Some very promising projects that are re-colorizing old photos and videos.
A project called De Oldify has shared some very impressive results.
DeOldify is a state of the art way to colorize black & white images. You can try it right now by visiting the free Google Colab notebook for photos or video. The notebooks are open source, and available to all.
https://deoldify.ai/#about
And another project at Neural Love has some impressive videos.
https://neural.love
We do video upscalingOur machine-learning masterpiece is built on top of an ensemble of neural networks that can upscale, add FPS, colorize, remove noise and much more
Everyone in California right now is sheltering in place. We have been asked to minimize travel, work from home and not leave home unless absolutely necessary. No driving to places for an evening walk etc. What’s allowed is to go downstairs for a quick walk in the neighborhood. Luckily, we live close to this spot so we decided to go for a quick walk.
It was nice to notice all the beauty, take in the fresh air and all the sights and sounds.
For years I was obsessed with this mountain. Old habits die hard – I always try to fly only at sunrise or sunset in Seattle. Just to get a glimpse of this awesomeness in perfect lighting. Seeing Rainier is a hit or miss. It is not visible everyday. Yesterday, I fell asleep on the way and we ended up there sooner than I had expected and I woke up with a start and looked out the window and saw Rainier almost behind us already. Very quickly I put on my lens and used a 200mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter to get at least this. And yes my heart had stopped beating for that entire time ❤️
Isn’t this such a special thing? Almost the same size as Mt Everest (just that Everest starts higher, so ends higher). Having a mountain near us keeps our egos in check. It makes it easier to give in to awe. To be big picture. To have a holistic perspective.
I have always wondered what would Silicon Valley & the tech industry be like if there was a huge mountain right outside reminding everyone of their place.
Us people here in the Bay Area – our thoughts, attitudes, desires, values etc. have a disproportionately outsized impact on the world through the mediums of things like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, AirBnB, Slack, etc. The decisions we make here are always biased towards the contexts we find ourselves in. And most of us here are usually quite unhappy, in survival mode, delaying gratification, playing the race to the bottom game, with a hope to someday be able to cash out or make it to finally make it all sustainable for ourselves. With that mindset, what are we optimizing for and for whom? And what impact does it have? 😀
Labels are very tricky to navigate, especially through the lens of history. Poznań is the chief city in the historical region called Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) which used to be at the heart of the 10th century Polish state. After more than a century of partitions between the Austrian, the Prussian, and the Russian imperial powers, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign state at the end of the First World War in Europe in 1917-1918. By then the capital of Poland was Warsaw and Greater Poland (which had now been under Prussian rule for a long time) was won back in the Greater Poland Uprising of 1918. Following the German invasion of 1939, Greater Poland was again taken over and now incorporated into Nazi Germany. Poznań was declared a German stronghold city in the closing stages of the war, being taken by the Russian army in the Battle of Poznań, which ended on 22 February 1945. Since then, Poznań has been back in what we today recognize as Poland. And this is what it looks like at sunset ☺️
So Audrey Desiderato and I happened to be in Kigali in Rwanda. And we had a drone. We asked around to see if anyone knew of a solar installation that would look good from the air. And someone connected us with the first utility scale solar project in E Africa! This is the very first picture the world saw of this huge, beautiful solar installation that’s in the shape of Africa. This image has been used in many places – including now in the USAID #actonclimate 2016 calendar!
