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grumbelbart2

330 karma · joined May 19, 2017

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grumbelbart2··on Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt
Essentially part of a machine vision software package, which in turn is computer vision specialized for factory automation. It's "industrial" because it was trained on such data (more expiration dates and SEMI-font on wafers, less random pictures of streets with some text).

That, plus engineering and support: a robust implementation, deployment on almost any system, fast and good long-term support so your factory doesn't stop for too long if something goes wrong etc.

grumbelbart2··on Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt
> OCRing this is a nightmare and is a good benchmark to any self-proclaimed good OCR/vision model.

It's not that difficult, our industrial OCR model read it correctly on its first attempt with default parameters. The characters are easily separable, there is no structured background (think expiration dates on yogurt aluminum lids) that confuses the reader, there is no almost-text-like texture anywhere that would clutter the result. The font is also nice and standard.

grumbelbart2··on CarPlay Is Additive
Mostly the second point.

They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group.

Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m

grumbelbart2··on Karp: Anthropic/OpenAI are stealing customer IP and their tokens have low value
It is like questioning the purpose of shovels, because surely if shovels generate so much wealth for the miners, wouldn‘t shovel companies ask for a percentage of the gold (say 30%) instead of selling shovels at a unit price?
grumbelbart2··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
The risk is that this does not scale, they run out of money, the robot won't work any more, and you payed a lot for nothing.
grumbelbart2··on Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot
Is there a zero-retention option?
grumbelbart2··on The first early human eggs from stem cells
No, we get an egg (i.e. the part usually provided by the female), which must then be fertilized by sperm.

I don't know enough to say if that allows extracting eggs from males. Could two males have a child together using this technique?

grumbelbart2··on The first early human eggs from stem cells
Bridges deteriorate by default. That is a well understood process with well understood reasons, which we monitor and work against. Salt, thermal cycles, load, rust.

Humanity does not deteriorate by default. Claiming it does so through some hand-wavy pseudo-evolutionary arguments is not a strong case, and requires at least some evidence to be taken serious. How about a (equally unfounded and just for the sake of argument) reverse claim: Humanity got more intelligent, because high child mortality favored physically strong children instead of mentally strong children.

grumbelbart2··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
> I had been cured of tuberculosis by them... in 7 days

Just FYI that might suck in the future. Some countries might deny you entry / visa, or at least require expensive additional screening if you had tuberculosis diagnosed in the past. It might be worth to fight this.

grumbelbart2··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
The thing is we tried that for decades, using more formal logic to build reasoning engines. And we never got it to be even a fraction as good and generic as learning-based LLMs are today.
grumbelbart2··on My Mathematical Regression
This interpretation also generalizes nicely to 3d. You have 60 moves, 20 of which will be up (60 choose 20), then 20 are east (40 choose 20), then 20 are south (20 choose 20).
grumbelbart2··on The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory
But were they given access to the raw data, or reports?
grumbelbart2··on Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You
This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.
grumbelbart2··on Snap Smart Glasses
Overly specific and not more than feel-good blurb. “When you’re recording” - what if they record it for, say, debugging purposes? Are images send into the cloud even if that light is off? “Prioritize” on-device processing is a meaningless promise, on the contrary - it means that some things will not be done on device. There is nothing in this text stopping them from streaming and storing whatever they want and need.
grumbelbart2··on Branchless Quicksort faster than std:sort and pdqsort with C and C++ API
There is a static branch predictor that is used if there is no statistic on a branching instruction yet, and it's really simple: Jumps backward are assumed to be taken (they usually are from a loop), jumps forward are assumed to be not taken.

So the jump that forms the loop will be predicted correctly for all executions but the very last (when the loop ends).

grumbelbart2··on CT scans of BYD car parts
They are "more" vertical, but they too have vital suppliers that they could not do without. The semiconductor supply chain is deep. Everybody knows ASML, but there are countless others that produce raw wafers, etching machines, special chemicals and so forth.
grumbelbart2··on Debug Project
And also since they don't bite, they won't compete for the same resources / food.
grumbelbart2··on Your Most Improbable Life
> This motionless destination “without difference”, is also known as heat death, or entropy.

