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t_von_doom

94 karma · joined April 17, 2020

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t_von_doom··on LLMs and Self-Referentiality
I would be interested in the answer to this question too. The visual cortex is certainly algorithmic in that light data enters, various cells and synapses react and fire and that information is ingested into something 'conscious'. Where does this then exist, and would it even be able to exist if we removed the biological algorithms at play?
t_von_doom··on LLMs and Self-Referentiality
I agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness?

Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot?

If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?

t_von_doom··on Mouseless – fast mouse control with the keyboard
I’m loving it! It was quite the jump from a standard layout to split + ortholinear + column stagger but within a week I was comfortable using it in the office.

No strain from using the ball, it is (or can be) quite sensitive so you only need very slight movements and as another poster mentioned there are a variety of ways to adjust the sensitivity of the ball on the fly via layers for speed vs precision.

It’s entirely programmable, and easy to do so, so if something isn’t working or doesn’t feel right it’s you can adjust every key and ball function to behave as you’d like.

Was also very fun to build - but you can buy them prebuilt too

t_von_doom··on Mouseless – fast mouse control with the keyboard
I wish I had seen this a few months sooner! I have solved the problem with hardware via a Keyball: https://github.com/Yowkees/keyball/blob/main/keyball44/doc/r...
t_von_doom··on Why do BIC pens have a hole in the lid? (2016)
The lid prevents leaks by acting as a physical gap between the ball and whatever it would write/leak on :)

Imagine putting a pen, ball down, into a breast pocket with vs without a lid

t_von_doom··on Ask HN: High Focus Activities
Olympic lifting is technical and precise. Great if you would like something more physically involved.

If you have a club near you, gliding is a relatively cheap hobby.

Otherwise sudoku or crosswords can be fun and low barrier to entry

t_von_doom··on Ask HN: How to deal with memory/cognition slowing down as an engineering leader?
My manager is experiencing the same due to a bout of long covid.

The way it appears he is dealing with it, from my perspective, is he has delegated the things which require immediate memory/cognition to us and is leveraging his expertise to direct us at a higher level and trusting us to execute and feed back pertinent information when we next check in.

While I feel for his worsening condition he has managed to do negotiate this in a way that:

1. Leverages his knowledge, expertise and network to a greater degree

2. Given us autonomy that feels empowering, while not increasing our workload to pick up his perceived slack.

t_von_doom··on Europeans have more time, Americans more money. Which is better?
When I read the post, my initial thought that 125 p/m was on the expensive side!
t_von_doom··on Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team
(UK) The govt. does not force the employer to continue employing you - but they do guarantee you are given a fair amount of notice and some severance pay depending on tenure.

The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for

t_von_doom··on Stable Diffusion 3
You’re very welcome to ask for clarification - I kept it abstract because there is a lot of grey area and it’s something we need to understand and discuss as technology and society evolves.

To spell out one such instance: I would like to live in a world where it is not trivial to depict and misrepresent me (or anyone) in a way that is photorealistic to the point that it can be used to mislead others.

Whether that means we need to outright prevent it, or have some kind of authenticity mechanism, or some other yet-to-be-discovered solution? I do not know, but you now have my goalposts.

t_von_doom··on Stable Diffusion 3
I would say the barrier to entry is stopping a lot of ‘candid’ unsafe behaviour. I think you allude to it yourself in implying currently it requires a professional to achieve the same results.

But giving that ability to _everyone_ will lead to a huge increase in undesirable and targeted/local behaviour.

Presumably it enables any creep to generate what they want by virtue of being able to imagine it and type it, rather than learn a niche skill set or employ someone to do it (who is then also complicit in the act)

t_von_doom··on The dangers of people who have been to boarding school
It’s my anecdotal experience that this really was not the case at boarding school.

Yes - it’s tough being separated from parents and family at a young age

Yes - of course there are bullies at school. Has anyone attended any institution where they don’t exist? I see them regularly in families, workplaces, academia and local communities.

It’s a different lived experience compared to traditional schooling for sure. But I enjoyed great camaraderie, and continue to enjoy lifelong friendships with those I spent my time with.

