textlapse (u/textlapse)

textlapse commented on Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/ksec

textlapse · 13 days ago

What’s the cost of training vs inference?

If it’s like Marvel sequels every year then there is a significant added training cost as the expectations get higher and higher to churn out better models every year like clockwork.

textlapse commented on Closer to the Metal: Leaving Playwright for CDP browser-use.com/posts/pla... · Posted by u/gregpr07

dataviz1000 · 15 days ago

Some benefits (without using Chrome.debugger or Chrome DevTools Protocol):

1. There are 3,500,000,000 instances of Chrome desktop being used. [0]

2. A Chrome Extension can be installed with a click from the Chrome Web Store.

3. It is closer to the metal so runs extremely fast.

4. Can run completely contained on the users machine

5. It's just one user automating their web based workflows making it harder for bot protections to stop and with a human-in-the-loop any hang ups and snags can be solved by the human

6. Chrome extensions now have a side panel that is stationary in the window during navigation and tab switching. It is exactly like using the Cursor or VSCode side panel copilots

Some limitations:

1. Can't automate ChatGPT console because they check for user agent events by testing if the `isTrusted` property on event objects is true. (The bypass is using Chrome.debugger and the ChromeExtensionDriver I created.)

2. Can't take full page screen captions however it is possible to very quickly take visible scree captions of the viewport. Currently I scroll and stitch the images together if a full page screen is required. There are other APIs which allow this in a Chrome Extension and can capture video and audio but they require the user to click on some button so it isn't useful for computer vision automation. (The bypass is once again using the Chrome.debugger and ChromeExtensionDriver I created.)

3. Chrome DevTool Protocol allows intercepting and rewriting scripts and web pages before they are evaluated. With manifest v2 this was possible but they removed this ability in manifest v3 which we still hear about today with the adblock extensions.

I feel like with the limitations having a popup dialog that directs the user to do an action will work as long as it automates 98% of the user's workflows. Moreover, a lot of this automation should require explicit user acknowledgments before preceding.

[0] https://www.demandsage.com/chrome-statistics/

textlapse · 15 days ago

Biggest drawback is the distribution medium: Chrome web store has lots of limitations (manifest v3) so the first point is moot.

Installing untrusted extensions requires a leap of faith that most users won’t and shouldn’t have.

Fortunately or unfortunately.

textlapse commented on Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest ioccc.org/2024/index.html... · Posted by u/mdl_principle

textlapse · a month ago

I wonder if there is an LLM competition that can take the obfuscated code and return the unubfuscated/detailed code…

textlapse commented on Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language flix.dev/... · Posted by u/freilanzer

textlapse · 2 months ago

Tangential, but I have a basic question: What makes Aarhus (mainly its university/techhub) a powerhouse for Programming Languages?

C++, C#/Typescript, Dart, etc all have strong roots in that one small area in Denmark.

In general, I am curious what makes some of these places very special (Delft, INRIA, etc)?

They aren't your 'typical' Ivy League/Oxbridge univ+techhubs.

Is it the water? Or something else? :)

textlapse commented on AI is not our future procreate.com/ai... · Posted by u/alexharri

textlapse · 3 months ago

AI/GenAI is unfortunately a loaded word. Does Content-Aware Fill count as "AI"? Does using trained data to fill content count as generative AI?

There is some nuance here that will be filled in by the courts and companies over time - just like other technologies that allowed creative mix-n-match.

I do agree that the current crop of "let's get all your YT videos and all your photographs to train our models and we will pay you peanuts by running ads" is objectively and morally wrong.

However, progress requires aligning the incentives and forcing some legal framework to compensate for training - not outright stop the generative AI train as that's simply not possible in this day and age.

textlapse commented on O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data sampatt.com/blog/2025-04-... · Posted by u/bko

arm32 · 4 months ago

GeoGuessr aside, I really hope that this tech will be able to help save kids someday, e.g. help with FBI's ECAP (https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/ecap).

textlapse · 4 months ago

Oops I made my comment after yours! Exactly my thought. These tech companies could spare 0.001% of their resources to significantly move the needle.

Or even host a geoguessr style competition and allow ‘steroids’ use (ChatGPT) during such runs.

textlapse commented on O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data sampatt.com/blog/2025-04-... · Posted by u/bko

textlapse · 4 months ago

Man this would be a game changer for those OSINT (Bellingcat/Trace an object) style work. I wonder if that has happened yet!

There could even be geoguessr style competitions that could significantly help move the needle at least as a copilot if not outright mass identify.

textlapse commented on Bilinear interpolation on a quadrilateral using Barycentric coordinates gpuopen.com/learn/bilinea... · Posted by u/mariuz

textlapse · 5 months ago

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textlapse commented on DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Bender

janalsncm · 5 months ago

Brains may operate on a compressed representation internally, but they only have access to their senses as inputs. A model that needs to create a viable compressed representation is quite different from one which is spoon fed one via some auxiliary data stream.

Also I believe the DeepMind StarCraft model used the compressed representation, but that was a while ago. So that was already kind of solved.

> simply a fascination similar to self-driving cars being able to drive with a image

Whether to use lidar is more of an engineering question of the cost/benefit of adding modalities. LiDAR has come down in price quite a bit so it’s less wise in retrospect.

textlapse · 5 months ago

Brains also have several other inputs that an RL algorithm trained from raw data (pixels/waves etc) don't have:

- Millions of years of evolution (and hence things like walking/swimming/hunting are usually not acquired characteristics even within mammals)

- Memory - and I don't mean the neural network raw weights. I mean concepts/places/things/faces and so on that is already processed and labeled and ready to go.

- Also we don't know what we don't know - how do cephalopods/us differ in 'intelligence'?

I am not trying to poo-poo the Dreamer kind of work: I am just waiting for someone to release a game that actually uses RL as part of the core logic (Sony's GT Sophy comes close).

Such a thing would be so cool and would not (necessarily) use pixels as they are too far downstream from the direct internal state!

textlapse commented on DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Bender

EMIRELADERO · 5 months ago

> I understand Sergey Brin/et al had a grandiose goal for DeepMind via their Atari games challenge - but why not try alternate methods - say build/tweak games to be RL-friendly?

Because the ultimate goal (real-world visual intelligence) would make that impossible. There's no way to compute the "essential representation" of reality, the photons are all there is.

textlapse · 5 months ago

There is no animal on planet earth that functions this way.

Visual cortex and plenty of other organs compress the data into useful, semantic information before feeding into a 'neural' network.

Simply from an energy and transmission perspective an animal would use up all its store to process a single frame if we were to construct such an organism based on just 'feed pixels to a giant neural network'. Things like colors, memory, objects, recognition, faces etc are all part of the equation and not some giant neural network that runs from raw photons hitting cones/rods.

So this isn't biomimicry or cellular automata - it's simply a fascination similar to self-driving cars being able to drive with a image -> {neural network} -> left/right/accelerate simplification.