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ReadEvalPost

279 karma · joined July 22, 2011

Engineering Manager @ FUTO.

cmdprompt at gmail.

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ReadEvalPost··on The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness
I've tried to explain this paper to people in similar circumstances and have also struggled!

In my mind the key point of departure between this paper and the more standard computational functionalist approaches is the importance of metabolism. Metabolism _precedes_ organism. The body is first deeply entangled with the environment through exchanges of resources (content causality) before it is capable of building computers (vehicle causality). Having built and alphabetized the world we can understand them in terms of discrete state transitions.

I expect my explanations have been unsatisfying as we can immediately move to seeing metabolism as some alphabetized input/output system that can be immediately placed back into the computational framework. Moving outside of this framework requires engaging with the enactivist/organicist traditions, which is a rich but minority view.

ReadEvalPost··on Voxtral Transcribe 2
You can try it on HF: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...
ReadEvalPost··on Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI
They aged out of being competitive against SoC NPUs. This is ultimately the successor to that.
ReadEvalPost··on Reality Check
Ed's main critique is about business sustainability -- it's true that there are many articles about AI on IP issues or ethics but he is unique in actually crunching the numbers on profit.
ReadEvalPost··on Coral USB Accelerator with Google's Edge TPU
The data has to go across PCI / USB to get to the internal (tiny) SRAM. It's not a good choice for clustering, you should just use a GPU for that.
ReadEvalPost··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
FUTO | Austin, TX | ONSITE | Software Engineer | Full-time | https://futo.org

FUTO is an organization dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that frustrate centralization and industry consolidation. Through a combination of in-house engineering projects, targeted investments, generous grants, and multi-media public education efforts, we will free technology from the control of the few and recreate the spirit of freedom, innovation, and self-reliance that underpinned the American tech industry only a few decades ago. Our principles are here: https://www.futo.org/about/what-is-futo/

There is consensus today that social media is broken. At FUTO we aim to fix this. In this role you will act as product owner of Polycentric (https://gitlab.futo.org/polycentric/polycentric), our open-source decentralized social network that also forms the basis of FUTO ID. Additionally you will also provide support for our next generation social media project.

More info here: https://futo.org/jobs/polycentric/

ReadEvalPost··on Obtainium: Get Android App Updates Directly from the Source
I work for FUTO, does it just need to be somewhere in the Download section? I'll see if I can get this added if so.
ReadEvalPost··on Launch HN: Synnax (YC S24) – Unified hardware control and sensor data streaming
FYI your CSS looks to be broken on Firefox.
ReadEvalPost··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2024)
FUTO | Austin, TX | On-site / Hybrid / Remote | Full Time / Hourly

FUTO is an organization dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that frustrate centralization and industry consolidation. Through a combination of in-house engineering projects, targeted investments, generous grants, and multi-media public education efforts, we will free technology from the control of the few and recreate the spirit of freedom, innovation, and self-reliance that underpinned the American tech industry only a few decades ago. Our principles are here: https://futo.org/what-is-futo

FUBS is our self-hosted programming system (including it's own programming language) that practices radical incompatibility with the existing software stack: https://gitlab.futo.org/eron/public/-/wikis/FUBS We are hiring a software engineer to help us develop an overlay network: https://futo.org/jobs/software-engineer-networking and have a general opportunity post for highly independent engineers: https://futo.org/jobs/senior-software-engineer-general-oppor...

FUTO is also hiring for hourly engineering roles on the revolutionary cross-platform video streaming app Grayjay https://grayjay.app/

Recommendation Engine Developer - Grayjay aims to introduce a feature that recommends creators/videos to users based on their interests. The initial task involves developing an algorithm to tag channels in a way that correlates them with similar channels. https://futo.org/jobs/recommendation-engine-developer-grayja...

FCast Developer - We seek to create an open source casting protocol for wide adoption. Some work has already been done (see https://fcast.org/). You can help bring FCast to a wide developer audience by making libraries for multiple languages and are interested in bringing FCast to new platforms (Roku, AppleTV, TizenOS, WebOS, …). https://futo.org/jobs/fcast-developer-grayjay

To apply, send your resume and cover letter to jobs at futo dot org with the subject of the position you're interested in.

