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edkennedy

711 karma · joined March 22, 2010

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edkennedy··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
beautiful work! the answers are relevant and poignant. thank you for building this. For funding, paid research api maybe?
edkennedy··on Amazon now discloses you're buying a license to view Kindle eBooks
What doesn’t make sense to me, is there is a more of a need than ever to own copies of the books we read. People will be creating their own RAG of the books they are reading to make use of the knowledge and expand upon the teachings. This way of thinking of licensing is antiquated. I’m sure Amazon will make some “Kindle LLM” but hopefully by then the industry is radically disrupted.
edkennedy··on A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee
There are two main decaf plants, one in Vancouver and one in Mexico.

The Mexican one is supposedly superior in taste, but the majority is processed through Vancouver with the Swiss Water plant. https://www.swisswater.com/blogs/sw/swiss-waters-new-decaffe...

edkennedy··on Meta 3D Gen
We need more of the stable diffusion tool set in 3d AI creation. Upscaling does incredible things in SD adding in all kinds of detail and bringing 512x512 to 4k. Inpainting to redo weird arms or deformities. Controlnets like outlines, depth, pose etc to do variations on an existing model.

The real fun begins when rigging gets automated. Then full AI scene generation of all the models… then add agency… then the trip never ends.

edkennedy··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
Missing from this extremely short and underreported article is how badly this played out in Japanese market. The culture they have states that musical instruments, creative tools have some energy and imbued sense of spirit to them. So destroying these elements of culture is really really blunt and gauche to them. The majority of the push back came from Japanese people, and then artists empathizing with their sentiment.
edkennedy··on Court approves 3M multi-billion dollar settlement over PFAS in drinking water
I agree with the sentiment here, education is needed and finance / bribery is a good example. At a certain point though, you have to wonder what is wrong with society where "Don't kill a bunch of people through negligence" becomes something that needs to be educated.
edkennedy··on In-App Browsers: The worst erosion of user choice you haven't heard of
These days I feel like spider man swinging from in app browser to safari to another in app browser to open in app. Sometimes switching 3-4 browsers before getting to my destination. Absolutely ridiculous, and should certainly be eliminated.
edkennedy··on Canada faces a series of crises that will test it in the coming years, RCMP warn
What do you know, another police message that implies they need a larger budget ad infinitum. Things are getting worse they say, please give us a larger stick.
edkennedy··on Introducing Qwen-VL (Alibaba LLM)
Interesting to see it allegedly outperforms GPT4V here!
edkennedy··on The promise and challenges of crypto and AI applications
I am mildly disappointed to see Vitalik rail against open source AI in the name of safety.
edkennedy··on Amon Tobin – Foley Room site (2007)
He's been posting some really interesting 3d art and composition on Instagram, where he also announced he was retiring from DJing. Glad to see him explore his art the way he sees fit instead of turning into a music factory.
edkennedy··on Concept sliders: LoRA adaptors for precise control in diffusion models
There are so many overlaps between diffusion and LLM, I wonder this kind of thing all the time!
edkennedy··on Electric heat to cost 77 percent more than natural gas, federal agency says
This article was Sponsored by WhatTheFrack Drilling Company.

Fracking/Natural Gas follows the same playbook as big Tobacco, they hire experts and sponsor all kinds of studies that align with what they want people to believe.

The main cost here seems to be the energy monopolies, not the method of heating.

edkennedy··on WeWork shares sink on reports of imminent plans for bankruptcy filing
It would be neat to have "webring" style community groups around the world as an alternative to wework
edkennedy··on Sober-curious movement: Non-alcoholic drink options grow
I would say the issue is also that those do drink are protective about their habits. They get quite defensive about being judged and will respond strongly to any threats they perceive against their drinking habits. This is characteristic of most addictions. It becomes a part of the personality and therefore it can be difficult to separate the action from the person.
edkennedy··on Ask HN: I spent months building an app and now I don't know how to get users
Thought leadership - get into social media, share your opinions (especially the tough ones) that led you to create this. Post 5x a day on many platforms. Take courses in social media and promotion.