This is BTW not how the heat death would look like. There would still be fluctuations that would, given infinite time, produce almost anything by chance at some point.

This is what the Boltzmann brain is all about: If the universe goes down that path, it is much more likely that what we experience is just a hallucination of a "brain" that spun into existence by chance, rather than all of this being a "real" universe. It's the precursor of the simulation question.

grumbelbart2··on The Fil-C Optimized Calling Convention
From what I understand, on x86 Linux stores a thread-local pointer to its TLS block in %fs. Could that simply be re-used?

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch/c/IT2dhS4q2M8?pli=1

grumbelbart2··on Starship V3
Isn't the question more an economic one: Is it cheaper to put some solar cells into the desert and to buy some batteries, or to launch things into space (plus the premium for radiation hardening and ensuring it survives long enough because you cannot service it).

Given the current trajectory of battery and solar prices I just don't that space-based systems are cheaper in any way.

Of course there is a long-term aspect should we climb the ladder in the Kardashev scale: Once we used all solar radiation reaching earth we must move to space to grow. But that is decades if not centuries away.

grumbelbart2··on Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era
What is going on with the font in this article? My Firefox renders it as a wired mixture of lower- and upper-case letters, all with the same height. Completely unreadable. Culprint seems to be this:

    font-feature-settings: "ss02" on;
grumbelbart2··on First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed
The exact same thing is happening with the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Switzerland has completed it almost 10 years ago, Germany still hasn't finished the links.

It is combination of the German planning system, which allows the processes to be stretched out due to objections, and spineless politicians who don't really want to commit to a route and kick the can down the road (because whatever they do, someone will be angry; but voter's don't really make you responsible if the link isn't built or is delayed).

grumbelbart2··on Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Both are right and it depends on which model you use and who submits those bugs. The capabilities of leading models went from 99% noise to 99% valid bugs in essentially a few months. Some projects are flooded with the former and need to take precautions to avoid essential DoS attacks on the maintainers.
grumbelbart2··on Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
Very cool!

Another maybe stupid question, would something like inotify(7) help to get rid of any active polling?

grumbelbart2··on We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
This fingerprint persists over private and non-private Firefox sessions until you restart Firefox. State actors might be able to connect your Google-login in FF window 1 with your tor session in FF private window 2.
grumbelbart2··on The RAM shortage could last years
To show ads you need people to stay on your platform. This is especially true once ads become more intrusive or of lower quality, something the big players seem to gravitate towards to keep revenue up. Google and Meta have ways to lock in users (networking effects, the best search engine available, having your data stored there).

I am not sure if OpenAI has that. Their edge regarding models is small, their strategy currently seems to be "buy ALL the hardware so nobody else can". Users can quite easily switch to other models.

grumbelbart2··on Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
Git packs objects into pack-files on a regular basis. If it doesn't, check your configuration, or do it manually with 'git repack'.
grumbelbart2··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
> Heat pumps are geothermal masquerading as electric

Air-to-air heat pumps are quite common 1-4 family homes. Even in Nordic countries such as Finland: https://www.sulpu.fi/heat-pump-sales-returned-to-a-growth-pa...

> And the highest number I ever heard for a heat pump was 135% [...] Truth is that electricity is great for kinetic energy but terrible at making heat. Most forms of energy can be transformed into another form of energy at about 50%. Electricity is the weird one where its 90% to motion but only 10% to heat.

Sorry but absolutely not, that's wrong on several levels. First off, in its most basic form of resistive heating, electric heating is already close to 100%. Heat pumps are even better, and I'll just quote Wikipedia

> At a cost of 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 1 to 4.5 kWh of thermal energy into a building.

grumbelbart2··on LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server
The article describes that a lot of the requests are for non-existent URLs. Do you observe the same?
grumbelbart2··on Apple Business
TSMC had the first copper interconnects, kind of their breakthrough node at the time, and the first EV-based process.
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