Hacker News: redredrobot

New comment by redredrobot in "Robinhood lays off 23% of staff"

redredrobot — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 21:59:30 +0000

Are you complaining that when they cut their pay from 400k to 32k that wasn’t enough? Or are you complaining that they didn’t cut their 32k salaries down further?

New comment by redredrobot in "Give up GitHub: The time has come"

redredrobot — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 03:21:29 +0000

They can both be true. It's can be easy to make the switch and still difficult to convince people to do it if the alternatives are simply crappier.

New comment by redredrobot in "Cold Showers"

redredrobot — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 03:17:31 +0000

The argument is - engineers are expensive so why pay for the expertise to setup and run machines? There's just so many better things for your company to be spending the money on.

New comment by redredrobot in "15.ai"

redredrobot — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:47:21 +0000

I think there are a bunch of people who consider this work unethical or at least deeply in the grey. The negativity isn't that surprising

New comment by redredrobot in "15.ai"

redredrobot — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:46:10 +0000

If they are used in a tool that lets you generate someone's likeness as part of user-specified new content, yes. But unlike 15.ai that isn't their core purpose and no such tool exists.

New comment by redredrobot in "15.ai"

redredrobot — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:38:14 +0000

I would imagine it will end with a similar outcome to video game likenesses - a person owns their likeness and you can't create products that includes their likeness without their consent.

New comment by redredrobot in "15.ai"

redredrobot — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:32:06 +0000

You're right about the compute part being wrong. I never said it wasn't legal, just that they took someone else's work to train it. I would hope that voice synthesis is illegal without permission from the voice's owner, but I imagine it is untested so far.

But it's not just about the popup - it 's more that when your work is fundamentally about using reusing someone else's character, it feels pretty hypocritical to be so focused on making sure you get credit.

New comment by redredrobot in "15.ai"

redredrobot — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 01:50:21 +0000

The author took someone else's IP as training data, trained a model on someone else's compute, and then gets extremely bent out of shape when others use the model without crediting them?

New comment by redredrobot in "Coinbase employees petition to remove execs"

redredrobot — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 07:06:36 +0000

I don't see how this can possibly go anywhere if employees aren't willing to put their names on it.

New comment by redredrobot in "I killed my startup"

redredrobot — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 06:39:15 +0000

Here is a 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos that I like where he talks about why he created Amazon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM. He describes a purely logical explanation of seeing data about internet growth and identifying books as being a uniquely good product to sell on the internet.

Which is not to say he wasn't "willing to dedicate [himself] entirely to solving the problem", but I think it agrees with your take about finding market opportunities rather than following a passion.

New comment by redredrobot in "I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)"

redredrobot — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 06:04:59 +0000

You're pretty quick to act like there is a lot of blame to be allocated, but GTA 5 is arguably the most successful game in history. With games that truly have technical problems so bad they ruin the game, people don't complain - they just don't play it.

Maybe a long load time just wasn't that important for the success of GTA.

New comment by redredrobot in "I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)"

redredrobot — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 10:22:43 +0000

You tell the interviewer you are familiar the question instead of pretending to come up with a solution on the spot. Is that not obvious to everyone?

New comment by redredrobot in "No, DALL-E doesn’t have a secret language"

redredrobot — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 21:23:26 +0000

But don't we already know that composition exists in DALL-E? Don't the points shown in the tweet indicate that some form of composition exists? The 3D renders are clearly render-like, the painting and cartoons are clearly in the appropriate style.

New comment by redredrobot in "No, DALL-E doesn’t have a secret language"

redredrobot — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 20:54:08 +0000

So his argument is that the text clearly maps to concepts in the latent space, but when composing them the results are unexpected, so it isn't language? Why isn't this better described as 'the rules of composition are unknown'?

New comment by redredrobot in "Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)"

redredrobot — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 19:38:15 +0000

Are you sure about that? I tend to think that Evernote's differentiation is the vast feature diversity. IMO old software like this often continues to succeed because it can support the long-tail of use cases in a way that newer software does not.

New comment by redredrobot in "Architecture Notes: Datasette"

redredrobot — Fri, 27 May 2022 16:58:27 +0000

Yeah - it’s probably unfair of me to say it doesn’t scale at all. But between large data and 2 extra orders of magnitudes of rows, the single SQLite file approach quickly breaks down, even if you don’t store the large content in-db.

New comment by redredrobot in "Architecture Notes: Datasette"

redredrobot — Fri, 27 May 2022 16:47:07 +0000

Datasette is pretty cool.

But AFAICT, it just doesn’t scale whatsoever. That SQLite db is both the dataset index and the dataset content combined, right? So you're limited by how big that SQLite db can realistically be. The docs say "share data of any shape or any size", but AFAICT it can't handle large datasets containing large unstructured data like images and video and multi-billion data point datasets are hard to store in a single machine/file.

Not really a criticism, but more wondering if there are scale optimizations in Datasette I'm not aware of since the docs do say any shape or size.

New comment by redredrobot in "Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession"

redredrobot — Wed, 25 May 2022 00:45:43 +0000

Completely untrue. Just finished up my interview process and my experience was that comp is higher than ever at the strong FANGs (I.e not Netflix). Microsoft and Amazon just massively bumped their comp maximums. Google was good as ever. Pre-ipos cash comp is still very strong although they are currently relying on previous stock valuations so the comp isn’t as good as they claim right now

New comment by redredrobot in "Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold"

redredrobot — Sun, 15 May 2022 19:07:52 +0000

I actually think it's probably pretty simple underneath the facade - Musk offered to buy Twitter for a lot of money. The market tanked and Musk doesn't want to pay that price any more. He thinks he can strong-arm Twitter and either not go through with the purchase or force them to accept a lower price. The law does not support this, but Musk has a history of being unbothered by the law and there are examples (not Musk) where this tactic has worked to reduce the purchase price by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Everything else is just window dressing.

New comment by redredrobot in "Ask HN: Food Addiction"

redredrobot — Sat, 14 May 2022 19:21:04 +0000

Did you actual address your addictions or did you just fill that hole with something new and so moderation became easy? I would suggest stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on the underlying problem that is driving your addictions, whether that is unhappiness or persistent habit triggers or whatever it might be. If you "quit food" will you just be writing this same post next year but with a new addiction?

More concretely:

- Identify why you need an "escape valve". Understand that having an escape valve that dominates your life negatively is the problem, not the shape that valve takes

- Identify the triggers that push you to the escape valve. Both the long-term triggers (for example, it could be being stressed or unhappy) and the immediate habit triggers (for example, it could be seeing paraphernalia or being extremely hungry). Try to reduce the long-term triggers. Try to develop new habits around the immediate triggers (trigger still exists, but habit response is something you want to do). Being aware of your habit loop is IMO important for improving how you react to triggers (therapy can be really helpful here)