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extasia

424 karma · joined September 7, 2022

AI doctoral student focusing on health applications.

Former SWE.

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extasia··on As Democrats push to ban caste discrimination, some Indian Americans object
The caste system should have died millenia ago. Disgustingly prejudiced set of beliefs.
extasia··on Ask HN: Are you happy you chose FastAPI over Flask/Django/Sanic/etc.?
I would say so, although you're encouraged to use a lot of async libs which can be a pain in the ass to debug. Flasks ecosystem seemed filled with half-abandoned libraries last time I checked (2021).
extasia··on Ask HN: Are you happy you chose FastAPI over Flask/Django/Sanic/etc.?
Agreed, flask is nice for a student who wants to handroll a lot of code as a learning experience, but you end up reinventing the wheel unnecessarily IME. The library ecosystem for flask seems quite fractured which doesn't help.
extasia··on ASCII-Gen, a CLI tool that converts images to ASCII art
For those purely interested in the algorithm part of the repo, this seems to be it:

``` /// Implementation for converting an image to ASCII art. impl ToAsciiArt for ImageConverter { fn to_ascii_art(&self, options: Option<AsciiOptions>) -> String { let options = options.unwrap_or_default();

        let target_width = options.width;
        let target_height = options.height;

        let width_ratio = self.image.width() as f32 / target_width as f32;
        let height_ratio = self.image.height() as f32 / target_height as f32;

        let mut ascii_art = String::with_capacity((target_width * target_height) as usize);

        for y in 0..target_height {
            for x in 0..target_width {
                let start_x = (x as f32 * width_ratio) as u32;
                let start_y = (y as f32 * height_ratio) as u32;

                let mut total_r = 0;
                let mut total_g = 0;
                let mut total_b = 0;

                for dy in 0..height_ratio as u32 {
                    for dx in 0..width_ratio as u32 {
                        let pixel = self.image.get_pixel(start_x + dx, start_y + dy);
                        let channels = pixel.channels();
                        total_r += channels[0] as u32;
                        total_g += channels[1] as u32;
                        total_b += channels[2] as u32;
                    }
                }

                let count = (width_ratio * height_ratio) as u32;
                let avg_r = (total_r / count) as u8;
                let avg_g = (total_g / count) as u8;
                let avg_b = (total_b / count) as u8;

                let luminance = (0.2126 * avg_r as f32 + 0.7152 * avg_g as f32 + 0.0722 * avg_b as f32) as u8;
                let character = match luminance {
                    0..=31 => '#',
                    32..=63 => '@',
                    64..=95 => '8',
                    96..=127 => '&',
                    128..=159 => 'o',
                    160..=191 => ':',
                    192..=223 => '*',
                    224..=255 => '.',
                };

                ascii_art.push(character);
            }
            ascii_art.push('\n');
        }

        ascii_art
    }
} ```
extasia··on Tell HN: "Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Win+L" opens LinkedIn if you're using Windows
You got me haha
extasia··on The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why
Tldr; men and women communicate differently and women's contributions are undervalued as a result.
extasia··on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
Admirable. Good luck.
extasia··on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
No chance you can strike up a good relationship with these people and then kindly ask them if they could turn it down a little?

Best of luck.

extasia··on Jina AI launches open-source 8k text embedding
Is this a text encoder model, BERT style?
extasia··on Reddit finally takes its API war where it belongs: To AI companies
Tangentially I quit yt a month ago and had a similar experience.
extasia··on Canada plans to regulate search and social media use of AI
>Banana republic, derogatory term for a country that has an economy dependent solely on revenue from exporting a single product or commodity. As a result, such countries are typically controlled by foreign-owned companies or industries. Banana republics usually have a highly stratified socioeconomic structure, with a small ruling class that controls access to wealth and resources, and are politically unstable. The term has its origins in the development of banana plantations by American corporations and their exploitation of land and workers in Central and South America beginning in the late 19th century.

- Dictionary Brittanica.

extasia··on LoRA Fine-Tuning Efficiently Undoes Safety Training from Llama 2-Chat 70B
Interesting. Curious if you tried constraining only the first n (1?) tokens and then removing the constraint; would the model revert to a refusal or follow through on its response?
extasia··on Ask HN: "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube" aggresively
That's a demonic level of tracking holy moly.

Not that you asked, but I managed to mostly quit YT by making a bet with a friend about who could go the longest without it. Might work for you too.

extasia··on M2 Ultra can run 128 streams of Llama 2 7B in parallel
You're right, none of that is disputed though?
extasia··on Data Processing benchmark featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc.
Care to elaborate? (I haven't use the language)
extasia··on Ask HN: What are you optimistic about?
Appreciate it mate! Been training on and off for about 6 years, but mostly neglecting chest to train legs!

What're your goals with lifting?

extasia··on Canada plans to regulate search and social media use of AI
I don't think that's even remotely true.
extasia··on Writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge
Ah gotcha. Yeah that sounds neat actually.
extasia··on Ask HN: What are you optimistic about?
That I'll hit my goal of a 100kg bench press this year.
extasia··on Writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge
Fill-in in what sense? Like a physical journal but digital?
extasia··on Ask HN: What book has been most influential in your life?
When I was around 14 or so I read an blogpost that we would now describe as being incel-like. It had a really profound and negative effect on my relationships with women for almost a decade unfortunately.
extasia··on Python 3.12
I think they mean the literal builtins `any` and `callable` instead of typing.Any and typing.Callable.
extasia··on Crafting Self-Evident Code with D
Literally^
extasia··on South Asians Are Divided over a Pending Ban on Caste Discrimination
I think the spiritual element is way more degrading, and indicates a much higher degree of prejudice.
extasia··on South Asians Are Divided over a Pending Ban on Caste Discrimination
I think it's way worst than that. The caste system has deep spiritual roots in Hinduism that are over 2000 years old. Certain upper (high Brahmin, presumably) castes would literally have to perform purifying rituals if they even laid eyes on someone from one of the lowest(?) castes. No such parallel exists in Europe afaik.

Source: the origins of political order, F. Fukuyama

extasia··on South Asians Are Divided over a Pending Ban on Caste Discrimination
I've yet to hear any good arguments against this ban. Sounds like people are simply upset that this is being made into an issue? Which sort of suggests that it is, in fact, a real problem; since it implies that there are those who benefit from an existing status quo.

Interested to hear from the SA members of HN on this one.

extasia··on Intimacy does not scale (2021)
From the title I was expecting a study on polyamory or the like haha.
extasia··on Why Does YouTube Hate Me?
Quit youtube within the last month and feel incredible. Recommend at least considering it
extasia··on Yann LeCun on comparing the number of parameters of PaLM 2 vs. GPT 4
One of his better takes this year
extasia··on How (not) to apply for a software job
I suppose it's a bimodal distribution: very high effort and very low effort will both have near-perfect grammar, albeit for different reasons. Since the low effort applications dominate in volume, the discriminator learns perfect grammar to be a negative signal.

Law of unintended consequences I guess.

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