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mbeavitt

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Honestly, I’ve gone back to dvd rentals! CinemaParadiso sends me as many films and boxsets as I can handle by post and it’s the same price as a standard Netflix subscription…

And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!

One thing I really admire about isomorphic and DeepMind in general is that they really try and encode human ingenuity into their models. The only reason that AlphaFold worked wasn't because they had better hardware or more money to train models - it's because they used every bit of information they had access to.

The same goes for AlphaGenome - it only takes a few hours to train the model, but it's freaking amazing what it can predict.

I really don’t understand why this social credit concept has become so widespread. It does sort of exist but not in the big government breathing down your neck kind of way.

Here’s an example - you can rent e-bikes and power banks at low cost, they are everywhere. If you don’t return an e-bike or power bank after using it, not only will that company charge you, but you’ll likely get blacklisted from renting more, even at other companies.

This is a good thing, no???

Stupid NYT 3 months ago

Haha this is cool, it reminds me of the simple.wikipedia.com alternatives to English language pages. Is there an about page linked somewhere? I’m wondering if the images are AI generated or if someone handmade all of this

Ask.com has closed 3 months ago

In 6 months we’re gonna see a HN thread: “I bought ask.com for £250k - here’s what I did with it”

These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)

Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!

Claude Opus 4.7 3 months ago

Honestly I've been doing a lot of image-related work recently and the biggest thing here for me is the 3x higher resolution images which can be submitted. This is huge for anyone working with graphs, scientific photographs, etc. The accuracy on a simple automated photograph processing pipeline I recently implemented with Opus 4.6 was about 40% which I was surprised at (simple OCR and recognition of basic features). It'll be interesting to see if 4.7 does much better.

I wonder if general purpose multimodal LLMs are beginning to eat the lunch of specific computer vision models - they are certainly easier to use.

Sizing chaos 5 months ago

Having briefly experienced weight loss drugs - and the bliss of that constant “EAT!” voice in your head just going quiet - I’m pretty convinced most humans have a genuine genetic predisposition to overeating.

And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier. Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.

Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

The funny thing I find about criticism is that you actually don’t have a choice about whether or not it affects your future actions. Criticism that I have dismissed has persistently come back to haunt me, perhaps via my subconscious.

what evidence do you have to back up this baseless claim? They openly publish their financial reports: https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports

$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.

Is it though? The algorithm you reference is meant to be a joke:

1) Write down the problem.

2) Think real hard.

3) Write down the solution.

This is not a useful algorithm in any sense, apart from that it might be thought provoking.

What's the "universal nike algorithm"? I didn't find anything on google.

You can't tease me with "Algorithm" in the title and then not actually define an algorithm... TL;DR: Read lots of widely acclaimed books that are close to the source of what you want to learn?

I can't imagine the horror of tracking down a regression and finally fixing it, only to find someone else edited another section of the codebase, ruining all my efforts.

This is fine in text documents (to an extent, obviously references to sections of text that no longer exist can happen) because different sections are not as inextricably linked to each other.

Ok but the lab has access to the unencrypted data? You haven't removed the requirement that the user needs to trust the lab with their raw genome markers. This entire operation hinges on the lab's trustworthiness, does it not?

Simulating the real world at increasingly accurate scales is not that useful, because in biology - more than any other field - our assumptions are incorrect/flawed most of the time. The most useful thing simulations allow us to do is directly test those assumptions and in these cases, the simpler the model the better. Jeremy Gunawardena wrote a great piece on this: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007...

The historical reason is that canals were originally built to facilitate horse-drawn boats, and as such there are no fences. The modern reason is that people use the canals all day, for hopping on/off houseboats and rowing training - putting up fences just for a few cows would make many people upset.

FYI, I live right next to this area and it's almost as central as you can get in Cambridge, so it's super busy - people and cyclists coming through this field all the time, including myself. There are plenty of fences around the roads and land borders of the commons, but it's just the canals that have these special uses that require a lack of fences.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/PifHtYpg1u2SfojF9

Perhaps they want to include online discussions/commentaries about their paper in the training data without including the paper itself

No, the desired behaviour is to follow a link to a github code section, e.g. https://github.com/splicebox/PsiCLASS/blob/04e2a118c1820f802... and then copy that into the editor with syntax highlighting and line numbers. I can copy it myself, but it would be nice to have a plugin to make things look nice. Additionally, it would be nice to preserve the link so that readers can jump straight to the relevant section of the codebase.