Hacker News Reader

f38zf5vdton GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge

Didn't this already happen several times in the history of cryptocurrency? Then GPUs because scarce again when the price of them goes up.

f38zf5vdton Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

Ding ding ding. There is never sanity in splitting (black and white thinking) and it's characteristic of mental disorder in individuals.

f38zf5vdton Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of seeing DALL·E /Stable Diffusion posts?

I'm tired of people acting like it just came into being out of nowhere. I've known about the training of the model for months, and about the predecessor Latent-Diffusion for a long time. Then there was DALLE-MINI/DALLE-MEGA. 4chan was all over SD and the leaked model before Hackernews was raving about it.

f38zf5vdton Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

IANAL. KF appears to me to be woefully in violation of US Federal law since it is a forum more or less dedicated to cyberstalking.

> The federal law concerning cyberstalking is 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2). It provides that it’s unlawful for any person to engage in a course of conduct through electronic communication that makes another individual reasonably fear death or serious bodily harm to themselves or another (including a pet or service animal). The behavior may also be illegal if it causes or could cause “substantial emotional distress.” A course of conduct means two or more acts suggesting that the individual has or will continue the behavior.

https://www.duimiamilawyer.com/blog/2020/12/is-there-a-feder...

The decision of investigators to turn a blind eye to it over the past decade is curious.

f38zf5vdton Ask HN: For those using Stable Diffusion locally, how do you filter fishy repos?

The official repos work fine.

https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers

https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion

f38zf5vdton Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach

That's a lot of text for "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words protected by CloudFlare will never hurt you".

f38zf5vdton Try Stable Diffusion's Img2Img Mode

You would need to run CLIP and generate CLIP embeddings from the images first, then feed them into the samplers. If you give it the starting images and caption them yourself, then it would also work.

f38zf5vdton Try Stable Diffusion's Img2Img Mode

One of the first things that came out when the model was released.

https://github.com/schmidtdominik/stablediffusion-interpolat...

f38zf5vdton Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy

Hugged to death, go here.

https://archive.ph/hOrqv

f38zf5vdton Cast iron leet

They are very affordable, but you need to order from somewhere that wholesales to restaurants.

https://www.wasserstrom.com/restaurant-supplies-equipment/pa...

These pans are pre-seasoned and ready for use.

f38zf5vdton Cast iron leet

Virtually every type of pan comes in carbon steel for affordable prices from cookware wholesalers. They've been life changing for me, especially combined with an induction cooker.

Not to endorse any specific company, but a Thermalloy 8-inch pan is available for approximately $20 USD.

f38zf5vdton Cast iron leet

I went from teflon to ceramic to cast iron to steel ("carbon steel"). You still have to season it, but it's a lot lighter than cast iron and things stick less. The price point is roughly the same. Searing with gas or induction is straightforward.

f38zf5vdton Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

People from illegal states already cross state lines to get abortions and then return to their home states. While it's not presently illegal, without Roe v Wade, I think that may quickly change.

> No state has yet enacted a law to ban this travel. But it has been attempted: In Missouri, a bill is pending that would enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits if the abortion is administered outside the state.

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/can-states-punish...

f38zf5vdton Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

IANAL.

No, ex post facto laws aren't legal.

If the state law says so, yes, you could get an out-of-state charge for providing financial aid to an abortion operation after contributing to an organization that funds them. With Roe v Wade gone, I am not sure there is a federal precedent for how to handle crimes relating to committing a murder in one state that is not considered a murder in another state.

f38zf5vdton Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

Various states already prohibit using public money to fund abortions, a prohibition on private funds for an act they consider extremely illegal and equivalent to murder is not a stretch.

"12 states prohibit state family planning funds from going to any entity that provides abortions."

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-family...

f38zf5vdton Why thinking hard makes us feel tired

Indeed, it's called the glymphatic system. We evolved to have a circadian system that drains brain waste products during sleep. There are probably other unknown neurological consequences of sleep that remain to be detailed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18115-2

f38zf5vdton Canadian law allows for assisted suicide for patients with psychiatric disorders

I heard the authors of the study tried to contact the cohort that succeeded, but not a single person bothered responding!

f38zf5vdton Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?

The extent to which "How to win friends and influence people" stays relevant never stops fascinating me.

f38zf5vdton “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

There are at least a few major carriers in North America offering RCS support.

One-on-one E2EE is a big deal and I would to see Apple on-board with it too, including without iCloud exceptions.

f38zf5vdton Tornado cash takedown and its repercussions

If North Korea donates stolen money to American political campaigns, is that protected free speech?

f38zf5vdton GitHub suspends Tornado Cash developer account

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

f38zf5vdton What ever happened to the transhumanists?

All humans are actively engaged in various levels of transhumanism, especially from a medical standpoint. We all hope that medicine will help us achieve what is, to us presently, superhuman lifespans. Many of us are mentally altered through psychotropic medicine and prefer living this way.

Transhumanism as a movement is just a vocal proponent of a process of technological adoption already happening on a regular basis.

f38zf5vdton Apple warns suppliers to follow China rules on 'Taiwan' labeling

China's long bet is that greed will outstrip any desire for North Americans to intervene with their autocracy. So far they've been absolutely correct.

f38zf5vdton Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships?

It's a response caused by survival. The environment is the stimuli and the genetics that are not eliminated are cultivated.

If I introduce an antibiotic into a culture of bacteria and they evolve resistance, then they appear to be responding to it on a collective level.

f38zf5vdton Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships?

> Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection.

Can't it be both? What's the difference? Evolution just responds to the environment, so a method of complex interaction with the environment like "consciousness" or "ever-polling situational awareness" seems like par for the course.

f38zf5vdton Mary Schmich's “Wear Sunscreen”, which turned into an unlikely 90s hit (2019)

It is absolutely cynical. There's another song in the album about getting fed up with modern life and committing suicide (No Surprises).

f38zf5vdton TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

Is anyone else just not worried about this at all? I started using IRC at the age of 7 and I turned out okay. My brother who ran with the local hoodlums is still a mess to this day. As as far as my children, I would be more concerned with them going to a nationalist political rally than I would be about them being online. Back in my parents time there were roving religious cults that indoctrinated youth, these days at least my kids can look these up online and realize what they're getting into.

There is a big, seeming North American sentiment that children are incapable of functioning without an adult and need to be protected at all times, rather than fostering their capability for independence. This is not to say you don't watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.

f38zf5vdton BMList – A list of big pre-trained models (GPT-3, DALL-E2...)

You can quantize the model to 8-bit tensors instead of 16- or 32-bit bfloats. NVidia has dedicated hardware in their latest series of GPUs so that they can do inference with 8-bit quantization quickly, and it yields 1/2-1/4x of the model in memory. There are other tricks that can be used like sparse tensors, which have been applied to language models and can reduce the memory overhead 10-100x.

See also: "From Dense to Sparse: Contrastive Pruning for Better Pre-trained Language Model Compression"

f38zf5vdton AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe

Most of them are not, just estimations based on previous results given sequences with known structure.

Every couple years there is a massive competition called CASP where labs submit previously unresolved protein structures derived from experimental EM, x-ray crystallography, or NMR studies and other labs attempt to predict these structures using their software. AlphaFold2 absolutely destroyed the other labs in the main contest (regular monomeric targets, predominantly globular) for structure resolution two years ago, in CASP 14.

https://predictioncenter.org/casp14/zscores_final.cgi

The latest contest, CASP15, is currently underway and expected to end this year. As with all ML, the usual caveats apply to the models Google generated -- the dangers of overfitting to existing structures, artifacts based on the way the problem was modelled, etc