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mikaraento

224 karma · joined March 2, 2013

Mika Raento was until recently a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, working on mobile machine learning features, infrastructure and SDKs.

From 2014 to 2018 he worked as a generalist consultant at McKinsey & Company, in McKinsey Digital, ending as an Engagement Manager.

From 2010 to 2013 Mika Raento was the VP of R&D at ZenRobotics Ltd, leading the development of the world's first waste-sorting robot.

Before joining ZenRobotics, Mika worked at Google on the first versions of Google Latitude. He joined Google via the acquisition of Jaiku Ltd, where he created the Jaiku S60 mobile client.

Mika has PhD in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki and a MSc in the same from the University of Jyväskylä. He lives in Käpylä, Helsinki, Finland.

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mikaraento··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Though to be more charitable closure was a direct reaction to the difficulty of maintaining a huge JavaScript codebase for Gmail and static typing like Java really helped. Typescript is better but closure was miles better than raw js.
mikaraento··on Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years
Today’s version would be to grade shell script homework randomly on either Linux or macOS :)
mikaraento··on Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins
Do you know of a good ready-made implementation of such a proxy? I’ve been looking for one.

GitHub is also a worry in terms of exfiltration. You can’t block pushes to public repos unless you are using GitHub Enterprise Managed Users afaict.

mikaraento··on How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Favelas
mikaraento··on Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro
That might be somewhat ungenerous unless you have more detail to provide.

I know that at least some LLM products explicitly check output for similarity to training data to prevent direct reproduction.

mikaraento··on Ask HN: How are most people converting HEIC to jpg?
You do know that something similar is true for JPEG, right? :)

JPEG is a compression method. Files with JPEG-compressed data are most likely to be in either JFIF or EXIF container formats. Both will almost always use the .jpg/.jpeg file extension.

mikaraento··on WinApps: Run Windows apps as if they were a part of the native Linux OS
Nit: RDP’s roots are more in multi-user windows like Citrix Metaframe than in remote administration. I’ve found it to perform better than the alternatives (remote X11, VNC, Chrome Remote Desktop) for remote GUIs. Nomachine is the only alternative that was close to its performance.

(And before somebody jumps in to correct me - in ancient times X11 performed quite well over the network but modern Linux GUI apps are no longer designed to minimise X11 network traffic)

mikaraento··on From blood sugar to brain relief: GLP-1 therapy slashes migraine frequency
I’m sorry you went through that
mikaraento··on Eating stinging nettles
Not quite. You take Finnish pancake batter (unleavened, a bit thicker than French crepes) and add blanched, finely chopped spinach or nettles.

https://scandicuisine.com/stinging-nettle-pancakes/ looks quite reasonable though most Finns would not use a blender for this.

mikaraento··on Eating stinging nettles
Relatively common in Finland to use young nettles like you’d use spinach in hot dishes (soup, blanched, pancakes).
mikaraento··on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
I can be that someone this time. The ”repair and protect” version has helped my low-level toothache.
mikaraento··on Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP
Heads-up to people trying this: Gmail will often put forwarded email into spam. Be careful especially in the beginning to check your spam folder. They may also reject the mail as spam, esp if your volume is large.

IIUC it’s hard to make forwarding to play nicely with DKIM and spf. There’s some disagreement on how to handle it. (I’m being purposefully vague as I did interact with folks handling this on the google side and don’t want to cause them trouble for helping me out).

mikaraento··on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
Thanks for the links.

AFAICT these have not resulted in any shipping products.

mikaraento··on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
Sorry, I meant to emphasize _different_ mechanical connections. That a sensor that detects pressure has a different mechanical linkage than the one detecting vibration. So you need multiple different manufacturing techniques to replicate that at correspondingly higher cost.

The “more than 10000” also has a large impact in size (sensors need to be very small) and cost (you are not paying for one sensor but 10000).

Of course some applications can do with much less. IIUC the article is all about a _universal_ humanoid robot, able to do _all_ tasks.

mikaraento··on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
The article points out that the human hand has over 10000 sensors with specific spatial layout and various specialised purposes (pressure / vibration / stretching / temperature) that require different mechanical connections between the sensor and the skin.
mikaraento··on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
Depends heavily on the use case. Indeed many tasks humans carry out are done without touch feedback - but many also require it.

