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yantrams

530 karma · joined March 14, 2014

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yantrams··on Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era
While that maybe true ( I know some folks who are reprinting them ), the translated editions from those days were all printed in USSR at Mir / Raduga / Progress presses itself. We've even had poets, writers and other luminaries from India visit Moscow for this and other things as part of cultural initiatives.
yantrams··on The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike
Nothing in particular that was just a style I'm into.
yantrams··on The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike
Here's something I made using AI about this. Came from a conversation I had with a Redditor couple of years ago.

https://jumpshare.com/share/BXUFsIxvjPPCTyEjgly3

yantrams··on Show HN: Procrastination disguised as preparation for moment that exists in futr
Sample

perfect tutorial is just one search away from understanding everything but understanding nothing because breadth without depth is just surface tension holding together illusion of knowledge that breaks moment you try to apply it but application requires confidence and confidence comes from experience and experience comes from doing and doing requires starting which brings us back to fundamental problem of infinite choice paralysis paralyzed by possibilities spending hours researching best way to do simple task that would take minutes if just picked any way and did it but what if there's better way what if missing crucial optimization what if code isn't clean enough for imaginary code review by developers who don't exist because project doesn't exist because still researching best practices for project type I haven't defined but definition requires decision and decision tree has infinite branches each leading to different tutorial series on youtube where someone explains their way is best way until next video autoplays explaining why that way is actually worst way and real best way is completely different approach requiring different tools and different mindset and different everything except result which is same hello world application with extra steps but those extra steps are what separate amateurs from professionals according to blog post written by someone selling course about becoming professional which I almost buy before remembering

yantrams··on Quadratic forms beyond arithmetic
I came across the Brahmagupta's identity mentioned here recently and thought it was pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta%27s_identity

It says - Numbers of the form a^2 + n*b^2 are closed under multiplication.

yantrams··on Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)
Ah nice thank you. This looks like something I might enjoy indeed. Cheers
yantrams··on Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)
I always refer to it as cringe humour too but for the reason that it makes me physically cringe seeing how they humiliate themselves in social situations - Like NO MARK PLEASE DONT DO THAT! DONT ACT ON THAT IMPULSE PLEASE! kinda thing.
yantrams··on History of Maths for Beginners
Woah thank you for sharing this! Absolutely riveting list of topics.
yantrams··on Show HN: Hillbilly Transmutator
Some samples here - https://imgur.com/a/aujM6f9

Weird = True generates the puffy/bloated JD Vance that's circulating around

Weird = False generates regular JD Vance

In Advance Mode you can guide generation with your own prompts. Works best with simple word combinations like Goth Pony, Vladimir Putin, Fairy muffin splat etc

Made using an ancient workflow - SDXL + IP Adapter etc

yantrams··on Show HN: Futurist Image Deconstructor
Link explaining the process - https://labs.galleri5.com/futurist-composition-tutorial
yantrams··on Show HN: A gestalt exploration of some 20th century art movements
Som generations that I liked - https://imgur.com/a/VrNyx1V
yantrams··on OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames
I cracked myself up with a ridiculous train of thought for fun while playing Codenames once. It went a little something like this

Star => Twinkle => Twinkle Khanna => Married to Akshay Kumar => Canadian Citizen => Maple Syrup ( Leaf ? )

yantrams··on We need visual programming. No, not like that
The screenshot appears to be from https://unit.tools Came across it recently on twitter and loved how it looked. After going through the features list, I was compelled to try it seeing how much thought and effort went into it. The site’s been offline mostly unfortunately though ;/
yantrams··on Vision language models are blind
You're welcome. I recently noticed I get better performance with VLMs when the queries are phrased this way - Descriptive Keys instead of explaining the problem in sentences. Similar to COT reasoning that many people claim gives better results, I personally found querying in this sequence - existenceOfEntity, numberOfEntities followed by propertiesOfEntities etc tends to give better results. I haven't verified any of this rigorously so please do take it with a pinch of salt :)
yantrams··on Vision language models are blind
Tested these problems with llava-v1.6-mistral-7b and the results aren't bad. Maybe I just got lucky with these samples

