lunaticlabs

2 ay öncediscuss

It’s a cool building. I got the privilege of being part of a hackathon that was run out of the building after it was no longer in use. I had a startup making a laser tag style game of assassin with cell phones, and I got to stay up all night with a bunch of college kids playing assassin in the building. Got to wander around to off limits areas and read white board graffiti from the last departing employees. It’s a the kind of office space I’ve only dreamed about working in.

lunaticlabs

6 ay öncediscuss

What is probably happening, based on my own experience inside companies doing hiring, is that we generally get flooded with CVs anytime we put up a job listing, and most of them are irrelevant. To help manage the flow of applicants, we use recruiters and HR people to filter the resumes. Since they don’t know how to evaluate engineers, inevitably they filter CVs by the somewhat arbitrary criteria that is in the job listing.

My recommendation for you, when you see a job listing, is to investigate the company and project, try and find people on the responsible teams, and see if you can network or reach out to them directly. This often will get you past the arbitrary screening that is setup, and they’re much more likely to be able to judge you on your merits and not whether you meet some arbitrary filtering goal. The first pass in hiring is always a fast rejection pass, and is rarely one that is looking for qualified people, just one that is trying to get the flow of applicants down to a manageable level.

lunaticlabs

6 ay öncediscuss

As a non-German living in Germany, the German insistence on you buying your kitchen in a rental is really really stupid, and serves no purpose. Besides the schemes listed here, where the landlord tries to sell you the previous kitchen at full price, the old renter will do it too. If they're having you take over their contract, they have some choice in who the renter is, and will often condition their acceptance of your rental offer on taking their kitchen at full price or more. If you don't want it, someone else desperate will take it. There's also a robust marketplace of second hand kitchen appliances on FB marketplace, where the tenants tried to do the same thing or just generally got stuck with taking their kitchen, and now are trying to unload appliances that don't fit the new place. In Germany, its not just fridges. It's also the stove/oven combo sometimes, the dishwasher, and the lights and lightbulbs. It's a horrible inefficient system that just makes renting a nightmare, and keeps everyone in place because of the enormous hassle of moving (the standard 90 day notice period doesn't help either. Trying to line up a new lease and old one ending without significant overlap is also next to impossible. The German rental market is broken).

lunaticlabs

7 ay öncediscuss

The big advantage of macs when it comes to GPUs isn't their direct speed, its the unified memory model. If I want to buy a GPU that has 64-128GB of addressable memory, it will cost me an enormous amount and the computer itself will be a server module for racks that is loud and not a consumer PC. You can buy a mac with a unified memory model, and even though its GPU is not on the top rankings, the fact that it can operate on your model in regular memory is what gives it its advantages.

lunaticlabs

7 ay öncediscuss

As a video game programmer, I can speak to this. For video games, we generally need geometry. Flat planes, things you can collide against, things we can reason about. Gaussian splats work as a bunch of 2D images stuck on top of each other, that in combination look correct. This is great for rendering, but makes it very very difficult/impossible to figure out whether you are inside some geometry or not, because it doesn't have any. it doesn't give you any way to reason about it as solid geometry. So in the end, you have to create the geometry that is the solid surfaces that you will collide against and move around in, and gaussian splats would be independent of that. Once you have all the geometry, its much easier to just render that.

There are tools that will generate geometry from splats, but its generally not very good, and gives messy results. Fixing the messiness is often more work than just re-doing it from scratch. This is another incredibly difficult problem that hasn't been solved particularly well.

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