skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Zapier-Like Automations for AI Image Processing
Hey HN! I’ve been working with AI models like Stable Diffusion and DALLE-3 for a while now and realized that building real applications with them usually requires building a multi-step image processing workflow, either to chain several models or combine AI results with basic image processing functions like cropping and resizing.

For example, you might want to take an input image, enhance lighting, upscale it, crop to square, and then add a text overlay. You can use a hosted AI model to solve some pieces of the puzzle, but ultimately you need to write your own code to glue everything together. I got pretty frustrated doing this for every project and decided to build ML Blocks.

ML Blocks lets you create custom image processing workflows that can handle end-to-end image generation or analysis pipelines using simple node-based workflows. Just connect a bunch of blocks and you can instantly deploy your entire workflow as a single API endpoint.

This initial version has around 20 blocks to play with. I will continue to add blocks as requested and I can see a possible future where this becomes like a Zapier for Image Processing, where blocks are community-contributed with a standardized API interface. I’d love to get your thoughts on this!
I dunno, AGI seems like a hard problem too.
Even if billboards are another monopoly, they creates more competition in the entire advertising market.
There have been several recent HN posts to the same effect. Here's a recent one I participated in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602025

It's not limited to ChatGPT either and seems more pervasive. Not sure what's happening
Can confirm you need to log into your Kobo account to get it going.
I'm glad to see the FCC sticking to its requirements and having a testing regime for them. Starlink's own service specifications are far below the 100/20Mbps requirements. They currently are promising 25-100Mbps down, 5-10Mbps up. In congested areas they often don't even deliver that in the evenings. [1]

I use Starlink in my rural area and am grateful for it. But hopefully the $900M will be better spent on other ISPs. A particular problem with Starlink is if it fails, there's no infrastructure left behind. The fiber installs that RDOF is paying for should outlive the companies getting the grants.

[1] https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70
> It was a death sentence 20 years ago. Now it’s indefinitely treatable for many people.

Wow. That's great to hear. 25 years ago I was in the midst of losing a close family member to multiple myeloma. I'm glad that the prognosis has improved so much since then.
There are two key effects of this decision.

The first effect is that it makes one additional general-purpose integer register unavailable for use for code. x86-64 has 16 general-purpose registers, but one of these is the stack pointer and basically can't be used for any other purpose; this would add a second reserved register for the frame pointer. This effect may cause slowdowns if the 15th register was critical for performance.

The second effect is on the ability to identify (and potentially unwind) the stack trace. With frame pointers, the pseudocode for computing a stack trace is essentially:

do
load return address, previous frame pointer from current frame pointer
print return address
move previous frame pointer into current frame pointer
until current frame pointer is invalid

Without frame pointers, the way you have to do this procedure is:

while current address has corresponding entry in unwind table:
parse unwind table entry to find a program to run
run this program on the current frame to generate return address
print return address
move return address to current address

It turns out that there is a full Turing-complete program described in the unwind tables to be able to generate a return address. This makes unwinding quite expensive, and also can create lots of security headaches if you want do something like unwind in the kernel (since the unwind table is arbitrary user code!). It can also be pretty unreliable at times, especially in cases where your program crashed due to stack smashing so that you have to expect that the data being randomly overwritten with garbage and thus horrifically inaccurate.
> Why bother using a product from a company that is notorious for failing to commit to most of their services, when you can run something which produces output that is pretty close (and maybe better) and is free to run and change and train?

Because it costs $0.02 per image instead of $1000 on a graphics card and endless buggering around to set up.
> The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

In an ideal world, we could first ban those practices, and only resort to punitive wealth/income taxes [1] if/when those measures fail to resolve the problem. The problem is regulatory/legislative capture by the wealthy. But I have doubts wealth caps would solve that - organizations such as WIPO or the BSA don't need multi-billionaire members to lobby effectively. A wealth cap would just multiply the number of shareholders.

[1] In the sense that they are intended to prevent ultra-richness, instead of merely filling government budget shortfalls from the pockets of those who can most afford it.
He's talking about the fact that those people don't need to worry about third parties accessing their files without their consent.
Totally right! Thx a lot for the feedback!
in this case what does 'solidarity' mean?

Are you personally willing to work for 1/2 or 1/3 the pay you receive, so that if you ever get laid off you have a slightly better severance package?

I am not.

