eloisius

This analogy is dumb. You could extend it to any novel tech that surprises people. If someone displayed CSAM on a screen, we’d say they were a predator, not gasp and say “he summoned images that appeared as real as you and me and moved as if they were alive, but behold they were but apparitions like shadows on the cave wall that disappear when the fire goes out!”

Every evidence shows that humans have a preverbal understanding of their world even before they learn language. If you've ever seen a crying baby encounter a nipple, you know what I'm talking about. We don't start with a prompt and iteratively predict tokens based on the ones we've just uttered until we stochastically output __STOP__. We don't conjure words from the void. We have higher level concepts, understanding, experience and response that are not unconscious, but do not have to make a round-trip through language.

This problem has been around in tech for at least as long as I've been here, but LLM-mania has definitely thrown water on the grease fire. The arrogant programmer/engineer type who thinks everything else in the world must be easy in comparison to their vocation. The disdain of all things outside STEM as "soft skill" stuff for IQ-inferior beings. And the one that gets me most: the utter lack of taste in anything outside tech.

You can see it in discussions here daily. Look a at the things people use to make analogies. It's like an HN cliche at this point to invoke Ansel Adams as the pinnacle of photography. Great, so the people making our cameras and shaping the platforms we encounter visual art on are only at a National-Geographic-calendar-level of photo literacy. The AI bros telling you that LLM writing can be just as good or better than human writing if you prompt it right are making the Harry Potter fanfic make sense to me.

It's like listening to someone convinced that chicken nuggets are just as good as the best chicken, which they've had at KFC, so they know. I can't wait for the Grok-generated, historically accurate Odyssey to hit the theaters before the end of the year.

I appreciate your thoughtful reply, and sorry for misreading your words as superiority complex. The straw man I thought I was responding to is the type of person who believes their inability (or unwillingness) to level with people is evidence of their Spock-like intellectual superiority, which I find juvenile and grating. The p(doom) stuff is certainly cringe though, and I'd spend a few cycles evaluating what your intention is for flashing your p(doom) around like a badge.

I have the same experience and I once found a GitHub issue about it. I don’t think it sounded like they planned to fix it anytime soon. I just added the Tailscale toggle button to my phone’s quick control panel and turn it on whenever I want to check all my syncthing nodes or something. I keep meaning to see if I can script up something with Shortcuts to make it turn back off automatically.

Or IRL bullying failed to bully the asocial tendencies out of them when they were young enough. But it looks like the day of the swirly may be upon us soon.

The overarching reason people see y’all as a group is the insufferable superiority fantasy that you walk around with, exemplified by utterances like “we can’t do the groupthink thing” or whatever the screed written on your profile is.

What would you accelerate? Is there a lot of linear algebra you could throw cuda at in Postgres?

I think they’re talking about how Huawei got their start

I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases

Some projects have fantastic documentation. Qt comes to mind. The experience of writing Qt is a pleasure because I can always jump to the doc for whatever class I'm dealing with and find what I'm looking for immediately. Also every argument type is well-linked in every signature so it's easy to follow and understand everything you're dealing with.

Earnest question: does anyone ever get fined for spam?

For the last few months I’ve gotten a handful of emails like this every time I post in the monthly who’s hiring thread. It’s always these dumb formulaic “15 years of experience doing $thing, not bad! But your resume doesn’t show that. I can help you write a resume that’s guaranteed to get a response” or promising me that clients are looking for profiles exactly like mine on their platform.

Buying it from CapitalOne like everyone else?

Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.

In Georgia they passed a law making it illegal to hand out bottles of water to people in line to vote while simultaneously reducing polling stations in certain areas to ensure long lines.

This makes is sound like everything except a narrow slice of “creative forms” should be subject to a giant efficiency optimization. I’ve never noticed instruction manuals to be hard to understand because of colorful language, so I don’t believe we need to optimize further in that regard. Why stop with language? Shouldn’t every personality outside of “creative forms” be more standardized? Sure I want to laugh at comedians, but wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to work together if everyone had a totally fungible personality?

Engineers often reduce human interaction and creativity down to computer analogs like “exchanging data,” treat work and business as life’s raison d’etre and then we wonder why every car on the road is monochrome and we’re on the umpteenth Gardian of the Avangers film.

