Panzer✓

T-Pain @TPAIN

“What if I’m not good?” What if you are??

sara beykpour @pandemona

Important conversations are happening on podcasts, and now your agents using Exa can hear them 🎧 @ParticleAPI is Exa's provider of podcast data and intelligence, delivering on our mission to bring spoken conversation to agents everywhere.

Polymarket @Polymarket

JUST IN: Reddit's r/opensource begins banning any project that uses AI, was created with AI, or is designed for AI tools.

Johnnie Manzari @johnnie

Portrait mode launched 10 years ago today. I think it resonated with people because it didn’t feel digital. It felt analog. And this was likely because the inspiration behind its technique went all the way back to oil painting. Sometimes pure math isn’t enough; you need to combine it with insights from the liberal arts. If you recall Portrait mode shipped a month after the iPhone did. This was because this insight about oil painting took a while to figure out. Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map takes forever to compute. One solution would be to reduce the amount of bokeh so the issues are not as obvious. But then you lose the whole point of the feature, which was to make it look like you had a large, wide-open lens. The solution to this conundrum—the tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of blur— was quite elegant, but it took a while to stumble across. There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong. We brought in a machine learning block to find the eyes, and draw a mask layer that protected them, then paired that with the disparity depth map. Counterintuitively, the solution was not to decrease the amount of blur, it was to increase it. The additional blur that we could add once the eyes were protected allowed us to hide the artifacts that were create by bad depth calculation. We let the ears go soft, let the nose go a bit soft. This is that wide open look that people loved, even if people didn’t realize that the ears going soft was why. I was thinking about this recently with regard to AI. We’ll be able to do more amazing things… we just need to study the masters who came before us.

Brian Moore @lanewinfield

made this project that randomly texts one of your contacts “thinking of u”

‎Gabe Follower @gabefollower

Mike Morasky, a developer from Valve, directly mentioned HLX (rumored to be Half-Life 3) during his Q&A session.

gray ❄️🫧 @graycrawford

it appears my squinting simulator is working 👀 we all love wave optics, naked-eye interference, eyelash diffraction right

Dennis Crowley 🇺🇸 (mostly on Threads, @dens) @dens

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure.

Ranjan @ranjanxroy

THEY DID IT! @Spotify FINALLY DID IT!

Zach Coelius @zachcoelius

AI coding dramatically accelerates second movers advantage.

Brian Corrieri @Brian_Corrieri

Meet PianoDuo, my second game for iPhone Duo. 🎹 Launching October 23. The top screen becomes a window into your room. Piano tiles flow toward you. Play melodies from famous classical pieces. Press & creators: DM me for TestFlight access. Gameplay captured from the app. When you play, the room view uses your live camera.