Hacker News: jamez

New comment by jamez in "Why I Stopped Arguing with People"

jamez — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:40:48 +0000

My same thought, precisely. Funny how certain expressions are now toxic telltale sign.

New comment by jamez in "OpenAI Issue with negative API balance"

jamez — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:49:56 +0000

We're in good hands! /s

New comment by jamez in "A market mystery: Why do capers come in such tiny jars?"

jamez — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:38:07 +0000

The article reads a bit parochial, with scarce mentions of market dynamics. Capers are definitely an uncommon sight in the US.

In Italy you will occasionally spot this bad boy: https://www.amazon.it/Capperi-Sotto-Sale-secchiello-1Kg/dp/B...

Also: preserve your capers in vinegar and say goodbye to their flavor. All you get is tiny vinegar capsules.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 14:49:36 +0000

No, or at least: not yet.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 22:45:37 +0000

I'm probably not the best person to elaborate on why societal anxieties arise every time our place in the universe shrinks. I guess observing reactions to copernican heliocentrism could be a good starting point. We're witnessing something similar, and while we may accept it at the individual level, the objections of the many will stir painful reactions.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 22:29:54 +0000

Well spotted. The agent does in fact assess whether or not the information it's processing is already in its vector DB. I'm still unclear if what you noticed is due to the LLM failing (Mixtral is good, but not great), or something else, but it needs fixing. Thanks for letting me know.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 21:26:52 +0000

I did! I want to switch to Mixtral-8x22B, time permitting. During the development of Stream of Consciousness I already swapped LLMs twice. This space is moving incredibly fast.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:54:00 +0000

LLM: Mixtral-8x7B text-to-image: one of the leading commercial models, whose TOS I may or may not be violating.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:48:32 +0000

The text-to-image model is an important component, but the current model in use is IMO good enough. My view for this project is that the internal monologue is more important than the output, so my wish is instead for a better open-weight LLM.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:20:39 +0000

Glad you like it! One of the things I tried to emulate is the notion of obsessions, which I believe is an important component of the creative process. It seems like Livia got obsessed with Dutch Proverbs and slowly drifted to "Dutch protest culture".

I have no control over what happens during the live streaming and I'm sure this autonomous agent could become a source of embarrassment, though I hope the few precautions I've built might be enough. :-)

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:15:09 +0000

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I fully agree re: the importance of art and the absurdity of the concept which, I hope it's clear, is embedded in the spirit of this project.

On the topic of the performance and worries that something is not working: the real-time generation is currently bottlenecked by the GPU used for this project. We try to approximate human reading speed for the recorded sessions (which you can find in the archive).

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art"

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:08:57 +0000

Thanks for reporting. Fixing that pronto.

Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

jamez — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 12:43:21 +0000

Hi HN,

moved by curiosity about how to build an autonomous agent, and to explore the boundaries of machine creativity, I built a fictional entity (dubbed Livia) powered by LLMs, Multimodal models and text-to-image models to find some answers.

What happened instead is that more questions have cropped up. An important hypothesis of this project is that, by observing the train of thought and witnessing the simulated state of mind and emotional emulation surrounding it, humans could empathize with a machine. What happens when that's the case? Would people enjoy companionship from a synthetic person? Would the Art establishment ever consider a non-human author (capable of making art and interacting with other humans) an Artist?

Whatever the answers, I can't shake away the feeling that human uniqueness is being eroded and that we risk facing a crisis of meaning. Perhaps projects such as this help us demonize those fears, similarly to how sci-fi does, even though the boundary between fiction and reality is blurring.

This was a collaboration with Tibor (hn user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tiborsaas). Read our release posts on: https://jamez.it/blog/b/14f and https://tibor.szasz.hu/post/stream-of-consciousness

Hope you enjoy it as much as we had fun building it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011937

Points: 75

# Comments: 31

New comment by jamez in "Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album"

jamez — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:01:58 +0000

So great to see interest in ePaper screens. Picture frame projects specifically seem to be gathering steam. Shameless plug: I built a solar ePaper frame that displays Google Photo albums or loads pictures from an sd-card. https://jamez.it/blog/2023/05/16/version-2-of-my-solar-power...

Replace your fine-tuned text-DaVinci-003 with Mixtral

jamez — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:51:25 +0000

Article URL: https://jamez.it/blog/2024/01/04/replace-a-fine-tuned-text-davinci-003-with-mixtral-8x7b/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38867671

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: A Sign In Space – simulating a message from ET

jamez — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:09:00 +0000

Over the past few months I had the privilege to be part of a team of artists and researchers who assembled a hypothetical message from ET for A Sign in Space, a project founded and directed by media artist Daniela de Paulis.

The message was loaded on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft orbiting Mars. On May 24th it was beamed back to Earth and received by several radio telescopes during a live performance.

Since then, a community of people from all walks of life has been attempting to make sense of the message. If you enjoy the challenge, join the discord channel https://discord.com/channels/1066055437457297469/11114043296... and give it a try!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38099251

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: My solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame"

jamez — Wed, 17 May 2023 15:10:49 +0000

So far, I've shared the instructions on how to build a custom solar engine, which was the most time-consuming portion of the project. Coming up next: high level directions on how to build one from scratch.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: My solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame"

jamez — Wed, 17 May 2023 13:59:19 +0000

I did, though I appreciate the appeal of recycling a screen no longer loved.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: My solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame"

jamez — Wed, 17 May 2023 13:57:39 +0000

Just a few days ago I stumbled upon Exeger and its promising Powerfoyle material. Looks like Big E Ink is already on it: https://www.powerfoyle.com/news/exeger-and-e-ink-partner-to-... To me, the most elegant way of re-doing the frame would be to coat the entire visible surface in this material.

New comment by jamez in "Show HN: My solar-powered, ePaper digital photo frame"

jamez — Wed, 17 May 2023 13:52:21 +0000

Indeed, it doesn't! I've been splurging on UV protecting glass for my frames and I hope that will make them last longer. Other than that, I try to position the frames close to windows, but not so much that they would receive many hours of direct light. I think there's a goldilock zone there somewhere.