canvascritic (u/canvascritic)

canvascritic commented on Open models by OpenAI openai.com/open-models/... · Posted by u/lackoftactics

nojito · 18 days ago

What? It’s a straight connect to the models api from azure, aws, or gcp.

I am literally using Claude opus 4.1 right now.

canvascritic · 18 days ago

Most healthcare systems are not using Azure, AWS, or GCP

canvascritic commented on Open models by OpenAI openai.com/open-models/... · Posted by u/lackoftactics

nojito · 18 days ago

Pretty much all the large players in healthcare (provider and payer) have model access (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic)

canvascritic · 18 days ago

This may be true for some large players in coastal states but definitely not true in general

Your typical non-coastal state run health system does not have model access outside of people using their own unsanctioned/personal ChatGPT/Claude accounts. In particular even if you have model access, you won't automatically have API access. Maybe you have a request for an API key in security review or in the queue of some committee that will get to it in 6 months. This is the reality for my local health system. Local models have been a massive boon in the way of enabling this kind of powerful automation at a fraction of the cost without having to endure the usual process needed to send data over the wire to a third party

canvascritic commented on Open models by OpenAI openai.com/open-models/... · Posted by u/lackoftactics

captainregex · 18 days ago

I’m still trying to understand what is the biggest group of people that uses local AI (or will)? Students who don’t want to pay but somehow have the hardware? Devs who are price conscious and want free agentic coding?

Local, in my experience, can’t even pull data from an image without hallucinating (Qwen 2.5 VI in that example). Hopefully local/small models keep getting better and devices get better at running bigger ones

It feels like we do it because we can more than because it makes sense- which I am all for! I just wonder if i’m missing some kind of major use case all around me that justifies chaining together a bunch of mac studios or buying a really great graphics card. Tools like exo are cool and the idea of distributed compute is neat but what edge cases truly need it so badly that it’s worth all the effort?

canvascritic · 18 days ago

Healthcare organizations that can't (easily) send data over the wire while remaining in compliance

Organizations operating in high stakes environments

Organizations with restrictive IT policies

To name just a few -- well, the first two are special cases of the last one

RE your hallucination concerns: the issue is overly broad ambitions. Local LLMs are not general purpose -- if what you want is local ChatGPT, you will have a bad time. You should have a highly focused use case, like "classify this free text as A or B" or "clean this up to conform to this standard": this is the sweet spot for a local model

canvascritic commented on Procolored printer drivers contained malware neowin.net/news/this-prin... · Posted by u/bundie

canvascritic · 3 months ago

SnipVex clipjacking wallets is almost beside the point, the real failure is a printer vendor treating software like a side gig. Printer and hardware companies get a pass on basic infosec hygiene that would be unacceptable for open source maintainers.

until that changes, airgap your weird hardware setups I guess

Also this is a perfect storm for lateral movement. USB-borne worms still work frighteningly well in small biz environments, especially ones with no centralized IT and people plugging printers directly into Windows desktops with admin perms. Here SnipVex is just a cherry on top-a nice, opportunistic payload for the growing class of infostealers targeting crypto wallets

canvascritic commented on France Endorses UN Open Source Principles social.numerique.gouv.fr/... · Posted by u/bzg

canvascritic · 3 months ago

Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto

canvascritic commented on The Fall of Roam (2022) every.to/superorganizers/... · Posted by u/ingve

mmooss · 3 months ago

Aren't you describing (and Roam using) what is essentially brain mapping, which is a well-established technology based on how our memories actually work?

canvascritic · 3 months ago

I'm not a fan of neurophysiology analogies because it veer into pseudoscience, but I'll play along.

Roam implemented static bidirectional links and called it associative memory. in reality, it's closer to mind-mapping software with backlinks. So without mechanisms for reinforcement (surfacing old notes intelligently), pruning (forgetting irrelevant junk), or plasticity (reorganizing in response to use), the system becomes a junkyard of half-formed thoughts.

