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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • By the same logic, raytracing is ancient tech that should be abandoned.

    Nice straw man argument you have there.

    I’ll restate, since my point didn’t seem to come across. All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement. A possible analogy would be automobiles in the late 60s and 90s: Just put in more cubic inches and bigger chassis! More power from more displacement does not mean more advanced. Continuing that analogy, 2.0L engines cranking out 400ft-lb and 500HP while delivering 28MPG average is advanced engineering. Right now, the software and hardware running LLMs are just MOAR cubic inches. We haven’t come up with more advanced data structures.

    These types of solutions can have a place and can produce something adjacent to the desired results. We make great use of expert systems constantly within narrow domains. Camera autofocus systems leap to mind. When “fuzzy logic” autofocus was introduced, it was a boon to photography. Another example of narrow-ish domain ML software is medical decision support software, which I developed in a previous job in the early 2000s. There was nothing advanced about most of it; the data structures used were developed in the 50s by a medical doctor from Columbia University (Larry Weed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weed). The advanced part was the computer language he also developed for quantifying medical knowledge. Any computer with enough storage, RAM, and the hardware ability to quickly traverse the data structures can be made to appear advanced when fed with enough collated data, i.e. turning data into information.

    Since I never had the chance to try it out myself, how was your neural network and LLMs reasoning back in the day? Imo that’s the most impressive part, not that it can write.

    It was slick for the time. It obviously wasn’t an LLM per se, but both were a form of LM. The OCR and auto-suggest for DOS were pretty shit-hot for x386. The two together inspried one of my huge projects in engineering school: a whole-book scanner* that removed page curl and gutter shadow, and then generated a text-under-image PDF. By training the software on a large body of varied physical books and retentively combing over the OCR output and retraining, the results approached what one would see in the modern suite that now comes with your scanner. I only achieved my results because I had unfettered use of a quad Xeon beast in the college library where I worked. That software drove the early digitization processes for this (which I also built): http://digitallib.oit.edu/digital/collection/kwl/search

    *in contrast to most book scanning at the time, which required the book to be cut apart and the pages fed into an automatically fed scanner; lots of books couldn’t be damaged like that.

    Edit: a word



  • No, no they’re not. These are just repackaged and scaled-up neural nets. Anyone remember those? The concept and good chunks of the math are over 200 years old. Hell, there was two-layer neural net software in the early 90s that ran on my x386. Specifically, Neural Network PC Tools by Russell Eberhart. The DIY implementation of OCR in that book is a great example of roll-your-own neural net. What we have today, much like most modern technology, is just lots MORE of the same. Back in the DOS days, there was even an ML application that would offer contextual suggestions for mistyped command line entries.

    Typical of Silicon Valley, they are trying to rent out old garbage and use it to replace workers and creatives.








  • My partner and I are both well into our 50s. When on land, our bed is on the floor, and we snap out of bed. We usually live on our sailboat; getting in and out of our berth is more akin to spelunking than getting out of bed.

    I (think I) understand the point you’re trying to make: this shit gets harder with some age. Do I have that correctly?

    I can’t emphasize this enough: take care of the hardware. Yoga, Pilates, weight training, cardio, core strength, stretching, attention to posture, etc. I have coworkers and friends 10 to 20 years younger than I with half the mobility, strength, and speed. And I have all kinds of issues from abusing my body in my youth. But some basic care keeps things usable.

    If anyone’s curious, here are some good starting points for keeping your mobility or restoring physical capacity lost to age:

    • “Ten Golden Exercises” by Daniel Philpot
    • Mackenzie Method physical therapy — Robin Mackenzie was a serious innovator in PT; “Bob & Brad,” the YouTube channel, are Mackenzie Method therapists
    • Yoga with Adrienne YT channel — she has some great starter videos for all kinds of mobility levels
    • any floor method Pilates that doesn’t require machines, for example YT channel “Move with Nicole”

    All that is a lot of words to say: the dreaded middle aged decline doesn’t have to be inevitable. But you do have to put in the preventative maintenance.




  • They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.

    Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.




  • Okay, I just recorded some h.265 footage with a Pixel 7a. I haven’t had a chance to pull the video into Resolve (another Blackmagic product). Using Camera 2 is intuitive* and powerful. Quick, intuitive controls for focus, exposure, and white balance locks. Easy focus and exposure, easy access to the controls I need on the fly. I didn’t see a RAW video option, but the gamut looks reasonable enough to be able to apply a LUT and still get the final effect I want. YMMV, however I think this results in video that I can use when I’m shooting in situations where I don’t want to use my bigger video camera. This is now my go-to for quick shoots and conditions when I don’t want to use the bigger, more expensive cameras.

    So, thanks OP for this post!

    *Gawd, I hate that word for software, but it fits here.


  • Halo effect warning. I own/use some other Blackmagic camera, controls, and software; they’re industrial strength. I was irrationally avoiding them for reasons I can’t even recall now. Probably some BS “Who are they? They can’t possibly be any good.” So I’m excited to try this out, but my knee jerk reaction is: FINALLY! Blackmagic’s products IMO have so much attention to things pros need, that even if this is only so-so, it could easily evolve into making Android phones a semi-proper video camera competitor to iOS ProRes.

    Yeah, that doesn’t really answer your question, but hopefully adds some context to something something cinnamon toast crunch.