skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
Hello HN!

I have a group of friends who are professional artists and they are not big fans of generative AI. I've tried my best to explain what it is and isn't and a few of them are interested in taking a more serious course on the subject.

Most of the learning material is either very technical and geared towards programmers or too vague and hand wavy to be practical to someone who wants to incorporate generative AI into their artistic workflow.

Most of them are familiar with text2img models, but ideally I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text and maybe even a high level description of what the different parts of a setup in, say, ComfyUI are doing (LoRA, VAE, CLIP, UNet models).

I admittedly have a tough time judging the technical expertise of people, but I think some of the resources I've personally found great for explaining the basics (3blue1Brown, Andrew Ngs course, ComputerPhile videos) are still too technical and impractical.

What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete?
What about performance? I wrote my thesis in OCaml and my recollection was that it had an amazing native code generating compiler that not infrequently output code that was almost as fast as C if you wrote it the right way. The story I heard about Haskell was far different at the time (admittedly decades ago).
the problem with your position is the absolutness of it to such a wide set of input parameters.

It's kinda like the folks saying Google is useless when there are clearly cases where it is useful.

In the same way LLMs have enormous value and utility, but equally there are places it is not as useful. Simply dismissing it as "mostly hype" is to miss the potential value.

For example, I've found it to be good at writing SQL queries. I can see how a human interface to a sql backend would make reading data much easier for my users.

Equally I have a well documented data schema, and lots of canonical docs for the product. I'd like to integrate this specialised knowledge with the existing SQL knowledge. In that context I'm interested in actual answers to the original question.

Is it even possible?
Yes. The sky is also blue?

However it's hard to see how being provably 2 years behind the first even in your own company in an incredibly hot area that people are doing tons of work in makes you suddenly second. By that logic I might still be in time to claim the silver for the 100m at the Paris olympics if I pop over there in the next 18 months or so.

I can see you created this account just to comment on this thread so I'm sure you have more inside information than I do given that I'm really not connected to this in any way. Enjoy your work at Google Research. I think you guys do cool stuff. It's a shame in my opinion that you choose to damage your credibility by making (and defending) such obviously false claims rather than concentrating on the genuinely innovative work you have done advancing the field.
And I think the brain, like other organs, might have its own microbial community, even if it’s a small or specialized one.
I've kicked around this idea for a restaurant for a while. Any idea what it's called (if it's still open)?
In my experience you are right - IT will always deny these requests, so you need to build the solutions in a way that avoids accessing existing DBs.

Usually it’s replacing a spreadsheet, so either the information can be manually keyed in or can be imported from various reports. Sometimes you even get into screen scraping, sometimes scheduled reports that are getting dumped to a drive and getting imported… basically any way that avoids needing to get permission from the IT team.
I wrote a Lox compiler and interpreter in OCaml a few years ago: https://github.com/gaultier/lox-ocaml

No idea how it holds up, it was my first try at a compiler, but it’s quite small. I was following the Crafting Interpreters book.
Location: Washington, USA

Remote: Yes, I am an experienced remote worker. In-office work is great, too.

Willing to relocate: I will gladly relocate to work at Apple.

Résumé/CV: https://dillonbrown.me/resume.pdf

Portfolio/Website: https://dillonbrown.me

My dream has always been to work at the company that created the Macintosh. I enjoy thinking about how we interact with computers and making designs like Apple does. I'm not interested in working anywhere else -- I have a pays-the-bills job and an insane amount of patience. I like what Apple does and see most every other tech design as a fight for second place.

Apple, get at me -- I have a music UI I think could improve upon on your work, as well as so, so many ideas. I'm happy to carry water for you until I am qualified to get coffee for your interns.

- Dillon
I'll side with RealPage on this one.

I think RealPage is right. The issue isn't that landlords are using software to help them price homes. The actual issue is the lack of housing. San Francisco banning the use of software to help landlords figure out the market value of their rentals is a bit crazy. Most landlords don't use RealPage. Therefore, if RealPage sets the price too high, it's the landlord who will lose money by having a vacant apartment. The basic money formula for a rental unit is occupancy * rental price. Both matter.

Now, if all the landlords in an entire city or community is using RealPage, then it should be illegal. That's a different story.
It just works.

