kajecounterhack

You can run it locally, and it's really fast. But since YouTube transcription is really good, I don't see why you'd use Whisper and get a worse transcription (unless maybe it's on videos that Google did not transcribe for whatever reason).

Have you talked to any startups? Young hungry folks were historically valued at startups, especially ones who have some OGs who can spare bandwidth to onboard / grow new hires, though maybe the game has changed.

Fwiw it would affect my decision to go to the beach even if only 70% accurate

> It's not as if the gov doesn't already employ in several sectors skilled software developers.

Supply and demand -- gov't doesn't pay as well, so top SWEs do not work for gov't. Stronger reward signals attract stronger performers. If you can get paid 2x-10x more to do the same work, who will you go work for?

> When you start talking about a constrained resource like this, it only makes sense to move it to the only entity without profit as its primary motivation.

If the goal is to give competitors a starting point to mitigate the negative effects of a monopoly, then sure it'd be nice to have an open index that anyone can get. However I'd argue this is an ineffectual strategy because it's likely to be too little to be helpful, and just have low overall quality.

Profit is a reward signal that typically signals a customer's demand / need. When organizations like gov't lose that signal, they typically end up optimizing for some far less effective target (someone's whim, political clout) and missing what the underlying need is in reality.

Additionally, gov't lacks of a lot of software infrastructure and tend to use outdated tech / must adhere to procurement procedures that don't always yield the right set of tools.

So in addition to being unable to understand constituent needs well, and being unable to hire good people, they also have the nasty privilege of working with worse infra when they do get funding.

> The government directly running something like this can be every bit as efficient as what any private entity could do.

I hope I've illustrated that the answer is no. Also, anecdotally I've worked with gov't on behalf of a big tech company and it was very enlightening to see the structural issues keeping them from succeeding at tasks of even moderate complexity. The US Digital Corps can only do so much :(

I'm not anti-gov't though -- gov't _can_ make private entities more efficient though by busting monopolies and enabling maximum competition in the markets. Big tech is certainly due for a shakeup.

> A publicly owned asset doesn't need to be managed by a private entity. The incentive can be exactly the same incentive that the NHS and NASA operate on. It's a fun problem that you can make a career on making better that is ultimately a public good. Not everything needs to be operated with pure profits in mind.

Sure like there's open street maps for maps, there could be something like that for search indices.

But I thought we were discussing the viability of making search indexing an independent, maybe even regulated natural monopoly as a way to democratize search and keep competition improving search itself.

And I think the answer is no because search companies will find alpha from maintaining their own secondary indices and use it as a competitive advantage, and the 3rd party index will be (and if not immediately, then over time become) inferior to what the search companies use to differentiate themselves due to natural pressures.

> the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately

I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to have a great index because it feeds into its competitive advantage. If the index is a shared resource, what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it? And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?

All search companies would have to maintain secondary indices to augment the public one. There's probably some artificial structure needed to make open indexing viable.

+1 would love to read a writeup about how this was made. Very cool.

Thinking back to childhood it was all History Channel, PBS, and Cartoon Network / Nick. Would be great to see analogues to some of those :)

Thank you! That's elucidating

How is it a point against the patent if the paper was written by someone under the employment of Shazam? Isn't the point of the patent to award the innovator with the right to profit from the innovation?

Whatevs reply guy

Yeah, it's a reasonable expectation since the blog highlights it. Just figure it's worth calling out that SOTA trackers are able to deal with object disappearance well enough that when used with this it would handle things. I'd venture to say that most people doing any kind of tracking aren't relying on their segmentation process.

It looks like it’s working to me. Segmentation isn’t supposed to be used for tracking alone. If you add tracking on top, the uncertainty in the estimated mask for the white ball (which is sometimes getting confused with the wall) would be accounted for and you’d be able to track it well.

Phew, what company asked this and for what role? The people want to know.

I was just about to post that it freaked me out a little, but wasn't sure if I was going to be the only one.

> Building more housing is the best answer. It lowers the price because there is more supply. There simply aren’t enough homes in the Bay Area, NYC and many other major cities.

One problem is building more luxury housing leads to more rent-seekers / investment homes / transplants, which doesn't solve the problems the area faces (e.g. lower income families can't make it work, and in addition to it sucking for them, they staff lots of critical functions so it ends up sucking for everyone since the price of everything increases and you get a whole class of supercommuting low-income folks -- ask bay area folks about their daycare teachers).

We need more _affordable_ housing, likely gated on AGI.

If you work on a big team, collaboration is everything. Figma enables collaboration in a way that very few other tools allow. SOTA before Figma was sketch files in dropbox or emailing them back and forth.

A lot of commenters here are lamenting the practicality of modern design culture (which is often centered around figma) for smaller teams / earlier projects where collaboration may not be as much the bottleneck. The tool itself is still very useful for small team collaboration though, and for folks thinking through ideas without having to code them up.

Figma also pioneered putting complex tools into the browser. Today people take multiplayer and 60fps canvas for granted but Figma basically created the space. It was a humongous technical achievement and continues to be a very difficult thing to copy, though folks are obviously trying (e.g. Penpot).

AI conversion of components to code is WIP for all toolmakers but obviously on the roadmap. Another hard problem you're kind of trivializing here.

> why would I want to use figma when I could use a non-laggy product that can convert my designs to code?

Can you list some examples?

