HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

v64

1,896 karma · joined November 10, 2012

well, I'm just this guy, you know?
submissionscomments
v64··on Problems that attract smart people
> There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with

For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and don't think about those things, the difference won't be relevant to them, and they'll judge the end product based on their own personal and arbitrary criteria. What's interesting about an artwork to one person makes it banal to another, and no amount of academic study or criticism will change peoples' tastes.

Let's not forget that often creators themselves aren't always actively thinking about composition, texture, color, etc, and part of the work for them can be as black box out of their subconscious as the creation of a neural network.

Similar to people being fooled by white wine dyed red, I think we'll also have critics who remark on how absolutely human a work of art has to be due to X/Y/Z, only for it to be revealed to be an AI work. That I think encapsulates a lot of what I look forward to in terms of the debate over what exactly about art is human-specific and what it means for something, human or not, to have artistic capabilities.

v64··on Problems that attract smart people
> The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works.

Although I see a comparison to previous technologies replacing human jobs, I'm willing to put that point aside and focus solely on AI.

Will AI generated content be cheaper? Will AI content be more interesting and engaging than anything a human could create? If there is no economic demand for human generated artwork, then should it still be viable to make money from it? Is there reason to believe the people who remain in the art market won't be able to make more money by occupying niches that AI art doesn't serve, or by selling to "hipsters" or "luddites" who are anti-AI art? It used to be the only way to make real money through art was having a patron. Perhaps there will be wealthy people who will still be willing to patronize human artists.

Historically, we are in a special place in history where average people can make a living through creative work, but it's not at all an easy industry to break into, even today, and it has always been competitive and everchanging, just as art itself. Economics aside, people have always produced art for intrinsic purposes, and they will continue to do so even when the profit motive is gone.

v64··on Wronger Than Wrong
> the actual execution is very much non-deterministic.

Only as a default. Temperature can be turned to 0 and other token selection settings changed from the defaults to create deterministic output from a given prompt.

v64··on Problems that attract smart people
Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too?

And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc.

I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.

v64··on Load LLaMA Models Instantly
Due to nuances of how data is split across the various model files, the implementation involved some non-trivial steps in order for everything to be allocated correctly. The changes are here [1].

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/commit/5b8023d9354010...

v64··on How to explain the Monty Hall problem to a disbeliever
I love the Monty Hall problem because it's so unintuitive that even Paul Erdos struggled to believe it for a while.

> Vazsonyi ran the program 100,000 times. Erdos watched the results of the simulation. The simulation results indicated that by switching, the odds of winning are indeed two out of three. Finally, he was grudgingly convinced that switching was better. He did not like it but seeing was believing. He could not argue with the results.

Apparently he later called Ronald Graham and explained to him that he finally heard a proof of the problem that made perfect sense to him, which he explained to Graham. Graham said he didn't understand the proof at all, but was happy Erdos understood where he had been mistaken.

v64··on ChatGPT's API is so good and cheap, it makes most text generating AI obsolete
One finding in the LLaMA paper [1] is that our current large models are undertrained. LLaMA with 13B params outperforms GPT-3 175B (not ChatGPT), but an "instruct" version of LLaMA was finetuned over the 65B model and did quite well.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13971.pdf

v64··on Show HN: Llama-dl – high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B GPT model
Note that unlike ChatGPT, these models are pure text completers and have not been trained to be prompted. The llama FAQ [1] mentions this and gives tips for how to get out of the ChatGPT mindset and prompt llama better.

[1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/FAQ.md#2

v64··on Show HN: Llama-dl – high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B GPT model
> Are you sure about that?

I'm not. The only way to know it is to try :) thank you for the link!

v64··on Show HN: Llama-dl – high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B GPT model
early int4 experiments seem to indicate it's possible but you do lose performance, see this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11i4olx/d_...

edit: to clarify, it may be possible to get this loss back and there is reason to be optimistic

v64··on Show HN: Llama-dl – high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B GPT model
The compute necessary to run 65B naively was only available on AWS (and perhaps Azure, I don't work with them) and the required instance types have been unavailable to the public recently (it seems everyone had the same idea to hop on this and try to run it). In my other post here [1], the memory requirements have been lowered through other work, and it should now be possible to run the 65B on a provider like CoreWeave.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028738

v64··on Show HN: Llama-dl – high-speed download of LLaMA, Facebook's 65B GPT model
If anyone is interested in running this at home, please follow the llama-int8 project [1]. LLM.int8() is a recent development allowing LLMs to run in half the memory without loss of performance [2]. Note that at the end of [2]'s abstract, the authors state "This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software." I'm very thankful we have researchers like this further democratizing access to this data and prying it out of the hands of the gatekeepers who wish to monetize it.

[1] https://github.com/tloen/llama-int8

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07339

v64··on EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
not nano, Neo, and its successor NeoX, one of the largest public GPT models available https://blog.eleuther.ai/announcing-20b/
v64··on Amazon officially becomes a health care provider after purchase of One Medical
I suggest reading this reddit post about hospital billing [1]. You certainly have options other than paying a shitload or leaving your arm untreated. Money can be negotiated, but you only get one body.

Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread you have health insurance. If you're paying for it, utilize it. You're in a better position to deal with this than uninsured people.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/x9b7vm/im_p...

v64··on The secret sauce of TikTok’s recommendations
To avoid seeing the same thing over and over, the most direct form of feedback that works for me is when that content comes up, quickly swipe past it. If you keep swiping, it'll start throwing more random stuff at you to see what sticks. I'm also always tweaking the list of people I follow so that if FYP gets stale, I can just look at their content for a bit.
v64··on Method for reducing coffee acidity
Additionally, in comparison to drip with a filter, the reduced extraction time makes a difference as well.
v64··on Method for reducing coffee acidity
Around 15 seconds. This is on the low end of extraction time, official instructions say between 10-30 seconds, although it's really to your preference, and some people prefer a minute or longer.

