HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

montebicyclelo

no profile record

Submissions

Show HN: SmallPebble – minimalist deep learning library in <1000 lines of Python

github.com
2 points·by montebicyclelo·قبل 6 أشهر·1 comments

Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days

4 points·by montebicyclelo·قبل 6 أشهر·5 comments

comments

montebicyclelo
·قبل 10 أيام·discuss
Hmm, there's a difference between unnecessary arguments about every tiny detail, and productive arguments.

I've seen many healthy technical disagreements; often leading to new insights coming to light, assumptions being made explicit, everyone leaving with a better understanding, sometimes resulting in one party conceding, sometimes resulting in a compromise. Guess it requires a certain level of maturity / people arguing in good faith.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 11 يومًا·discuss
> Then cite them as blog posts

My point is it's still useful to have a somewhat authoritative place to cite (high quality) blog post level content. arXiv has formatting requirements and doesn't go down like random personal sites.

> a LaTeX PDF can launder epistemic status

True to a certain extent, although something people are aware of and they can judge the content themselves (hopefully).
montebicyclelo
·قبل 11 يومًا·discuss
Well, some blog posts are worth citing.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 12 يومًا·discuss
Isn't the directionality important. I.e. it is currently possible to run useful / great models locally, but on high end machines; and in a few years we will likely be able to run even better models on standard machines.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 21 يومًا·discuss
"why not alternative", would be better framed as, "here's a fun variation" — because both approaches are just playing around with technology, for fun / curiosity / exploration. Storing in the pixels is a fun approach, resulting in something Rube Goldberg-esque.
montebicyclelo
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Ever considered second hand slightly older gens? Even M1 is still great for many use cases. E.g. often corps are selling them on Ebay, in pretty good condition.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
Reminds me of this [1] HN post from 9 months ago, where the author trained a neural network to do world emulation from video recordings of their local park — you can walk around in their interactive demo [2].

I don't have access to the DeepMind demo, but from the video it looks like it takes the idea up a notch.

(I don't know the exact lineage of these ideas, but a general observation is that it's a shame that it's the norm for blog posts / indie demos to not get cited.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43798757

[2] https://madebyoll.in/posts/world_emulation_via_dnn/demo/
montebicyclelo
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
Originally wrote this in 2022 to improve my understanding of deep learning internals. Recently refreshed it, removing CuPy to keep it lighter and educational. (Plus modernized the stack, e.g. with uv and improved CI.)
montebicyclelo
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
For an example of an AI generated song that's gone viral in the last few days, getting millions of views on Spotify / Youtube, see this post from earlier today:

"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
montebicyclelo
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
Yep, it is convincing. And it seems the video is performed by a human, although I did think it could be AI. They say in the description:

> I couldn't resist putting a face to this gem.

After saying it is AI:

> How people was touched by this version of « Papoutai » by stromae made by AI, I was also touched as y’all, as an independent Artist I wanted to put my emotions and my soul on this masterpiece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ8GbwQV5zE
montebicyclelo
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
As a hobbyist, shaders is up there as one of the most fun types of programming.. Low-level / relatively simple language, often tied to a satisfying visual result. Once it clicks, it's a cool paradigm to be working in, e.g. "I am coding from the perspective of a single pixel".
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss


    bulk_send(
        generate_expiry_email(user) 
        for user in db.getUsers() 
        if is_expired(user, date.now())
    )
(...Just another flavour of syntax to look at)
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
Incorrect Pytorch gradients with Apple MPS backend...

Yep this kind of thing can happen. I found and reported incorrect gradients for Apple's Metal-backed tensorflow conv2d in 2021 [1].

(Pretty sure I've seen incorrect gradients with another Pytorch backend, but that was a few years ago and I don't seem to have raised an issue to refer to... )

One might think this class of errors would be caught by a test suite. Autodiff can be tested quite comprehensively against numerical differentiation [2]. (Although this example is from a much simpler lib than Pytorch, so I could be missing something.)

[1] https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/230

[2] https://github.com/sradc/SmallPebble/blob/2cd915c4ba72bf2d92...
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
Agreed, and its larger context window is fantastic. My workflow:

- Convert the whole codebase into a string

- Paste it into Gemini

- Ask a question

People seem to be very taken with "agentic" approaches were the model selects a few files to look at, but I've found it very effective and convenient just to give the model the whole codebase, and then have a conversation with it, get it to output code, modify a file, etc.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
At your own risk — one place is ebay sellers with a large number of positive reviews, (and not much negative), who are selling lots of the same type of MacBook pros. My assumption is they've got a bunch of corporate laptops to sell off.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
On the contrary; now might be a good time to get an M1 Max laptop. A second hand one, ex-corporate, in good condition, with 64Gb RAM, is pretty good value, compared to new laptops at the same price. It's still a fantastic CPU.
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
> nanochat is also inspired by modded-nanoGPT

Nice synergy here, the lineage is: Karpathy's nano-GPT -> Keller Jordan's modded-nanoGPT (a speedrun of training nanoGPT) -> NanoChat

modded-nanoGPT [1] is a great project, well worth checking out, it's all about massively speeding up the training of a small GPT model.

Notably it uses the author's Muon optimizer [2], rather than AdamW, (for the linear layers).

[1] https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt

[2] https://kellerjordan.github.io/posts/muon/
montebicyclelo
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
I did the same. I was sad to lose the comments, but the ads were awful and I don't particularly want someone elses ads / tracking on my hobby site. I switched to gisqus [1], which is powered by GitHub discussions, which seems to be working ok. (The site is hosted on GH pages so seems reasonable to also use GH discussions for the comments.)

[1] https://giscus.app/
montebicyclelo
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
> One of the simplest CRDT strategies is Last-Write-Wins (LWW):

> Each update gets a timestamp (physical or logical).

> When two devices write to the same field, the update with the latest timestamp wins.

Please also have a robust synced undo feature, so it's easy to undo the thing you don't want that gets written. Apps that sync often seem to be stingy about how much "undos" they store/sync (if any).
montebicyclelo
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
Yeah... Looks like can get about $1/hr for 10 small VMs, ($0.10 per VM).

So for $3000, that's 3000 hours, or 125 days, (if just wastefully leave them on all the time, instead of turning them on when needed).

Say you wanted to play around for a couple of hours, that's like.. $3.

(That's assuming there's no bonus for joining / free tier, too.)