u/jueidu

Since the text alerts were not clear/did not specify the streets:

1. West Bound lanes of E Pflugerville Parkway at Great Basin will be closed due to downed power lines.

2. All lanes of N Heatherwilde Blvd from Worley Dr to Great Basin and north bound Wilke Ridge at the entrance of Springbrook Neighborhood Park will be closed due to downed power lines.

Updates from a few hours later just say: “While emergency crews assess the damage, roadways will continue to be closed until further notice. Please find alternate routes and drive safely.”

This is basically screwing over anyone in Highland Park since this affects half of the neighborhood exits and ways to commute to 35 without taking the toll road!

https://page.alertsense.com/content/2052/

[Note: This post contains a link to an article which discusses politics, and this post is flaired as “Politics” to keep discussion on-topic. So please don’t ask why comments appear to be deleted, or panic about your comment not showing up right away.]

https://www.science.org/content/article/deepfakes-are-everywhere-godfather-digital-forensics-fighting-back

We know this will not be news to all of you, since we have seen this mentioned before in comments from time to time, but this is a recent article that, among other things, has an excellent description of and interactive tool to demonstrate the use of simple geometry to extrapolate vanishing points for what should be straight and parallel lines - such as floor tiles, walls, shadows, and mirror reflections, to help detect fake and AI generated images.

The idea is that, in real photos and videos, parallel lines, when extrapolated, should have perfectly intersecting vanishing points (the points where the lines intersect). Think of a photo of a long, straight hallway, or the shadow cast by a cube, or the line between an object in the foreground and the same place on that object in a mirror. When extrapolating those lines - which mathematically should be straight - if the place where those lines meet are not all in exactly the same place, the image is most likely fake, because that kind of funhouse distortion doesn’t typically happen in real life.

ie: While it is *theoretically* possible that a building was constructed extremely poorly to the point that walls are not parallel, or that a photographer is using a fisheye lens, or the light source in an outdoor daytime photograph is something other than the sun - it is *extremely* unlikely and uncommon. Therefore, in photorealistic images which we are expected to believe are real, regular photos of real events or places, you can expect that lines which should be parallel will, when extrapolated, have converging overlapping points. See the attached photos for reference, and feel free to try this method on your own photos!

This article also has some great insight into the history of fake photo detection and the scientists at the forefront of this ever-changing battlefront. There is also a very interesting section about the use of AI to detect AI, including how to train AI on sets of real and fake images to increase the accuracy of detection - *and*, importantly, how that method falls short and why it’s not reliable.

We will highlight some interesting sections from the article in the comments as the article is quite long and bound to cause some TL;DR reactions.