My point essentially is - don’t assume on the basis that someone attended boarding school they are emotionally inept or incomplete which is the impression I got from this article

t_von_doom··on UK's nuclear fusion site ends experiments after 40 years
My interpretation of your quote was that the boiling wasn’t referring to the heat produced, but instead the idea that mass (our planet) is being converted to energy, reducing the mass of the planet
t_von_doom··on Make Parking Impossible
Fiat 500s and that family of cars were designed for short, urban, European driving - they are naturally going to be terrible on highways.

If long trips (> 1hr) are frequent then you want (arguably need) something very different

t_von_doom··on Twitter showed us its algorithm – what does it tell us?
This is what Twitter used to be - I would log in, scroll down until I had seen all updates since I last checked and then left the app. This was, however, before you got tweets in your feed from people you don’t follow (outside of retweets)
t_von_doom··on Cambridge delivery robots form orderly queue at traffic lights
While not ideal, I’m glad that these robots are failing in a (somewhat) safe and orderly way
t_von_doom··on Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market
A fair point but unfair in that you are not also asking this of the OP. The status quo is that that a dedicated camera will be better than a smartphone (see other comments)
t_von_doom··on The iPhone 14 keeps calling 911 on rollercoasters
The problem here is there is no guarantee that you’ll be in a car for x amount of time _before_ having a crash.

Geofencing might have to be the way

t_von_doom··on 'A fluke': The oldest webcam is still watching over San Francisco
I don’t know if you are being tongue in cheek here, but in case you aren’t: It’s been done!

https://www.centennialbulb.org

t_von_doom··on Food delivery robot casually drives under police tape through active crime scene
Other commenters have covered some economical reasons, but it is also an opportunity to provide for work for disabled people like in the ‘Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe’ in Tokyo where the robots function as waiters.
t_von_doom··on Shortsightedness has become an epidemic
I wonder how much that might be explained by variance around the mean
t_von_doom··on 25% of U.S. adults are not active enough to protect their health
To echo what a few other posters have said, but the other way around:

As a European who’s visited the states a few times, the portion sizes always amaze me. They are gargantuan in comparison to what I’m used to

Edit: Fun video - https://youtu.be/rg3Y3tCmBWo

The _smallest_ Burger King drink has 90ml more liquid than the _largest_ UK size

t_von_doom··on Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
As a Mac user with the same gripe of the ctrl key placement: Remapping it to the caps lock works wonders :)
t_von_doom··on This Sneaker Does Not Exist
EDIT: To clarify - don't remove the entire image of a sneaker, just impute away the logo filling in the space with the 'context fill' algorithm found in photo editing tools
t_von_doom··on This Sneaker Does Not Exist
Slightly different implementation of your second option: Remove the logos in the dataset and train on this brand agnostic library
t_von_doom··on The Google Pixel 6 won’t ship with a charger
The skeptic in me says that people would take a freebie regardless of whether they actually need it or not.

Maybe a slight improvement would be to offer the phone at full price minus the RRP of the charger. Then if it's necessary the customer can pay the 'full' price as it introduces a perceived cost

t_von_doom··on Spatial Audio
I initially thought the same on another article, however it turns our spatial audio in the apple music sense, is not exclusive to the pros/max - despite sharing the same name as the head tracking-esque feature in those headphones.

Quite disappointed as it is quite obviously confusing

t_von_doom··on Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’
> The idea that you can see from somebody’s face what they are feeling is deeply flawed. I don’t think that’s possible.

I agree with most of the article but this point I disagree with. Non verbal communication is a huge component in how we interact with each other.

Covid example: When on calls where no cameras are on I get far less feedback when presenting to a 'room' compared to if I was to present in person or have cams on, even if the room stay silent in both situations.

By looking at faces I can see who is distracted, who looks confused and whether what I am saying is being received well or poorly. Did that joke get smiles (polite or genuine ones?) or eye rolls?

Now - do I think the current SOTA algorithms are at this level of nuance? No, definitely not. But to say it isn't at all possible is ridiculous in my opinion

t_von_doom··on iOS 14 tracking changes sees big ad spending drop, tumbling prices
I know nothing about how apples advertising works so sorry if this is a silly question:

The screenshot in the link posted explicitly states apple does not track (maybe how they justify not using the word) you for their advertising network, so what are they doing instead?

t_von_doom··on I’ve had the same supper for 10 years
Here (in the UK at least) you can buy little jars of paste, often made from some kind of meat or seafood. It seems the intended use case is to spread it on bread. I personally have never tried it nor plan to but see for yourself via James May: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVdodVA3qTk
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