HN user

wolfd

370 karma
Posts2
Comments64
View on HN
Steam Frame 8 months ago

I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.

Still hoping that you’re right, though.

I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.

International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.

A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.

The gates are extremely fast, and you don’t need to wait at all when you tap your card. In practice, this ends up being a pretty big deal for the number of passengers going through some of those gates. The whole experience is noticeably faster than any other ticket gate I’ve been through.

I’m not sure if you’re intending to leave a negative or positive remark, or just a brief history, but the fact that people are still managing to squeeze better performance into linkers is very encouraging to me.

A major issue with motion interpolation is that it can’t be perfect, and is often far from it. The implementation on many TVs is jarring, you’ll see super-smooth motion while an object is moving a slow or medium speed, but as soon as the patch of pixels that it’s tracking goes really fast, it assumes the patches are distinct, and the motion will be juddery. Individual objects switching from high-framerate to low in the span of a half-second is quite noticeable to my eyes, but I admit that most people around me don’t seem to care.

Maybe one day the real-time implementation will be good enough, but I find that it’s shockingly bad most of the time.

I would be _shocked_ if Zuck wasn't thinking 24/7 about how to capitalize on LLMs. I'm sure there are a thousand ideas (maybe even a few good ones?) being thrown around Meta at how to use LLMs to beat Google/Microsoft+OpenAI at the "search buddy" game.

The implementation as it stands is actually easier the way they do it. They replace the image by scaling Rick to the image size. That means that they can still automatically put your output images in a grid without any extra code. They could have zeroed the pixels, but that could have led to confusion about if things were working or not.

It's silly and you're able to patch it out if you so desire. But most importantly, they released the model to everyone so it's way more open than OpenAI's DALL-E 2 (for better or worse). I don't think the argument that they're trying to control you really makes a lot of sense given how widely accessible this model is.

Thanks for finding those images! I threw together a page that lets you compare them via a slider. You should be able to zoom in on mobile!

https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/

The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.

I am fond of Starlark, the Python-like configuration language of Bazel. It's code, but they've removed most of the footguns that you encounter when using Python as configuration (e.g. you can't mutate global state).

I think it's a pleasant middle ground between config and code, it's definitely code, but limited.

The free market is really only able to be efficient when consumers have choice. With healthcare, choice is usually not an option (e.g. you get charged for the cost of your care even if you are unconscious when they bring you to the hospital). I wish it was that simple, but it's not. Getting policy right is a very difficult task, but I don't think we can fall back to the free market to solve that problem.

I think that the other commenter was referring to the relative complexity in JWST's unfolding/deployment. It might be possible to deploy something from Starship that doesn't need to be packed as tightly (and save on engineering costs there) and still get around the same performance.

A complicated sunshield deployment seems somewhat inevitable, personally, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong there.