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eloisius

5,854 karma · joined January 6, 2008

Taipei. Photography, computer vision, lattes, cycling.

Mistakes, typos, misspellings–even the occasional em-dash are 100% human-generated for human readers.

Professional inquiries:

https://tractable.cv

Unprofessional inquiries:

https://zacstewart.com

submissionscomments
eloisius··on Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
[flagged]
eloisius··on Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
What would you accelerate? Is there a lot of linear algebra you could throw cuda at in Postgres?
eloisius··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
I think they’re talking about how Huawei got their start
eloisius··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases
eloisius··on Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master
Some projects have fantastic documentation. Qt comes to mind. The experience of writing Qt is a pleasure because I can always jump to the doc for whatever class I'm dealing with and find what I'm looking for immediately. Also every argument type is well-linked in every signature so it's easy to follow and understand everything you're dealing with.
eloisius··on The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle
Earnest question: does anyone ever get fined for spam?
eloisius··on The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle
For the last few months I’ve gotten a handful of emails like this every time I post in the monthly who’s hiring thread. It’s always these dumb formulaic “15 years of experience doing $thing, not bad! But your resume doesn’t show that. I can help you write a resume that’s guaranteed to get a response” or promising me that clients are looking for profiles exactly like mine on their platform.
eloisius··on DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits
Buying it from CapitalOne like everyone else?
eloisius··on Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.
eloisius··on Whistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
In Georgia they passed a law making it illegal to hand out bottles of water to people in line to vote while simultaneously reducing polling stations in certain areas to ensure long lines.
eloisius··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
This makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality?

Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.

eloisius··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)

  Location: Taiwan
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe
  Technologies: Python, Torch/PyTorch, COLMAP, OpenCV, C++, Qt
  Résumé/CV: https://zacstewart.com/resume.pdf
  Email: hnwh202609 at zacstewart dot com
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-stewart-79b2a5a6/
Looking for computer vision work. Multi-view stereo, camera calibration, SfM, scene reconstruction, 3D object triangulation, 3D multi-object tracking. Object detection, tracking, video processing. I mostly work in Python and C++, but the stack is not super important to me. I have 16 years of experience as a software engineer. I go the extra mile producing technical notes, reports, visualizations, etc. to help communicate my results. References available upon request. I'm accustomed to working with clients in US timezones. Willing to travel.

RECENT PROJECTS

Camera/Projector Calibration System

- Novel projector mapping technique for 3D, real-world interactivity

Damage detection/grading for collectable items

- 2D damage detection using smartphone camera from multiple views

- Map 2D multi-view into global 3D space for unique damage instance collation with novel camera calibration technique using differentiable rendering

- AWS pipeline to orchestrate all the ML/GPU crunching to support a mobile app

Real-time soccer markerless motion capture

- Camera calibration (20+ cameras) using COLMAP

- Calibration refinement and camera drift maintenance

- 3D object triangulation from multi-view 2D object detections

- 3D human pose reconstruction from 2D pose estimations

- 3D multi-object tracking

- Real-time pipeline (60 Hz)

Video auto-cropping to convert long-form landscape orientation videos in to vertical, short videos

- Prioritize between competing subjects in video

- Create smooth panning crop-out region for each subject

- Naturally transition focus between different subjects

eloisius··on Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes
What is the morally correct approach to dealing with murderers?
eloisius··on Creepy Crawlies
How do you reliably detect the bots? Instead of slowban, I would feed it something abhorrent like an archive of 4chan posts.
eloisius··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
There’s also Ecuador who officially uses the USD as their currency.
eloisius··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
Like I said, you're reading a lot more into what I wrote, than what I actually wrote. No one is more or less responsible for their actions on account of being Indonesian. And I've already agreed that in this case it appears not to be the result of desperate acts, but I am replying specifically on the point that "desperation is no excuse." Responsibility for most desperate situations begin way further upstream. I wonder if you hold your colleagues working at Meta to the same anti-social behavior standards, or yourself if you drive to work when taking the bus would only mean a few hours of inconvenience.
eloisius··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
I think you read a lot into my comment that’s not there. I replied to someone who wrote “ Desperation is no excuse.”

