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lukeinator42

719 karma · joined November 5, 2015

My name is Lukas, and I am CTO and Co-Founder of a startup called Reverb Robotics Inc. where our goal is to bring Auditory Perception to Robotics.

I have a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science, M.Sc. in Neuroscience, and am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge. I have experience in software development and machine learning for robotics as well as other industries. You can find my contact info at https://lukasgrasse.com or feel free to drop an email to lukasgrasse@gmail.com.

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lukeinator42··on Oregon lawmakers approve money to buy an iconic waterfall listed on Redfin
Hopefully a non-profit that supports a group of monks would be motivated by more than just the bid with the highest amount of money, especially since they seem to have always allowed public access to the waterfall.
lukeinator42··on Cartesian – AI 3D Modeling for Design
I've had decent success getting Claude Opus to design models using the python cadquery library, and then I can import the step file to fusion 360 to make any changes I want afterwards.
lukeinator42··on Backprop Alternative: Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding
There is a lot of interesting research into predictive coding as an alternative means to solve the credit assignment problem that might be a more plausible model of what happens in the brain.

I really liked this paper that showed using a predictive coding learning rule leads to the exact same gradients as backprop in arbitrary networks:

Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary Computation Graphs https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/34/6/1329/110646/Predict...

lukeinator42··on Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
There's also the irony that this AI written piece criticizes how low the domains are on the tranco list when trellner.com doesn't even make the list, haha.
lukeinator42··on Unified Memory, Explained: Why Mini PCs Can Run 70B Models a Big GPU Can't
The writing style is this staccato LLM-like style that is difficult to read as it has zero flow and meaningless sentences.

Like what does the second sentence even mean? Is it even a sentence? "The roofline math, the prompt-processing catch, the NPU red herring, and the owner-measured speeds."

lukeinator42··on Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)
It's extremely feasible. English is the defacto language of most research in the EU. I spent some time in Italy during my masters degree and know lots of people who have gone on to research or university instructor jobs in various countries in the EU. You definitely have to learn at least some of the local language for day-to-day life though.
lukeinator42··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
isn't this just a by-product of seed hybridization which has enabled pretty much all of modern agriculture? A lot of testing goes into finding the two strains that combine together to create high-yield seeds, but the next generations of those seeds won't produce well.
lukeinator42··on I built a mmWave material classification radar
It's a cool technology, but for it to gain commercial interest it needs to solve a problem better than the status quo. What problem is it solving and for who? If I was to buy that mmwave radar device it would probably cost more than the $60 test, and I would want assurances that it is as accurate as existing tests.
lukeinator42··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
This happened to me on a paper I submitted recently where it was clear the reviewers used AI. Revising a paper based on LLM review is also exhausting, haha.
lukeinator42··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
Just because the US sanctions a country, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to as well. As a Canadian we traded with Cuba even when the US had an embargo on them.
lukeinator42··on Midjourney Medical
I think the scanner outputs petabytes of raw data that then get processed down into images, so you would only need to store an image per slice ideally, kinda like MRI DICOM files.
lukeinator42··on New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater
This would be great for other use cases too like climbing bolts and anchors in coastal areas. Lots of areas are switching to titanium glue-ins which are expensive, but I wonder if this could enable more affordable option. A climber recently died in Greece after multiple bolts failed: https://gripped.com/news/rock-climber-dies-in-kalymnos-after...
lukeinator42··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
The other concerning aspect of this leak is the fact that the list was shared with a group of separatists, and the data on the list is basically everything you need to fraudulently sign someone up for the separatist referendum petition. Some separatists are claiming that certain ridings have had 92.9% of eligible voters sign the petition which is highly dubious: https://x.com/RiseOfAlberta/status/2049668987307303389.

Elections Alberta has now said they are going to check for this: "Verification after today’s date will include determining if any of the seeded names from the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors are contained in any incoming petition." https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...

lukeinator42··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
nope, nike vaporflys are super popular. There are usually limits on stack height for many marathons though.
lukeinator42··on Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
lukeinator42··on Artemis II Looking Back at Earth
If they didn't do that people would probably be commenting that its fake or AI.
lukeinator42··on Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths
A Baofeng UV-5R cannot receive shortwave, it's in the VHF/UHF range for receive/transmit and can receive commercial FM broadcast.
lukeinator42··on Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
A good analogy for equal temperament might be the Gregorian calendar, as a year does not evenly divide perfectly into 365 days. So in order to compensate for that we adjust the calendar by a leap year every so often to make the calendar more accurate in the longer term. That's kinda similar to how every note is a little off in equal temperament so that at the larger scale of being able to play all intervals works out.
lukeinator42··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
it's still up for me
lukeinator42··on Canadians promised to boycott travel to US. They meant it
No, they mean we actually clear US customs in Canada as non-US citizens.
lukeinator42··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
Same, I haven't been able to get gemini or claude to tell me to walk a single time and I've even tried changing the distance in the prompt, etc.
lukeinator42··on Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality
It's a within-subject design and they literally did a power analysis in the paper. This is not absurdly low n.
lukeinator42··on The Sling: Humanity's Forgotten Power
I have a couple slings my cousin brought back from Tibet, and a few years ago when I was in Peru I brought some back from there as well (they're called 'huaraca' in Quechua I think). I find it interesting that many cultures used them historically but it never became a sport like archery, javelin, etc., did.

They're very lightweight and are definitely an underrated backpacking tool for keeping marmots at bay when they're attacking your tents and gear, haha.

lukeinator42··on GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
I was also wondering this, and in one of the footnotes they say "Given that our experiment was conducted in 2025, one might wonder whether Kansas’ updated law is reflected in GPT’s training data and thus skews its decisions. We find no evidence of such contamination." when talking about a specific updated law. But how does one have 'no evidence of such contamination' without seeing the training data?
lukeinator42··on Flying Around the World in under 80 Days
I also found this blog: https://www.theastroimager.com/picoballoning/pico-ballooning.... His balloon JR14 flew for 507 days and made 6 laps of the earth which is pretty wild.
lukeinator42··on Flying Around the World in under 80 Days
This is an interesting article from a couple of days ago about tracking diy balloons long distance: https://spectrum.ieee.org/explore-stratosphere-diy-pico-ball.... Given the tracker can be built for $14 it might be worth it to test a version with just the custom hydrogen enclosure and tracker and see how far it gets.
lukeinator42··on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant
I think it's worth looking at this commentary on the study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00856. It aligns with a lot of our intuitions, but the study should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.
lukeinator42··on 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos
I mean it's not just any old foreign bank either though, in Canada the King of England is still our head of state.
lukeinator42··on Light Mode InFFFFFFlation
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
lukeinator42··on Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
It's only line-of-sight, but isn't the range 10s-100s of kilometres in open areas? Some repeaters on hills/mountains etc. could connect large areas potentially.
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