CNET: Google’s interactive 3D Valentine’s Day puzzle features adorable hamsters. “Valentine’s Day is the day we celebrate love, and Monday’s Doodle puts you in the position of having to reunite two lovelorn hamsters. After a brief overture, the hamsters have been retreated to opposite sides of the Doodle, which is constructed of disjointed habitat tubes.”
BBC: Covid-19: Celebrating Valentine’s Day during a pandemic. “Following nearly a year of social distancing, lockdowns and limited opportunities to socialise in person, some couples are thinking about how to make the day special even though they are apart. Others will be trying to find some time for romance while cooped up at home with young children.”
The Next Web: Scientist trains AI to write messages of love on candy hearts. “Janelle Shane, who in her day job creates computer-controlled holograms for studying the brain, collected genuine messages printed on the heart-shaped sweets to use as training data. She then fed them to a neural network so that it could learn the patterns behind the words.” I think “All Hover” was my favorite.
AI Weirdness: Candy Heart messages written by a neural network. “I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data – although its imitation is sometimes imperfect. The candy heart messages it produced… well, you be the judge.” Cool Cud.
It’s Valentine’s Day. If you use Snapchat you might want to take advantage of Snapchat’s romantic geofilters. “Nothing says romance like the word ‘geofilter’ or at least that is what the fine people at Snapchat believe. They’re offering users the chance to create their own custom designed filters to surprise their valentines. This isn’t a completely new idea — you’ve long been able to add them to weddings, parties and other special events.” Based on this article I think you’re going to have to shell out a minimum of $5 for the grand gesture; still, it’s cheaper than roses.
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