dmayle (u/dmayle) - Readit News

dmayle commented on Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos zdnet.com/article/meta-mi... · Posted by u/mdhb

dmayle · 7 days ago

I used to work at Meta (back when it was just Facebook), and I pioneered a similar effort back in 2016-2017-ish. Now, I don't know anything about the current version (which seems to offer cloud processing as well), but when I was there, the effort was entirely local to the phone.

We had caffe2 running a small model on the phone to try and select and propose photos for the user to share.

We were trying to offer an alternative sharing model that both made sharing easier, while offering the user the controls that made them feel comfortable with photo suggestions. (for those who never noticed, we launched Moments, which was an app that allowed automatic private sharing of your camera roll with a close selection of friends and family, but the experience wasn't great because it was centered around group events and sharing photos with the people who were there, not connecting with the ones who weren't)

Ultimately, it was scrapped, because we were paranoid that we hadn't come up with a user experience that made it clear that this was happening only on the phone (I think we even tried a notification model), or that we'd accidentally surface someone's boudoir photos, and we were too worried about the kind of knee-jerk reactions that you're seeing in this thread.

I'm guessing that someone at Meta either had a more successful go at the UX, or they feel that the opinions about AI have shifted enough that there will be less fear.

Upon reading the article, it looks like there are two options, one which is local-only, and similar to what we built, and a second one which tries to make better suggestions using online, and that is only enabled after asking the user.

I would suspect that the cloud processing version also runs a local model to attempt to filter out racy photos before sending them to the cloud, but I don't know for sure.

I think the article is a bit disingenuous in it's presentation, but it's possible that I'm biased because I know how a similar thing was built, but it definitely sounds like fear-mongering.

dmayle commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

dekhn · 12 days ago

We've basically been watching Google gradually re-discover all the tricks of supercomputing (and other high performance areas) over the past 10+ years. For a long time, websearch and ads were the two main drivers of Google's datacenter architecture, along with services like storage and jobs like mapreduce. I would describe the approach as "horizontal scaling with statistical multiplexing for load balancing".

Those style of jobs worked well but as Google has realized it has more high performance computing with unique workload characteristics that are mission-critical (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-fifth-epoch...) their infrastructure has had to undergo a lot of evolution to adapt to that.

Google PR has always been full of "look we discovered something important and new and everybody should do it", often for things that were effectively solved using that approach a long time ago. MapReduce is a great example of that- Google certainly didn't invent the concepts of Map or Reduce, or even the idea of using those for doing high throughput computing (and the shuffle phase of MapReduce is more "interesting" from a high performance computing perspective than mapping or reducing anyway).

dmayle · 12 days ago

As to MapReduce, I think you're fundamentally mistaken. You can talk about map and reduce in the lambda calculus sense of the term, but in terms of high performance distributed calculations, MapReduce was definitely invented at Google (by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat in 2004).

dmayle commented on Is air travel getting worse? maximum-progress.com/p/is... · Posted by u/mhb

dmayle · 21 days ago

This is one of the hot button topics, but I was surprised to see the (false) reference to the FAA having race and gender quotas.

This was suggested to me six months ago by someone who was extreme right wing, (going as far as to say that the FAA only hired non-white employees) and I found the claims bizarre enough to research on my own. They claimed that this was a known fact, whether you read left or right news sources, but when I did my research (not on bias, but on actual hiring results), it said that historically, the FAA has been about 90% white, and currently is about 70% white (IIRC), which is a far cry from suggesting that the FAA has race and gender quotas.

Again, here, the article makes the same claim, but this time with a citation (!), so I wondered if there was some truth to it, that I missed, earlier, but again, the truth does not pan out. It seems that a few members of the NBCFAE (National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) stepped over the line in their attempts to to change hiring practices that were preventing black candidates from being considered (going from increasing the diversity of the candidate pool, which is laudable, to discriminating in order to change up the racial mix, which is illegal).

However, in all of this, it's not the FAA acting, just a few powerful individuals from the NBCFAE. That doesn't change the fact that something bad happened, just the characterization of it ends up being completely misleading.

dmayle commented on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

perching_aix · 23 days ago

Is it time for me to finally package a language model into my Lambda deployment zips and cut through the corporate red tape at my place around AI use?