Thanks that was my understanding too, but I hurt the boomers with "whatevs" lol

If it makes y'all feel better my gen alpha kid will hurt my feelings in different ways and get revenge for you =_=

> I just don't like to see people breaking the civility guidelines here as it's just about one of the last places online where discourse is largely held to a a civil level for disagreements.

I seriously disagree that this breaks any sort of social contract between you and I on the internet. It was intended to be mildly dismissive but not overly rude. There's a higher standard for communicating with care at work (you should care about your coworkers), but do you really think people on the internet have time for this shit? I don't know you guy.

I was going for something between YMMW and "whatever you say." The slight tilt toward the latter was received poorly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's just how I talk. Maybe it's generational.

You're being insecure. It's not rude to disagree.

Also, there's often no perfect combo of words, there's a spectrum of options and you just pick an operating point. Transcription is a longer word than "word" so there's a tradeoff. It doesn't feel like a chasm to me.

I'm also an audio person and I understood it just fine, so whatevs.

I read it as "we can't do it now because complex reasons, but we know it's still a problem and want to do it" and that feels pretty good. Like who's supposed to set the timeline for rectifying long-lived errors in judgement? Unwinding long-lived errors generally takes time.

It's in the FAQ.

When a name has been in use as long and is as widely used as ours, the legal, technical, and financial ramifications are broad and deep. A name change effort would have a hefty price tag, would take multiple years to implement, and would have to be led almost entirely by volunteers. As a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, it is not possible to divert the majority of our funding and volunteers away from our primary mission of providing software for the public good, especially as the foundation prepares for mandatory changes that will come from the Cybersecurity Resilience Act (CRA) and other pending legislation. Because of these very real challenges, at this time it would be very difficult to implement a legal name change for The ASF.

Because of these reasons, the ASF Board has decided to prioritize changing the logo and branding and not changing the organization’s name at this time. It is important to us that we take whatever actionable steps we can now to create a more welcoming and inclusive community.

I use Nest cameras at home instead of ring because based on work at Google I expect there to be strong internal guardrails relative to Ring (also heard about their lax standards), but happy to hear anecdata from (ex-)Nest engineers about potential issues.

Google Meet uses source separation technology to denoise the audio. It's a neural net that's been trained to separate speech from non-speech and ensure that only speech is being piped through. It can even separate different speakers from one another. This technology got really good around 2021 when semi-supervised ways of training the models were developed, and is still improving :)

> while cars are ofc different i think the same learnings apply

They are very different. Unit tests and stress tests can be conducted on pure software. You can monitor them and if there are failures you can retry.

Robot software needs all the stuff you use for regular software, but then you have this huge space of counterfactuals that can only be verified using large scale simulation. How do you know the simulator is realistic? That it has a sufficient level of scenario coverage? That the simulation was even run? That the car didn't catastrophically regress in a way that will lead to a crash after 1M miles of driving (which in a scaled service will happen quite frequently)?

Oh and a fault can result in a death for Waymo, but not for Google Search. So that's kind of a major difference.

> If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process.

That's just the thing. Each release is not always safer than the last. Even ascertaining that with any reasonable level of certainty requires a lot of technology. In a company's hands alone, this "trust me bro" amounts to a ticking time bomb since companies have a tendency to trade safety for profit.

> If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.

You don't think the outcry at Boeing applies to Waymo?

A new software release has driven zero miles. You do not know what kind of performance it has -- regressions both happen and are expected with every launch.

The number of miles a release ends up driving is mostly in simulation + some human-supervised on-road testing, and may be low / influenced by the availability of resources ($$$). There are little to no regulations or 3rd party checks on the process used to clear releases.

They do not simulate every release on all X miles driven. They can't, it's super expensive, and that's to speak nothing of challenges like simulation realism or compatibility of the simulator with multiple generations of hardware that isn't backwards compatible.

They could have no deaths for years, then suddenly a whole lot after a bad software push. Recently they issued a recall because of a bug where the car could hit a telephone pole. Imagine if the software had a bug when their cars were ubiquitous on highways, slamming cars into concrete medians? Imagine if a fault could bork critical technologies like the lidar at a high rate across the fleet?

What happens to Waymo if they kill even 1 child due to a bug or lapse in model quality? I imagine many would wake up to the reality of their safety story and demand a way to audit software releases. Or would you continue to let your kid ride Waymo? This is also to say nothing of sensor failures and other ways the car can mess up.

The probability of your dying in a Waymo is not # incidents / # miles, because past performance does not guarantee future performance when it comes to new releases. It's unknown quantity L (likelihood of encountering a dangerous bug per unit time) * T (time spent in car). Without more data about L (which changes based on many factors, like the company's process for certifying releases), L*T could go from 0 to something unacceptably high really fast.

You trust the car you drive today because the parts are quality controlled and regulated. Software drivers are a very new part added to this chain of things to trust. Their quality control process is not yet publicly regulated. The reality is there needs to be an advancement in technology to ensure software quality / safety, ideally from the role of an unbiased auditor that can catch faults and ground the fleet asap, then restore public faith by ensuring gaps in the qualification processes are fixed. No such mechanism exists today.

> That is: the sensors cannot see far enough ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour. That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...

It's more of a challenge when your stopping distance is low (more problematic for trucking than it is for TaaS vehicles since trucks are so damn heavy).

I suspect some challenges are risks like tailgater collisions and high-stakes lane changes at speed, and even more problematic is just profitability (what if your cars are tied up in traffic jams, what if they don't have enough charge left to make a long round trip, etc).