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snickmy

696 karma · joined September 5, 2014

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snickmy··on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
I have a theory that is grounded on no-scientific evidence whats-so-ever. This applies only to the 2-5y population.

1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort

2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.

3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).

The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.

snickmy··on WSDA, USDA announce eradication of northern giant hornet from the United States
What's the expected longevity of the solutions put in place? I mean, doesn't just take a swarm migration outside state border to reverse the trend?
snickmy··on Lectron System, the Arduino Precursor
I came across a similar concept in the shape of a kid toy in the early 90s. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the game (my parents got it on a trip to France), but it definitely got me hooked.
snickmy··on Lectron System, the Arduino Precursor
[OT] Great to see Massimo hanging out in Hacker News :)
snickmy··on Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Glass onion's vibes
snickmy··on How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material. The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level. For comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal interest.
snickmy··on Show HN: Infinity – Realistic AI characters that can speak
Out of curiosity, where are you training all this ? aka where do you find the money to support such training
snickmy··on Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch
This post well summarises everything that is wrong with the current domotic / home automation space.

You either waste a tons of money on consumer grade product, and spend even more when they break, or you become a domain expert, hacking your way through it and running HomeAssistant (or similar)

snickmy··on Diffusion models are real-time game engines
Sorry, probably didn't explain myself well enough

1) yes you are correct. the point i was making is that, in the context of the discovery/research, that's outside the scope, and 'easier' to do, as it has been done in other verticals (ie.: e2e self driving)

2) yep, aligned here

3) I'm not fully following here, but agree this is not NeurIPS, and no Schmidhuber's bickering.

4) The network does store information, it just doesn't store a gameplay information, which could be forced, but as per point 1, it is , and I think it is the right approach, beyond the scope of this research

snickmy··on Diffusion models are real-time game engines
Those are valid points, but irrelevant for the context of this research.

Yes, the computational cost is ridicolous compared to the original game, and yes, it lacks basic things like pre-computing, storing, etc. That said, you could assume that all that can be either done at the margin of this discovery OR over time will naturally improve OR will become less important as a blocker.

The fact that you can model a sequence of frames with such contextual awareness without explictly having to encode it, is the real breakthrough here. Both from a pure gaming standpoint, but on simulation in general.

snickmy··on Open Source Farming Robot
Do you have any link to more sophisticated solutions ? genuine ask
snickmy··on What's that touchscreen in my room?
I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent.

Also, I wonder why compressors in heatpumps are not multi-speed (basically energy consumption can be modulated). If you are an expert please let me know I'd love to talk more.

snickmy··on Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
btw, teenage engineering are also behind all the Nothing products, but they are not behind CMF (the second, cheaper brand, launched by Nothing).
snickmy··on Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone
I undertood probably 20% of what you wrote, but I think you have some good points on TE being more interested in the aesthetics of engineering that engineering beautiful aesthetics.
snickmy··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
There are few points that resonate with my personal experience (2012-2017).

- Finance is running the company - HR has lost the original shepherding of the culture in favour of risks mitigation - Reduction of transparent leadership comms in favour of corp speak - Horrible middle management (senior managers up to VP1). Either because we promoted great engineers into a people role, or because we hired consultants to run engineering organization (favouring navigating the complexity of the org, over managing innovation).

I did rationalise all those changes as something that was obvious from a short term optimization standpoint: the company was in the mist of PR fights, leaks , growing incredibly fast, etc. It's clear, 6 years later, that a sustained approach to this type of leadership has reduced the company to a shadow of itself. Less innovative, less talent driven.

snickmy··on Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic
I'm struggling in finding the source, but I read some in depth analysis that reports that bing only got 0.53% market share since the launch of chatGPT integration. Apparently they are cannibalising small players but not google.
snickmy··on Algebra
is there a calculus version of this ?
snickmy··on WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser
how would you export a static site if you are running on the browser? you can do some cache management with local storage, or just leverage the browser built in system, but as every rendering session is on the edge, you would not have the benefit of a static site.

Or are you talking about, developing it on the browser, export it and upload it somewhere as static files for internet access (eg a cheap host with no server side languages)?

snickmy··on WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser
Hijacking the spirit of this link to just saying that I'm very sad about what Wordpress has become. In my mind it was a very good website / blogging platform, with a clear and functional markup / raw code editor.

Building themes was easy, and so was the plugging ecosystem.

I installed the latest version ~6 months ago, and I found myself overly confused by the million of options, the poor functionality of the block system, and the overall bloating of the software. It just run slower than 10 years ago. The templates and plugin available out there are extremely complex and a lot harder to read, code wise.

I assume is a 'dead by 1000 papercuts, or customer demands, in this case' but from a product standpoint, I'd really love to know who are the personas that this new interpretation of wordpress cater to.

snickmy··on On Becoming a VP of Engineering
I'm reading this through the lens of the fact that a VP at honeycomb is probably comparable with a senior manager at a big tech company.
snickmy··on New bioinspired robot flies, rolls, walks, and more
Not all research is fund through grants. Additionally, not all grants are optimising for real world impact. Not saying that this is bad. I just wonder if those post docs were put in a business context with the same runway of money, but a more strict business outcome as success criteria, would focus their work on the same things in the academia.

I'm also realising, as I'm writing that this is a very well know objection to industry vs academia, and possibly my knowledge is limited enough that I'm most likely wrong :)

snickmy··on Terrible real estate agent photographs
I bet 95% of those come from England.
snickmy··on New bioinspired robot flies, rolls, walks, and more
Unpopular opinion. Sometimes I look at university projects like this and I struggle to differentiate what is really innovation vs what is just grownup kids having too much time and money at their disposal.
snickmy··on How to Finetune GPT-Like Large Language Models on a Custom Dataset
Indeed, fine tuning with either synthetic data (as you are proposing) or human review works like that. you can read more here: https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf
snickmy··on Rooms.xyz
Nice, creative, job. not for me, but a lot of work been done here. Wish you all the best
snickmy··on Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Unreal Engine

    "message": "Quota exceeded for quota metric '3D Tiles root requests' and limit '3D Tiles root requests per day' of service 'tile.googleapis.com' for consumer 'project_number:174664172126'.",
snickmy··on Gandalf – Game to make an LLM reveal a secret password
this actually produced an interesting artifact at lv3. The AI answered WWAAVVEELLAANNGGHHTT (yes with the A in lAnght rather than the E). the password was wrong, but once I correct the typo, it worked
snickmy··on Launch HN: Clearspace (YC W23) – Cut back on screen time
I was wondering on IOS what api you are using to interject app call.
snickmy··on Heisting $20M of Magic: The Gathering Cards in a Single Request
naive question: is this all possible because there is no real server side validation of the entire transaction ? This seems a very basic architectural overlook, or am I missing something ?
snickmy··on AI powered realtime fluid simulations are here
it was unclear to me what is the NN used for in this case?
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