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vletal

933 karma · joined April 12, 2016

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vletal··on Scala 3 slowed us down?
I was so stoked, when it was released. Loved the approach they take. So, I can say, there was at least one person who asked for it.

With the hindsight, it is not a great mainstream language and the new opinionated language is too hard for junior Joe developers.

Anyway, you clearly have not read the article, as it is about bug in a transitive dependency, not an actual Scala 3 issue.

p.s.: Scala compiler is one of the most aggressively tested pieces of software in the JVM ecosystem.

vletal··on Has LLM killed traditional NLP?
The idea that we can solve "language" by breaking down and understanding sentences is naive and funny with the benefit of hindsight, is it not?

An equivalently funny attitude seems to be the "natural language will replace programming languages". Let's see how that one will work out when the hype is over.

vletal··on US-owned Greenland and Gulf of America? What a weird week
> "already promised to allow an independence vote"

Exactly, an _independence_ vote.

vletal··on Entropy of a Large Language Model output
https://github.com/xjdr-alt/entropix
vletal··on 1-800-ChatGPT
Have you been paying attention at all these past few weeks? Google is crushing it with releases. Gemini 2.0 is great, Veo2 is crushing Sora, live video conversation from aistudio... 12 days of OpenAI turned out to be 12 days of Google.
vletal··on Sora is here
Image details 9/10 Animation 3/10 Temporal consistency 2/10

Verdict 4/10

vletal··on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct
That would be 1.38 bits per weight on average, which I can confidently guess would not perform well.
vletal··on Why Do Older People Waste Their Time Playing Dumb Phone Games?
My mum (65+) is addicted to Duolingo. She has been practicing English for a year. They gamified the app well. She did not learn much though.
vletal··on Liquid Foundation Models: Our First Series of Generative AI Models
Thanks! I am collecting all "test prompts" which appear at HN and Reddit. I plan to create a hugging face dataset. I will soon publish "Vojta-1B", which is gonna pass all of them.
vletal··on Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio
This sounds too good. It's not too far away from me having a hard time wondering "is it just overly scripted corporate PR podcast".
vletal··on EU ChatControl is back on the agenda
Yeah. A slippery slope. If you force major apps to comply, smaller apps will pop up.

Not sure if you can win this whack a mole.

vletal··on Meta 3D Gen
Seeems like simple enough 3D-to-3D will be possible soon!

I'll use it to upscale 8x all meshes and textures in the original Mafia and Unreal Tournament, write a good bye letter to my family and disappear.

I think the kids will understand when they grow up.

vletal··on Category theory using string diagrams (2014)
I was into this stuff when Scala was at its peak. I still think that it made me a better developer and it's just fun trying to understand all these concepts, but after several years I came to the conclusion that category theory will never hit mainstream.

Sure, the best ideas are already lurking into mainstream languages, but noone is building Monads and Functors. Implementations used in practice are not pure (flatMap on List accepts Sets/Options...).

These days I would probably jump on the Rust hype train and learned more about memory management and safety instead.

vletal··on Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
That is just a baseless speculation.
vletal··on Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
What would be the implication? I do not believe that DMA forces Apple to make iPhone sharing to Windows. How would it reduce "security"?
vletal··on Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
I do not get it. If they are really into "private cloud", "your data belongs to you", ... They should be compliant out of the box.

This decreases my trust in Apple.

vletal··on Microsoft's Nadella is building an AI empire
I'm in my 30' so I remember office 97 and 2000.

I still believe that was the peak of their UX.

vletal··on Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
Wasting perfectly good hardware like that is a shame.

I hate that companies are allowed to use just ever so slightly different designs of their products every generation.

We are over regulating SW companies, because it feels free, it's just a software.

Why can not we force the biggest HW developers to make sure that devices can share spare parts across generations AND preventing them from bricking perfectly good devices?

vletal··on Physicists now question the fate of the Universe
This kind of reserach, which comes with new ideas which better explain our observations, helps balance exactly the blind faith in religion.

People will always ask "where everything came from" questions. And if there is no science with plausible big-bang => background radiation... theories, you can just as easily return back to creationism.

vletal··on Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation
Can I just take an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner and fill it with water and ground coffee?
vletal··on Better and Faster Large Language Models via Multi-Token Prediction
The n+1-th token is discarded if it is unlikely given the n-th token.
vletal··on Google Quantum AI
There is no AI on the whole front page. Right?

Where is the AI?

vletal··on Tesla drivers have highest accident rate despite Autopilot claims, who is lying?
The article pinpoints a flaw in the study - crashes vary in severity, maybe the distribution is different for Teslas - and concludes with "anyway, bad look for Tesla regardless".

Which makes me wonder, what is the distribution of crashes? Do Teslas prevent more severe collisions? Any more detailed data on this?

vletal··on VW is putting buttons back in cars
In my first car (1989 Ford Escort, 3-door) I could adjust both temperature and radio volume without loosing eye contact with the road. I felt under control and safe. Recently I've rented a Tesla Model 3 and man, how far did we come since then. If just the voice control did not keep telling me "Sorry, I can not do that yet".

My dad (65yo) just bought a new car with a mediocre central display. It makes me super uneasy to see him drive. The man used to slap me over my wrist for looking at my phone while driving. Now it takes him 1+ seconds JUST TO adjust his eye sight to be able to while switching from the road to the display and back! Then he has to navigate the touch menus...

I am really worried he is going to hurt himself or someone in 10 years time he will likely own this car.

vletal··on Google is embedding inaudible watermarks into its AI generated music
The example in the link you posted is equivalent to quietly whispering "GENERATED BY GOOGLE" every 15 seconds of over the generated track.

Regenerating an audio is similar to painting a fake painting. It is the strokes which will reveal the original author. But in this case you want to claim the piece for yourself - stripping the signature elements of the author BUT still preserve the original quality.

So, make sure the ID is not more nuanced and distributed than you might think :) Otherwise your auto-encoder might reproduce it as well.

vletal··on Google is embedding inaudible watermarks into its AI generated music
No. The watermark is inaudible.

Btw. audio compression is already doing most of the "stripping inaudible" stuff. You know, why wasting bits on something which is less likely to by picked up by the listener. It is done by assuming a model of human hearing.

vletal··on [dead]
Please change the title, it is misleading. I actually read through the text first trying to find information about how GPT-4 is integrated with DALL-E3.

Moreover, I am not a fan of stock photos in articles and I find the generated illustrations even worse. Both quality and relevance to the accompanied text is very low.

vletal··on Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
I've only seen people getting ticket for crossing in Prague if they

  * disregarded any safety measure (arrogant crossing red light while cars are present)
  * were crossing red light in front of a Police station
Prague has such a shortage of officers they stripped the education requirement and basically anyone who passes psychological evaluation can become one. It is a rare sight to see one in flesh.
vletal··on The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
Submarines are not glued tight, yet they are waterproof.

Much bigger deal for Apple is design. Exposed screws sealing the back cover would give Jony Ive OCD ticks, I'm sure

vletal··on Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
> We are building Sydney Opera Houses.

Sorry, this made me laugh. I know there are software engineers which build clean and polished beautiful mega structures. I _aspire_ to that. Yet that is a niche market.

In reality, most devs are making unique family Vilas at best.

I wish I could ever say I feel like I contributed to an equivalent of 'Sydney Opera House'.

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