rsp1984

You can start with plain language and work your way up towards the math. But it doesn't work the other way round.

The problem is that equations give the illusion of conciseness and brevity but in reality always heavily depend on context.

You give a physicist an equation of a completely unrelated field in mathematics and it will make zero sense to them because they lack the context. And vice versa. The only people who can readily read and understand your equations are those that already understand the subject and have learned all the context around the math.

Therefore it's pointless to try to start with the math when you're foreign to a field. It simply won't make any sense without the context.

Don't despair. The key to becoming proficient in advanced subjects like this one is to first try to understand the fundamentals in plain language and pictures in your mind. Ignore the equations. Ask AI to explain the topic at hand at the most fundamental level.

Once the fundamental concepts are understood, what problem is being solved and where the key difficulties are, only then the equations will start to make sense. If you start out with the math, you're making your life unnecessarily hard.

Also, not universally true but directionally true as a rule of thumb, the more equations a text contains the less likely it is that the author itself has truly grasped the subject. People who really grasp a subject can usually explain it well in plain language.

It's distribution. Guy's got a brand name now. People and investors recognize his name. It's a lot easier to find an absolute quantity N of investor money for a fraudulent but well-known name than it is for an unknown upstart.

The fraud might have a low close rate but the top of the funnel is huge. The unknown upstart can't even get meetings.

This is the classic flawed reasoning on the left. Capitalism & free markets =/= lawlessness.

A small & focused government would have more resources, not less, to function in one of its core tasks, which is enforcement of law. Environmental protection is very compatible with a small govt and free markets as long as the legal system can focus on enforcing those environmental laws.

On the other hand, in a dysfunctional bloated government (as in large parts of Europe and the US) the legal arm is overburdened and suffocated by an ever-growing body of laws and regulations whose enforcement remains out-of-reach in any realistic scenario. Add in rampant lobbyism, lawmakers who are corrupt and dumb as sh*t, and and a fast-growing subset of the population that doesn't share the values of liberal democracies (thus keeping police and courts busy) and you have the perfect breeding ground for high-level lawlessness.

And to your question: while Europe's population looks stable from the outside, an "exchange" in happening in the background. If the working man's net pay is ~ 34% of the gross pay, while at the same time, a small family can get ~3k EUR per month in govt handouts + free healthcare without anyone working, it's not exactly incentivizing high performers to stay (and yes, many are leaving and for good reason).

> you seem to suggest that The Free Market could correct our path to fascism, and that pesky human services and wanton over-regulation are what are really preventing us from reaching our final enlightened form...

Not quite. I am merely pointing out that capitalism and free markets are not the enemy and that larger, more involved governments, which the political left (to which I'd assign the author) support, are a perfect breeding ground for sleaze, corruption and nepotism. This effect btw. can be observed in all of the states in which socialism has been tried. Each and every time, without exception, citizens are fleeing from these countries into capitalist countries and it's never the other way round.

The problem with these kinds of articles is that their arguments completely break down when looking at the facts.

The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1]

At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3].

Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism.

The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence.

The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it.

[1] https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[3] https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-f...

The obvious problem with the 5% rule is that voters who don't like any of the established parties are faced with the decision between voting for something they don't like or most likely throwing away their vote.

As someone who writes algorithms for a living I can think of ~ 100 ways to resolve this bug without limiting the original intent. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with one. However the fact that this %5 rule hasn't been changed tells you everything you need to know about the legislators.

The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.

In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.

In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.

I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.

Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.

> Manus is running $5000 credit for 2000 people.

How would this work though? They give out free "credits" and then claim usage of those as ARR? That would be outright fraudulent, no?

Who is paying for those "Manus Credits"?

While I have no issues believing that the outlined strategies are effective, and I sincerely congratulate the author on his journey, there is a flip side to engineering "social normalcy" that IMO the author is missing:

Any reasonably "normal" person (anyone that's not severely autistic) will find there are people that we effortlessly connect with and many others we don't. It's the natural state.

