hansworst

I’m not really sure if I agree with this argument against Facebook. It’s true that Facebook had a part in this, but the same can be said for any kind of media for any given historical conflict.

Here’s an article describing the effect radio had on the rise of Hitler: https://daily.jstor.org/an-affordable-radio-brought-nazi-pro...

A few years before these genocides, western media were praising Facebook for its role in the uprisings in the Middle East. It was seen as a force for good, allowing people to self organise against dictatorial regimes.

Hell, back in the day the printing press pretty much brought down all of the power structures at the time, because suddenly people had more free access to information.

This is exactly the kind of course I’ve wanted to do for some time now. Even before stable diffusion it felt like other media synthesis applications like StyleGAN were what I wanted to learn, but most machine learning courses focus on more traditional data science topics.

Of course you can start with a more traditional course and then learn something like stable diffusion afterwards, but as a newbie it’s quite hard to figure out where to even start. A full-fledged course that takes you exactly where you want to go is a lot easier and I think it can help learners to stay motivated because they have a clear goal in mind. If I want to learn how to create cool images, I want to spend as little time as possible predicting housing prices in the Bay Area.

The post you’re replying to is talking about drivers of intrinsic motivation. Paying off a debt and getting paid money for your work are examples of extrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivation is generally thought to have a larger impact on the quality of output, although the line can be blurry sometimes.

Isn’t this an argument for blockchains? If you could rely on blockchains instead of trusting based on past cooperation, you could save money and thus add more value. Obviously blockchains have a cost, but in some cases the cost savings you could achieve may outweigh that.

We absolutely do this, in every possible industry. The first cars weren't anywhere near the efficiency they have today, and the ones we have today aren't anywhere near theoretical max efficiency either.

In the real world, you always have to make a tradeoff between delivering some value now and delivering the maximum theoretical value at some potentially non-existent point in the future. And after some time, throwing more money at the problem won't increase the value output by that same amount, and so you have to accept that your product is imperfect, but still adds some value.

Add to that some market mechanisms that exist in the software world, where it's often better to move fast and capture a large share of the market than to polish your product and be left with no users. And suddenly building your app with Electron doesn't seem so bad from the point of view of someone who just wants to solve their users' problems.

If the app turns out to add real value, you can always polish it later and do a rewrite in assembly. If it doesn't, at least you didn't spend five years writing that chat app when you could have done something more interesting.

By this definition, the current financial system is also decentralised. After all, if one bank fails, a new bank could very easily take its place. Even our system of central banks consists of a relatively large number of more or less equal peers. If the US central bank fails, I'm sure "the economy" will be more than happy to change things up radically and reassign some of the global influence on the financial system that the fed currently has to competing nations' central banks.

I’m guessing it means that things went from one single government with lots of power ruling over a large population to many governments ruling smaller groups of people.

I don’t think it’s really about the clothes being uncomfortable, but just the idea of being forced to wear certain kinds of clothes

This post is the one that resonates the most with me so far

I’ve experienced similar thing wrt the build system, but haven’t used redux in all but one of the React projects I’ve worked on as a full time product engineer over the past couple of years.

I guess it is just a taxi calling app, but I have to say that for me personally, Uber has become a very useful tool because I can just instantly get wherever I need to go whenever I travel to a new place I've never been before. I hardly ever use Uber in my home city, but when I travel I use it all the time.

That kind of stuff used to involve a bunch of planning, now I just open an app and I immediately get a decent estimation of time needed and price to get to my destination, all over the world. I don't find it so surprising that there is a bunch of complexity involved there.

Here, you pay with attention, same as with advertising. Arguably this whole site is an advertising platform for YCombinator, and they keep you coming here by maintaining an engaging community with interesting posts/comments. So while you do get something out of it in the form of potentially useful information, YCombinator also certainly benefits from running this platform.

Maybe the web was initially not designed for doing these kinds of things, but on the other hand it is basically the only platform that enables people to click a link and immediately start using whatever app is behind the URL. That's fundamentally why the web has grown as much as it has, and why there is huge incentive for people to build more APIs that let people do more with that platform.

I suppose you could in theory build a similar kind of platform that allows you to the same things in better ways. There may even be a lot of money there. But it hasn't happened, and so it makes a lot of sense IMO to build these kinds of apps.

Nerfs don’t contain a surface representation, but instead contain a occupancy field to represent the shape. This has implications for rendering speed (you generally need more samples along each ray to get an accurate representation). It also has implications for uses outside of rendering, e.g. in physics simulations where you need to know exactly where the surface is. Lastly, you can use SDFs to get arbitrarily detailed meshes by sampling the field at some resolution, who which is trickier with nerfs because the surface is more fuzzy.

