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melbourne_mat

499 karma · joined October 15, 2012

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melbourne_mat··on Safer roundabouts are replacing traffic signals (2023)
That is nuts!

The weirdest thing we have here (unrelated to roundabouts) is the hook turn which cars must obey at many intersections in the city:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn

melbourne_mat··on Safer roundabouts are replacing traffic signals (2023)
I live in a country where roundabouts are common. They're great for relatively low traffic intersections as you can often get through much faster than lights.

They are a liability when traffic levels are high enough - say during peak times - when one inbound direction is blocked by another.

Wondering why Americans loathe them?

melbourne_mat··on Cost of self hosting Llama-3 8B-Instruct
This is another one of those "I used this for 5 minutes and found this out" naive posts which add nothing useful.

Check out the host LLM's at home crowd. One app to look at is llama.cpp. Model compression is one of the first techniques to successfully run models on low capacity hardware.

melbourne_mat··on Can Demis Hassabis save Google?
There's an easy fix for AI transforming the output of the Internet giants into useful content for us: just block those AI apps/services. They are determined to be the interface between humans and machines because that is where you make your money.
melbourne_mat··on Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Silicon Valley is not the only place to find engineers who know what they're doing. Some of us want to stay in our home country and/or don't want to jump through the hoops that American tech companies demand.
melbourne_mat··on Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
I know AWS - and I would guess the others too - discourage hybrid by setting the egress traffic costs to extreme levels
melbourne_mat··on Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Total salary bill: $20m. 50 staff so average salary: $400k. I'd be happy with $200k USD - that's more than I get paid in my country at current exchange rates.
melbourne_mat··on Lisa Su saved AMD – Now she wants Nvidia's AI crown
She's a competent leader there's no doubt. But to say she saved AMD is just more mindless leader worship. TSMC saved AMD, because they gave AMD the ability to produce CPUs that could finally compete with Intel.
melbourne_mat··on Deep sleep may be the best defense against Alzheimer’s
Yeah I also don't sleep well. I wonder if lack of deep sleep has a causal relationship to Alzheimer's or if it's just an association?
melbourne_mat··on Align Your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
I've seen the phrase "uncanny valley" thrown around a bunch of times. Who are these people who have emotional reactions to CGI which is not quite real looking?
melbourne_mat··on Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
I can imagine AI academics are in a tough spot. However what about the existential angst the rest of us - who don't even do anything AI related on a day to day basis - are feeling? I think big changes are coming and it's not gonna be pretty.
melbourne_mat··on EA Lays Off over 200 Apex Legends Testers over Zoom Call
"we are expanding the distribution of our Apex Legends testing team"

Goodbye US employees, welcome Asian and Eastern European employees. It's definitely not about costs though (wink)

"They will be provided 60 days severance, though that won’t cover the length of many people’s contracts, sources said."

This I don't get: if you have a fixed term contract and they don't honour it surely you can get all your cash in court?

melbourne_mat··on Birdwatch, Twitter's collaborative fact checking system
How to save some cash: 1. Fire your staff, 2. outsource their work to the general public. Brilliant!

But seriously folks: Twitter is rubbish. Find something more useful to do with your time.

melbourne_mat··on MEGA65 Adventures
Saw the big, hard to exit pop-up and clicked away :-(
melbourne_mat··on Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
Funny how similar our days are! There is however the weekend for stuff like this. I assume an interested employer would be willing to allow that.
melbourne_mat··on Ask HN: What's the most stable form of digital storage?
Gdrive
melbourne_mat··on How to analyse and aggregate data from DynamoDB (2020)
The alternative - which I did 2 weeks ago at work - is to use Hive through AWS EMR. Then it's just SQL all the way instead of reinventing the wheel like this article recommends.
melbourne_mat··on OpenLGTV: Legal reverse engineering and research of LG TVs firmware
You have a clothes dryer?
melbourne_mat··on Physicists make most precise measurement of neutron’s lifetime
As a physics layman my first thought when reading that is special relativity: things happen more slowly (ie. decay) the faster something is moving. Not sure how fast the beams are moving though.
melbourne_mat··on Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow
Thanks for pointing that out - I feel dumb recommending Brave now
melbourne_mat··on Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow
Brave has ad blocking built in - you don't need extensions.
melbourne_mat··on Footage of Australian Raven Attacking a Wing Drone in Canberra, Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixYVFZnNl6s&t=1

From my son's favourite YouTube channel. These are American Ravens but probably similar to the Aussie variety behaviour wise.

melbourne_mat··on Footage of Australian Raven Attacking a Wing Drone in Canberra, Australia
It's springtime here. The birds get a bit aggressive this time of year.

https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/goodliving/posts/2017/08/m...

melbourne_mat··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
I think you're barking up the wrong tree, mate.

The story is "law enforcement and conservative government work together to bring in new laws that makes law enforcement's life easier".

I don't see how tech companies, union bosses or WA tax revenue has much to do with it.

melbourne_mat··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
The top thread which I think you're referring to mixes up the new digital surveillance laws and one state's digital quarantine phone app. I don't think anyone from Australia is going to defend the new digital surveillance laws.
melbourne_mat··on Bitcoin’s first day as El Salvador’s legal tender
There goes my Bitcoin investing brother's sanity
melbourne_mat··on Rudroid: Writing the World's worst Android Emulator in Rust
I'd like to check this out but that web site kills my mobile browser every time. What are they doing?
melbourne_mat··on Spice.ai – Open-source, time series AI for developers
Two questions:

- are they talking about prediction? I assume yes because they talk about time series but it's not explicitly stated

- how does it compare quality wise to Amazon forecast (and the other cloud vendors services)?

By the way: here's the spiel for Forecast:

"Amazon Forecast Accurate time-series forecasting service, based on the same technology used at Amazon.com, no machine learning experience required"

That makes sense and is not ambiguous.

melbourne_mat··on Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
I'm Australian. Your argument seems to be "If only the tech sector in Australia had some smart people". That's nice but I don't think that's what is going on.

Most of the general public is apathetic to this kind of thing. They just don't get worked up like Americans do about freedom. Especially in the middle of an epidemic (covid19 is now out of control in the two biggest cities).

We have a conservative government at the moment. They're interested in power for the sake of it and very much against transparency. They're certainly not going to listen to anyone's opinions about it - they'll just do it and wear what they know will be a negligible hit they take in the polls.

melbourne_mat··on Clarifications regarding arrest of climate activist
I'm angry and ready to switch. Who's the best alternative?
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