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simon_kun

195 karma · joined January 23, 2009

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simon_kun··on Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
Google launched similar functionality in NotebookLM today. You can generate podcasts from a wide range of sources: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews...

Looks like you can generate from Website URLs if you add them as sources to your notebook, as well as Slides, Docs, PDFs etc. Anything NotebookLM supports.

simon_kun··on Mr: Apple Intelligence Features Not Coming to EU at Launch Due to DMA
possibly: request to be forgotten triggering model retraining if user data has been used to train it.

dma means permissions can be revoked iirc

simon_kun··on My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
I love blogs like this. reminds me of 2005.
simon_kun··on Our next-generation model: Gemini 1.5
Today.
simon_kun··on What if AI didn't make you a bad writer, but a better thinker?
This is an extremely insightful article. Strong agree with the core points made that these are copilots or co-processors rather than replacements. Maybe at some point in the future we will all be replaced (sound familiar?) but for now these are tools that can help us make progress as a society at a much faster rate
simon_kun··on Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?
I did it through Dry January - it's socially normalized. Made it through Jan 2019, then just keep going.
simon_kun··on Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?
doubtful - I'm tuning GPT3 with good midjourney prompts as we speak
simon_kun··on Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?
https://laion.ai/blog/laion-aesthetics/
simon_kun··on NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android
Do folks know that 55% of ad revenue goes directly to the creators whose content you are watching? Apps like this sound great, but ultimately damage ecosystems. YT Premium is like $11.99/mo and you never see an ad again. If you think you're getting $12/mo USD value out of YT, then I question why you'd want to go through the hassle of this over just paying not to see ads (ps: premium income also goes to the creators!) - how much is your time worth?
simon_kun··on Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
this. if a Google/IG ads team was put on Twitter ads, their revenue and user satisfaction would likely go through the roof
simon_kun··on Product-focused and sales-focused companies
How mission driven teams at FAANG build $1Tn+ market cap:

1. Product teams create utility at ~zero marginal cost per additional user

2. Platform teams drive distribution

3. Monetization teams convert utility to cash

4. GOTO 1

simon_kun··on No More KYC with ShapeShift
I'm by far not an expert in this space, but governance coins can also be utility coins - eg provide you with certain rights to use a service, or use a service at a discount or priority in some way ( eg. see Celsius). In this way, the coins circulate and can be used as a form of payment in an alternative to fiat but that were originally bought with fiat (similar to tokens at a laundromat). Overall, I recommend you look into DeFi for a few examples of this (eg Uniswap, Celsius)
simon_kun··on No More KYC with ShapeShift
I understand. Governance tokens are equity (usually with voting rights), and are used to generate a capital base for a decentralised product (think: crowdfunding). Not all governance tokens are airdropped and the secondary market for said tokens often results in them appreciating over time. I would suspect shapeshift to fund itself and generate wealth for the founders through doing this both at the point of issuance and over time.
simon_kun··on No More KYC with ShapeShift
they will release their own governance token through an airdrop. It's the new way to fund decentralised startups - no need for VC. Essentially it's the equivalent of an IPO on day 1.
simon_kun··on BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980 – 1989
'78 reporting in. We had a BBC Micro in our school library in Derbyshire. That coupled with the Speccys and c64's floating around at the time are probably a large part of why I'm sitting here in SF working at a senior level in big tech. Thanks BBC.
simon_kun··on PostgreSQL 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13 and 8.4.17 released
It's testament to Canonical that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still gets security patches backported to 8.3. If you (still) have servers running Hardy, it's 'apt-get upgrade' time: http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1789-1/
simon_kun··on SQL Injection Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails; affects all versions
Does anyone know of a patched version of rails 2.3 series on rubygems?
simon_kun··on I had no idea how to make custom maps, so I learnt by doing. You should too.
Hey Alastair, great post! Understanding OSM labels and so on can be pretty time consuming. You might like the mapdig library for CartoDB that lets you drill down into your spatial data to get a handle on what's what: http://vizzuality.github.com/mapdig/examples/osm_line.html (OSM london lines demo). Maybe next time :)
simon_kun··on Hetzner EX 4S Unixbench, dd and htparm results
For those that are curious, the motherboard in these systems is a ASUSTeK P8H67-M PRO. Seems like it's a gaming board - understandable given it's an i7 platform.
simon_kun··on Hetzner EX 4S Unixbench, dd and htparm results
I can't find one either. In fact, AWS doesn't seem to be running with ECC RAM except for some of the GPU instances. Happy to be corrected here.
simon_kun··on Hetzner EX 4S Unixbench, dd and htparm results
I'm not sure AWS have updated their specs since then (all the specs for an ECU refer to a 1Ghz 2007 Xeon). We also tested our staging c1.xlarge and it scored less than the cloudharmony results indicated a c1.xlarge should.
simon_kun··on SimpleGeo To Be Acquired By Urban Airship
If you mean tech as opposed to their data offerings, you should take a look at CartoDB http://www.cartodb.com. All the power of PostGIS with a lot of the pain points rounded off.
simon_kun··on Firefox 9 uses type inference to improve JavaScript performance by 20-30%
If you're interested in the relative performance of the current crop of JS engines, you may like to check http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=regress for commit by commit benchmarking over time.
simon_kun··on Linear algebra for game developers
If people are interested in learning about vectors in a visual programming environment, then I highly recommend this tutorial on 2D vectors by Daniel Shiffman (of processing fame) http://processing.org/learning/pvector/
simon_kun··on You're Using JSON, Why not MessagePack?
because when JSON is Gzip'd there's only around ~5% in it: http://goo.gl/b2Uur (the bit on geojson).
simon_kun··on How can I learn to program?
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
simon_kun··on US states: If they were countries
I love this work. It would be nice if there was some representation of the similar country area - kinda like a cartogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram)
simon_kun··on Mixpanel (YC S09) Gets A UI Makeover; Monthly Data Volume Growing By 40 Percent
What does Mixpanel think about adding statistical significance where appropriate? Take the Fbconnect and nonFbconnect users vs song engagement in the video. The chap in the video was fairly certain there was no significant increase, but visually it looks as if there in fact was have a slight, but significant difference between the two patterns of engagement. Impossible to tell without some sort of statistical analysis. There are probably lots of cases like these if your offering is fundamentally sound.

If I was the guy that championed and implemented FBConnect in my app and one of my co-founders thought that based on that graph there was no significant difference I'd be pretty pissed off.

simon_kun··on Game Preview: Voxatron - voxel-based, destructible environment, 8bit soundtrack
This game is perfect for the 3DS
simon_kun··on Google's library for dealing with phone numbers (Java/JavaScript)
Not the answer you were looking for, but you could run the Java lib with JRuby, or use the JS lib with Ruby/V8 and "The Ruby Racer" (https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer)
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