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madlag

270 karma · joined August 1, 2011

Edtech Hacker EX CTO @ Stupeflix
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madlag··on I made an app that runs Mistral 7B 0.2 LLM locally on iPhone Pros
Stability is actually defined by having a lower energy level. That explains why energy can only flow from a less stable system to a more stable system : the more stable system does not have available energy to give.
madlag··on I made an app that runs Mistral 7B 0.2 LLM locally on iPhone Pros
Yes, it's Unity based, so quite easy. There is another version on Quest too, so running on Android : https://www.meta.com/fr-fr/experiences/6113695908674751/ .
madlag··on I made an app that runs Mistral 7B 0.2 LLM locally on iPhone Pros
I love the idea, that's the future. However you should be aware that the explanation of second law of thermodynamics generated by the LLM you used in your app store screenshot is wrong: the LLM has it backwards. Energy transfers to less stable states from more stable states, and not the reverse. (I use LLMs for science education apps like https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/explayn-learn-chemistry/id6448..., so I am quite used to spot that kind of errors in LLM outputs...)
madlag··on Large Transformer Model Inference Optimization
May I add another method: block fine-pruning of transformers (pruning while fine-tuning) ?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.04838

Using blocks allows to keep good performence on GPUS, while giving some flexibility in the pruning pattern. And when removing entirely empty rows and columns the pruned matrices are actually pretty dense, so competitive with structured pruning for speedup, but less "aggressive" on the network during the pruning process. Disclaimer: I am the main co-author.

madlag··on Show HN: A tool for motion-capturing 3D characters using a VR headset
Thanks for the pointer, I will definitely have a look at this format, I was not aware of this.
madlag··on Show HN: A tool for motion-capturing 3D characters using a VR headset
Thanks! Yes, that’s the way to go. There is only a compromise between code simplicity/specialization and compression performance. And another point is the ability to use the format in memory without too much decoding or overhead when opening the file, random access for fast forward etc (when doing delta encoding) etc. (And I actually need strech too because my NPC interacts with objects, so the arm/hand bones should be at their exact place at replay, that’s 32 bones just for fingers.)
madlag··on Show HN: A tool for motion-capturing 3D characters using a VR headset
Thanks for the kind words! Yes, file size for live action or shipping directly in an app is always an issue. I may actually contribute some code, my file format is no rocket science, just a bare set of floats with some metas, not even some diff encoding between frames, so quite easy to interpret between languages and platforms.
madlag··on Show HN: A tool for motion-capturing 3D characters using a VR headset
Thanks for this! I have been working on something similar for an upcoming education app, record a course and play in the same app with a compact file format (1MB per minute, could be much less with some tricks). You can see a demo here : https://youtu.be/zcHAzQXm3Hg and more at https://explayn.me I will definitely check your lib, and will be happy to switch if it’s better !
madlag··on A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night
Efficiency of solar panels on satellites is about 40%. That means ~ 700W/m2 if correctly oriented. That's quite a lot of power, even if you stay 50% of the time in night while orbiting Earth. So no need for huge panels usually. (Updated : more like 40%, not 50%)
madlag··on Proving the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Pruning is All You Need
OpenAI just announced it will port its sparse libraries to PyTorch, so exciting times ahead! You can read more here about this (OP here) : https://medium.com/huggingface/is-the-future-of-neural-netwo...
madlag··on At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power
I don't think you have the right numbers in mind talking about the compute you need for AI. The prices are getting lower and lower of course, but you still need tons of money to train the kind of networks that make the news.
madlag··on The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
What a pity they did not call it Rama ;-)

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

madlag··on Devastating wheat fungus appears in Asia for first time
Reminds me a bit too much of Interstellar's Blight. http://interstellarfilm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blight
madlag··on SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time
There is no such thing as a dumb rocket : to get down, they are using almost exactly the same stuff they use to get up, weight wise: they use the gimbaled engines, and the nitrogen attitude thrusters. The only additional devices are the grid fins, to control aerodynamically the descent, and the legs. Then you have to write the right software, and it does not weight much more ;-)
madlag··on Show HN: My friends made a Snake remake
It reminds me so much of my young years on Atari #8bitnostalgia ;-)
madlag··on U.S. Coding Website GitHub Hit with Cyberattack
Yes, that's one of the method that was used: from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284226 :