Brains forget for a reason, roam doesn't

canvascritic commented on K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for developers kscale.dev/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

codekansas · 3 months ago

Well, the point of being open-source is that I don't think there is much of a moat in the hardware, in the limit, and it's better to accelerate the ecosystem and start building standards. It's very similar to Tesla - electric cars are easier to build than gas cars, so the moat has to come from branding / integration / software (for reference, before K-Scale I worked on the FSD ML team at Tesla, which informed a lot of my thinking about what the right business model for this would look like).

I think humanoids are in their infancy. Eventually most of the margin will come from software capabilities, which we do plan to charge a lot of money for (like, download a software package and your robot can clean your house, that's probably worth something). But in order for that business model to work we need to have commodity, standardized hardware.

canvascritic · 3 months ago

this all makes sense and is honestly the most coherent humanoid startup thesis i've seen outside of figure.ai. You're right that the unit economics of hardware are a trap unless you can commoditize the complements. And humanoid hardware clearly wants to become a commodity, but no one's finished the job yet and it seems brutally difficult (see: the ghost of Willow Garage)

The tesla analogy makes sense to me but with a caveat: they still spend billions on CapEx and own verticals like battery chemistry and drivetrain design. In this case you’re betting that the value collapses upward into software, like the shift from phones to apps, but for that to work, your software has to deliver exponential delta per dollar

With that I think the real risk is that your "clean your house" package is deceptively hard in the long tail, and you will end up with the iRobot Roomba UX. Novelty fades fast when it constantly gets stuck under the couch or whatever the equivalent of that is for humanoids. To be fair iRobot/Roomba is a household name but still "only" a ~$1.5B company, which seems meager compared to ambitions in this space

As an aside I would love to see an RFC-style doc on how you think humanoid software standards should emerge. ROS is still a frankenstein, and someone needs to kill it gently lol

canvascritic commented on How the humble chestnut traced the rise and fall of the Roman Empire bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

canvascritic · 3 months ago

When my grandfather died, the only thing he asked to be buried with was a small pouch of roasted chestnuts. he used to say they reminded him of long cold walks home through wartime forests that smelled like smoke and bark.

Anyway after the funeral, I cracked one open by the fire and it was still sweet. RIP baba

canvascritic commented on K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for developers kscale.dev/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

codekansas · 3 months ago

Actually, we use COTS components for basically everything, that's how the price is so low. It's just that we do a lot to make sure we understand how everything works together from software to hardware

IMO humanoid companies do make a lot of big claims which is why it's important to make everything open-source. Don't have to take my word for it, can just read the code

canvascritic · 3 months ago

Thanks for the reply

IME the COTS angle cuts both ways. It brings costs down and makes iteration faster, but whats the moat then?

if the value is in integration, that’s fine, but integration is fairly fragile IP. Open source is good reputationally but accelerates the diffusion of your edge unless the play is towards community+ecosystem lock-in or being the canonical reference impl (cf. ROS, HuggingFace)?

canvascritic commented on Yahtzeeql – Yahtzee solver that's mostly SQL github.com/charliemeyer/y... · Posted by u/skadamat

canvascritic · 3 months ago

This is a clever hack and a cute abuse of SQL joins to brute-force what’s essentially a 2-ply MDP over a finite space.

The core idea btw of using precomputed transition/score tables to simulate and optimize turn-by-turn play is a classical reinforcement learning method

What would be interesting here is to flip it: train a policy network (maybe tiny, 2-layer MLP) to approximate the SQL policy. then you could distill the SQL brute-force policy into something fast and differentiable.

i’d love to see a variant where the optimizer isn’t just maximizing EV, but is tuned to human psychology. e.g., people like getting Yahtzees more than getting 23 in chance. could add a utility function over scores.

Anyway this is a great repo for students to learn expected value optimization with simple mechanics.