I often see charitable groups from the Sikh community in central London serving the homeless. Interesting to hear the background around that! https://asiasamachar.com/2023/10/10/meet-the-sikh-community-...
Readit Newsjanekm commented on The Sikh Practice of Langar, a Free Meal Where Everyone Is Equal wttw.com/playlist/2022/04... · Posted by u/thunderbong
janekm commented on Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/andrewpareles
So early stage that we can't download it? Why would I want to join a discord server for a code editor?
What is the plan when VS Code introduces all your features?
Well the code is there: https://github.com/voideditor/void/tree/main/extensions/void
But it's super basic right now... Like literally just the bare minimum to make an LLM call in a side window and a view to apply/reject diffs. Pretty much a weekend project at this point.
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janekm commented on Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019) dalpix.com/reverse-engine... · Posted by u/jnord
Since the topic of the article is about reverse engineering, I think it is extremely important to remember this. R&D time is very expensive. As people predominantly in CS, we should be aware of this, as this is typically how we are classified. And I think everyone innately knows how much more difficult it is to create something from scratch, the help you get just by having a reference, and how much easier it is to copy (or modify) when you have the thing in your hands (or source).
And it is worth noting that prices are vastly different in China. Labor is much cheaper and licenses aren't respected. The cost of living is cheaper to a smaller profit margin goes a much longer way. As tfa mentions, there are identical cameras sold by different manufacturers. It is unclear if this is typical reskinning or designs being taken. Both significantly reduce the cost of things. I have no idea how much hosting costs in China.
Regarding hosting, it's a big pain point for companies building these systems out of China as the "great firewall" makes it really hard to have reliable connectivity between the Chinese Internet (and datacenters) and outside. The ap-east-1 zone of AWS, based in Hong Kong, is very popular in that context as it tends to be accessible from both sides (so cost is fairly typical of AWS costs in that case). Alternatively Alibaba also have cloud datacenters in Hong Kong with similar properties.
janekm commented on Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019) dalpix.com/reverse-engine... · Posted by u/jnord
These cameras are extremely suspicious -- just follow the money. I bought some cheap Chinese cameras in 2020 that by default send the video stream to a Chinese server, which you can watch with an app on your phone. The cameras were about $40 on Amazon, so my guess is the manufacturer was getting paid maybe $15-20 for them.
Bandwidth to and from China is not that cheap, and you could be running this stream 24x7. The streaming service still works 4 years later even though the company whose name is on the camera has vanished.
So, who is paying the server/bandwidth bill? The camera is too cheap to afford indefinitely providing this service, so you can only presume that you're paying in another way. Probably there is some third party in China that the camera manufacturer makes a deal with. The camera manufacturer may even be getting paid to pick a particular provider.
Something worth keeping in mind is that Chinese factories that makes things like IP cameras don't typically have their own (significant) R&D departments and instead work from examples provided by the makers of the chipsets. Sometimes there will be another company involved that provide an "IoT ecosystem" (Tuya is a major player here: https://www.tuya.com/solution/hardware/ip-camera ).
So it's not necessarily surprising that the backend still works even if the manufacturer (Amazon brands are not typically the factory themselves, for practical reasons frequently changing "brand names" are used) is no longer present.
I wonder if a clipboard or a ladder would work better with the bouncers at a club.
A club is one of the few places where this strategy won't work, unless there's an emergency (which the bouncers would obviously know about) the only people who would show up are from the sound and light company whom the bouncers already know.
> "When Driscoll’s learned that Alphabet was changing course with Mineral, the berry producer was eager to find a way to keep using the technology, said Scott Komar, Driscoll’s senior vice president of global research and development. The company uses the startup’s technology to predict how many berries its crops will yield, which enables it to provide more accurate forecasts to its buyers and labor partners, Komar said."
> “We were really disappointed that Alphabet decided to change directions,” Komar said. “We have really had a great partnership with the Mineral team and from our vantage point they were just getting takeoff altitude. And then all of a sudden, you know, plans changed.”
Google is beyond parody with how they still continue to kill off promising products.
It's the curse of being a company with a $xxxB main product line. It becomes really hard to justify projects that could at best contribute a few million to your bottom line...
You might be interested in knowing that LCSC (same company as JLCPCB) are about to offer proper panel / membrane keypad prototyping: https://www.lcsc.com/panel-printing
janekm commented on Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models machinelearning.apple.com... · Posted by u/2bit
Well, here's another one: they promised that your local (non-iCloud) photos don't leave the device. Yet they will now — among many other things they mentioned doing with your photos — allow you to generate "Memoji" that look like the people in your photos. Which includes the non-iCloud photos.
I can't picture any way to use a RAG to do that.
I can picture a way to do that that doesn't involve any model fine-tuning, but it'd be pretty ridiculous, and the results would probably not be very good either. (Load a static image2text LoRA tuned to describe the subjects of photos; run that once over each photo as it's imported/taken, and save the resulting descriptions. Later, whenever a photo is classified as a particular subject, load up a static LLM fine-tune that summarizes down all the descriptions of photos classified as subject X so far, into a single description of the platonic ideal of subject X's appearance. Finally, when asked for a "memoji", load up a static "memoji" diffusion LoRA, and prompt it with the that subject-platonic-appearance description.)
But really, isn't it easier to just fine-tune a regular diffusion base-model — one that's been pre-trained on photos of people — by feeding it your photos and their corresponding metadata (incl. the names of subjects in each photo); and then load up that LoRA and the (static) memoji-style LoRA, and prompt the model with those same people's names plus the "memoji" DreamBooth-keyword?
(Okay, admittedly, you don't need to do this with a locally-trained LoRA. You could also do it by activating the static memoji-style LoRA, and then training to produce a textual-inversion embedding that locates the subject in the memoji LoRA's latent space. But the "hard part" of that is still the training, and it's just as costly!)
That's going to be something similar to IPAdapter FaceID: https://ipadapterfaceid.com
Basically you use a facial structure representation that you'd use for face recognition (which of course Apple already compute on all your photos) together with some additional feature representations to guide the image generation.
No need for additional fine-tuning. A similar approach could likely be used for handwriting generation.
I never understood why not all investments and income of politicians needs to be publicly available, and why all contact with lobbyists ought to be logged and recorded, at the very least for internal review purposes.
Or how it is possible that in countries which do have this to some degree (EU for example), every time we try to look at something the archives have mysteriously been lost..
It's almost as if politicians are less motivated to enact legislation that is inconvenient to politicians.