zerocrates (u/zerocrates)

zerocrates commented on Mistral OCR 3 mistral.ai/news/mistral-o... · Posted by u/pember

belval · 3 days ago

I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document understanding".

Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models instead will make in-word typos.

zerocrates · 3 days ago

Is DeepSeek's not VLM?

zerocrates commented on Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

fwip · 3 days ago

> Maguire subsequently partially apologized for those comments in a video. “This tweet did not land the way I thought it would,”

What an asshole. He could have gotten the kid killed, not to mention the damage to his social reputation. And he can't even manage a "sorry if you were offended" non-apology.

zerocrates · 3 days ago

The "did not land" video they're talking about, that was his response to people being mad at him for calling Mamdani an Islamist (and being "from a culture that lies about everything"). Also, "partially" is doing a lot of work there: he starts that video saying "cancel culture is alive and well" and doesn't in fact back off at all from his claim: the "did not land" part is even just Maguire lamenting that he accidentally helped Mamdani by targeting him.

Anyway, when he went after the Brown student saying he was "very likely" the shooter (also bringing in Mamdani again), he did less: he simply deleted the video.

zerocrates commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis

lesuorac · 10 days ago

Can you guys just read stuff before talking?

> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.

The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.

zerocrates · 10 days ago

It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.

There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.

zerocrates commented on You can now buy used Ford vehicles on Amazon theverge.com/news/821258/... · Posted by u/apparent

Night_Thastus · a month ago

While I really like the idea of buying a NEW car direct from the manufacturer, a used car from Amazon is significantly less appealing - both for the consumer and Amazon.

* If Amazon spends the appropriate time researching into each car's history, properly inspecting and repairing any defects and working with customers if there are problems - they will not make a net profit. Not 'maybe', they won't.

* If Amazon doesn't have due diligence, people will get cars with endless problems, Amazon will be covered in bad press, and the whole thing will collapse due to low demand.

Plus, unlike buying a new car where inspection doesn't matter nearly as much - buying online gives you 0 way to really look at it yourself and take it to a local mechanic to have it inspected. (Which I am EXTREMELY glad I did, I nearly bought a car that would have been a disaster)

I suspect this effort will last maybe a year and a half at best.

Cars are bulky, heavy, expensive, and lose value quickly with age. Even new, the competition is so tight and logistics so hard that it's a nightmare. Used cars are so much worse an industry to work in.

zerocrates · a month ago

Since they go through the dealers it's probably just the dealers' existing "certified pre-owned" scheme.

zerocrates commented on 'No One Lives Forever' turns 25 and you still can't buy it legitimately techdirt.com/2025/11/13/n... · Posted by u/speckx

CobrastanJorji · a month ago

I think it's basically just "this is complicated, complicated means corporate lawyers, corporate lawyers are expensive enough and the potential profit is small enough that it's not worth it." It's not just "will this be net positive," either. There's an opportunity cost. Those corporate lawyers are needed for other important projects that might make more money.

But also, I kind of think it becomes a thing where it's too small potatoes for anybody senior enough to actually approve all of the legal stuff to care enough to make happen. Sure, it's basically free money, but it's not a lot of free money.

zerocrates · a month ago

The potential that you spend the money/time just to end up proving that you don't own it is I think the main blocker.

zerocrates commented on Laptops with Stickers stickertop.art/main/... · Posted by u/z303

nntwozz · a month ago

Ha, what a throwback!

I remember this one with the Intel SSD sticker:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-320-ssd-300-gb/imag...

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_6571.JPEG

"The Intel SSD 320 is the much anticipated follow-up to the Intel X25-M, easily the most popular consumer SSD to date."

https://www.storagereview.com/review/intel-ssd-320-review-30...

Time flies, such a nice upgrade back in the day; now we take these things for granted.

[EDIT]

I just saw the fon.com sticker too… nostalgia hits hard.

I used that on a vacation in Madrid back when Starbucks was filled with people on their laptops, mostly white MacBooks.

zerocrates · a month ago

I definitely got one or more of those stickers with some Intel SATA SSDs... sadly those I think have been the ones I had the worst luck with. I think they were one of those series that had some really bad write amplification problem or something like that, due to I think some issue with their power-saving implementation.

zerocrates commented on How cops can get your private online data eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06... · Posted by u/jamesgill

OkayPhysicist · a month ago

The crux of the issue is that, just like how you're free (if extremely ill-advised) to invite a cop to search your car or home without requiring a warrant from them, the companies are letting the cops search "their" information (about you) freely.

The companies are entirely within their rights to say "fuck off and get a warrant, you ghouls", but from their perspective, it's a lot easier to just hand it over.

zerocrates · a month ago

They aren't always entirely within their rights to refuse to give up your data: the third party doctrine doesn't transfer your expectation of privacy to the third party holding your data, it says that neither you nor the third party has an expectation of privacy for that information. Subpoenas and court orders and other process short of a warrant can compel disclosure of this "third party" data.

This is why there's a patchwork of statutes requiring Fourth Amendment ish processes for things like wiretaps and emails.

zerocrates commented on New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair nottingham.ac.uk/news/new... · Posted by u/CGMthrowaway

annoyingnoob · 2 months ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7068624

zerocrates · 2 months ago

I know there's value to recording the selection process and all that but it's a little funny to have a review that ends up only including one study: at that point just give me a link, not a paper.

zerocrates commented on Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31... · Posted by u/dw64

catlifeonmars · 2 months ago

Agree. Additionally, original title, "arXiv No Longer Accepts Computer Science Position or Review Papers Due to LLMs" is ambiguous. “Due to LLMs” is being interpreted as articles written by LLMs, which is not accurate.

zerocrates · 2 months ago

No, the post is definitely complaining about articles written by LLMs:

"In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers. Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers – especially papers not introducing new research results – fast and easy to write."

"Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues."

Surely a lot of them are also about LLMs: LLMs are the hot computing topic and where all the money and attention is, and they're also used heavily in the field. So that could at least partially account for why this policy is for CS papers only, but the announcement's rationale is about LLMs as producing the papers, not as their subject.

zerocrates commented on Introducing architecture variants discourse.ubuntu.com/t/in... · Posted by u/jnsgruk

ploxiln · 2 months ago

FWIW the cool thing about gentoo was the "use-flags", to enable/disable compile-time features in various packages. Build some apps with GTK or with just the command-line version, with libao or pulse-audio, etc. Nowadays some distro packages have "optional dependencies" and variants like foobar-cli and foobar-gui, but not nearly as comprehensive as Gentoo of course. Learning about some minor custom CFLAGS was just part of the fun (and yeah some "funroll-loops" site was making fun of "gentoo ricers" way back then already).

I used Gentoo a lot, jeez, between 20 and 15 years ago, and the install guide guiding me through partitioning disks, formatting disks, unpacking tarballs, editing config files, and running grub-install etc, was so incredibly valuable to me that I have trouble expressing it.

zerocrates · 2 months ago

I started with Debian on CDs, but used Gentoo for years after that. Eventually I admitted that just Ubuntu suited my needs and used up less time keeping it up to date. I do sometimes still pull in a package that brings a million dependencies for stuff I don't want and miss USE flags, though.

I'd agree that the manual Gentoo install process, and those tinkering years in general, gave me experience and familiarity that's come in handy plenty of times when dealing with other distros, troubleshooting, working on servers, and so on.