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varelse

2,997 karma · joined October 19, 2011

Perma-banned, if you're reading this, you opted in, don't get all huffy that I hurt your fee fees. I am a very bad person and if you're that delicate, opt out.

One snarky comment a day keeps the Sam Altman Fanboys at Bay

Or you could just delete all my comments but you won't because this is creepy.

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varelse··on AI companies cause most of traffic on forums
It's certainly one of the few things that actually gets their attention. But aren't there more important things than this for the Luigis among us?

I would suspect there's good money in offering a service to detect AI content on all of these forums and reject it. That will then be used as training data to refine them which gives such a service infinite sustainability.

varelse··on Does current AI represent a dead end?
Mamba-ish models are the breakthrough to cheap inference if they pan out. Calling a dead-end already is just silly.
varelse··on No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains
The heart rate monitors in Google and Fitbit devices are insanely inaccurate during exercise. I had suspected as much already. Whenever a brisk walk indicated my pulse was 150 or so. But first, I could not reproduce this wearing a halter device and later I could not reproduce this wearing a polar heart rate monitor or a Frontier X2 ECG.

Conclusion, Fitbit and Google heart rate monitors on those wearables are hot garbage. Cue some snooty googler insisting I'm doing it wrong somehow.

varelse··on Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen

So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.

But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.

Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.

varelse··on Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?
It's the past. I've let go of it as much as I can. But I will always have what if questions about it. But broadly, academia was a dead-end. I should have never gotten a doctorate, it was a waste of time. And I doubly should never have done a post-doc because that's indentured labor. The day I left academia my salary more than tripled my income, an experience many sorts in AI encountered more recently. Unless one is born into wealth, academia is a horrible choice IMO. And too many of the tenured sorts calling the shots are some of the most unethical sorts I've ever met. Ironically, the most ethical team I ever worked with was at a hedge fund likely because it's pretty hard to hide the loss of funds at one. And everything else has been between those two extremes.
varelse··on Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?
ACE score of 5. I turned out badly. Rich, but badly. Just ask any of the data faking cheating scientists I channeled my trauma into exposing who got me kicked out of academia. But that's how I got rich. Money changes everything.

You will never feel safe. You will instead build a life, a portfolio, and a network of friends as a surrogate for feeling safe. And you can trust my words, I'm shadowbanned.

varelse··on Dark Star at 50: How a micro-budget student film changed sci-fi forever
It was only last year that I realized the country music opening theme "Benson, Arizona" was about relativistic travel through space, shortly after playing it because I had just driven through Benson, Arizona.
varelse··on Vernor Vinge has died
In 5 to 10 years we will have likely moved on to the next big model architecture just like it was all about convolutional networks 5 to 10 years ago despite the pivotal paper being published in 2017.
varelse··on They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing
Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse?

Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.

varelse··on Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
Ministry For The Future was far too optimistic. Termination Shock presents how late stage capitalism and the accelerationists would team up to make money on half-baked science to save the planet. The West will probably be fine but we're going to make Mao and Stalin look like amateur hour mass murderers when we finally save our own butts.
varelse··on Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
Why the burgeoning economic development of full self-driving space needles! Sure, their former homes will be uninhabitable, but imagine how much they'll get selling the land? Why they'll be able to move to Antarctica if that's what it takes! I'm getting a tear in my eye right now over all that profit and shareholder value as we boldly evacuate the planet into the future!
varelse··on The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances
There are a ton of contaminants in our drinking water that the EPA recommends you remove and we know they are harmful but they are not mandated to do so. Get yourself a water filter because they're not going to filter it for you.
varelse··on AMD's Next GPU Is a 3D-Integrated Superchip
And that's the consequence of giving the market leader a decade and a half head start. No one and I mean no one was preventing AMD or Intel from building a competitive hardware and software ecosystem other than themselves.
varelse··on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use
Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest.

Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.

varelse··on Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers
Or simplify a white list for all cell phones by default. But just like they make it hard to keep your snail mailbox from being clogged from garbage, this remains hard.
varelse··on AI.gov
Which is pretty much what the proposed regulations on AI will do as well whist destroying small company innovation and treating consumer AI like software and media piracy.