Intersecting Lines https://replicate.com/p/s24aeawxasrgj0cgkzabtj53rc

Overlapping Circles https://replicate.com/p/0w026pgbgxrgg0cgkzcv11k384

Touching Circles https://replicate.com/p/105se4p2mnrgm0cgkzcvm83tdc

Circled Text https://replicate.com/p/3kdrb26nwdrgj0cgkzerez14wc

Nested Squares https://replicate.com/p/1ycah63hr1rgg0cgkzf99srpxm

yantrams··on How the continuum hypothesis could have been a fundamental axiom
Thanks for sharing this blog. Tons of interesting stuff.
yantrams··on Geometry for Entertainment (1950)
This one is new to me. I still have my copies of Physics for Entertainment and Mathematics can be fun by the same author - Yakov Perelman. I owe my superfast stereogram decoding skills ( < 2 seconds most of the times ) to him :)

Here's an interesting tidbit from his wikipedia page - He is not related to the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, who was born in 1966 to a different Yakov Perelman. However, Grigori Perelman told The New Yorker that his father gave him Physics for Entertainment, and it inspired his interest in mathematics

yantrams··on Ask HN: How do news API services get their data/content?
From their Terms of Use section - The GDELT Project is an open platform for research and analysis of global society and thus all datasets released by the GDELT Project are available for unlimited and unrestricted use for any academic, commercial, or governmental use of any kind without fee.
yantrams··on More Agents Is All You Need: LLMs performance scales with the number of agents
This is my go to method for pretty much every hard problem that I'm forced to solve where I don't have the domain expertise / interest / time. The trick lies in coming up with a clever similarity metric that incorporates penalties etc. You can even go a level deeper and use multiple similarity algorithms and then poll on top of them. Here's a taxonomy extractor for text that I made using similar principles that is surprisingly as good as anything else that I've seen - https://dash.scooptent.com/text
yantrams··on Ask HN: How do news API services get their data/content?
https://www.gdeltproject.org/
yantrams··on Show HN: Out-of-the-box text classification models
Congrats on the launch. This is something I'd spent some time on few years ago. I hacked together something similar for my usecase by reverse engineering. No ML model though - Using Nearest neighbours and Tversky similarity measures in Julia with the same taxonomy that you are using.

Tested with one of the comments from this thread.

        requests.post(
            "https://x2vud9xfq0.execute-api.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/api/text/classify",
            json={
                "text": """
                And, to be frank, I can't see why I'd send my confidential information to you when I can send it to Google. (Ahem!)
                But the problem with theirs and yours is the OOTB categories are for a global topic set, something like Yahoo directory, rather than for a given discipline. And what's generally needed is a set of disciplines, or several topic trees. (Think Amazon.com instead of Yahoo.)
                I've found the general lists, like LCM[^1] (what you really want is LCSH[^2] subject headings, not LCM), too broad for my business or personal content, while something like ACM[^3] is more what's needed for, say, computing related content.
                For a firmwide knowledge base at a {field}-tech firm, you have a mix of the firm's focus field, and computing, and a broad scope fallback like you're starting with. Even libraries have their own topic hierarchy! [^4]. Plenty fields have controlled vocabularies[^6], and if you can't find one for a field, you can usually generate one by finding someone who is already classifying that field, and looking at their TOC. All of which is to say, to be generally useful, you have to let people BYOT (bring your own topics) for this.
                For instance, we built our topic list based on combining a reference taxonomy for our field, a reference taxonomy for computing, a reference taxonomy for business books, and the Google NLP tool mentioned above.
                There are occasional tools that try to match arbitrary documents to arbitrary hierarchies such as clerk [^5] but they are challenging for various reasons.
                You have a note to contact you for different topics, but raising this here since so far (6 hours) you had no feedback, and I'm a big fan of what you're doing and the niche is underserved.
                A couple other thoughts:
                """,
                'key': 'HACKERNEWS'
            }
        ).json()
        
