indrax (u/indrax) - Readit News

indrax commented on I'm Not Sure I've Ever Enjoyed Programming · Posted by u/Alekhine

indrax · 4 years ago

https://www.shadertoy.com/

* Low friction, nothing to install, near instant feedback.

* Fun starting at simple shapes, gradients, distortions, all the way to absurdly good looking rendering.

I did have that experience of growing up with fun programming, for me shader programming brings that back.

indrax commented on Brain implant translates paralyzed man's thoughts into text with 94% accuracy sciencealert.com/brain-im... · Posted by u/wlkr

gonehome · 4 years ago

I’m pretty skeptical of people that make this claim. It’s just surprising to me that a base level feature would work so differently. I’d expect some variation in models (like that old Feynman video about counting), but if you can speak and use language it’s hard for me to accept literally no internal voice is going on.

I’ve always kinda suspected people making this claim are lacking introspection to such an extreme extent that they don’t even recognize the inner voice that’s omnipresent.

indrax · 4 years ago

For many cognitive processes, I don't see a clear survival value to conscious awareness of that process, so I don't expect that awareness to be a reliable feature. The survival relevant result of that cognition can still come through.

I also think that an internal voice that doesn't get conscious awareness is likely to become a process that doesn't present as voice. So it's not like someone can just pay more attention and hear something, because it stopped talking a long time ago.

indrax commented on Simula One – office-focused, standalone VR headset based on the Linux Desktop simulavr.com/... · Posted by u/pabs3

jarcane · 4 years ago

I have to ask: Who the hell is any of this for?

Simula, Facebook's virtual office meetings, all of this virtual office stuff ... ISTR we loudly declared the death of skeumorphism and yet here we are. "Put this dumb thing on your head just to have an office call" is such a bizarre over-correction to something, and I can't figure what it is. Are some people just really not coping with the shift to remote-first work life?

Who would actually want to do this? What benefit does this provide me over just ... having an extra monitor? Is this just throwing cash after a fad?

indrax · 4 years ago

I look at this like Multimedia and the web in 1995. Yes some of this is a shadow of Microsoft Bob. We don't know what we're doing with VR yet but the technology has crossed over the line from being a toy or experiment. Skeuomorphism is a temporary workaround until we (users and designers both) learn what conventions are most powerful and port more applications to VR.

indrax commented on It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is pluralistic.net/2021/10/2... · Posted by u/jensgk

version_five · 4 years ago

I think you're missing the point. Researchers literally could upload their work to github if they wanted to right now. They choose to publish in journals because the reputation means their work will get seen and will have credibility with other researchers. It's a bit like Big-4 auditing in a sense. They don't do anything particularly special, but their size and reputation give credibility to their audits that wouldn't otherwise be possible. And like journals, they have had some spectacular failures that are dwelt upon, but in general they make vetting much easier.

indrax · 4 years ago

They're paying for credibility, but assigning the credibility to an organization instead of an open and understood process of vetting. This confuses me.

indrax commented on The age of machine learning as code has arrived huggingface.co/blog/the-a... · Posted by u/gk1

didibus · 4 years ago

True, though I'm assuming by "the world", they mean that traditional processes which would have involved pen and paper and other non computer based tools and systems are all being redesigned to make use of computers, thus Software is eating them.

But AI is not replacing processes that rely on software with something that no longer relies on software. What AI is doing is it lets you replace even more processes that were not yet able to be handled by a computer with one that a computer can do, and thus it just helps Software eat even more of the world. Decision making and judgement tasks were not able to be successfully moved to computers prior to the recent advancements in AI, now some of those can be.

indrax · 4 years ago

I think this is a reference class problem. One could also say software replaced work done in offices with work still being done in offices. (until recently) Most of the work was still done on literal desktops. but significant changes have been happening within the subset of the office and within the use of the desk.

indrax commented on The age of machine learning as code has arrived huggingface.co/blog/the-a... · Posted by u/gk1

didibus · 4 years ago

> A few years ago, Forbes wrote that "Software ate the world, now AI is eating Software"

As far as I know, AI is Software, so this type of reasoning really confuses me.

I think it is possible that "developers" might have some of their work find automation using AI and ML, but Computer Science will obviously stick around as long as computers are around.

For example, someone has to code the algorithms which are used to teach the computer how to learn. Someone has to code the pipelines for capturing data from the physical world into the digital world. Someone has to code the storage and exchange of that data to the ML models, and someone has to plug the inference into the production processes and systems. Someone has to put alarms and monitors around all these things to assert their operation. Someone has to code the UIs and interfaces that users will use to interact with all those systems. Finally, someone needs to code compatibility and optimizations of all these models and their implementation to continue to work and leverage new hardware capabilities.

If people think that developers were spending 90% of their time hand tuning business rules and coming up with manually implemented inference and decision models they are highly mistaken. That could have been 5% of the job in some circles, but 95% of the job has always been all these peripheral tasks.

If anything, there will be even more work now, since ML models require a lot more periphery to develop, train and ship.

indrax · 4 years ago

Software is also part of the world, just a very different part.

indrax commented on After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020) theanarchistlibrary.org/l... · Posted by u/SanderMak

zohch · 4 years ago

> The current system created artificial scarcity

The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.

indrax · 4 years ago

Do you think abundance requires the current system?

indrax commented on Steal This Comic xkcd.com/488/... · Posted by u/ColinWright

indrax · 4 years ago

Mirror: https://imgur.com/OPVQstH

indrax commented on Open Source Tractor opensourceecology.dozuki.... · Posted by u/vincent_s

Cthulhu_ · 4 years ago

I wonder why the frame is made out of bolted beams with holes in them, are bolts and holed beams easy to find or something?

I mean I can imagine that if you have the tools to build those, you'd have a welder as well. Granted, welding might be a bit more challenging than cutting beams and drilling holes.

indrax · 4 years ago

It's conceptually gridbeam. https://gridbeam.xyz/

General construction kit for real world applications. In theory you could take a machine apart and use the beams for some other machine. A smaller kit could build any of the machine designs as needed.