"Sphere Encoder 2" This paper fixes why one-step autoencoder generation looks blurry. It trains the latent rotation all the way from an encoded image to the 90° equator region where random generation actually starts. Then instead of forcing those highly ambiguous latents to reconstruct the exact source image pixel-by-pixel, it uses semantic, latent-consistency, and feature-space score-matching losses so the decoder can generate a sharp plausible image rather than average many possibilities into blur. On ImageNet, it reaches FDr6 4.92 with just 4 steps and ~23x less sampling compute than PixNerd, though its gFID is worse.

Metallic sphere with textured surface hovered smoothly with abrupt direction changes over Delgosha Garden, Shiraz, Iran... Witness's account of the sighting. I was on a video call with my family while visiting Delgosha Garden in Shiraz, Iran, when a strange object in the sky caught my attention. It was coming toward me and passed close by before moving across the garden. The first thing I noticed was that it was completely silent and moved so smoothly that I felt like I had never seen anything move that smoothly before. Its surface reflected the sunlight, and I believe it had some kind of texture on its surface. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a completely smooth, featureless orb. I have three videos of it, but they were recorded with my old Samsung S7 Edge, so the quality isn't very good, especially with the zoom and camera shake. In the first video, I was still talking to my family on the phone, so I removed the audio. The second video starts after I finished the call and continues until I could no longer see the object because of the trees. The third video starts from behind one of the garden buildings. The turn to the right is obvious in this video. For a few seconds, the object appears to stop moving, which scared me, and that's why I didn't record anything after that. I didn't actually watch it disappear myself because I was scared, but it started moving upward into the sky, which can be seen in the third video. I showed the videos to my family and friends, and they thought it was probably a balloon or a drone. That's why I never published them before. I'm still not sure what it was, but I wanted to put the videos out there anyway, even if it turns out to be just a balloon.

The Project Sphere campaign is complete. Time for the results! 🏆 Top 20 have received 100 USDT each, sent directly to their wallets submitted on Rarelist. The leaderboard is now frozen. All rankings are locked in for the promised $SPHERE airdrop. The current Top 200 will share 2% of the total supply! Project Sphere will also run a separate campaign right before the token launch. Follow @projectspherexy for the launch announcement!

Why does stretching a sphere into an egg multiply its volume by the product of its three axes? The map x=aρsinφcosθ, y=bρsinφsinθ, z=cρcosφ sends the unit ball to the ellipsoid. |J|=abcρ²sinφ. Integrating yields V=(4/3)πabc. Radiologists use this formula to estimate organ and tumor volumes from three scan diameters. Independent stretches multiply volumes by the product of the scale factors.