Plenty of Rockchip bargains out there but how long are they supported https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/popular-rockchip-sbc-...

Meanwhile the original Pi model only just went EoL https://endoflife.date/raspberry-pi
Considering that most AI add-ons type hint code reasonably well, there no real reason not to, just for readability.

It takes a few seconds to prompt and then check it.
There's also a chance that the countries they were able to / encouraged to test in are quite hostile to LGBTQ+ people
But bacteria are incredibly adaptable
Premiere = official? Do you know how it compares to this by Cloudflare? https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun
Note that this is same desugaring for normal let

let x = y in F <===> (\x.F)(y)

just replacing function application with a different function (>>=).
> Maybe because I haven’t used languages like these in the past [...]

Yes, that definitely the case.

If you know what each function above does, including the function composition dot (.), then this is like reading English — assuming you know how to read English.
> Now, if all the landlords in an entire city or community is using RealPage, then it should be illegal.

Exactly this is the monopoly that people are worried about and why there is strong push back.
Just how much we still don’t know about the brain and its protective systems... It’s crazy to think that a major part of the brain’s anatomy was essentially hiding in plain sight for all these years.
Many institutions prohibit the installation of third-party applications, which can limit technically skilled business users. ComputeLite addresses this challenge by enabling users to run Python code directly in the browser. Unlike Excel macros, which are tied to specific operating systems and software, ComputeLite offers a truly platform-independent solution.

This is especially beneficial for students who may not own a personal laptop. They can use shared computers, such as those at school or friends’ homes, while keeping all their code, data, and packages stored in SQLite. This setup allows them to seamlessly transfer their environment between devices, ensuring flexibility and accessibility.
Luxurious 640x480 sounds suitable for the coveted retro graphics look :-)

I switched to OSX late and was not acquainted with Stuffit. It appears these .sit archives are in that format, but the "unar" utility on my system extracts only a readme file (in plain text), with the remainder being 0 byte files.

unar -version # v1.10.7

Maybe an alternative unarchiver or a previous version might work.
Very interesting. And there is still ethnic tension in that area to this day.
Do we have data on what % of rental units in San Francisco uses RealPage?

I'm a landlord myself and have never used RealPage or any software to help me price. I simply look at a few comparables, gauge the quality of my apartment vs theirs, and set a price. I can understand if some landlords don't have this skill or time and would rather let a 3rd party help them set a price.

As far as I know, RealPage is more for very large landlords that own many units. Most San Francisco landlords are mom and pop.
Mars is extremely hospitable to humans, compared to almost every other planet except Earth.

Mercury: tidal lock to Sun, heavy solar radiation and solar flares up close, complicated orbital movement, low gravity, basically no atmosphere. May be habitable underground in particular belts with reasonable temperatures.

Venus: a runaway greenhouse effect, metal-melting temperatures and colossal pressure on the surface, colossal never-clearing clouds, very strong winds, sulfur and chlorine abound in the atmosphere. Could be habitable using artificial islands floating in the upper atmosphere where the temperature and pressure are comfortable. At least the gravity is close to that on Earth.

Jupiter is not habitable by itself, just due to the very strong gravity. Various moons of Jupiter are all pretty cold (though some have liquid water under the surface), and at his distance from Sun, the amount of sunlight reaching them is rather small, even when reflected by the giant disc of Jupiter in the sky. It's cold, solar power in impractical, uranium and thorium are not apparently abundant.

Saturn: see Jupiter, only even farther and colder.

Neptune: see Jupiter, but even without serious moons.

Pluto / Charon binary: not even a planet. At this distance, Sun is but another star in the sky.

Compared to these, Mars, with its conditions that resemble Earths's polar regions over large swaths of the surface, acceptable distance from Sun, serious amounts of water (as ice), acceptable gravity, acceptable amounts of sunlight, and relative closeness to Earth looks not that bad at all, and basically the only practical candidate for an autonomous, self-sufficient world.
Basically nothing here is specific to software. You can talk about a piece of writing exactly the same way. Even the part about patching; lots of books have revisions.

I don't really see the point of focusing on software in particular before answering the general question. It's not being used to bring any special insight, and to my eye it's a false narrowing that makes it harder to answer.