I would rather get paid what the most I can/am able to negotiate, and live in a country with so many opportunities, that if I did ever get laid off, I could move to another opportunity with equally attractive pay and benefits easily.

Giving up a huge chunk of your earnings potential in order to have your severance package, should you ever need it, be slightly better doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to me.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?

I have yet to be convinced otherwise.
(1976) https://www.straightdope.com/21341329/how-to-detect-tornados...

Modern TVs, not so much. A quick glance doesn't show anyone working to make an RTLSDR tornado detector, which prolly means I just missed it. Seems like it shouldn't be too hard.
You can literally read the article- where Apple even put in a freakin picture showing which cameras are used.

And then you go on blithely accusing people telling you of refusing to participate (which is itself a logical fallacy) in a high handed, holier-than-thou manner.
No they meet the targets just fine the FCC has determined that they don't see a path for SpaceX to meet the 2025 requirements despite the overwhelming evidence that they are keeping up on satellite launches.

That's why everyone is calling it political. The FCC has their opinion and based on that they are withholding not a failure to meet contract requirements.
Why do you think it's still this way? Why hasn't somebody implemented something better? Is it too core that we can't afford any instability?

Edit: apparently it has been done, but only very recently and hasn't had a major distro ship it yet
As an individual that attended an ivy league school, this article seems absolute nonsense as to the causality of the authors inability to bridge the class barrier. My "elite education" is not the sum total of my life experience. My encounters with other people, be it other ivy league educated or high school drop out, is a learning experience and always has been. Judging them from a class perspective is simply unwise. Judge them by what they say and their actions. Are they true to their word? Are they willing to negotiate or state succinctly what their position is? These are what human interactions are about. The elite attitude that is attributed to "elite education" more likely a lack of interaction with "lower class" individuals from early in childhood.
I've given up on trying to find such goods on the web, to be honest. Instead, I've gone back to the old-fashioned method of hitting up craft fairs and the like in person.
The mendacity in your comment coupled with the glee you express in it is disturbing.

> Even for Google Podcasts which is being terminated, users who don't pay have gotten notifications for well over a year that the service was going to shutdown

Uh, no. It hasn't even been 3 months since the shutdown was announced—and I personally only learned about it a few days after the announcement by a chance conversation with someone who mentioned it in person. (This was thankfully well after I had already gotten what personal data of mine I could out of the app and migrated to another player precisely due to the lackadaisical approach user data handling by whomever is responsible for Google Podcasts. It was notable for being one of the Google services that doesn't make user data available through Google Takeout.)
Flutter Spy, a tool to reverse engineer and extract data from a Flutter app
Flutter Spy is a Bash-based command-line tool designed to provide insightful code analysis and data extraction capabilities from built Flutter apps with reverse engineering. It empowers developers, bug hunters, and security enthusiasts to explore and uncover valuable information within Flutter app binaries.
That's basically it. As a sysadmin, I supported over hundreds of Linux servers (mostly virtual) pretty much by myself. We paid the license so that if the shit hit the fan (and we really had no way of fixing it) we can call on Red Hat. At least, I could be able to tell my bosses that things were being handled.

This never happened, of course. But it's CYA.
No, you're totally right. I was mostly thinking it over myself, why in the day and age of instant cheap internet listing houses are still mostly sold through realtors through a proprietary database.

And I guess it's because they're just sooo expensive that everyone wants to be super sure to get everything right.
The "available VRAM" is the big difference. You get a lot more to use on an apple silicon machine for much cheaper than you get on an nvidia card on a $/GB basis, especially if you want to pass the 24GB threshold. You can't use NVIDIA consumer cards after that and there is a shortage of them.

The power:perf ratios seem about equal although, so it's really up to apple to release equivalently sized silicon on their desktop to really have this be a 1:1 comparison.
Money can be moved.
Won't we get the same if we train LLMs on video that has people speaking but things seen that might be related? Training data is easy to come by with cameras (although privacy concerns have to be addressed, or might prevent this from happening at all).

Surely someone has thought of this already.
I think I probably combined these programs in my head.
you can use stable diffusion on many hosted services out there (eg Replicate) for fractions of a cent. 2 cents per image is absurdly expensive, they're anchoring that on the dalle3 price, which likely won't go down because there's little incentive to do so, specially from their stakeholders/partners (shutterstock, etc)
This is important to consider when judging Tesla's engineering capability, but not when judging Elon Musk's highly optimistic promises.

Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.
Yeah, back in the 32 bit days -fomit-frame-pointer was the only optimization you could count on to really make a difference. It wasn't small either, often 10-15% speedup. No other flag on gcc would make even a full percentage difference in my testing.

The Amd64 architecture fixed the underlying problem, so this is pretty much just a holdover. I'm surprised they even enabled it by default.
It's not the economic system they're grown under, it's the geographic locations and their propensity for drought.
There was a comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HackerThemAll with neutral rating that was likely taken down by a mod action despite not violating the rules.

I am reposting it below shortly with minor stylistic changes for politeness.

“Go's SQLite drivers exhibit surprisingly poor performance. In C# I was able to conduct 2 millions of point queries per second on my laptop. And it's not the fastest language in the world.

Go is overrated. It's crudely trying to imitate what Pascal had in '80s using awkward syntax and tooling, but giving you extra CVEs for free.”

Personally, I did not expect it to be this bad…and C# SQLite drivers aren’t even something new - most of them have been written eons ago and consist of fairly standard somewhat allocatey code.

I wonder if it’s because of significant interop overhead in Go, or just fundamental language limitations and quality issues.
I once did something based on the same principle, for a (very-very light) security solution, atop a simple closed-source media appliance that could play from USB Storage.

I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree representing every possible sequence of a password of length N. Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the directory that had the non-kid-safe media files.

The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time. (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had, though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the appliance from working after an initial delay.
Bradley IFV is not on this list.
Mega encrypts everything by design. Why use corporate crap and keep up with their lying to you when you can use products that don't steal your data. I'm surprised Dropbox is still in business. At some point their fancy product name won't save them from the consequences of their lying to the customers.
A lot of folks conflate brutalist with Soviet constructivist. They do look a lot alike, but come from completely different origins.
If you click the setting to 'off' you are making the assumption that your stated desire will be honored and that there won't be another move like that in the future. The better move would be to stop using Dropbox, that way you are really sure that your files won't be accessed by unauthorized parties.

I really don't get what drives companies like Dropbox to throw their carefully built up reputation under the bus like this.
It did on January 6th, 2021.
We will pay for them (through governmental taxes) instead of the advertised products that the advertisements get us to pay for. It's a net-win for the community.
During lockdown 1.0 in the UK I wanted to get tv news from NL so as to get a second view. I’m from the UK but speak Dutch as a second language.

Anyway, I wrote a C++ (boost) command line tool to brute force MAC addresses to a popular illegal IPTV service out of Russia. The server had > 9000 channels available though I was only interested in the Dutch ones.

I’d feed the MAC address into Kodi’s Stalker Client.
Mastodon is receiving this positively, as well.

https://mas.to/tags/threads
I’m not actually ok with companies using DRM to brick public infrastructure.

The manufacturer should be put out of business.
The Second Batch of the Open Source AI Grants
All his off-cloud hardware was seized by the FBI.
Further to this, if you are running a program where compute is mainly a sparse linear solve, you are memory bandwidth limited and on modern systems like AMD Epyc you will very very likely see improved performance if you undersubscribe cores by 2x - e.g. using max 64 threads per 128 cores.
I prefer to silo my accounts. Can you ask here?
Ran into similar pathological behavior on servers with huge amounts of ram (>1 TiB). Negative dentries builds up until the kernel decides it is time to reclaim and locks up the server for >60 seconds scanning pages. :-/
As an app developer, I'm massively behind them
It’s still possible, although increasingly annoying.

I believe Firefox now points to its snap variant, which I discovered when it broke a bunch of my browser extensions. Switching to the official Mozilla PPA was easily enough, but left a bad taste; if Canonical continues down the route of silently nudging users onto snap, I’ll probably switch to Debian.

(I have no particular opinions about snap itself, other than that it seems poorly documented and doesn’t adhere to the “do what I say” philosophy when it’s secretly injected into apt.)
I mean yeah you can't pick articles ala cart from Apple News, but you can pay for one subscription to get access to a bunch of different news sources, and it presumably distributes your subscription fee (minus Apple's cut) to news sources depending on what and how many articles you actually read. Which is sort of like what you were talking about?
For light integration testing, Apache Derby has pretty good fidelity with prod SQL databases. Never benched it but perf wasn’t a problem.
Parent poster didn't submit a link talking about their work like it should be the focus of the entire world.