Update #1:

Tried it. Well, dreams dashed - would now fit space wise (<250 MB despite the name), but it sadly really doesn't seem to work for my specific prospective workload.

I'd have wanted it to perform natural-language to command-invocation translation (or better, emit me some JSON), but it's super not willing to do that, not in the lame way I'm trying to make it do so at least (literally just prompting it to). Oh well.

Update #2:

Just found out about grammar-constrained decode, maybe there's still hope for me in the end. I don't think I can amend this comment today with any more updates, but will see.

dmayle · 23 days ago

Did you finetune it before trying? Docs here:

https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/huggingface_text_full_...

dmayle commented on Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions asciinema.org... · Posted by u/phendrenad2

dmayle · a month ago

I want to take just a second, not to talk about asciinema itself, but to use asciinema to talk about a project I just discovered recently called carbonyl.

It's a command line web-browser that uses a headless GUI browser (in this case chromium) in order to surf the web and render it to the terminal. brow.sh preceded it (powered by Firefox), but in my testing, carbonyl has much better web support.

In any case, here's a very brief demo: https://asciinema.org/a/HLHWeKE2s5bdyhUGQPBum49kx

It's so short because the bandwidth is high to use it, and asciinema.org rejects casts that are greater than 10MB

dmayle commented on Burrito Now, Pay Later enterprisevalue.substack.... · Posted by u/gwintrob

zug_zug · 4 months ago

Is this really how this works? Do you have a source?

Also… in this situation does klarna get any of that 1340 or does Alice just delete the app?

dmayle · 4 months ago

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but otherwise correct...

Alice has $100 in burrito debt at 0%, but misses one payment, which automatically reverts to a 30% interest rate, back-tracked to the start of the "loan".

She also receives a $7 late payment fee, which is equivalent to about 90% interest for the time covered.

Her bank will often re-order operations on a given day in order to maximize the fees charge (yes, this happens, yes, this is legal), so even if she had her paycheck arriving on the same, the operations will often be sequenced with largest debits first, followed by credits, so that the overdraft hits as early as possible, and the most possible number of failed payment fees can be extracted, followed by the credit, which is now greatly reduced

(I actually had this happen to me as a student once, five late payment fees because of re-ordering, which caused me to both never let this happen again, and change banks immediately for one which wasn't as predatory).

Burrito loans are like payday loans, but even more predatory... They are neither ethical, nor moral (usury is even covered in the old testament, for christian folk).

dmayle commented on First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV cnn.com/world/live-news/n... · Posted by u/saikatsg

dmayle · 4 months ago

You could educate yourself, you know, instead of trying to regurgitate something that someone else said that you thought looked clever.

What would you call Americans? United Statesians?

There are two countries called the United States in North America, there's the United States of Mexico, and the United States of America. People from the United States of Mexico are called Mexicans, and people from the United States of America are called Americans.

And what about people from the continent of North America? There's called North Americans, just like people from South America are called South Americans.

dmayle commented on How Nintendo bled Atari games to death thereader.mitpress.mit.ed... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

EvanAnderson · 5 months ago

I'm shocked at how "few" pages printing all 8x8 bitmaps would actually require. Assuming full page coverage of an 8.5 x 11 sheet at 600 dpi I'm only coming with a touch over 548 billion pages. I expected it to be more. Legal-size paper drops that to about 430.5 billion pages.

dmayle · 5 months ago

I think your math is a little off (or maybe mine is).

I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.

However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP

dmayle commented on The Egg (2009) galactanet.com/oneoff/the... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

dmayle · 5 months ago

On the vein of similar books, in the late 80s, early 90's a read a science fiction anthology that had more or less the same exact story as Mickey7.

Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).

Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).

The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.

Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)

dmayle · 5 months ago

I answered my own question! It's called Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budry, and was in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two

dmayle commented on The Egg (2009) galactanet.com/oneoff/the... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

dmcc365 · 5 months ago

Mickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Alternatively, the Murderbot series.

dmayle · 5 months ago

On the vein of similar books, in the late 80s, early 90's a read a science fiction anthology that had more or less the same exact story as Mickey7.

Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).

Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).

The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.

Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)