This one's going to be out of left field, but last Thursday I launched Countdown Treasure (https://countdowntreasure.com)
It's a real life treasure hunt in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a current total prize of $31,200+ in gold coins and a growing side pot.
I modeled it off of last year's Project Skydrop (https://projectskydrop.com) which was in the Boston area.
* Shrinking search area (today, Day 5, it will be 160 miles, on Day 21 it'll be just 1 foot wide)
* 24/7 webcam trained on the jar of gold coins sitting on the forest floor just off a public hiking trail
* Premium upgrades ($10 from each upgrade goes towards the side pot) for aerial photos above the treasure and access to a private online community (and you get your daily clues earlier)
* $2 from each upgrade goes towards the goal of raising $20k for continued Hurricane Helene relief
So far the side pot is $6k and climbing.
It's been such a fun project to work on, but also a lot of work. Tons of moving parts and checking twice and three times to make sure you've scrubbed all the EXIF data, etc.
Thanks! Yeah, I unfortunately can't shell out a straight $20k donation, but I saved the $25k over the year from my e-commerce business and justified it as a marketing expense if worse case scenario happens and it's found earlier than the math predicts. But if we get past break even then can't wait to write that check to help out the communities around here that are still recovering.
Maybe some? But the circle today will be 160 miles wide or about the same width as Switzerland and Denmark. So I'm not sure how much shadows would help you pinpoint a specific location in an entire country worth of mountains.
I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.
The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.
This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.
Only if the phone app is open source, or at least the api, alllll of it, is public so no one needs the default app nor is limited by it.
Alternatively, maybe the overall simplicity will mean that a 3rd party full computer replacement would be feasible even without any official help from the manufacturer.
I mean yes, but also this is a complex new prototype vehicle. I can assume that there may be mistakes/ non ideal things that they only catch post production.
As long as the fixes are a long the lines as bios updates (not required per say, but may fix bugs or edge cases) then that seems reasonable.
Oh sweet. Delicious. Very reassuring. Was really hoping this thing was going to be device agnostic.
My 2015 car had 3g "smart" features that no longer work since 3g has been sunset in the US. Awesome to see forward thinking of a smart feature-set that can be updated with a module you'll likley already have an upgrade path for.
There's a difference between phone-dependent and phone-augmented. I don't know the details of the truck, but I think a happy medium would be for an app to exist to augment the truck's abilities and allow at-home updates, but to not require the app or phone to just use the truck (even for long periods; i.e. you could go forever without using the app and the truck will just keep working in its current state).
I think this is technically "image variations" and I think image variations are still only dall-e 3 for now (best I could tell earlier today from the API)
I started Accomplice v1 back in 2021 with this goal in mind and raised some VC money but it was too early.
Now, with these latest imagen-3.0-generate-002 (Gemini) and gpt-image-1 (OpenAI) models – especially this API release from OpenAI – I've been able to resurrect Accomplice as a little side project.
Accomplice v2 (https://accomplice.ai) is just getting started back up again – I honestly decided to rebuild it only a couple weeks ago in preparation for today once I saw ChatGPT's new image model – but so far 1,000s of free to download PNGs (and any SVGs that have already been vectorized are free too (costs a credit to vectorize)).
I generate new icons every few minutes from a huge list of "useful icons" I've built. Will be 100% pay-as-you-go. And for a credit, paid users can vectorize any PNGs they like, tweak them using AI, upload their own images to vectorize and download, or create their own icons (with my prompt injections baked in to get you good icon results)
Do multi-modal models make something like this obsolete? I honestly am not sure. In my experience with Accomplice v1, a lot of users didn't know what to do with a blank textarea, so the thinking here is there's value in doing some of the work for them upfront with a large searchable archive. Would love to hear others' thoughts.
That looks interesting, but I don't know how useful single icons can be. For me, the really useful part would be to get a suite of icons that all have a consistent visual style. Bonus points if I can prompt the model to generate more icons with that same style.
Recraft has a style feature where you give some images. I wonder if that would work for icons. You can also try giving an image of a bunch of icons to ChatGPT and have it generate more, then vectorize them.
Former Googler, VC-backed AI founder. Currently running my own e-commerce business. Lifetime startupper, hybrid frontend / backend designer and developer, who loves building intuitive products with Rails, Stimulus and Tailwind.
The other day I noticed shipitsquirrel.com was available, so I spent a couple evenings pair programming with ChatGPT to make a fun little Missile Command style game where you help Ship It Squirrel ship by blowing up distractions ;)
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