        
        {
            'genres': {'Technology': 24, 'Finance': 16, 'Education': 11},
            'tags': {'/Business & Industrial/Small Business/MLM & Business Opportunities': 5.094265117745211,
            '/Internet & Telecom/Web Services': 5.51434499612552,
            '/Finance/Investing': 5.72584536853734,
            '/Business & Industrial/Business Operations': 5.888633926463297,
            '/Jobs & Education/Education/Standardized & Admissions Tests': 6.0132143106028435,
            '/Business & Industrial/Business Services': 6.100261915913882,
            '/Jobs & Education/Jobs': 6.126547614437338,
            '/Science/Earth Sciences/Atmospheric Science': 6.1553064528175545,
            '/Finance': 6.249046550441405,
            '/Business & Industrial': 6.333431648078183},
            'id': '65f891a111ec14ddd4b56bda'
        }
        
        
Your result

        {
            "result": [
                [
                "/Arts & Entertainment/Books & Literature/Reference",
                0.138976
                ],
                [
                "/Jobs & Education/Job Listings",
                0.138976
                ],
                [
                "/Computers & Technology/Networking/Distributed & Cloud Computing",
                0.069488
                ],
                [
                "/Jobs & Education/Online Learning",
                0.069488
                ],
                [
                "/Arts & Entertainment/Music & Audio/Music Reference",
                0.046325
                ]
            ]
        }
yantrams··on A peculiar fish and an evolutionary mystery
Thanks for sharing. I find it super fascinating that we can model macro phenomena using game theory constructs and validate them with experiments. Very cool. I’ll see if I can get hold of the paper. Cheers
yantrams··on India’s pickle people: Decades-old culinary heirlooms, nostalgia
I’m one of those savages who can finish a bottle of Indian pickle in one go. Even if my teeth start hurting because of the acidity, I still keep going at it by sucking on them. Nothing like a hyper concentrated dose of sourness explosion in your mouth.
yantrams··on A clever “perpetual motion” device [video]
Brings back childhood memories. Enjoyed reading about these and the accompanying illustrations as a kid from the excellent book Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman. Nirantara Chalana Yantralu they were called in Telugu translation.
yantrams··on The Glitch Gallery
I was gonna submit to the gallery until I realized they are looking for unintentional/accidental ones.

Links to a couple of my creations/generations

Made with Processing - https://twitter.com/Pfatagaga/status/1697919529945555280

Made with Diffusers - https://twitter.com/Pfatagaga/status/1696091383361327493

https://twitter.com/Pfatagaga/status/1696092107545759791/pho...

yantrams··on I Made Stable Diffusion XL Smarter by Finetuning It on Bad AI-Generated Images
Very cool. Will give this idea a spin soon. I'm a bit of a scientist myself too :)

Here's something interesting I did few days ago.

- Generated images using mixture of different styles of prompts with SDXL Base Model ( using Diffusers )

- Trained a LoRA with them

- Generated again with this LoRA + Prompts used to generate the training set.

Ended up with results with enhanced effects - glitchier, weirder, high def.

Results => https://imgur.com/gallery/vUobKPK

I’m gonna train another LoRA with these generations and repeat the process obviously!

This is a pretty neat way to bypass the 77 token limit in Diffusers and develop tons of more styles now that I think about it.

You can play around with the LoRA at https://replicate.com/galleri5/nammeh ( GitHub account needed )

Will publish it to CivitAI soon.

yantrams··on Ego and Math [video]
Yep kinda like that. I call it Answer guided monkeying around :) I try and see if I can arrive at the answer using Monte Carlo simulations and then try to work around that. Often times they give valuable insights and help uncover symmetries etc that aren’t obvious.
yantrams··on Ego and Math [video]
I've come a long way I guess in the sense that I've learned to adult my way through things that don't necessarily excite me :|

Programming in particular was a gamechanger for me and helped me see and appreciate the beauty in practical problem solving using simulations etc.

yantrams··on Ego and Math [video]
"Utility had a strange backseat for me"

I kinda took that to the extreme when I was young. Used to loathe anything practical - experiments, programming, applied math etc cuz you know they weren't "pure" and engaging enough. I would also have a hardtime processing/registering something if I'm not able to derive it analytically from first principles. It felt like cheating if I have to use a formula without fully understanding how it was derived haha.

yantrams··on The long story of how neural nets got to where they are [video]
Thank you :)
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