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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

Something really interesting here if you read the title and comments first is that this is an optical thing. It's not software running on the camera, it's physical.

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This seems to be a new PR spin on the same technology that was posted a while ago. 3D printed optical neural networks. I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest considering the energy efficiency and speed of computation.

The problem with them is that you don't get multiple layers of nonlinear operations: wave functions in simple media form a linear space after all.

I don't see any technical reason you couldn't implement a relu in optics. There is a whole area, nonlinear optics (I think you may have intended that when you you said 'simple media?' Well, let me see. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03787

From two years ago: https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-45-17-4819&id=... but again, this isn't simple media.

Thanks, the papers you quoted seem to describe something with low losses (though i can't find explicit statements to that effect when skimming). I was under the impression that nonlinear optics will have huge losses, because it requires multiphoton interactions (which should usually have low cross sections), so will have to figure out which part of my intuition doesn't hold.

Because you brought it up in the context of "I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest in..." I do assume that it is something neat with an interesting application and cool engineering behind it.

However,

"3D printed optical neural network" sounds like a term someone came up with by selecting randomly from a bag of PR buzzwords and trying to come up with the most incoherent phrase possible, to the point where if I saw a headline about it I'd assume it was a scam or something.

Also blurs the line (hrumf) between what is hardware and what is software? I mean software designed the hardware to behave with a certain ... algorithm?

While that idea might seem somewhat out-there, it's fairly straightforward once you think about it. We know the transfer function for light through matter, and can calculate its derivative. Therefore, we can use ML to design matter shapes that have desired properties.

All computers are effectively physical systems that control their noise levels to achieve logical operations. In this case, it's an analog system with no moving parts, but I imagine that given the existence of spatial light modulators and mems mirrors, you could probably reprogram the system in realtime to erase what you wanted on the fly.

This COULD provide privacy.

ICs are hardware designed by software to run any software for decades.

Interesting article. Though I don't think the cryptography angle will pan out. I wonder if it was added because crypto's been a buzz word of late, and the researchers just really wanted to build this camera.

Maybe HN should make the comment button only available after first clicking the link. I see more and more of this "omg title" behavior on HN these days

I’d prefer they enforced the rules and kick people who mention reading the article

like all 3 of us rn?

Low effort trolling as also against the rules

Not trolling, just pointing out how you could've just flagged the comment if it was really an issue for you. Instead you ended up breaking the rule yourself just to beat your drum about it

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Except that I didn’t break the rule because it’s about telling people to read the article not about mentioning the article at all.

Let ML decide!

biology inspires software inspires hardware

I guess with more and more stuff coming out of nano- and bio-tech we can append "inspires biology" and bring it back around

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