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peterstjohn

One thing I will say about the Yoto player is that there is an API: https://yoto.dev/api/ . You can do all sorts of things: get button presses over a MQTT queue, redirect the player to download audio from a server that _you_ host, and even dynamically update the playlist behind the scenes. Oh, and add static or animated GIFs for display on the device. It's really fun to mess around with - I created a travelogue for my daughter when I was away for a work trip a couple of months ago…
Re:What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI? on Saturday June 06, 2026 @02:27PM (#48427578)
Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)
Re:What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI? on Saturday June 06, 2026 @01:08PM (#48426891)
Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…
Re:How We Built Bluey's World on Monday August 04, 2025 @02:43PM (#44789851)
Try Hey Duggee - it's not as explicitly British-coded, but there's a ton of stuff in there if you were watching Spaced in your late teens and now find yourself a parent…
Re:Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf] on Sunday March 30, 2025 @03:58PM (#43527081)
For my sins, I didn't actually realise how great that was until quite a bit afterwards! ;)
Re:Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf] on Sunday March 30, 2025 @02:22PM (#43526308)
Ha, same here! It really helped my imposter syndrome, as I overheard a couple of guys talking about the ARM assembly they were doing on their Archimedes on the first day…and I hadn't written anything fancier than QuickBASIC at the time…
Re:How Britain got its first internet connection (2018) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:19PM (#42651839)
I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P
If you think that of Owen's output, for heaven's sake I fear for you if you ever read a Jonathan Meades article…
You would just film almost _directly_ across the river and shoot on the South Bank, one of the major brutalist outposts in London. It's lovely.
Re:Are we at peak vector database? on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:40AM (#39142482)
I no longer work there, but Lucidworks has had embedding training as a first-class feature in Fusion since January 2020 (I know because I wrapped up adding it just as COVID became a thing). We definitely saw that even with just slightly out-of-band use of language - e.g. in e-commerce, things like "RD TSHRT XS", embedding search with open (and closed) models would fall below bog-standard* BM25 lexical search. Once you trained a model, performance would kick up above lexical search…and if you combined lexical _and_ vector search, things were great.

Also, a member on our team developed an amazing RNN-based model that still today beats the pants off most embedding models when it comes to speed, and is no slouch on CPU either…

(* I'm being harsh on BM25 - it is a baseline that people often forget in vector search, but it can be a tough one to beat at times)

Re:Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling on Sunday December 17, 2023 @10:58AM (#38673678)
Well, why wouldn't they sell (license) the rights to make Transformers films (which as far as I know is just extending their existing contract with Paramount)?

They still own the underlying IP[^1], so as long as the contract is a decent one, Paramount has to deal with the actual making/distributing the film, and Hasbro just gets the money, and a toy line off the back of the film. Feels like an easier set up than taking the risk on movie-making yourself (which they did attempt with eOne for other properties, but seemingly have decided that it's probably not a good deal with them)

[1] yes, yes, it's a bit more complicated with Takara in the mix too, but you can essentially view it as a Hasbro-owned property

Re:Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @05:40PM (#37772210)
+1 to everybody that mentioned that Vespa has great vector support _and_ lexical filtering. And you likely will end up needing both.

Don't sleep on some of its newer features like multi-vector document fields, either…

Re:Do we think about vector dbs wrong? on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @07:50AM (#37390468)
That paper does a terrible job of making Lucene look useful, though. 10qps from a server with 1TB of RAM is not great (and I know Lucene HNSW can perform better than that in the real world, so I am somewhat mystified that this paper is being pushed by the community).
Re:What Is a Vector Database on Friday May 05, 2023 @12:09PM (#35831245)
It definitely depends on your use case. If you are just searching through the entire array at all times, then this is certainly an acceptable option (you could even flip it all onto a GPU too).

But when you start to require filtering or combining the vector search with a lexical search, then something like Pinecone, Vespa, Qdrant, Lucene-based options (e.g. Solr and ES) etc. become a lot more practical than you building all that functionality yourself.

