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zdyn5

281 karma · joined June 20, 2021

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zdyn5··on Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background
Nice work! Can you comment on how this differentiates from Paperclip?
zdyn5··on Kodak increases film production capacity to meet commercial, consumer demand
No, CMOS image sensor Bayer RAWs are not accurate to what we actually see. Just a few of the many things that need to be addressed to get an even “normal” looking image:

1) They’re overly green because the greens of the RGGB color filter array are more sensitive to light than the other colors. This needs to be corrected with nontrivial auto-white-balance algorithms (not only the green bias needs to be fixed but other scene-dependent factors)

2) The Bayer pattern of the color filter array creates a checkerboard color pattern that needs to be fixed with debayering/demosaicing algorithms - again nontrivial if you don’t want to create artifacts or overblur with simplistic interpolation approaches, and there are even ML algorithms that do this now.

3) Bayer RAWs are linear in photon intensity which is not accurate to how our visual system compresses the high dynamic range. Therefore, various tone mapping algorithms are required to reproduce a natural-looking tone/intensity map of the scene.

4) Small sensors can’t collect enough light and this inhererently results in noisy raw images that need to be denoised. There are a lot of different denoising approaches (including modern that are basically all ML), but care needs to be taken as this is one of the places where it’s easy to generate an overly-processed image.

There are a lot more steps that happen in a typical image processing pipeline, while yes can be tuned in non-ideal ways to produce overly-processed-feeling images, but are at the end of the day necessary if you don’t want something that looks like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7

zdyn5··on How AI Could Break the Career Ladder
Can’t this cynical take be used to nullify any and all journalism? I get the need to be suspicious generally but this comment doesn’t add to the conversation in any substantive manner. At least give us some take on how the author and her content would be likely biased given this commercial influence.
zdyn5··on Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
Sorry I had misread your line - somehow the “not” didn’t register. Can’t remove/edit my previous comment for some reason.
zdyn5··on Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
Little doubt? By tautological reasoning sure…
zdyn5··on Open-Sora does pretty good video generation on consumer GPUs
I know it’s probably using < 1000x compute of the real Sora, but “pretty good” is stretching it
zdyn5··on How Meta trains large language models at scale
H100s are far from consumer video cards
zdyn5··on On the implausibility of the Death Star's trash compactor (2002)
Not if they eject the trash above escape velocity
zdyn5··on How a Shifting AI Chip Market Will Shape Nvidia's Future
Is software that important on the inference side, assuming all the key ops are supported by the compiler? Once the model is quantized and frozen the deployment to alternative chips while somewhat cumbersome hasn’t been too challenging, at least in my experience with Qualcomm NPU deployment (trained on NVIDIA)
zdyn5··on How a Shifting AI Chip Market Will Shape Nvidia's Future
From a high-level design standpoint, wouldn’t the general-purposeness of NVIDIA’s GPUs (even if they do have some AI/LLM optimizations) put them generally at a disadvantage compared to more custom/dedicated inference designs? (Disregarding real-world issues like startup execution risks, assume competitors succeed at their engineering goals) Or is there some fundamental architectural reason why NVIDIA can/will always be highly competitive in AI inference? Is the general-purposeness of the GPU not as much of an overhead/disadvantage as it seems?

Also how critical is NVIDIA’s infiniband networking advantage when it comes to inference workloads?

zdyn5··on Building a Password Cracker in 2024
Thanks everyone for these informative answers!
zdyn5··on Building a Password Cracker in 2024
Naive question: how is brute-force cracking still a thing in real-world systems? Aren’t there time-outs/bans for guessing wrong after like 3-5 guesses? How does one get the opportunity to try millions/billions/etc of times?
zdyn5··on Meta documents show 100k children sexually harassed daily on its platforms
Yes per day, it’s still a minute percentage
zdyn5··on America lost the chestnut, its "perfect tree"
I believe it’s the Overstory?
zdyn5··on Users report iPhone 15 is overheating
Just got mine - it did run hot the first day but the next day it was fine (although I did turn off background app refresh after the first day, maybe that had something to do with it)
zdyn5··on Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
What’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.
zdyn5··on Firm regrets taking Facebook moderation work
Gotta virtue signal the regret!
zdyn5··on Meta Reports Second Quarter 2023 Results [pdf]
What are you talking about? He directly addressed it a couple times and ended his remarks on it: “Moving onto our product roadmap, I've said on a number of these calls that the two technological waves that we're riding are AI in the near term and the metaverse over the longer term.” “As our investments in AI continue, we remain fully committed to the metaverse vision as well. We've been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary. The next big thing on the Reality Labs side is the launch of our Quest 3…” Source: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q2... From the press release you linked: “Finally, for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem. “ They’re digging in even deeper, despite the incorrect superficial perception they’re done with it.
zdyn5··on Telling the Bees
Thank you for sharing this. I’m a Christian as well and have found the same peace about death. At the same time, I get stressed out easily about work and probably have an existential dread about negative reputation or “wasting my potential” - clearly my work-related identity is an idol (in Christian parlance).

