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TGower

179 karma · joined November 21, 2024

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TGower··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
I'm all for intellectual property reform, I'm still not a fan of the current rules being ignored for large companies directly competing with authors and artists, while ordinary people pirating are getting fined 220k for 24 songs [1].

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fine...

TGower··on Vacate a drone restriction that criminalized recording immigration agents
To me it's more like the sign saying "No guns in the bank". It's not going to stop someone who intends on doing harm, but that's not it's real purpose. If it was normal to be able to openly carry a gun into the bank, that makes the security guards job much harder.
TGower··on Vacate a drone restriction that criminalized recording immigration agents
The article doesn't mention the safety angle at all. It's reasonable to argue that even though the Ukraine conflict has popularized drones as weapons, given that we haven't had a major incident yet this temporary flight restriction was premature, but not mentioning it at all makes the bias pretty clear.

The TFR (which made it illegal to fly a drone within a bubble 1000 feet high and 3000 feet radius of a mobile asset) has been replaced by a NOTAM that basically says flying near them in a way that poses a credible safety or security threat means they can sieze or destroy your drone. I'd say this is the better resolution, and to me represents a "genuine change of heart" by the FAA, finding a way to serve the safety purpose of the TFR without overstepping.

TGower··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
The framebuffer that you are filling out is still at native resolution, but while computing that frame buffer you can do many of the steps at reduced resolution. For example, instead of evaluating the pixel shader code for every pixel, it could evaluate once for a block of four pixels in the reduced resolution region and use the result for all four.
TGower··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.

[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

TGower··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Kimi / open models or jailbreaking frontier models. Your recollection of the Anthropic refusal isn't quite accurate, cyber hacking wasn't a sticking point, just domestic drag net surveillance and fully automated weaponry.
TGower··on Benchmarking Pocket-Scale Inference
Note that the Model Intelligence score shown here is not the same as the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score they use for full size models, the top models on this Pocket-Scale chart have a score of 63, but that translates to just an 11 on the normal scale.
TGower··on Pixel 11 Pro Fold
I love mine, but I used to try and stuff a Kindle into my jeans pocket because reading on a large screen is so much more enjoyable for me.
TGower··on ESP32-C3 SuperMini antenna modification
Combat robots are more like RC cars than autonomous robots, the driver stays in control of the bot over a radio link. I use ESP-NOW, and get about 6000 packets per second from the transmitter to the ESP32 in the box, and each comes with radio link stats, signal strength and Channel State Information. Using autocorrelation on the signal strength gives you the rotation period, and using that you can establish a Phase Locked Loop to remove the drift of integrating rotation speed to get absolute rotation angle.
TGower··on Making difficulty curves in games
Difficulty scaling is done to such an extent that even common enemies scale right along with you. In the opening scene, there is a bear you come across and at level 1 or 2, you are able to one shot it. Then the story takes you on a grand quest where ostensibly you go from a nobody to the savior of the world. However, due to difficulty scaling, if you run into the same bear halfway through the game, it will be harder to kill than when you were level 1.
TGower··on ESP32-C3 SuperMini antenna modification
I'm doing something similar, using the directionality of the antenna to turn an ESP32 into a high RPM gyroscope for use in a combat robot. Standard gyro chips top out well under 1000 RPM, and are much more expensive than an ESP32 board, plus the ESP can serve as the radio control link and brain of the bot at the same time.
TGower··on Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
An intuitive explanation for why reasoning tokens help is to remember that LLMs are just mathmatical functions f() that take in an input sequence x and produces the next token f(x). Without reasoning tokens, you require the function f() to immediately take you from x to the start of an output sequence that is a correct answer. With reasoning tokens, this is much relaxed, allowing for many repeated applications of f() to gradually steer you from the input sequence to the start of the correct output sequence.

It seems intuitive that continuing a correct output sequence is easier than the "discontinuity" of jumping from the input prompt to the output sequence.