Yes, it's hard as an introvert! But once you "break the ice" and turn it into a habit, you will continue to grow.

edkennedy··on Ethereum founder on U.S. crypto crackdown
Nationalize the Oracles (like Link) basically
edkennedy··on DeepFloyd IF: open-source text-to-image model
I think this is just for pre-release, and they will release fully licensed for Commercial. It doesn't make sense to have a model like this that can do game changing text and logos... but then not license it for commercial. If they don't, that would be ridiculous.
edkennedy··on StableLM: A new open-source language model
I'm really hoping for the ability to load in different sets of trained material as embeddings/textual inversions like in Stable Diffusion. Imagine scanning in some of your favorite philosophy and design books and throwing them with small weighting as a little flavor to your answer. The crossovers between LLM and Stable Diffusion type models (like Loras) is such a fascinating space to explore.
edkennedy··on ComfyUI – A powerful and modular Stable Diffusion GUI
I believe I saw a few people on r/stablediffusion talking about using a UI like this recently, I suggest sharing it there as well!
edkennedy··on Ask HN: I'd like to learn how to tell stories better to friends
Try to tell one story every time you talk to someone, and if you talk longer make sure to fit in as many as you. Tell about experiences in your life, stories from friends, funny things you have heard. Continue to expand them, bring variety and fun into them to make them interesting. It feels awkward at first, but eventually people get into it. They can be quick stories, or long ones. Just try to keep them coming... whenever a fragment of a memory, or an image of something related comes up, turn it into a story! Doesn't have to be fiction, sometimes the best stories are real lived experience.
edkennedy··on Two of the UK's water companies are still using dowsing to find leaks
Interestingly this all started in 2017 when a PhD student started aggressively pursuing water companies to find out which ones used dowsing: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-fi...

It seems she did not follow up on the claims of accuracy, or investigate the validity of the practice at all. It was simply immediately discredited as witchcraft and called a waste of public money. I guess this is the scientist vs engineer dilemma at work. The fact that 10 of the 17 water companies were using dowsing 5 years ago before a public shaming shows that the practice could have practical use.

edkennedy··on Two of the UK's water companies are still using dowsing to find leaks
There were a number of studies done in Germany where they would send dowsers out in places where people had cancer. The doswers were seeking geopathic stress lines (or "earth lines") which were thought to have aided the development of cancer. There are a number of articles online, here's a more recent one from the Irish Times discussed with a modern dowser: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/checking-the-fault-li...
edkennedy··on Korg makes music with Raspberry Pi
Akai has really been disappointing since they were purchased by inMusic brands. They have released a bunch of half baked products with serious bugs. (Looking at you, Akai Force).
edkennedy··on “No convincing evidence” that depression is caused by low serotonin levels
Much more comprehensive article on the study that is not behind paywall here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

(Also it skips the editorialized title and presents the data)

edkennedy··on U.S. Treasury breached by hackers backed by foreign government – sources
My first thought on this was that it was an EvilginX hack, ala https://www.thecloudtechnologist.com/office-365s-mfa-is-vuln...
edkennedy··on My Phone Was Spying on Me, So I Tracked Down the Surveillants
This is essential work, using the GDPR as a tool for data privacy journalism. Unfortunately, GDPR is only the beginning and lots of work like this needs to be done to uncover the breadth of the damage that is being done daily. Also, as the article states this shows that stronger laws need to be in place all over the globe.
edkennedy··on Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
Cops rarely get fired, they get paid vacation.
edkennedy··on McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu
Then again, that's what everyone said about "proper meat replacements" as well a few years ago.
edkennedy··on 25th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of "Hackers"
The soundtrack was fantastic, and had a wide variety of music. I started a lifelong love of electronic music because I was gifted the soundtrack on cassette.
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