I was watching “Hustle” (Adam Sandler basketball movie) yesterday and strangely enough a line he said resonated with me: “they can’t kill you if you’re already dead.” (The context in the movie was that the youngster protagonist missed his official chance of playing in the NBA by failing the combine, and thus was “dead.” He had nothing to lose when he got a random last-ditch chance to demonstrate his skills in another venue.). As a Christian we believe that our old selves have died and that we are born again in the Spirit, even while we are here on earth. This gives those who believe this the confidence to face any fear or challenge in this lifetime, as we have already died anyway, there is nothing to lose since our new lives are secure in Christ (even after a physical death process).

zdyn5··on US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles
If the rotation of the craft is simply due to a rotation of the camera, why do the clouds not also rotate? I’ve only skimmed the video but he doesn’t seems to account for this relative rotation between the craft and clouds…
zdyn5··on Why You Should Give Up on Your Dreams
Agreed here. Lots of things are outside our control over reasonably large time spans- macroeconomics, rapid tech & ecosystem disruptions, changes in your own personal life, etc. - but if there’s some underlying deeper “dream” that is flexible in how it can manifest concretely, then it can potentially be robust to these changes and what look to be initial setbacks. Perhaps the same (or similar) thing can be achieved in a different form.
zdyn5··on How Apple catches leakers: From color changes to comma placement
It’s gotta be somehow automated like that - can’t imagine any other way it would be scalable to the entire engineering base at Apple.
zdyn5··on PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]
You can verify that your Bard instance is using Palm 2 by asking “are you using the palm or palm 2 model?”
zdyn5··on Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely
Sorry to say but sweet docile 8 month old girl is EZ mode and very different from a 3 year old boy running around banging on your office door demanding your attention every 20 minutes.

Source: have 3 yo boy and 7 mo girl, even with stay at home mom to help. The girl’s presence is almost unnoticeable during work hours unless I want to see her, it’s fully under my control. The boy is a totally different story. Wouldn’t get anything done if I didn’t go to the office.

zdyn5··on Seymour Hersh – Why Substack?
Good points and I mostly agree here… important to have healthy skepticism but I still don’t think previous well-deserved recognition should be deemed irrelevant in areas where trust plays a big factor (like where where anonymous sources can’t be verified).

If there are verifiable counter-claims/evidence then that’s where the action should be.

zdyn5··on Seymour Hersh – Why Substack?
>Proof by authority? Not sure how this “proof by authority” cynicism applies here. Those events are pretty well established by now and he won a Pulitzer for breaking the story in the face of coverup… isn’t that exactly what high-quality journalism should be? And be rewarded for? There might be an unseemly bragging tone but it doesn’t make it any less true. What’s next - Einstein’s Nobels are also proof by authority?

Relevant (accurate) past recognition should be taken into account as a prior when evaluating uncertain present claims. It doesn’t mean they’re automatically right, and evidence/arguments should be evaluated on their own merit as much as possible, but in the face of opaque fog of war, are you suggesting this journalist should be taken no more seriously than some rando off the street?

zdyn5··on Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
M1 is indeed the same level as IC6 at Meta
zdyn5··on Estimating square roots in your head
Knowing the squares up to 12 isn’t that difficult to memorize and comes in handy… I imagine those who have them memorized did so in K-12 and just never forgot it.
zdyn5··on Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it
What was the scale of academic research post WW 2 compared to now? I’d imagine our research budgets are a significantly higher fraction of GDP now.
zdyn5··on Why CRT in sci fi deep space ships actualy make sense
Harder sci-fi may be more focused on the science but a big component of sci-fi as I understand it is exploration of humanity and its social dynamics in unknown/challenging environments. In which case CRT might indeed be relevant in some scenarios…
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