An example of feed-forward manipulation is lifting a medium-sized object. Classic example is lifting a coffee cup. If you misjudge a full cup for empty you may spill the contents before your brain manages to replan the action based on sensory input. It takes around 300ms for that feedback loop to happen. We do many thing faster than that would allow.

The linked article has a great example of a task where a human needs feedback control: picking up and lighting a match.

Sibling comments also make a good point on that touch may well be necessary to learn the task. Babies do a lot of trial-and-error manipulation and even adults will do new tasks slower first.

mikaraento··on Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
Do you know of success stories here? Success of transferring models learned in physics simulation to the real world.

When we (ZenRobotics) tried this 15 years ago a big problem was the creation of sufficiently high-fidelity simulated worlds. Gathering statistics and modelling the geometry, brittleness, flexibility, surface texture, friction, variable density etc of a sufficiently large variety of objects was harder than gathering data from the real world.

mikaraento··on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
Around 2008 a core step in search was basically a grep over all documents. The grep was distributed over roughly 1000 machines so that the documents could be held in memory rather than on disk.

Inverted indices were not used as they worked poorly for “an ordered list of words” (as opposed to a bag of words).

And this doesn’t even start to address the ranking part.

mikaraento··on Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003) [pdf]
IIRC it was never used for any voice/call switching. I think it was used in one (line of) ATM switch(es).
mikaraento··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
Definitely lowered alcohol consumption for me.

I no longer get that dopamine rush of the first drink.

Some people go as far as describing it as anhedonia. I kinda get it.

mikaraento··on Run LLMs on Apple Neural Engine (ANE)
Could you provide a pointer to docs for this? It wasn't obvious from an initial read of their docs.
mikaraento··on I use zip bombs to protect my server
I remember that years ago (mobile) Safari would aggressively use GPU layers and crash if you ran out of GPU memory. Maybe that's still happening?

Preview on a mac handles the file fine.

mikaraento··on The case of the UI thread that hung in a kernel call
I remember being able to file support cases just by buying one for a couple of hundred dollars. They'd also promise that if it turned out to be a bug in the product the fee would be refunded.

(My case wasn't solved. It was something about variable delays in getting packets off the network and into userspace but we never got to the bottom of it).

mikaraento··on DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL
So maybe not luxury, but premium. Like MB or Audi in cars. Pricing still plays out differently.
mikaraento··on Short Message Compression Using LLMs
I guess text in images would be similar, and is indeed where image generation models struggle to get the details right.

E.g., making a greeting card with somebody's name spelled correctly.

mikaraento··on DOS APPEND
SUBST was commonly used for source code directories. It served at least two purposes: making source appear at the same location on all machines and working around path length limits.

I've also used SUBST when reorganizing network drive mappings.

mikaraento··on Ozempic increases risk of debilitating eye condition: studies
They didn't study patients using semaglutide for weight loss only.

I guess a Bayesian would increase their estimated probability of such a problem also for the weight loss case, but not by as much (as diabetes predisposes people to other ailments).

mikaraento··on The Qualcomm DSP Driver – Unexpectedly excavating an exploit
For compute offload, Google has indeed done that - the Tensor chips have Google's TPUs instead of Qualcomm DSPs.

Both on these TPUs as well as on pre-Tensor hardware that had Qualcomm DSPs, Pixels would not allow apps access to the kernel interfaces. Access would be blocked or mediated via a separate service process ('binderized HAL').

(Some) OEMs have repeatedly opened access to these kernel interfaces in order to trade security for performance.

(I used to work on compute offload at Google).

mikaraento··on Debanking (and Debunking?)
To be charitable, I think tptacek was referring to a variant of "accounts aren't closed because of credit risk" as not being true. The credit risk talked about in the article was ACH reversals with a bankrupt account owner falling on the bank, rather than overdrafts.
mikaraento··on OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts
RFC 9413 referenced in a parent mentions HTML. It points out that formats meant to be human-authored may benefit more from being liberally accepted.

I also read that XHTML made template authoring hard, as the template itself might not be valid XHTML and/or different template inputs might make output invalid. (I sadly can't find the source of this point right now, but I can't claim credit for it).

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