Thursday, 27 June 2024

AI Researcher Fei-Fei Li - The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

 A very interesting read, from the personal perspective of an immigrant Chinese family coming to America and also from the various AI related goals described, showing the backdrop of the US (salt mines of the) academic research environment (see below, what sold it for me is when she urged her researchers to "read the old stuff" again, not just the latest hot off the press stuff [other people's wins] - as good ideas often come well ahead of their time, with respect to be practical in the "at the time" technology available): 


I listened to this on Amazon's Audible after the recommendation from Geoffrey Hinton's on Twitter (or X if you prefer). 

I also like the way she described the benefit of having a North Star (your own personal one), something that is never attained but is always guiding you in the correct (or at least an interesting) direction (and yes you can switch it, but the obsessive ones who win Noble Prizes don't seem to).

Her Wikipedia page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li

Thursday, 13 June 2024

Sunday, 2 June 2024

1:72 Pegasus Hobbies - Pz 38(t)

Two in a box is a very appealing selling point for the wargamer. Two Pz 38(t)'s would also nicely flesh out and complete my early WWII Panzer Battalion (as per Command Decision OrBat). Small little things with a few parts (so it is not an exercise in fiddly modelling, gets the thumbs up from me - especially teh all in one track. One small 'ouch' moment though, in fitting the track to body of the tank there is a sharp "snap" from the track, as it broke cleanly in two. Something had to give as the track was warped in a concave fashion and had to be bent back to fit correctly. Thankfully the resulting small gap was easily bridged with "a small slither of plastic-card" (see below, in its "gap state", construction was therefore a little more exciting than I wanted as this happened four times, once for each side of track):  


Despite that it was a very nice quick build but with a detailed model (see below, the first one finished - commanders cover chosen to be open): 


Two tanks completed, turret hatches open awaiting "commanders" - with a small fleck of white denoting the plastic-card track repair (see below, once the first tank was done, then the second one was much faster): 


Searching around in the spares box for some German Commanders and I found two Plastic Soldier Company (PSC) ones that looked early war(ish) and they were shaved/sculpted to fit into the turret, which meant "breaking arms - the reangling then", sounds much more complicated and brutal than it actually was. It amounted taking a small triangular wedge out of one part of the arm/shoulder and then adding it to another part): 


Undercoating and painting next (tbc when though). At least the "to be assembled pile" is one box smaller.