> The first round was cross-domain JavaScript, stopped with an "alert()". Second round was cross-domain <img>, stopped with referrer. Third was DDoS-ing GitHub Pages. Fourth is the ongoing TCP SYN Flood attack.

madlag··on Lightbot: A simple programming game
My daughter has been playing it since she was 7, it's really cool to teach the basics of programming, and more generally to improve accuracy of spatial and time reasoning.
madlag··on ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
So you choose to suffer the bad sides of the government without taking any advantage from it ? You are free to do so, but is it really the wisest solution when you are just looking for a solution to survive ? And isn't it a form of church too, to refuse anything coming from the government ? (I am not from any church, if you're asking)
madlag··on ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
Yes, of course, no paperwork at all would be perfect, you don't want to waste your time on anything but your job, but the benefits are really worth it. And to answer you, I had to do some reporting, yes.
madlag··on ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
I can assure you that you will want the government to help, especially when you don't have any money to start your business. You should ask a few entrepreneurs about this.
madlag··on ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
You don't have to make some profit to benefit it, as you get employer taxes back for R&D employees, which can be very important, something like 40% of employee cost. It lowers a lot cost per employee.
madlag··on ParisIsBack – The Paris Tech Guide
Wow, that's a great deal of french bashing in such a short comment. I agree that the immigration laws must be a real pain for some people. But for the rest, you must have been out of luck :

- tax reduction schemes are a no brainer, you just have to justify once a year that you are doing something in relation with R&D, and there are too lots of ways to get some government grant to help start your business

- french entrepreneurs are from a lot of different origins. Of course you will find and some rich people creating companies, but most of the people creating companies here are taking real risks and don't have large amount of cash to back them if they fail

- seed investment is not difficult at all, and government grants are here too to help save your shares, even better that seed .

I am telling this as a cofounder of Stupeflix, the company behind Replay, app of the year on the Apple App Store, and proudly based in Paris for 6 years now.

EDIT: sorry for my English, it's not my native language, but I am trying hard to learn it...

madlag··on Show HN: Glose, a next-generation social reading platform for ebooks
Nice landing page, I really can't wait to test the app !
madlag··on The Technology Behind Hyperlapse from Instagram
You can have fused information from CoreLocation, with some smoothing and so with lower time resolution, but you can have too raw data from the gyro / accelerometer.
madlag··on The Technology Behind Hyperlapse from Instagram
You're welcome and thanks for the encouragement ! Actually, when you get the timings ok you don't need anymore some "runtime" adjustments, everything is fixed in advance. You just have to get the calibration data for every device, of course. By the way, as you said, you can use a clap to synchronize automatically two videos, using just the audio track, but that's another story ;-)
madlag··on The Technology Behind Hyperlapse from Instagram
Hi srean ! One of the author of steady speaking. Hyperlapse tech looks like a lot Steady, because when you are using the same gyro data, you're quite bound to follow the same maths to compensate the camera shake. About the gyro stream / frame stream sync, it's very important to have it as precise as possible. We have seen that having just 1 ms of error in sync is already very visible to the naked eye. So you have to build a very accurate model of the timing of the CMOS and gyro sensors, taking into account exposure, rolling shutter, and sometimes software / hardware glitches in the lower technological stack.... Hope it give you some clues about that kind of tech !
madlag··on Show HN: Steady – Shoot Cinematic Videos
It looks like that if you turn the device, the recording interface switch to 16/9, so you can do both.
madlag··on Butchering HQX pixel art scaling filters
Nice stuff ! I am wondering how we could use it to improve some of our stuff with this ...
madlag··on NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars
It's usual for CCD sensors in space to have such artifacts, due to energetic particles. It's true for a camera on Mars too, as the atmosphere is way too thin to protect from solar particles. http://www.eso.org/~ohainaut/ccd/CCD_artifacts.html
madlag··on Computational solution to quantum foundational problems
Of course there are some large scale (~150km http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/8/9/193/fulltext/ ) or large number of particles quantum effects that are usually very carefully crafted , but the majority of the matter that surround us does not show such behavior, so I still wonder about this ;-) That said, thanks for the reminder !
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