Hacker News Reader

What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point.

As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value.

I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.

View on HN

The pet detection part isn’t the point, that’s just a visible output. The actual goal was to stress test agents + distributed compute on something non-trivial.

I dunno there are literally 100s of millions (billions?) of people who spend more than an hour per day just scrolling through social media feeds.

How much does it cost to send a billion people an hour of video every day? Almost all of the resources tech uses is for pointless or even negative things.

What % of compute/bandwidth do you think is used for "real value"? I would guess it is well below 1%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com