> What this means of course is that programs are eternal unchanging things. We don't create programs as much as discover them.

This is a hell of a claim to pull out of nowhere.

I disagree that sentence 1 implies sentence 2.

And calling it a "fact" in the next sentence is bold!
Yes, test@bonbook.co is not valid for booking. And private beta requires onboarding.

The inbox simulator provides high-level functionality of the beta without access.
They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons that don't actually look any better, added some realtime shadows that don't fit with the style of the game, and called it a "Warcraft 3 2.0".

Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.

I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.
Location: Kenya

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to long/short-term relocation for key projects

Technologies: Figma, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, JavaScript, React, Webflow, Framer

Résumé/CV: [Available on Request]

Email: uiwithux@gmail.com

I run a UI/UX studio agency, Presentra.com offering unlimited design and Webflow/Framer dev subscription services. I also design custom objects, including but not limited to PFP avatars. Open to collaborating on exciting projects!
"AI Inside" Opens New Markets for Vertical SaaS (Part 2)
"In this post, we (a16z) will look at how AI will open new markets previously deemed too “small” to support a large VSaaS company. By increasing LTV (Life Time Value) per customer (through replacing labor with software) and reducing CAC (through leveraging AI-driven sales and marketing tools), we believe AI will open a plethora of new markets. Namely, the long tail of niche industries you were likely not thinking of before this post: chiropractors, dry-cleaning and laundry services, veterinary services, and more."
And it makes me wonder how much we’re still missing or overlooking in the microbial landscape of our own bodies.
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy
> Modern games also tend to be better at not needing new players to refer to the rulebook as they used to

I wonder if those new players have thousands of sessions of play under their belt or if they are truly new players or with only a few games of experience.

I don't listen much to the explanation of a new game because there are usually too many rules to remember, they resemble parts of some other games (like learning Python when you know Ruby) and I ask questions when I'm playing and (sorry if somebody feels bad about this:) these are not chess or go or backgammon, I'm not expected to study to become good and play thousands of games of them, they are all casual games to me.

All I need to have a decent first game and not score last is identifying a way to score points and play along that line. If I play that game again I will do better (maybe.) If I don't play it anymore it doesn't matter if I invested my attention into its rules.
this sounds like IBM
Location: Hyderabad, India
Remote: Yes, 8+ years of remote experience

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, React, Postgres, Node.js, Java, Dataflow, Go language, BigQuery, BigTable, Terraform

Résumé/CV: Available on request

Email: hi [at] vramana [dot] dev

Website: https://blog.vramana.com

Staff Software engineer (8+ yoe). I have experience lead multiple teams and delivering complex projects on time. I can help with hiring and growing engineers. I have a deep passion for performance engineering work.
This is a much deeper question that just software, but any thing given a label and treated singularly.
like other game companies (cough Nintendo) their old library is viewed as direct competition with their current set of games/subscription products. also wotmrth remembering that Blizzard is now a Microsoft property.
A way to get to the PDF link
Thanks for the idea! I just made that feature!
Happy BonBook could help. Thanks for the glowing recommendation
> Irmak believes we should start with our everyday notions. When we talk about software, these are the kinds of things we generally believe about it. The way we talk about software, we being the everyday folk, should inform our theory as to what kind of thing software is

While this view is often intuitively persuasive and reasonable, I think we should be careful with it. While you could argue that social constructs are by definition constructed by the beliefs of everyday folk, sometimes our everyday beliefs really do turn out to be fundamentally incoherent. In other words I believe that ontological error theories can be correct and/or persuasive.

In any case, people interested in this might enjoy reading the SEP page on computer science, which includes a section on the software/hardware distinction and the ontology of software more generally: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/
It would probably be best if we didn't stray too far from the original topic at hand which is prescription drugs that affect various addictions and why they do so.
Let's take that further: you wouldn't want to use your code above either, because it would be impossible to tell why the parser failed. Which is going to be really frustrating once it fails. And if it doesn't fail the first version is fine.
Had similar thoughts, but in the end decided that having the option of playing some of my favourite games from childhood was worth more to me than any spite I have towards Blizzard.

