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lesiki

152 karma · joined October 29, 2013

Nairobi-based tech type.

meet.hn/city/ke-Nairobi

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lesiki··on They’re made out of weights
Does anyone have a link to a good video visualisation of training & inference?
lesiki··on Ask HN: Best CS refresher material online?
With that out of the way, curious whether you have an answer? What is your favourite CS refresher material that is available online?
lesiki··on Ask HN: Best CS refresher material online?
Sure, it's a valid nitpick.

My intended meaning was "What is your favourite CS refresher material available online", and agree that the answers will be subjective.

lesiki··on Apple Vision
It feels like a missed opportunity that the current generation doesn't already do that. All the talk is that Apple have been exploring VR behind the scenes for a while, and the devices all have 2+ lenses.

It would have been quite cool for them to announce that all your iPhone 14 videos were actually recorded in 3D and ready for Apple Vision all along.

lesiki··on What if we tolerated diseases?
> We would soon die out as a race due to population decline as we are well below the required rate of replacement in a diseased population

Isn't there a strong correlation between birth rate & child mortality? Most rich societies have slowed down their birth rate in large part because you don't need 5 kids in order to ensure 1 makes it to adulthood.

If we tolerated disease, we would probably increase birth rates to compensate for the spike in child mortality.

lesiki··on Show HN: The HN Recap – A daily podcast that recaps the top HN posts of the day
Agreed, I don't think the success of conversational podcasts precludes using the same platform for something like this.

Other feedback:

For this HN Recap, 20 mins daily is a bit long, a 5-10 minute version would genuinely be part of my daily routine.

1 chapter/section per story would be cool, so that I can skip stories I'm not interested in. I listen to podcasts through PodcastAddict on my phone but tested this on Spotify web at my computer, maybe this is already in there & I just didn't see it.

Echoing what others said - I'd love for the general vibe of the comments to be included in some way, I actually tend to spend more time in HN comments than reading the articles themselves.

Finally, I'm sure this is on your radar already, but IMO the big opportunity with AI-synthesized podcasts is personalized podcasts. For example, a personal Hacker News Recap RSS feed that knows the kind of stuff I upvote, or has me opt in to topics/tags when signing up.

lesiki··on We need a more sophisticated debate about AI
Fully agree. I don't see why general intelligence implies or requires consciousness/feeling/etc.

We can probably create a tool with the ability to act independently and with super-human knowledge and judgement, but without feeling, emotion, or anything except a simulated sense of 'self' to ease our interaction with it. I suspect that we'll create that version of general intelligence long before we create AI with consciousness, emotion or a genuine sense of self or desire for self-preservation.

lesiki··on Nutlope/roomGPT: open-source clone of Interior.AI
Can it do hands & fingers now?

Stable Diffusion is amazing, but I've never seen it reliably generate realistic hands. The examples in the ControlNet repo show a chef in the kitchen with 6 fingers.

lesiki··on Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
Now: Human Chess: a variant where you can't play what AI would play.

Next: AI that can play Human Chess.

After: Human^2 Chess: you can't play what the AI above would play.

etc

I wonder if this creates distinctly new games at each level, or if it's just nonsense one level down.

lesiki··on Show HN: mybf.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect
Why would this be better?

If existence of a competitor stopped everyone from trying anything new, the web would be much more bland.

Even at this early stage, there's differentiation from alternativesto in their principles e.g. lack of downvote buttons, different qualification criteria for posting reviews.

lesiki··on Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar
This looks really good! I'm a Meeter user so it's a real use case I have already spent time looking for solutions to.

I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10, but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).

Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?

lesiki··on Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS
Wow, here I was thinking I was somewhat original with my JIRA opening workflow. I have it configured exactly the same way.
lesiki··on Agony of an African Programmer (2014)
It is not. Source: African.

Unless of course you're comparing software developers' lifestyle to the refugees, nomads and slum dwellers? In which case $20k in San Fransisco is also balling out of control, when compared to the homeless guys living on your porch.

lesiki··on Agony of an African Programmer (2014)
> id rather make 20k in africa than 80k in europe.

You criticise the comparison then proceed to make a vacuous one yourself.