ReadEvalPost··on Ask HN: What resources to learn tech and software in manufacturing?
When I asked a similar question of a VC that's invested in manufacturing they recommended I tour factories and ask what their painpoints are.
ReadEvalPost··on The emergence of AI engineering
That advice makes sense if we're talking about 800B+ parameter models that require a gigantic investment of capital and time. For models that fit on a consumer GPU you're leaving chips on the table to not take advantage of training / fine-tuning. It's just too easy and powerful not to.
ReadEvalPost··on The emergence of AI engineering
"Build, don't train" is poor advice for a prospective "AI Engineer" title. It should be "Know when to reach for a new model architecture, know when to reach for fine-tuning / LoRA training, know when to use an API." Only relying on an API will drastically reduce your product differentiation, to say nothing of the fact that any AI Engineer worth that title should know how to build and train models.
ReadEvalPost··on An Internet Canvas
Vienna Hypertext fits exactly this niche: https://vienna.earth/
ReadEvalPost··on Blessed.rs – An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem
Do you have any recommendations on libraries for parsing CAN with Rust (or are your tools OSS)? I'll be working on a project in a couple of months that'll need to pull data off CAN.
ReadEvalPost··on Against Effective Altruism
The article's thesis is that EA's moral realism stance (which finds it's apotheosis in utilitarian moral calculus) is ill-supported and highly questionable, especially when combined with theological anti-realism.

It's definitely not written to win over any EA supporter, that's for sure.

ReadEvalPost··on Problems for Goff’s Panpsychism
I highly recommend Feser's Aristotle's Revenge that's mentioned in the article. Very much dismantles the pervasive materialist attitude.
ReadEvalPost··on Risk of myocarditis after the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination in the USA cohort study
The study only checks for myocarditis diagnosis codes 1-7 days after vaccination. That's a very short timeframe... We have multiple months worth of data at this point, I wonder what happens to the incidence rate at longer timelines.
ReadEvalPost··on DeepMind: A Generalist Agent
Do you love? Do you dance? Do you desire? Do you rage? Do you weep? Do you choose? Every moment of your existence you exert your will on the world.

A denial of will is a denial of humanity. I want nothing of a science that would do such a thing.

ReadEvalPost··on DeepMind: A Generalist Agent
Certainly we can say our ML models are becoming more general in the sense of being able to cross-correlate between multiple domains. This is quite a different story than "becoming a general intelligence." Intelligence is a property of a being with will. These models, and machines in general, do not posses will. It is we who define their form, their dataset, their loss function, etc. There is no self-generation that marks an intelligent being because there is no self there at all.

It is only the case that ML expands our own abilities, augments our own intelligence.

ReadEvalPost··on Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
I've been publishing writing far outside consensus progressive attitudes since the pandemic began with zero issue so far. Don't make your workplace your audience or invite controversy around your workplace and you're very unlikely to have a problem.
ReadEvalPost··on Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat
What waste products do the bioreactors produce? How are they disposed?

As I said, concentrated feed operations are bad. That shit should be dispersed in a pasture, fertilizing it.

ReadEvalPost··on Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat
Harm is done to the ecosystem when we concentrate cows in one place and feed them chemically fortified slurry. When cows are allowed to graze pastures, they instead have a positive effect on the local ecosystem.

As such, I am extremely skeptical that the right way forward is to reduce and concentrate the essence of a cow into bioreactors and feed them chemically fortified slurry.

ReadEvalPost··on Jwz: Robot war dogs hunting migrants now
Alternative reading of the same information: "US monitors border using novel technology."

Nations have the right to restrict entry, which entails checking if someone is coming in. That's not hunting.

ReadEvalPost··on Google lowered its salaries in North Carolina. Now workers are protesting
On one hand they cut my base salary by 25% when I went remote in AZ, but on the other I'm paying 35% less in housing to own a 3 bedroom house instead of renting a 1 bedroom apartment. I get the annoyance but there's something to be said about being grateful about the overall purchasing power increase.
ReadEvalPost··on Journal of Controversial Ideas
I must admit I was hoping for much more controversial ideas than what Volume 1 contained. There are plenty of well-argued dissident ideas online, these articles take only a small tentative step outside the mainstream.
ReadEvalPost··on A Compass for the Politics of Collapse
Notably missing Doomer Optimists who accept the reality and inevitability of collapse, while viewing it as an opportunity for localist, agrarian communities to rise in the wake.
ReadEvalPost··on YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
As of May 2021 vaccine hesitancy by % of group is highest among PhDs: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

Funny how one's enemies are always the lazy ignorant ones.

ReadEvalPost··on The Future Is a Landscape
His book Green Wizardry contains by far the best description of matter, information, and energy I've found in any work. Ignore outsider perspectives at your own peril.
ReadEvalPost··on Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens (2015)
Animals are host reservoirs for COVID as well, meaning the fantasy of 100% vaccine coverage also does not solve the problem.
ReadEvalPost··on Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices
Evolutionary pressure selects for less deadly viruses over time. You're right though, there is still longitudinal risk as this does not preclude a vastly more deadly strain--but at that point the effectiveness of a vaccine is similarly unknown.
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