Re:What Is a Vector Database on Friday May 05, 2023 @12:04PM (#35831148)
Yes! We've been running Milvus in production for about three years now, powering some customers that do have queries at that scale. It has its foibles like all of these systems (the lack of non-int id fields in the 1.x line is maddening and has required a bunch of additional engineering by us to work with our other systems), but it has held up pretty well in our experience.

(I can't speak to Milvus 2.x as we are probably not going to upgrade to that for a number of non-performance reasons)

Re:What Is a Vector Database on Friday May 05, 2023 @11:56AM (#35830997)
Are they forking Lucene or somehow getting the Lucene devs to increase that limit? Because this PR has been open for over a year now: https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/11507
Fun project, with a bit of a kicker as I see the words "Colerain Avenue" and realize it was literally across the road from me.
So just use their base model and fine-tune with a non-restrictive dataset (e.g. Databricks' Dolly 2.0 instructions)? You can get a decent LoRA fine-tune done in a day or so on consumer GPU hardware, I would imagine.

The point here is that you can use their bases in place of LLaMA and not have to jump through the hoops, so the fine-tuned models are really just there for a bit of flash…

Re:Airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @08:32AM (#35438574)
I once travelled with a 5kg vat of fondant icing on a transatlantic flight. "Yes, it looks very much like Semtex, but it's fine!" Still not exactly sure how I got away with it…
Re:Algolia Acquires Search.io on Thursday September 15, 2022 @10:05AM (#32852197)
Heh, my eyes did pop at that one, considering we've also been doing that over here since 2020 at least ;)
Re:Algolia Acquires Search.io on Thursday September 15, 2022 @09:37AM (#32851732)
It really does give you the best of both worlds - resistant to typos, handling synonyms without all the usual hand-written rules, but still able to handle direct searches like ISBNs.

(disclaimer: I work on Semantic Search at Lucidworks)

Two big reasons for Vespa over Milvus 1.x:

* Filtering

* String-based IDs

(a caveat that I haven't used Milvus 2.x recently, which does fix these issues, but brings in a bunch of other dependencies like Kafka or Pulsar)

Re:Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” synth sounds on Saturday July 09, 2022 @04:29PM (#32038995)
UTAH SAINTS! UTAH SAINTS!

;P

(It would have been more fun if we'd spent the past month with clickbait like "What is Orgone Energy, Anyway?"

Re:A gentle introduction to vector databases on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @02:21PM (#30445121)
If you control the HNSW implementation, it can definitely do pre-filtering. Vespa does it, and you can modify open source HNSW libs easily. I added pre-filtering support to an internal fork of HNSWLIB last week, for example…
Re:ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back on Saturday February 19, 2022 @06:42PM (#30401652)
It was the Gameboy version, not the C64.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGIKnn-COS4

Re:Tabletop Chocolate Factory on Saturday November 20, 2021 @11:29AM (#29289461)
It's not a lie, yes, but it does rather undermine the entire point of the machine if you have to re-temper outside of it to use a standard shaped mold.
Re:Tabletop Chocolate Factory on Saturday November 20, 2021 @11:16AM (#29289347)
The ring molds look quite awkward too…
Re:Tabletop Chocolate Factory on Saturday November 20, 2021 @09:03AM (#29288136)
Two hours is _really_ fast (normally you end up grinding for 8+ hours), so I'm curious as to what the ball mill does differently than other melangeurs.

The yield is quite low (250g) when you consider you can easily get 2kg out of a Premier Wonder machine for around $300. Yes, you'll have to temper the chocolate yourself, but these days you can do that really easily with a water bath and some cocoa butter (the 'silk' method).

Re:Can’t Get You Out of My Head [video] on Sunday February 14, 2021 @01:12PM (#26134598)
There are a few recycled interviews from The Living Dead in ep 2 for sure.
Re:Thank u, next on Monday January 07, 2019 @10:54AM (#18846147)
We both know Durham is better though ;P

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