Brain Food

Ways of Seeing Through Uncertainty.

Finding Your Footing in Wonderland

In a world that feels like Alice's Wonderland, where chaos reigns, and the ground seems ever-shifting, learn to dance on the embers of change.

Like Alice, we may not have chosen this journey, but we can choose the next step the moment we become aware of the option to choose.

Truly — optionality is Pandora's Box.

If given agency, none of us would choose to ignore our calling.

For example, we can look at the dialogue around remote work. Remote work was my norm long before COVID shut the world down. Code is the bridge upon which software engineers build trust. If you have been in the trenches of a deployment weekend or an emergency rollback of a major feature, you know. The bond you wish your team could have is the loyalty and trust earned and given in moments of intense pressure. If level heads and calm voices are maintained despite sweaty brows — all the better.

The teams that swim when the sea is stormy come in many forms. No size fits all. Adding some less frequently commentated ideas to the argument on remote work:

As a female, I have felt more empowered and equal in high-functioning remote teams. The playing field is level in this case. Given the baseline of high working standards, respect among the team, and defined structures for documents and communication are in place—remote is neutral territory.

AI Safety Bites

Deregulation or Bust

In another week, with more information than our human brains can tolerate, we are seeing the approach we expected from the new regime in the United States. DJT and co. are hardwired to disassemble all attempts at thoughtful progress in the Artificial Intelligence space and elsewhere. The AI safety page has gone dark with a 404 error on Whitehouse.gov; no surprise, but the point taken. The screenshot of the 404 page below is from January 24th, 2025, the URL of the White House page for "executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence."

NIH funding for science is on hold, the tech bros are duking it out for space in the orbit of the new president, and China is plowing ahead of the West on AI and now Fusion.

Must read stories for this week come from the BBC and BioMetric Update.

Read about the supercomputer using AI to develop vaccines at the ​BBC​.

Biometric Update covers the Stargate AI initiative minus any checks and balances. Who needs those anyway? The human race, perhaps? Read the article ​here​.

AI Creative Applications

Visual Storytelling - AI Edition

This week, I completed a promotional video for our app, AICharmLab. To bridge gaps in the footage, I explored Runway ML's new "Frames" feature.

I have explored AI as a creative storytelling tool since beginning TheTechMargin two years ago, and boy, have we come a long way.

Runway has had my loyalty on and off over these two years. I only need to generate enough content for the moment and generally create my creative assets in batches. I primarily use ​RunDiffussion​ to quickly spin up Deforum and Automatic 1111 with scripted visualizations aided by a nifty tool called Parseq.

The server route is the most economical and offers the finest-grained control over parameters, but it is an approach that does not work well for quick, "ad-hoc" video snippets, the likes of what I needed for my promo video.

For the video, I wanted to use magic and inspiration. Playing with Runway was intuitive, and the results were beyond impressive. Short ten-second clips were exactly what I needed to fill in the narrative gaps in the visual flow I had already built.

Sora, by OpenAI, has a terrible UX by comparison and limited credit availability, which you cannot "top up," so you must wait (waiting? in the age of AI, the shock) until your credits refresh on your monthly subscription date.

Runway's seamless generation process swiftly improved my workflow. As I built the video in Adobe Premier, ideas to improve a segment or tighten up the overall piece were easily executed in Runway and ported into the editor. Ultimately, this workflow helped to create what I am calling a promo, but I think it equally stands on its own as an inspirational sequence for creatives of all stripes and types.

If you are interested in the result of my work, check out the video here, leave a comment and subscribe while you are there! I read and appreciate every nod of appreciation and feedback.