With drip coffee or french press, you're looking at steeping times around 3 to 5 minutes.

v64··on Method for reducing coffee acidity
For sure, I was using stomach discomfort as a broad euphemism to mean the overall unpleasantness I experienced from drinking coffee compared to days when I abstained. Anecdotally, I have a friend who quit coffee for similar reasons who also took up drinking AeroPress brew successfully.
v64··on Method for reducing coffee acidity
Using an AeroPress is an easy way to create low acidity coffee at home. I used to drink drip and french press and had to stop due to stomach discomfort from the acidity, but thus far have not experienced those effects with the AeroPress. Compared to the other methods, the grounds are exposed to hot water for less time, resulting in an overall less acidic brew.
v64··on Ain't it funny how the knight moves?
Thanks for generating this! I struggled quite a bit getting to a few squares, and the graph shows they were indeed far apart from each other and that I wasn't missing something obvious.
v64··on Gattaca draft script (1997)
Here is an interview with director Alex Proyas where he explicitly discusses the removal of the opening narration [1]:

BLAKE: What is the biggest difference between it and the original?

ALEX PROYAS: The general pace of the movie is quite different. The director’s cut more or less is the version I had originally sent out when I was first testing the movie. We had problems in testing and it’s why the studio had us add in the voice overs, which I thought was rubbish really! My instinct then was when something wasn’t playing right to speed it up and I’ve never been happy with that, so this version is back to a more leisurely and thoughtful pace it was meant to be. The voice over from the beginning is gone of course. There is also a few scenes added back that were ditched that I think are perfectly good scenes and I have no idea why we dropped them then.

[1] https://screenanarchy.com/2008/06/alex-proyas-interview-dark...

v64··on Gattaca draft script (1997)
From the Wikipedia entry:

"A director's cut of Dark City was officially released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on 29 July 2008. The director's cut removes the opening narration, which Proyas felt explained too much of the plot, and includes approximately eleven minutes of additional footage, most of which extends scenes already present in the theatrical release with additional establishing shots and dialogue."

I originally saw the director's cut, then went back and watched a video with the opening narration. I felt that my viewing of the movie was improved having seen it originally without.

v64··on Gattaca draft script (1997)
>Dark City's aesthetic and story-telling style made it one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen. You are in the dark most of the movie, both in aesthetic of the film and metaphorically in the sense that you don't know what is going on, but discover it slowly, and along the way you are lead to reach premature conclusions that turn out later to be false.

I'll add that if you haven't seen Dark City and are going to watch it, you must seek out the director's cut. The theatrical cut basically ruins the plot up front assuming the audience won't get it and it changes the film dramatically.

v64··on Back to the Future: On misunderstanding modular synthesizers (2016)
Playing with modular synthesizers scratches both the programming and music parts of my brain in a really unique way. A big part of the fun of this type of electronic music is getting to craft the sound itself, unlike sitting down at a piano where your modification options are more limited (but prepared pianos are an interesting subject too!) or a keyboard where you're restricted to presets without a lot of modification possibilities (if you have any at all).

Dividing up sound synthesis into its different modules (VCOs, VCFs, VCAs, LFOs, etc) makes perfect sense coming at the problem from a programming point of view. It turns sound synthesis in a Lego toolkit and there's no end to what you can create by combining all these in novel ways.

There's a lot of aesthetic enjoyment to it too. Putting together an octopus jumble of patch cords, seemingly random and impossible to keep track of to an outsider, just looks really badass :) Even better that it's actually a deliberately constructed mess, all in service of generating a sound you've never heard before, and when the cables are all disconnected, will never hear again.

The overlap between the tech and music worlds in the modular scene is great as well and it's very cool being able to talk to people who can get both technical about music and artistic about technology. For us, the modular synthesizer just makes sense.

v64··on What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me
EIP-4895 [1] will enable beacon chain withdrawals and will be included in the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for next year. No actual release date has been decided yet [2].

[1] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895

[2] https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/01/when-will-ethereum-sta...

v64··on What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me
The transition to proof of stake occurred in September [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/ethereum-switches-to-proof...

v64··on Gameboy Doctor: debug and fix your gameboy emulator
Awesome idea to make this a standalone program! When I was developing an NES emulator, I basically had to do this entire process manually with another NES emulator that produced tick by tick logs, then compare it to mine with a diff. Having the last executed opcode right there is helpful too. Next time I revisit that code I may have to take a crack at making an NES Doctor.
v64··on Alameda took 1B hit in mobileCoin trade to prop up FTX
CT = Crypto Twitter, and it's referencing the midwit meme [1] [2].

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

[2] https://twitter.com/notfrydoteth/status/1590386451027746817

v64··on FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows
FTX had various betting markets where you could wager on the outcome of the 2024 election. Some larger speculators wanted to buy bets bigger than what the orderbook for the market could handle, so FTX directly acted as the counterparty to their bets. Source is Twitter, so grain of salt, caveat emptor, etc.
v64··on FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M
> how did the hackers get the keys?

It's most likely an inside job, either by disgruntled employees or SBF himself:

"In a subsequent examination, FTX legal and finance teams also learned that Bankman-Fried implemented what the two people described as a "backdoor" in FTX's book-keeping system, which was built using bespoke software.

They said the "backdoor" allowed Bankman-Fried to execute commands that could alter the company's financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors. This set-up meant that the movement of the $10 billion in funds to Alameda did not trigger internal compliance or accounting red flags at FTX, they said." [1]

[1] https://archive.ph/YImJS

← PreviousPage 3 of 17Next →