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mangoman

1,576 karmajoined 14 ปีที่แล้ว
https://prashanth.world

meet.hn/city/us-Durham

Socials: - linkedin.com/in/prashanth-sadasivan - github.com/prashanthsadasivan

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Submissions

Muse Image – new image generation model from Meta

ai.meta.com
2 points·by mangoman·เมื่อวานซืน·0 comments

A squeaky nail, or the wheel that sticks out

prashanth.world
17 points·by mangoman·8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·10 comments

Why did that macOS upgrade take so much space?

eclecticlight.co
3 points·by mangoman·9 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·0 comments

comments

mangoman
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss


  This release unifies those capabilities with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture built around two towers. 
  Reasoner tower: A vision-language model (VLM) ... This serves as the ‘brain’ that reasons about the world before any generation happens.
  Generator tower: Generates future observations and action sequences. This tower uses a diffusion-based process to generate physics-aware video and action outputs that are conditioned on the reasoner tower’s understanding.
This sort of approach (and others i've seen like it) always appeal to my inner engineer, trying to optimize and balance tradeoffs between model architectures and combine two things to yield the best of both worlds

But based on my understanding of the Bitter Lesson (http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html), this is precisely the wrong approach in the long term. I'm linking the actual text of the bitter lesson because I think it's misunderstood (or I just don't agree with how i've seen it used in discourse). Specifically:

  The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach. 
This architecture feels specifically like "trying to build knowlege into the agent that will help in the short term" but will plateau long term. That's not to say that there won't be some interesting learnings or things built on top of it, but I doubt that there's a lot of juice to squeeze with this kind of approach IMO.
mangoman
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I dunno, I thought that too for a while too, but there are a lot of new ideas in terms of architecture that may warrant massive training runs. Mamba and state space models are pretty interesting, but haven’t had their transformer moment yet because I haven’t really seen anyone go for broke on training it with a huge data set and model size. Even some of the more fundamental changes too like Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks or some of the ideas behind continuous back propagation haven’t really had the opportunity to be pushed to the limit. I think it’s still early days on what these models can do. And I say this as someone who bought a Mac m3 max 128gb ram, based on the hope that the on device training and inference work would eventually move locally. It’s encouraging to see the progress though and I hope it does move locally though.
mangoman
·5 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.”

I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…
mangoman
·5 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I guess what’s wrong with it? Let’s say it has read only access, new messages and calendar invites need approval. I’m not sure I understand the harm? I suppose data exfiltration, but like you could start with an allowlist approach. So the first few uses and reads take a while with allowing the ai to read stuff , but it doesn’t seem that crazy given it’s what we basically do with ai coding tools?
mangoman
·10 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I’ve never built something like ICEBlock that puts me personally in the crosshairs of not just normal hacking attempts, but also the political will of the federal government. I can’t imagine the cess pool that is Joshua’s DMs. I think OP makes all the right assessments when examining how seriously ICEBlock is taking the risks here. The Android push notifications assertion is proof enough to make me raise a pretty big question, let alone the other issues raised.

Were I building something that I would want to assert the level of privacy claims that ICEBlock asserts, I would absolutely be taking any/all reports about security extremely seriously.
mangoman
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
is there any PC that matches or comes close even to apple's trackpad?
mangoman
·7 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
>When I was in a traditional office environment I used to tell my people: If it’s 2pm and you’ve finished your work for the day and you have no meetings, just go home

I've often had this thought - what is the ultimate cost of giving someone a random friday off, not counted against any sort of vacation policy? "Hey, you've been working really hard and the team is better off for the work you've done, take a three or four day weekend". Would that really harm the bottom line? I mean, in a metrics driven environment, if we hit our metrics, then why not spend some time gearing up for the next thing by recharging?
mangoman
·13 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Github is a lot bigger than just helping developers now. Rendering CAD files, Visualizing CLU maps. Github isn't working just on improving the developer experience. They're working on improving the entire collaborative process. I love that now they're helping even government be collaborative.

Just because its not focused on code doesn't mean you can dismiss it as "some intern" project.