smahs (u/smahs) - Readit News

smahs commented on Ollama's new app ollama.com/blog/new-app... · Posted by u/BUFU

bapak · a month ago

This is the most "just build your own Linux" comment I read this year.

Just download some tool and be productive within seconds, I'd say.

smahs · a month ago

I only did it once some 15 years back (in a happy memory) using LFS. It took about a week to get to a functional system with basic necessities. A code finetuned model can write a functional chat UI with all common features and a decent UX in under a minute.

smahs commented on O(n) vs. O(n^2) Startups rohan.ga/blog/startup_typ... · Posted by u/ocean_moist

mperham · 4 months ago

Don’t forget about us O(1) solo entrepreneurs!

smahs · 4 months ago

Still O(n).

smahs commented on StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text starvector.github.io/... · Posted by u/lnyan

chris-tsang · 5 months ago

Author of VTracer here. Finally being able to comment on hackernews before the thread got locked.

Would be interested in learning about your workflow. Is it a logo generation app?

I feel like this is an example of "Machine learning is eating software". Raster to vector conversion is a perfect problem, because we can generate dataset of infinite sizes and can easily validate them with vectorize-rasterize roundtrips.

I did have an idea of performing tracing iteratively. Basically by adjusting the output SVG bit-by-bit until it matches the original image within a certain margin of error. And optimizing the output size of the SVG by simplifying curves if it does not degrade the quality. But VTracer in its current state is oneshot and probably uses 1/100 of the computational resources.

VTracer seems to perform badly on all the examples. I suspect it can be drastically improved simply by upscaling the image (via traditional interpolation, or machine learning based) and picking different parameters. But I am glad that it was cited!

smahs · 5 months ago

Thanks for noticing this, and yes I have also noticed what you're pointing out, but workable for many use cases. I use this workflow for making images for marketing or web (so images are more artistic than photo realistic generations to begin with). Think of stuff you can find on undraw, but generated by image models from prompts. Then run them through VTracer. The reproductions are not perfect, but are often good enough (can be slow depending on how sharp you want the curves, and often very large file sizes as you mentioned). Then make any changes in inkscape and convert back to raster for publishing.

> logo generation app

For logo generation, I would actually prefer code gen. I thought of this problem when reading about the diffusion language models recent (if there is lots of training data available in form of text-vector-raster triplets).

smahs commented on Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit lesswrong.com/posts/4mvph... · Posted by u/paulpauper

r_klancer · 5 months ago

Though a local model I'm running (gemma-3-27b-it; https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGU...) just told me various correct sounding bits about his history with alcohol (correctly citing his alma mater and first wife), but threw in:

"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."

Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)

smahs · 5 months ago

Gemma 3 4B (QAT quant): Yes, Paul Newman was indeed known to have struggled with alcohol throughout his life. While he maintained a public image of a charming, clean-cut star, he privately battled alcoholism for many years. He sought treatment in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was reportedly very open about his struggles and the importance of seeking help.

smahs commented on Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns hello-jp.net/building-bey... · Posted by u/jpoersc

all2 · 5 months ago

At a previous employer, I pitched tooltips as a potential way to surface AI interactions.

I may still try it in an app I'm building.

Docs -> RAG -> tooltips / onboarding sounds like it might work out ok.

smahs · 5 months ago

^^ I have vague memories of Clippy, but I remember it as obnoxious, often consuming the precious screen real estate on the low res monitors of the day, without offering anything valuable. But tooltips on the web with CSS and libraries like floating-ui can be much more compact, agile and barely noticeable.

I have tried showing help text in an internal app using tooltips when the user would hover over the target element (or show a small icon on touch devices), and the feedback was good as the tooltips were never in the way but easily available for help (accessibility for keyboard users needed some thinking, but for the limited audience for that app, it was not a problem). And while you're at it, may be make it more engaging than a simple text only tooltip (which can be done without any intelligence), and let the host to customize and offer complex workflows.

smahs commented on StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text starvector.github.io/... · Posted by u/lnyan

peter_d_sherman · 5 months ago

This would be absolutely GREAT for generating icons for applications!

(Also would make a great SaaS... for $X/month ($9.95, $19.95, ??.??) generate unlimited icons...)

Congrats to the team for their pioneering hard work in this nascent area of LLM/Transformer research!

Well done!

smahs · 5 months ago

No it won't (most likely). VTracer (which the authors compare with) is fast, runs in browser via wasm, consumes way less resources and can even convert natural images very decently. But the model seems cool for the usecase of prompt to logo or icon (over my current workflow of getting a jpg from flux and passing it through VTracer). I hope someone over at llama.cpp notices this (at least for the text-to-svg usecase, if not multimodal).

smahs commented on Knowing CSS is mastery to front end development helloanselm.com/writings/... · Posted by u/tipiirai

sunami-ai · 6 months ago

CSS: The AI's Achilles Heel

smahs · 6 months ago

On the contrary, I have found reasoning models (DS R1 mostly) to be very good at complex positioning and transition problems. They can't "visualize" anything, so can't design well unless you explain them well (which is the problem in design, most people have vague ideas but can't explain it well in CSS terms).

smahs commented on Knowing CSS is mastery to front end development helloanselm.com/writings/... · Posted by u/tipiirai

maigret · 6 months ago

Of course but that’s a too general statement. What developers IMO fail to get is that CSS is so different because it’s a language to express design and they don’t understand the basics of design. Almost all programming languages are about logic and taught at all CS / programming schools. But design mostly isn’t and is much more complex than people think first (check for example grid theory).

smahs · 6 months ago

And geometry, which is high school level for the most part IMO but combined with cascading in the third (z) dimension. Introduce 'relative' with its own coordinate system and then do transforms in it (to be fair, its only complex in some cases like where the transformed parent is different from the relative parent). And then get into the time domain for transitions. Its math after all, but not the same that most programming courses teach.

smahs commented on LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/signa11

abc-1 · 10 months ago

Anyone who followed Deep Learning in the 2010s would have guessed the same thing. Big boom with vision models by adding a lot of layers and data, but eventually there was diminishing returns there too. It’s unsurprising the same would happen with LLMs. I don’t know why people keep expecting anything other than a sigmoid curve. Perhaps they think it’s like Moore’s law but that’s simply not the case in this field.

But that’s fine, LLMs as-is are amazing without being AGI.

smahs · 10 months ago

Leaving the distortions from inflated and unrealistic expectations (case in point: people expecting evolution of AGI somehow have not yet well defined what AGI is), I also think that in the mid-long run the current state of LLMs will bloom an entire economy for migration of legacy apps to have conversational APIs. The same investors will then have a new gold rush to chase, as it always happen.