angusturner

6 ms·

31.
by angusturner 1y ago
I would actually say that scams and financial crimes seem to be the only concrete use case of the technology at the moment. (Unless you count speculation/gambling).
32.
by angusturner 1y ago
The thing is though, once you regulate crypto then what’s the point? You are left with a highly inefficient/expensive and immutable database. Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But th
33.
by angusturner 1y ago
The thing this really hits home for me is how Apple is totally asleep at the wheel. Today I asked Siri “call the last person that texted me”, to try and respond to someone while driving. Am I surprised it couldn’t do it? Not really at this
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by angusturner 1y ago
I have been developing with MCP for a few weeks now, making some small python and javascript servers to integrate with Claude Desktop. I am yet to see a use case that wouldn't be better served with an HTTP API. I understand the need to
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by angusturner 2y ago
I mean, it seems possible that with greater absolute wealth people might tolerate greater relative inequality but like … why run the experiment? Anyway, that’s the path we are on - Piketty doesn’t hazard a guess about if/when society c
36.
by angusturner 2y ago
I personally think we should resist the temptation to separate out values from the discussion. Like, even if it was the case that some extremely high-level of inequality turned out to be "optimal" in some GDP-maximizing way, the q
37.
by angusturner 2y ago
When I was at uni I read Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and parts of his newer "Capital and Ideology" (although I never quite got through that one). The big takeaway for me was that wealth inequalit
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by angusturner 2y ago
I have no idea what you are basing this claim on, although it seems in stark contrast to the evidence provided by other commenters in this thread. AI is not a replacement for engineering expertise and deep understanding of the actual user p
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by angusturner 2y ago
Credit to the engineers that built this, but it fills me with rage that Elon has this sort of unchecked power. How long before this starts getting deployed in safety critical applications or government decision making processes? With no ove
40.
by angusturner 2y ago
I am so so sorry you have to deal with this. As an Australian I have been watching on in horror this week at the way trans persons are being demonized and oppressed in your country. I know HN is meant to be an apolitical space, but I hope t
41.
by angusturner 2y ago
I think the tools to solve the challenges of waste, environmental damage etc. already exist within the framework of capitalism. Mostly they are just unpopular and seen by many as a government overreach. 1. taxes that force corporations and
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by angusturner 2y ago
Not sure why this is down-voted so heavily. In Australia, the property market has been artificially inflated for years with favorable tax incentives that encourage investors to hoard properties and sit on them, while writing off any losses
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by angusturner 2y ago
Fascinating - thanks for the detailed reply. I can’t believe I failed to think of lighting but this makes so much sense. It’s almost like for a pure ML solution you would need a nerf (or similar) which is conditioned on the entire (dynamica
44.
by angusturner 2y ago
Can anyone familiar with 3d graphics speculate what would be required to implement this into a game engine? I'm guessing that adding physics, collision-detection etc. on top of this is non-trivial compared to using a mesh? But I feel l
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by angusturner 2y ago
Are beyond and impossible really failed? In Australia they seem quite popular. Just basing this off the fact that the supermarket section for plant based meat/dairy alternatives seems to be exploding in recent years. Also a few popular
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by angusturner 2y ago
Its worse than that. I've seen some people conflating the term "AI" with "LLM".
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by angusturner 2y ago
Great write up. The Github mirror is also quite convenient.
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by angusturner 3y ago
I would love for a non-python based deep learning framework to gain traction. My initial impression though is that the scope is very broad. Trying to be both sci-kit learn and numpy and torch seems like a recipe for doing none of these thin
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by angusturner 3y ago
One area that I would dive into (if I had more time) is "geometric deep learning". i.e) How to design models in a principled way to respect known symmetries in the data. ConvNets are the famous/obvious example for their trans
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by angusturner 3y ago
Sorry, but I cannot get past the fact that so many Americans openly refer to undocumented migrants as "illegals". What is really dystopian is focusing blame onto immigrants instead of the economic and political elite.
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by angusturner 3y ago
I think this “wisdom” is not really agreed upon, and in fact I’ve seen a few works successfully leverage synthetic data (including a cool one from Sergey Levine et al recently).
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by angusturner 3y ago
I’m an Aussie, and after living 3 months in LA I think it was the most poorly designed city I’ve ever been to for this exact reason - I felt unable to walk practically anywhere! It felt like my options were drive or taxi. And we know what L
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by angusturner 3y ago
HN still seems to value constructive criticism though, to an extent that is simply not possible on YouTube. YouTube comment section is basically a cesspool of toxic positivity now, with absolutely no informational value at all. I feel like
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by angusturner 3y ago
Anyone else think its an abuse of terminology to refer to speaker conditioning as "in-context learning" and "prompting" now? Like, using a reference encoder to condition on an unseen target speaker has been around for 4
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by angusturner 4y ago
I guess the challenge here is that the human mind is not a blank slate, and has been optimized first by billions of years of evolution. If it takes all the data on the internet (or more) to bootstrap AGI, but that system is then capable of
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by angusturner 4y ago
Largely agree with this, although I think it would be interesting to formulate in terms of: "what is the mutual information between the fMRI scan and the stimulus". i.e) is there actually more information than a few bits encoding
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Physical Limits to Computation(arxiv.org)
2 points by angusturner 4y ago|0 comments
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by angusturner 4y ago
There is a strong, well-understood connection between deep-latent variable models (e.g. VAEs, diffusion models), and compression. Many state-of-the-art compression algorithms are in fact based on generative models. But the thing is, the mod
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by angusturner 4y ago
Oh my god, I'm glad someone else noticed this because it was driving me nuts. Deeply troubling that their case hinges on such a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. I bet a proper analysis of that toy experiment would conclu
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by angusturner 4y ago
Stable diffusion (or any likelihood-based generative model) is a learned compression algorithm. It is not the "container of compressed bytes". You can use a trained generative model to compress images, by combining it with some

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