zooch (u/zooch) - Readit News

zooch commented on In Praise of 'Megalopolis' compactmag.com/article/in... · Posted by u/makaimc

zooch · a year ago

I saw Megalopolis and loved it. Mind you I went in knowing that it was apparently a $100 million Neil Breen flick. That only made me want to see it more though, since I've sat through all of Neil Breen's movies in awe of how bad they were.

Hard for me to call Megalopolis bad though.

It's operatic and impressionistic. People keep asking what it all means, I've never thought you had to know what a movie means to enjoy it.

Something like Southland Tales, meets Tree of Life, meets Neil Breen.

zooch commented on Infinitone Microtonal Saxophone xerocraft.org/news/298-ma... · Posted by u/brudgers

amadeuspagel · a year ago

That's due to clipping. For a sine or a triangle, you'll hear clipping at a volume where a sawtooth or square still sounds fine.

zooch · a year ago

If you switch from sine to square or sawtooth the change in volume is jarring.

Waveforms having the same amplitude doesn't mean the ear hears it at the same volume. There's more frequencies contained in different waveforms and the ear is more sensitive to certain ranges.

A smoother representation of the waveforms might contain the first 5 - 10 frequencies of Fourier series but even then you need to compensate with a change in amplitude.

It's not a DAW, it's a web app, and the users will appreciate the favor.

zooch commented on Tiny Language Models Come of Age quantamagazine.org/tiny-l... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

dmezzetti · 2 years ago

I'm a big believer that smaller models will take hold. The throwing paint at the wall strategy of having 100B+ models and random data won't scale. It's possible it will take new model architectures to get there. But having more fine-tuned control over model parameters is a pattern that will emerge. Then smaller, domain specific models can be joined together to form larger models, if full generalization is needed.

I have an article on building micromodels that discusses some of this: https://neuml.hashnode.dev/train-a-language-model-from-scrat...

zooch · 2 years ago

I would like to have a more modular approach with more specialized training of the models.

Currently I can only really use smaller models for micro-tasks like sentiment analysis or classification, but any type of problem solving has to be left to GPT-4.

zooch commented on Coroutines make robot code easy bvisness.me/coroutines/... · Posted by u/bvisness

taeric · 2 years ago

Coroutines are covered in Knuth's first volume. And, I confess, I think I went years thinking he was just describing method calls. Yes, they were method calls that had state attached, but that felt essentially like attaching the method to an object and calling it a day.

Seeing them make an odd resurgence in recent years has been awkward. I'm not entirely clear that they make things much more readable than alternatives. Reminds me of thinking continuations were amazing, when I saw some demos. Than I saw some attempts at using them in anger, and that rarely worked out that well.

Also to the point of the article, I love being "that guy" that points out that LISP having a very easy "code as data" path makes the concerns expressed over the "command" system basically go away. You can keep the code as, essentially:

    (DriveForward 0.5 48)
    (while (NotCarryingBall)
        (Grab)
        (pause 2)) 
    (DriveBackward -0.5 48)
    (Shoot)

With god knows how much bike shedding around how you want to write the loop there.

Of course, you could go further for the "pretty" code that you want by using conditions/restarts such that you could have:

    (DriveForward 0.5 48)
    (Grab)
    (DriveBackward -0.5 48)
    (Shoot)

And then show what happens if "Grab" is unsuccessful and define a restart that is basically "sleep, then try again." Could start plugging in new restart ideas such as "turn a little, then try again." All without changing that core loop.

zooch · 2 years ago

With these examples I think the author would still be stuck with stepping through the state machines with the students. Unless what you wrote would allow for the "autonomousPeriodic function to keep ticking" another way?

zooch commented on 'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma engadget.com/blackberry-m... · Posted by u/cf100clunk

initplus · 2 years ago

The tv series he go-directed “Nirvana the Band the Show” was also quite funny.

zooch · 2 years ago

Came here to mention Nirvana the Band the Show. One of my absolute favourites and I recommend it to everyone.

Blackberry was good as well - don't expect the exact facts, it says right in the beginning it is a fictionalization.

zooch commented on Don Knuth plays with ChatGPT cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/ch... · Posted by u/talonx

gfodor · 2 years ago

I can't believe he spent his precious time on this and didn't instruct the grad student to pay $20 to use GPT-4. Sigh.

zooch · 2 years ago

Also, how is typing the questions in an email to a grad student simpler than using the chatGPT UI. He's instructed his own authentic intelligence assistant to interact with the artificial intelligence assistant for him.

zooch commented on Apple’s new headset meets reality bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/sudheer_paturi

paul_grisham · 2 years ago

How is this feasible at all? Not only all the tech for the AR device to be light and have decent battery life, but the software you describe would need optical recognition of what you're looking at, then match that to the manual of the object to tell you what the pins do. All on a device with significant size and heat constraints.

zooch · 2 years ago

For early generations I'd imagine you'd have to plug them in via usb (which would still be fine for my use case I was describing). Processing done on a different device, get some type of AI to summarize datasheets and match it to pins. All of which probably doesn't sound good to you but I'd still prefer it over turning my neck and scrolling back and forth.

But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.

zooch commented on Apple’s new headset meets reality bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/sudheer_paturi

dangus · 2 years ago

VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.

The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.

So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.

Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.

zooch · 2 years ago

I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.

zooch commented on Where have all the hackers gone? morepablo.com/2023/05/whe... · Posted by u/danieka

jdm2212 · 2 years ago

I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time.

Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.

zooch · 2 years ago

Meta is a 10 million dollar company?

zooch commented on 100K Context Windows anthropic.com/index/100k-... · Posted by u/samwillis

lumost · 2 years ago

I'd be more impressed if it could rewrite Mr. Carraway as an ML engineer in the entire novel. However it's not intrinsically clear that it cannot do this...

It'll be tough to find good benchmarks on long context windows. A human cannot label using 100k tokens of context.

zooch · 2 years ago

My thoughts exactly - rewrite the novel with Mr. Carraway as an ML engineer while maintaining themes/motifs (possible adding new ones too). I'm guessing what's impressive is that these are the first steps towards something like this? Or is it already possible? Someone please correct me here.