Developed countries are rich after centuries of extracting natural resources, to the point that Europe is nearly deforested, American rivers in the rust belt used to catch on fire from chemical pollution, and we destroyed a pacific atoll with over 20 nuclear bombs.

A little rich for us to suddenly care about the coral so much that we can lecture developing countries about it. In this case, it doesn’t seem these are the acts of desperate people, but the arrogance of someone who will probably never face hardship beyond “ramen profitability” saying desperation is no excuse is astounding.

eloisius··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
Easy to say when it’s not your child facing starvation. The long term doesn’t matter if your family isn’t going to make it another month.
eloisius··on The Vibe Tax
If that turns out to be true I hope that there are metaphorical Japanese out there still willing to pay 30,000 yen for quality shirts while the rest of the world SHEINs out.
eloisius··on The Vibe Tax
A project I was working on for a couple years until this spring started to turn like this when another contractor started committing AI work. There was a test literally called “test_imports.py” that, you know, tested that you could import every module of the project. I asked if we could just run `python __main__.py` to test that the imports worked, but he said no, we need this for big Claude-powered refactors to make sure nothing breaks.
eloisius··on I'm becoming AI-blind
Have you seen how many people form one-sided bonds with stars that don’t know they exist? Lonely people suspend disbelief to find some comfort. It’s not proof that the chatbot is indistinguishable from a human companion.
eloisius··on I'm becoming AI-blind
> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I think the mistake here is the notion that there was a definition of intelligence. Or at least a consensus on that definition. Just because compsci nerds of the day thought the Turing test was the final threshold before “real” AI, doesn’t mean philosophers, psychologists and everyone else bought into it. And when we arrived and it turns out to be underwhelming it’s because the compsci nerds made the same mistake they always make: that their models truly encompass all the dense complexity of the real world.

eloisius··on Stop Making TUIs
The LLM fetishists really do themselves a disservice with these wild, over-the-top statements about AI capabilities. I’d be willing to bet money that giving Claude a screenshot of part of this blog post would not producing “something useful” for any reasonable interpretation of useful. This reminds me of a line from Peter Diamandis’ Abundance (basically the only thing I remember) that described Google using a “stroke of HTML” to organize the worlds information.
eloisius··on There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
If the job is now being a promoter, how can you not see that it’s a low skill, low pay job anyway? There are a billion capable promoters in LCOL countries that can prompt as good as someone in the Bay. Might not be worth stressing so hard to be a promptmaxxer. Could just become a bus driver or some other skilled profession if you want to keep earning a living.
eloisius··on Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)
Some tools like code rabbit (PR review bot) encourage you to do this. I couldn’t believe I found myself replying to code review comments to explain to an AI why we would rather let an exception crash the app than to catch and hide it several times so that it would stick in its memory. Having to interact with bots as if they are humans, especially when they are gate keeping, is degrading.
eloisius··on On AI regulation and messaging
I have seen that current AI models are capable of doing a sloppy job at many tasks when directed to do so, but I have never seen an example of a machine having its own volition.
eloisius··on On AI regulation and messaging
If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Other humans are just pets.
eloisius··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
I don’t know about the $10 temu drills, but Shein fast fashion is produced on the backs of a transient and insecure underclass. https://youtu.be/BeIkPqpVmE8?si=yWwKbmmcsHHHA0CY
eloisius··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that Wikipedia page.

> Reduplication is sometimes employed in verbs and adjectives to enhance the effect of them.

> 胖胖的 pàng pàng de ('quite fat') from 胖 pàng ('fat')

This is the exact opposite of how I'd understand it. Saying someone is 胖 is just calling them fat (rude), but 胖胖的 is teasing, cute, chubby, etc.

eloisius··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
I would defer to a native speaker, but Chinese is extremely contextual, and even native speakers often can’t tell you the formal rules of usage for something like this. There’s a lot more listening to register and intuiting intent required than with English. The same phrase used in different way can have a different function. In this usage it does not sound like plural “people” to my ears.

You can say something like 「你看!可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三!」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).

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