Now in any sufficiently intelligent and psychologically OK person the act of eliciting / pushing emotional connection with people from the latter group (where there's no natural connection) should trigger a certain amount of internal disgust.

The fact that it doesn't seem to be the case with the author would indicate that he's more of an outlier. Based on his writing he does seem intelligent and psychologically OK, so there might be other factors at play. My point is that his journey might not be transferable 1:1.

Excellent, thanks. So basically this is saying: "our pixels-to-token encoding is so efficient (information density in a set of "image tokens" is much higher as compared to a set of text tokens), why even bother representing text as text?"

Correct?

Can someone ELI5 to me (someone who doesn't have the time to keep up with all the latest research) what this is and why it's a big deal?

It's very hard to guess from the github and paper. For example, there is OCR in the title but the abstract and readme.md talk about context compression for LLMs, which I find confusing. Somebody care to explain the link and provide some high-level context?

Let's not forget this gem here [1].

Tells you everything you need to know about the company and its leadership.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law:

Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.

Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.

I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.

I apologize for this extremely dumb question, but how is this a "server"? As far as I'm aware Blender is a local app. It can run without an internet connection. If an LLM wants to call into it, it needs to call its local python API.

Is this just unlucky naming or am I missing a critical piece?

A bit "off topic" but this is called AMA, so why not:

To which degree do you see your own profession (law practice) changing with AI? As an outsider it looks like most of the legwork, research work or basically anything a non-senior attorney would spend their time on could soon be done by LLMs. How accurate is that impression? What future do you envision for law-related professions?

This was of course a calculated move. The founders of Glass are not that stupid. They knew the original author would complain in the loudest way possible and cause a viral outrage, which would give them a ton of eyeballs and exposure.

Engagement hacks, outrage, eyeballs, distribution, attention at all cost. Welcome to tech in 2025.

Except that no view-dependent effects that would benefit multi-view consistency are present in your splats.

So yes, it's very much like the RGB-D visualizations from 10 years ago, just with splats instead of points.

I don't know. All of this smells fishy. Clearly noone has worked 16 years on this. The whole description is odd. Made by a new HN account. The thing barely works. Sometimes you get stuck in the same question loop. Sometimes buttons are huge.

Is it possible that this is some form of clickjacking site?

Shameless plug, but if you own an iPhone pro or iPad Pro (which have Lidar integrated), you should give Dot3D a try. It does everything you describe and we made it very easy to use.

Should change title. They sold 51% at a valuation of $8.75B, so cash in is ~ $4.29B.

A bit off-topic but I'm so glad to see skeuomorphic UI make a comeback!

Check out the toggle switch in the upper right corner! I hope more designers will follow this example.

To be honest I don't understand why this is needed. All the leading AI models can already write code that interfaces perfectly with well-known APIs, and for the niche-APIs I can supply the docs of that API and the model will understand.

So all that's needed are API docs. Or what am I missing?

You're correct. The logarithm produces what's essentially a cross product matrix, 0 on the diagonal and symmetric off-diagonal. The off-diag elements are the 3-vector I was talking about. Thanks for pointing that out.

If you take the Matrix logarithm of an SO(3) (3x3 rotation matrix) you get a 3-vector that represents the axis of rotation, scaled by the rotation amount (in radians). This is also a cheap operation using the inverse Rodrigues formula [1].

The 3-vector is not a bijective representation (starts repeating after length == 2*pi) but otherwise is the most elegant of them all, IMO. No need for rotors or quaternions. Plus you can simply use Rodrigues to get a rotation matrix back.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigues%27_rotation_formula

Always telling this whenever the topic of Kalman Filters come up:

If you're learning the Kalman Filter in isolation, you're kind of learning it backwards and missing out on huge "aha" moments that the surrounding theory can unlock.

To truly understand the Kalman Filter, you need to study Least Squares (aka linear regression), then recursive Least Squares, then the Information Filter (which is a different formulation of the KF). Then you'll realize the KF is just recursive Least Squares reformulated in a way to prioritize efficiency in the update step.

This PDF gives a concise overview:

[1] http://ais.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/teaching/ws13/mapping/...

Agree 100%