Mandelmus

Another leading monocular depth estimation model, Marigold [1] is also from ETH.

[1] https://marigoldmonodepth.github.io/

The book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" by Walter Scheidel makes a similar argument:

> Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...

Here is a thread of videos from my tests of the recent DIAMOND model: https://x.com/chrisoffner3d/status/1845436198254227590

I really wonder how much more stable Genie 2 is.

> Thriving companies like Arc and Linear build an entire aesthetic ecosystem that invites users and advocates to be part of their version of the world.

Afaik Arc still has no revenue and no clear path to a business model, so I’m not sure I’d call it a “thriving company.” I like and use their browser but I fully expect it to die once the money runs out, because people won’t pay for a better looking browser.

Clearly you haven’t read a lot of research papers in computer graphics, geometry processing, and shape analysis.

What I never understood is: why did browsers drop RSS support?

It's a beautiful language that's a joy to write. It's safe and ergonomic, and has an extremely powerful type system. I'd say those are good reasons to use Swift.

I had to look this up. I'm doing my master's in computer science at ETH Zurich, where it is ranked #5 globally according to THE [1], and I pay 804 CHF (874 USD) per semester, i.e. 1608 CHF (1,748 USD) per year. I just had to check MIT's tuition.

> The median annual price paid by an undergraduate who received an MIT Scholarship was $12,715 in the 2022–2023 academic year. [2]

You're basically right, MIT (ranked #3) is almost eight times more expensive than ETH (ranked #5). To be clear though, ETH Zurich is in Switzerland, which is not in the EU.

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[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

[2] https://mitadmissions.org/afford/cost-aid-basics/access-affo...

So, is CoreNet the equivalent of Keras, whereas MLX is the Jax/PyTorch equivalent?

What's the meaning of life though, and why is it love?

> My limited understanding is that Nerfs are compute-heavy because each cloud point is essentially a small neural network

There's no point cloud in NeRFs. A NeRF scene is a continuous representation in a neural network, i.e. the scene is represented by neural network weights, but (unlike with 3D Gaussian Splatting) there's no explicit representation of any points. Nobody can tell you what any of the network weights represent, and there's no part of it that explicitly tells you "we have a point at location (x, y, z)". That's why 3D Gaussian Splatting is much easier to work with and create editing tools for.

And it appears to be at ~80 GB of RAM via quantisation.

A big portion, maybe even a majority, of my fellow students uses an iPad.

Most of these self-help books are basically what happens if you take what could be a decent blog post and just blow up the word count until you can publish it as a book.

I was in open relationships in Berlin’s polyamorous community for nearly five years and I concur with everything you said.

The Machine Learning community is still overwhelmingly on X, which likely explains your experience. There are other communities, like that of Ape/iOS developers, that have moved to Mastodon, and for which the quality of conversation is now much higher on Mastodon than on X.

Please don’t paste chatGPT comments in here. If I wanted to ask chatGPT about this, I’d do it myself.

Same for me. I've been mostly vegan for over ten years now. I "downgrade" to only vegetarian when it really cannot be avoided – which, luckily, has been only when I've travelled to countries where there really weren't any vegan options.

> On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.

That straw man could fatten a whole cow.

As a current compsci masters student at ETH Zurich: yes, having those explanations is wonderful, but that just means that topics like SVD and PCA are taken for granted now, and the things that we need to chew on are things for which no nice canonical explainers have been created (and that likely weren’t taught in 1990).

Personally I think that innovation in explanation/illustration of abstract mathematical topics is one of the most valuable kinds of progress, but it’s rarely talked about as such. When someone comes up with the right framework, visualisation, or metaphor for explaining a complex and abstract subject in a way that induces “the right” mental model, and this new teaching “tool” proliferates, that is just a beautiful thing to see.

Yes, using the LaTeX source code (or HTML, once that becomes reliable and widely used) should be much more robust than PDF parsing.

Can somebody who knows their stuff about voice synthesis explain to me why chatGPT sounds like it's speaking German with an American accent when I speak to it in German? It's really surprising how believably it sounds like a native American-speaker speaking excellent, just not accent-free, German.

I would imagine that voice synthesis models would somehow be trained on data from native speakers, so why the accent?

> Neither Paxton nor X argues that Media Matters was falsely claiming to see ads on pro-Nazi content. In fact, the suit confirms that the screenshots the organization posted are real. But it alleges the organization “manipulated” the service to make X serve the offending ads. “Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare.” The alleged manipulation involved creating an account that exclusively followed a combination of major brands and extremist content, then “endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed” until it saw a confluence of the two.

> I do wish functional programming were more taught

My first CS bachelor's semester in Germany in 2017 taught functional programming using Haskell (as well as C and NASM assembly in another course on computer architecture).

OOP using Java and Python was only introduced in the second semester.

> Regardless I think it's important that students get exposed to more than just Python, which seems to increasingly be the only thing students come out knowing.

In my B.Sc. studies I used C, C++, Haskel, Assembly, Java, Python, and Swift.

To be honest, as a German I have no idea where this increase in productivity is supposed to have occurred. My experience and intuition is that Germany is suffering from a rise in lethargy and inefficiency ("German efficiency" is a meme that's utterly outdated and inapplicable, at least in my sector, IT).

I'd be happy to learn about concrete and representative information that balances my perspective but I have yet to see it.

At the end of the bell curve you have higher variance between people? Aren't two people at close points of the curve by definition similarly skilled? In fact, for two close x-values of two people at the tail end of the curve the y-values (skill levels) are much closer than those of two people closer to (but somewhat off from) the median, where the slope is steeper.

Can you show me a source for that full quote? I can’t seem to find it.

I have yet to find a way to use Obsidian with images (sketches, diagrams) as easily as I would like. If there was a way to combine Obsidian's keyboard-based note-taking features (including LaTeX equations) with graphics and diagrams drawn in an app like GoodNotes 5 for iPad, that would be fantastic.

> Academia is accustomed to publishing in the form of papers (e.g. pdf). This form has fixed margins, cannot contain animations or interactive widgets. Would publishing in an environment that allow for more flexibility be better for communicating their achievements and ideas?

I think it certainly would but we don't have a robust and time-tested format that allows us to carry scientific research in rich media across long periods of time, i.e. centuries or millennia. The simpler the medium the more robust it is to the erosive forces of time. So far, black ink on white paper is the winner here.