A former Gizmodo writer changed name to ‘Slackbot’, stayed undetected for months
/ Management didn’t pick up on the duplicate Slackbot — or its grouchy new eyebrows. a:hover]:text-black [&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-black dark:[&>a:hover]:text-gray-e9 dark:[&>a:hover]:shadow-underline-gray-63 [&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-13 dark:[&>a]:shadow-underline-gray-63″>There’s something a bit different about this Slackbot icon…
Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let’s find out
Generative models have been shown to be capable of synthesizing highly detailed and realistic images. It is natural to suspect that they implicitly learn to model some image intrinsics such as surface normals, depth, or shadows. In this paper, we present compelling evidence that generative models indeed internally produce high-quality scene intrinsic maps. We introduce […]
Open Source Motion Capture for Autonomous Drones (2023)
Introduction While the core content of my motion capture drones project is on the YouTube video, I thought I should create a blog post with some additional details and my own thoughts on the project. If you haven’t watched the video do that first, it covers all the fun stuff. [embedded content] Motivation Like most […]
Meta’s new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development
Engineer’s Codex is a publication about real-world software engineering. Meta recently released a paper called “Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta”. It’s a good look at how Big Tech is using AI internally to make development faster and software less buggy. For example, Google is using AI to speed up code […]
Forum reactions to Satoshi’s Bitcoin paper
James A. Donald: To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that […]
Show HN: Little Fixes – a spatial forum to improve your city
I walked with a mother who was pushing a stroller in the ditch. She told me that she needed to go to the store, didn’t have a car that day, and didn’t feel safe walking along the street, so she was taking the ditch, knee-high weeds and all. I observed the well-worn path she was […]
Beautiful Probability
❦ Should we expect rationality to be, on some level, simple? Should we search and hope for underlying beauty in the arts of belief and choice? Let me introduce this issue by borrowing a complaint of the late great Bayesian Master, E. T. Jaynes:1 Two medical researchers use the same treatment independently, in different hospitals. […]
Show HN: OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere
@article{liu2024okrobot, title={OK-Robot: What Really Matters in Integrating Open-Knowledge Models for Robotics}, author={Liu, Peiqi and Orru, Yaswanth and Paxton, Chris and Shafiullah, Nur Muhammad Mahi and Pinto, Lerrel}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.12202}, year={2024} }
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning
Handwriting notes in class might seem like an anachronism as smartphones and other digital technology subsume every aspect of learning across schools and universities. But a steady stream of research continues to suggest that taking notes the traditional way—with pen and paper or even stylus and tablet—is still the best way to learn, especially for […]
Mamba: The Easy Way
Oxford, UK — February 23, 2024 Today, basically any language model you can name is a Transformer model. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and GitHub’s Copilot are all powered by Transformers, to name a few. However, Transformers suffer from a fundamental flaw: they are powered by Attention, which scales quadratically with sequence length. Simply put, for […]