They have shown themselves to be bad curators of their own catalogue, so I bought a copy to avoid having issues during some possible future point when I just want to experience some nostalgia.
Agreed. The main draw of OCaml is that it isn't pure like Haskell. Haskell's purity is really what makes it weird (and great).
The code for the distributed search cluster is not yet stable enough to be published, but it will be released as open-source as well.

As for shared storage, do you mean something like NAS or, rather Amazon S3?
Cloud-native support of object storage and separating storage and compute is on our roadmap. Challenges will be maintaining latency and the need for more sophisticated caching.
I'd be happy with a new mini even every third generation. My 12 mini is still great except for the battery life (even after getting a new battery less than a year ago).
The entire stack down to silicon exploded multiplied by 3 or 4 in that time.

Vectorization, more cache levels, branch prediction, multiple cores and processors, gpu, virtual machines, (operating systems, but they didn't change much, I only let the placeholder for the layer), containers, but all that in the cloud, distributed databases, frameworks written in a language that need to be compiled to a language that is actually implemented by a web browser in the client (we are far better on compatibility between browsers, but much libraries or practices keep stuck in the past).

I haven't touched shift in practices that make it far worse.

That make it more unreasonable.
minor nitpick, I think you meant arity. If it's a typo sorry for the nitpick if you had only ever heard it spoken out loud before: arity is the number of parameters (in the context of functions), parity is whether a number is even or odd
A race suggests the presence of at least two participants that are running at the same time. As of now, I only see one contender with any chance to make it to the start line.

Maybe in 30-50 years there will be a race to build and sustain Mars bases, and attain some control of the territory there.
I mean, the paper you linked below describes the situation fairly well. We know the current semiclassical understanding of gravity is incomplete, but near the event horizon of black holes, QFT+GR are sufficient to model the physics. It's only at the Planck level that the math stops working, due to UV divergence. And under QFT+GR, the math shows that black holes can form, that objects can pass the event horizon from their perspective, and the black hole will evaporate later. Not much has changed since the 70's there.

Now, it's entirely possible that a complete theory of quantum gravity comes out and upends our understanding of what happens everywhere in space, including at event horizons, and perhaps it's the case that black holes are never formed. But to date, a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity has yet to be created. But just saying "assume black holes don't form, and all contradictions go away" by itself doesn't really help, because that just says get rid of GR and/or QFT, but doesn't say what to replace them with, beyond "something that doesn't produce black holes". Which, sure, would be great, but the devil is in the details. The more important thing to most people in the field is solving the UV divergence problem anyway, which will answer in detail questions about Planck level effects. Whatever comes out of that will (hopefully) unfold naturally into the answer to the information paradox too.

As far as the final question, nobody knows. That said, care is needed when describing events from different perspectives. The principle of relativity isn't that all observers agree on all events. It's that physics is the same in all frames of reference. Which is nuanced: what does one mean by "the physics"? In essence, it's a layman's statement of Noether's Theorem, relating symmetries and conservation laws. So, depending on quantum gravity's symmetries, different observers could see wildly different sequences of events, but they would agree that the conserved properties of the theory were indeed conserved. But until such a theory exists, it's anybody's guess as to what those symmetries actually are.
> People aren't using static ips for authentication purposes

Lol. Of course they do. In fact, it's the only viable way to authenticate servers in Current Year. Unlike ssh host keys, of which literally nobody on this planet takes seriously, or https certificates which is just make-work security theater.
Yep, this wouldn’t necessarily apply to everyone — especially those who balance multiple roles
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TL;DR: JAX (the GPU-accelerated Python ML framework)

Pretty cool to see applications of all this good stuff developed for ML in other areas! I guess a side effect is that the calculations should now be differentiable and you could optimize various parameters using gradient descent if you wanted. You could even use it as a component of a neural net and backpropagate gradients through it.

Also it's not clear if they used GPUs but they probably could for an even better speedup in a scenario with large batches of calculations.
Great essay, just read it
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Honest question by someone who is not familiar with this space: what prevents a well-resourced by determined civilian team from beating them? Like, yes, this is rocket science…but it's rocket science done by a team of college students. Surely there are other groups interested in this kind of thing? Does the government step in at some point and go "that's enough" when you try to do significantly better?