Release your work for scrutiny and then it will be scrutinized. If you're publicizing it then you've asked for scrutiny, and the people doing the scrutiny aren't required to be scrutinized in return.
> It was

No. It was never designed or advertised to offer "faster than fibre" connections to end users, and all along Musk and maintained it makes absolutely no sense for a person to use Starlink if they already have access to a ground-based option like fibre or cable or LTE.

> All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government

Those are wild claims.

Please post citations about how it's bleeding money or is supported by the government.
It was FTP [1]. If only he had said rsync, we wouldn't be here now /s

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Synecdoche, New York is an awe-inspiring work, but it's incredibly hard to watch and left me ruined, mentally, for days afterwards. It's obvious why it's not a popular movie -- he talks about wounds in this speech, and that movie is basically an open psychic sore. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to make a movie that's so relentlessly grim and honest.
He said it's good enough for the military but apparently not good enough for the FCC chair who Biden appointed. How is that hard to understand?
A lot of talented people try hard and end up in poverty.

Luck > any attribute (IQ, etc)
They work on me and that’s exactly the problem — that is they work at manipulating me. And that’s why I want them gone. I’d rather free up the energy I spend on trying to ignore them and put that energy into something that actually makes my life better.
Perhaps start looking at what your life seems to really demand of you. How are you being employed by those around you? As a means to their ends, or as a means to your own ends?

Rand is garbage, and I'm insulted to end up being brought anywhere near that slop in your philosophical address space. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a helplessness taught by the optimizations we structure our societies around. A capitalist, consumerist society is going to focus around training the largest portion of it's population to act as specialized cogs that can be orchestrated by someone the next layer of abstraction up in pursuit of purely profitable/profitmaking engagements.

If you change the optimizations, you change the system. You change the people that compose that system, you change the very bounds of the human experience.

Just look at how much the world changed around the pandemic. The old order of the office & commute was shattered for many. Look at how deemphasis of throwing more fossil fuels at a problem changes the direction of innovation.

You say the Riddle of Mice is ineffable by a single person. I say you're full of it, and looking at the problem wrong. It's completely effable, you just can't imagine society having a place for such a person given your priors about how the world operates. And in that, you may be right!

That does not equal the Riddle of Mice being conquered by a single person can't happen. It's just unlikely, and dhould such an extraordinary individual exist, you'd likely see them as mad.
What are the pros and cons of llamafile (used by OP) vs ollama?
Yeah. To be fair there is a stronger argument for it being enabled in fedora than an LTS release (RHEL or Ubuntu) since it has more cutting edge software that needs more frequent debugging, is less likely to be used in production where the (minor, but uneven) performance hits may matter, and has so many upstream developers using it as their daily driver.
Your joking right? Nothing apple does is preventing any of that
llamafile doesn't use docker. It's just an executable file. You download your llamafile, chmod +x it, then you ./run it.
It is possible to use Docker + llamafile though. Check out https://github.com/ajbouh/cosmos which has a pretty good Dockerfile configuration you can use.
this looks really amazing. i have a relatively old smartphone (2019) and its really surprisingly smooth and high fidently. amazing job!
Isn't that why English is usually the near the top of language difficulty rankings? I mean, your point is true, but I don't know of anyone actually confused about it.
After drinking Coke for about 32 years, I switched to Coke Zero (I have cystic fibrosis and scarring of the pancreas eventually leads to diabetes). After 14 years, drinking a regular Coke tastes like I'm drinking maple syrup.

I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)
About the "OpenPGP Schism"
> The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat.

I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike journalists, infra engineers don't have the luxury to pretend storage space is free or infinite.

When you win too much at a casino, or eat too much at a buffet, or stay too long at a McDonald's, or stay too long at the gas pump, they will all ask you to leave. There are common-sense limits to most services. Free-service tiers on internet services are not exempt. Extreme usage threatens the business model.
Well for one, human learning actually produces an understanding of the thing.
Still reboots though, doesn't it?
no, you're incorrectly assuming why i agree to copyright, despite me telling you exactly why i agree to copyright: because of the threat of legal action. not to mention that i neither agree nor disagree with your statement that copyright benefits society.

this is just a pointless exchange now.
The problem is that Netflix doesn't have enough customers whose tastes skew towards your own.

And another way of putting that is "I find it depressing how many people watch TBBT (compared to shows I prefer)"
Social Media and Adolescent Health