An anecdote to disprove your generalisation: I used to work in Europe (Reading, UK) and now work in Africa (Nairobi, Kenya) and can confirm that 80k in Reading would give me a far higher quality of life than 20k in Nairobi.

Africa and Europe are both large, diverse places, just no point making a statement like this.

lesiki··on Show HN: (My First game) Dicentric, a fun and relaxing puzzle game for android
Brilliant game mechanics, such an awesome idea. Level 7 was the clincher for me!
lesiki··on How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
I'm "double Bantu" - as a Kenyan I speak our national language Swahili, and I'm also from the Bantu Bukusu tribe of Western Kenya on my father's side.

This migration history is even more complex because the migration was in waves - Bantu who went to South Africa later migrated north again, meeting Bantu who were already there from earlier migration. You can tell this from the fact that some southern African languages have closer linguistic relationship to some East African ones, than they do to other Bantu languages in their region.

My dad (Bukusu of Western Kenya) once met a gentleman from the Venda tribe of South Africa, and they conversed in English for an hour until the South African got a phone call that he answered in Venda. My dad understood practically every word that was said on the phone, and they each discovered this tribe they'd never heard of before had more language overlap than their neighbouring Bantu tribes back home.

It's fascinating if you consider just how big an area we're talking about, and how much opportunity existed for other languages to wipe out Bantu dialects. I'm no linguist but I think Africa has a propensity for multilingualism that has kept these tribal dialects alive, and aside from DNA this gives the strongest evidence of the past migrations of Bantu people.

lesiki··on Inside Medium's Meltdown
Well, the point of the analogy was to illustrate the business model.

I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.

I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.

lesiki··on Go Web Examples
I don't know much about Go so can't speak to the server-side handling of file uploads. The drag/drop side of things is server agnostic - I strongly recommend http://www.dropzonejs.com
lesiki··on jQuery 3.0 Released
Just last week I started a new project, injecting some firebase-backed functionality into a squarespace site, and I used jQuery.

I use it for the same reason I use lodash when I could do everything it does in vanilla js: because it's a slightly more dev-friendly API.

Much like the PHP community, jQuery's community has earned it a reputation as a hacky tool for people who don't understand where jQuery ends and Javascript begins. However, it didn't become popular by accident, and in competent hands, it still has its benefits.

lesiki··on Buckets: CMS built on Node.js and MongoDB
That is a very pretty landing page.
lesiki··on Facebook Events Suck
Facebook events are fine, it's the writer's FB friends that 'suck'.
lesiki··on Google's robots.txt
'baraza' is Swahili for forum/meeting place. It was very much Yahoo Answers, targeted at the African market - here in Kenya, most people only have internet access via mobile connections, often using feature phones, hence the minimalistic stylesheet.

Baraza never really took off.

More about it here: http://whiteafrican.com/2010/10/05/google-baraza-qa-for-afri...

lesiki··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)
FrontlineSMS/SIMLab,

Nairobi, Kenya.

Looking for Senior Devs, Chief Engineer (lead dev), BA, and leads for some upcoming projects.

We build tools that let people set up automated SMS messaging systems, at any scale but targeted towards small- to medium-scale organisations. Our most notable users are NGOs all over the world, who use FrontlineSMS to communicate with people who couldn't be reached by any other means of electronic communication.

Our dev office is in Nairobi, Kenya, and we're looking for Senior Developers and a new Chief Engineer to head the dev team.

The dev work is mainly Groovy/Grails web development, with some Android work of late. We open-source what we can (https://github.com/frontlinesms/), and contribute to the Grails project and its plugin ecosystem. Our office is in the same building that houses the iHub, Ushahidi, Brck, Mfarm, and other leading Nairobi dev startups.

If you fit the bill and like the idea of living in Nairobi for a few years, please check out the links below.

http://www.frontlinesms.com/ http://www.frontlinesms.com/connect-with-us/jobs-and-interns... http://dev.frontlinesms.com/jobs/

info at frontlinesms.com

lesiki··on Why you shouldn't use getters and setters on Android
I think the point is that whatever slowdown the use of Accessor pattern introduces will actually be a lot smaller than 2X, which is useful information when deciding whether to discard the great benefits of using the Accessor pattern that others have mentioned.