It feels like building more infrastructure just causes people to use more of it, because the "cost" of using it goes down. Kind of similar to how having faster computers has just resulted in us creating more bloated software, instead of everything becoming snappier.

There is no market pushback because free services hide negative externalities. So when users choose something that’s free over something they’d have to pay for, I’d say they’re generally unaware of the negative consequences (either to them or to the rest of society) because by claiming a service is free of charge, the provider is effectively hiding those negative effects, and making their revenue in some opaque way (e.g. advertising)

There will never be market pushback as long as those externalities aren’t priced in. And Imho the only for that to happen is for governments to introduce regulation, e.g. by taxing the externalities so that “free” service providers are forced to be more upfront about the actual cost of their service.

This is basically how science works in practice too. If you want to publish a paper and make an impact, better make sure you publish in one of the important journals/conferences. And if you’re trying to figure out if a source is trustworthy, it probably make sense to see if it was published in a reputable journal.

Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made that very easy. But trust is still something that needs to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have trustworthy institutions, I don’t think it’s something we can easily replace with technology.

Although at least on platforms like Reddit (and I suppose the internet as a whole) it’s possible to create your own echo chamber where your opinion that was shunned elsewhere is allowed to exist and can gather a following.

The echo chamber effect of these platforms is often called out as a bad thing, but in my opinion it may also be useful as a way of nurturing ideas that would’ve otherwise been squashed early because they’re too contrarian. The problem is, you can only find out whether an idea is good or not by exposing it to an increasingly large audience. And then I guess there’s the risk of allowing “dangerous” ideas to gain such a large following that they’re hard to stop.

There is no mesh here. Nerfs are 5d (colours are computed based on a 3D position vector + a view direction vector) fields that are rendered volumetrically. So the “texture” is an integral part of the neural representation of the scene, not just an image applied to a mesh.

The cool part is that this also allows for capturing transparency, and any effects caused by lighting (including complex specular reflections) are embedded into the representation.

My take on it is that because there are so many good singers out there, people generally don't really care about that aspect of music as much (anymore?).

With so much technology available to basically anyone who cares enough to learn how to use it, it's becoming much more important to use that technology creatively than to have some natural talent for singing.

Not sure about Norway specifically, but job boards for non-western refugees existed before this war started:

https://www.refugeeforce.nl/apply

https://www.hackyourfuture.net/

But the “solution” to that potential problem arising cannot be limiting the information that drivers get. At least not as long as Uber also wants to treat their drivers as independent contractors.

The video says it's 4 seconds, which is sadly a more realistic number I think.

I may be misunderstanding the Wikipedia description on segment trees, but it feels like this is basically what bounding volume hierarchies are used for in computer graphics.

I started programming in Flash (after doing some basic html/css), and have later done some stuff in Processing as well. Flash was an infinitely better tool to get started with programming because it lets you actually draw and animate vector graphics, and then sprinkle in a tiny bit of code to make things interactive.

Compare that to Processing, where even just using some images drawn in some other tool is more difficult than it should be. I don't think you can really even compare the two in terms of beginner productivity.

I recently came across https://rive.app/ which seems to make some steps in the right direction as a replacement for Flash-the-authoring-tool.

At the time, (most?) websites didn't adjust for responsive web either. There's nothing inherent about Flash that made it impossible to support responsive layouts with it. In fact, if anything, developing with Flash gave you more control over positioning than html/css did at the time.

Sure, there were downsides to Flash. It's true that many Flash-based apps/websites used more battery power than html/css stuff. But I'd argue that this is an indicator that there is a demand for rich content on the web. Since Flash was killed, we've seen a resurgence of all kinds of heavy JavaScript libraries, and forums like hackernews are full of people complaining about websites being sluggish and slow to load because of the amount of js that's being injected. Well guess what - now we've just replaced Flash with a fragmented open landscape.

Is it better? Maybe - to a degree the openness of html/css/js is good for obvious reasons. But to be honest, I think the web still hasn't recovered from the blow Apple gave to the creative ecosystem that had been built up around Flash, because there still isn't a similar tool that allows you to easily build web-based rich, interactive experiences, full of animation and rich graphics, the way Flash did about 15-20 (!) years ago

If I go on holiday, I’m not mis-allocating 100s of millions of dollars. I simply don’t have the power to do that, and maybe nobody should to prevent this kind of issue in the first place.

Not sure if they use the same, but here's an article about text rendering from the CTO of Figma: https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering...

This is an interesting story, but you have to wonder what led to this kid starting to smoke weed in the first place. It sounds to me like he may have had bigger underlying mental health issues that caused him to start smoking, rather than the weed being the cause of his subsequent suïcideer attempt and heroin addiction.