TGower··on Our position on open-weights models
More of a "Everyone knows what CCP references and I'd have to include a distracting explanation if I want to use the more technically correct acronym"
TGower··on Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment
Are you saying that cloud models are not verifying the draft model predictions? The way draft models are used in something like llama.cpp results in exactly zero degredation of output quality, with the larger model verifying each draft model token and discarding it if it does not match.
TGower··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
> I can't see where one can opt-out of this new behavior and into the existing behavior, only a description of the new behavior's bypass (which is not the same thing at all)

I don't understand this, the ability to bypass new behavior in settings menus is basically the defenition of a new feature having an opt-out. Can you elaborate?

TGower··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
This is a wild misrepresentation of the situation. Saying there is no opt-out is just false, they even provide the information on how users can opt-out. The "mandatory 24 hour cooling-off period" is also misleading, it's easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB.
TGower··on Gemma 4 on iPhone
These new models are very impressive. There should be a massive speedup coming as well, AI Edge Gallery is running on GPU, but NPUs in recent high end processors should be much faster. A16 chip for example (Macbook Neo and iphone 16 series) has 35 TOPS of Neural Engine vs 7 TFLOPS gpu. Similar story for Qualcomm.
TGower··on I Built an SMS Gateway with a $20 Android Phone – Jonno.nz
Prepaid mobile carriers offer "free" phones with one month of service. $25 a piece for Samsung a16 4-pack from Metro, if you only want 1 you can do $45 for a moto g power (8gb RAM) from Straight Talk. I've been using these as alternatives for SBC projects, cheap, battery and screen can be nice, most GPIO needs can be achieved by slapping on a $2 ESP32 clone over usb-serial. The supply will probably dry up soon, I think they might be eating a loss on just the RAM BOM.
TGower··on I Built an SMS Gateway with a $20 Android Phone – Jonno.nz
All of them, you can still sideload after the changes.
TGower··on Google releases Gemma 4 open models
Any chance of Qualcomm NPU compatible .litertlm files getting released?
TGower··on A dot a day keeps the clutter away
The easiest way would be to setup some cameras and start recording everything. Gemini could already sort that into events you could query. If you have privacy concerns, at the current pace of progress, local LLMs should be up to the task soon if they aren't already.
TGower··on Android Developer Verification
I still don't get how they are driving away devs. It's super easy for us to click the setting. If I urgently need to test my app during the 24 hour waiting period, I can just adb it on my device.

Based on the reaction here, it's obvious I'm missing something here, but I just don't see any real reason devs are feeling like they are being driven away. It's hardly more of an inconvenience than enabling developer mode, and I feel like we all get why they hide the developer settings menu behind that.

TGower··on Android Developer Verification
Just don't install the OS updates then.
TGower··on Android Developer Verification
Really, there are apps that will intercept and exfiltrate your bank one time code sms that are just sitting on the play store? First I'm hearing of this, what's the name of one?
TGower··on Android Developer Verification
Then shouldn't we celebrate the victory, drop it, and move on?
TGower··on Android Developer Verification
It really seems like they are doing a lot to appease the tiny minority of us power users, adb load unaffected, one time toggle in settings to opt out, no change to alternative app stores as long as the apk was built by a verified developer. Crazy how harsh the sentiment is here, there are real people being harmed by scam apps intercepting sms one time codes and this will reduce the rate of that happening. It's not like we can't sideload anymore, though a lot of comments here seem to be implying otherwise.
TGower··on Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of data centers
Even the noise turns into heat
TGower··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
Nanite is a good counterexample, very impressive and innovative technology. Even more impressive that they released the technical details instead of going the software patent route. I think trying to leverage the war chest to go after Steam's monopoly was exactly the type of adventurous plan you are talking about, the safe play would have been to make minimal investments and continue churning out games hoping for another big hit.
TGower··on The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
With those past examples the majority of people thought "It's not my problem, I won't be affected", and they were mostly right. With an automation wave of the scale needed to get to effectively no jobs, that's just not the case. They will see that it is indeed coming for them, their friends, and family. They will act accordingly. Altruism not required, just self interest.
TGower··on The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
> a planet that is breathable and isn't burning

This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.

> More free time?

Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?

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