riot Games, Roblox, Sony, Square, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, Ubisoft, and Valve. Nintendo is notably missing from that list, as are other Asian gaming giants like Bandai Namco, Sega, Capcom, and Nexon (not to mention the American Warner Bros. Interactive). Among Us maker Innersloth will also receive a copy of the letter, an addition that likely reflects that game's impact rather than the company's size.