  Location: Taiwan
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe
  Technologies: Python, Torch/PyTorch, COLMAP, OpenCV, C++, Qt
  Résumé/CV: https://zacstewart.com/resume.pdf
  Email: hnwh202609 at zacstewart dot com
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-stewart-79b2a5a6/

Looking for computer vision work. Multi-view stereo, camera calibration, SfM, scene reconstruction, 3D object triangulation, 3D multi-object tracking. Object detection, tracking, video processing. I mostly work in Python and C++, but the stack is not super important to me. I have 16 years of experience as a software engineer. I go the extra mile producing technical notes, reports, visualizations, etc. to help communicate my results. References available upon request. I'm accustomed to working with clients in US timezones. Willing to travel.

RECENT PROJECTS

Camera/Projector Calibration System

- Novel projector mapping technique for 3D, real-world interactivity

Damage detection/grading for collectable items

- 2D damage detection using smartphone camera from multiple views

- Map 2D multi-view into global 3D space for unique damage instance collation with novel camera calibration technique using differentiable rendering

- AWS pipeline to orchestrate all the ML/GPU crunching to support a mobile app

Real-time soccer markerless motion capture

- Camera calibration (20+ cameras) using COLMAP

- Calibration refinement and camera drift maintenance

- 3D object triangulation from multi-view 2D object detections

- 3D human pose reconstruction from 2D pose estimations

- 3D multi-object tracking

- Real-time pipeline (60 Hz)

Video auto-cropping to convert long-form landscape orientation videos in to vertical, short videos

- Prioritize between competing subjects in video

- Create smooth panning crop-out region for each subject

- Naturally transition focus between different subjects

What is the morally correct approach to dealing with murderers?

How do you reliably detect the bots? Instead of slowban, I would feed it something abhorrent like an archive of 4chan posts.

There’s also Ecuador who officially uses the USD as their currency.

Like I said, you're reading a lot more into what I wrote, than what I actually wrote. No one is more or less responsible for their actions on account of being Indonesian. And I've already agreed that in this case it appears not to be the result of desperate acts, but I am replying specifically on the point that "desperation is no excuse." Responsibility for most desperate situations begin way further upstream. I wonder if you hold your colleagues working at Meta to the same anti-social behavior standards, or yourself if you drive to work when taking the bus would only mean a few hours of inconvenience.

I think you read a lot into my comment that’s not there. I replied to someone who wrote “ Desperation is no excuse.”

Developed countries are rich after centuries of extracting natural resources, to the point that Europe is nearly deforested, American rivers in the rust belt used to catch on fire from chemical pollution, and we destroyed a pacific atoll with over 20 nuclear bombs.

A little rich for us to suddenly care about the coral so much that we can lecture developing countries about it. In this case, it doesn’t seem these are the acts of desperate people, but the arrogance of someone who will probably never face hardship beyond “ramen profitability” saying desperation is no excuse is astounding.

Easy to say when it’s not your child facing starvation. The long term doesn’t matter if your family isn’t going to make it another month.

If that turns out to be true I hope that there are metaphorical Japanese out there still willing to pay 30,000 yen for quality shirts while the rest of the world SHEINs out.

A project I was working on for a couple years until this spring started to turn like this when another contractor started committing AI work. There was a test literally called “test_imports.py” that, you know, tested that you could import every module of the project. I asked if we could just run `python __main__.py` to test that the imports worked, but he said no, we need this for big Claude-powered refactors to make sure nothing breaks.

Have you seen how many people form one-sided bonds with stars that don’t know they exist? Lonely people suspend disbelief to find some comfort. It’s not proof that the chatbot is indistinguishable from a human companion.

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I think the mistake here is the notion that there was a definition of intelligence. Or at least a consensus on that definition. Just because compsci nerds of the day thought the Turing test was the final threshold before “real” AI, doesn’t mean philosophers, psychologists and everyone else bought into it. And when we arrived and it turns out to be underwhelming it’s because the compsci nerds made the same mistake they always make: that their models truly encompass all the dense complexity of the real world.

The LLM fetishists really do themselves a disservice with these wild, over-the-top statements about AI capabilities. I’d be willing to bet money that giving Claude a screenshot of part of this blog post would not producing “something useful” for any reasonable interpretation of useful. This reminds me of a line from Peter Diamandis’ Abundance (basically the only thing I remember) that described Google using a “stroke of HTML” to organize the worlds information.

If the job is now being a promoter, how can you not see that it’s a low skill, low pay job anyway? There are a billion capable promoters in LCOL countries that can prompt as good as someone in the Bay. Might not be worth stressing so hard to be a promptmaxxer. Could just become a bus driver or some other skilled profession if you want to keep earning a living.