I guess the president felt bad about banning GPU sales to China so he decided to gimp America too.

varelse··on Dev sets up "goatse" trap for sites that steal his free web game
I once had a manager at my dad's company steal my code for my opus Star Trek game. He left tracks so I followed those tracks into his account and made the game absolutely no fun to play by making it impossibly hard (1979).

He then had the nerve to complain to my dad that the game was too hard.

varelse··on OpenAI just replaced its core values with completely different ones
The real question would be why anyone cares about empty mission statements like this anyway?

Parsing them for meaning is nearly as useful as parsing your morning bowel movement to predict your day.

varelse··on The AI research job market
The biggest tell I got out of this article is OpenAI's willingness to pay $1M per AI researcher but they only want to pay $300K for their new hardware design people. I think we know how that will play out, but narcissists gotta narcissist.

As someone who rode the first AI wave to 7 figure comp a decade ago, let moneyball round 2 commence! Let's see who can get to 8 figure comp first! That money isn't doing anyone any good if it's just sitting in a brokerage or bank account. Didn't you hear? The singularity is near! You simply cannot afford to miss out or you're going to get Vernor Vinged!

Along the way, don't forget to take some time out of your busy day to drink the delicious bitter tears of venture capitalists and upper management whining that you are paid too much.

varelse··on Intel Xeon Max 9480 Deep-Dive 64GB HBM2e Onboard Like a GPU or AI Accelerator
NUMAAF I guess, but it doesn't seem like they did anything interesting with it yet.
varelse··on Stablevideo: Text-driven consistency-aware diffusion video editing
Runway runs circles around zeroscope. But that shouldn't be a blocker for zeroscope to catch up and/or surpass. Both runway and pika Labs deliver better quality at the moment. Evidence: struggling with all three of them.

Runway outputs the best video quality and options for video length whilst pika delivers better fidelity to an input image as inspiration. All of this subject to change without notice

varelse··on Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand
George Hotz: because eventually Elon Musk's false promises and over the top shenanigans just weren't doing it for you anymore...
varelse··on Google tries internet air-gap for some staff PCs
Sure, they give you two computers. But you better not ask for a GPU!
varelse··on Things I wish I’d known before fulltime RVing (2017)
I drive a class B up to 400 miles a day. You really don't want to drive more than 8 hours daily no more than you want to work more than 8 hours daily. And I say that as someone who went from San Diego to Seattle in a single crazy marathon drive once in a sports car during the very dar.kest days of the pandemic. I will eventually trade mine in for an EV option because my limitation isn't hot water or gasoline but rather electricity. I have both a generator and lithium batteries but on a 100° day I like to be polite. So the idea of charging the silly thing at an electrify America is really appealing. Cue someone ranting about the environmental toll of EVs.
varelse··on Ok, it’s time to freak out about AI
It's a feed forward network guaranteed to halt with an obscene power envelope that tells lies with an air of absolute certainty. Not scared, but really annoyed with those who are...
varelse··on What is Google doing with its open source teams?
Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.
varelse··on San Francisco's Postwar Sex District (2006)
Legalize it all and regulate it to protect sex workers. Make pimps and their equivalents obsolete.

It would be better if we could provide better options to those who end up turning to sex work, but that's crazy talk. So let them make the best of a crappy situation that most Americans seem to favor them being in instead of punishing them for not being born rich.

Come on guys you can vote this one down, you just know you can vote this one down. If you even see this one, please vote this one down. I need 2,979 more down votes.

varelse··on Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before
The concept of anything a light year away or more being able to wipe out life on Earth is pretty mind-boggling to me. I wish we focused more on things that were mind-boggling rather than mind killing. But that's just not how this culture is playing out.
varelse··on Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before
Anything beyond ~50 light years is out of range.
varelse··on Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates
New variants are now emerging every 30 days. Good luck with that plan. Why is the concept that life finds a way so hard to accept? We're getting our asses kicked by this thing.

But I would agree with you if the variants would just stop creating themselves. But it doesn't seem like any immunity really lasts. So this leads to repeatedly infecting yourself with variants as they emerge (1 in 6 chance of a bad outcome of long covid or worse), become a bit of a test rat for the latest vaccine, or some combination therein.

I'm hoping we eventually get a vaccine that transcends the evolutionary range of this thing. And then we could do exactly what you're suggesting. But that's a science project and you never know how those will go.

The main concern I have is will we be a nation crippled with PTSD and long-term healthcare concerns when this is finally over with?

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