@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

urusan

@urusan@fosstodon.org

Java developer by day, Julia developer by night.

Amateur philosopher

Sometimes funny...

Working Dad

Controversial things about me:
Everyone: transhumanist, into AI (art)
Right-wing: polyamorous (married), agnostic atheist, leftist, working class consciousness
Leftist: corporate drone by day, loyal citizen of the US (but a serious reformer), former libertarian

I hope you can look past all that though, we people need to stick together

Lives with: Wife, T (son), and A (daughter).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

urusan, to random
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Kid: Jumps in and tries to click on an ad in a mobile game my wife is playing
Wife: Stops him This is why you aren't allowed to play this game yet. You click on ads.
Kid: What's an "ad"?
Me: It's an active attempt by someone to attack your mind.

urusan, to random
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Physics!
https://youtu.be/AL2Chc6p_Kk

urusan, to random
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Now that the cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFT bubble has definitively popped, can "crypto" go back to mainly referring to cryptography?

urusan, to random
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Yesterday I heard about a sysadmin on Fedi who got hit by over a TB of data scraping.

Last night and into today I've been getting a lot of automated spam and hearing admins talking about the spam wave.

Conclusion: that must have been THE SCRAPENING

urusan, to random
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Oh nooooooo

urusan, to random
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I've been playing around with training LoRas on 2-image datasets.

Ironically, they aren't as good as 1-image datasets. The second image causes the two to conflict with each other, which has the effect of causing substantial AI artifacts in certain parts of the generations. In my initial examples it's mostly the faces and hands, but it can appear elsewhere too.

These issues can be overcome, mostly on the user side, but it seems like it's generally more useful to have 1 or many.

urusan, to random
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I just read the Dall-E 3 paper and the TL;DR is that humans are not good at creating good training data.
https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-3.pdf

They start over and use a small amount of extra high quality human generated data to bootstrap an image captioner that produces the training data they want. Then they trained DALL-E 3 from that and it made a huge difference.
https://openai.com/dall-e-3

I'm sure open models will follow suit soon, this isn't a difficult improvement to implement.

urusan, to random
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I read a really great book a while back: The Victorian Internet. It covers the history of the telegraph up through the time that the telephone started to seriously displace it.

The transition from telegraph to telephone is interesting, but it basically grew out of seemingly unrelated developments in multiplex telegraphy.

AI is to computers as the telephone is to the telegraph.

urusan, to random
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While techno-solutionism is a problem, don't write off the importance of technology either.

For instance, my mother is alive today due to a cancer drug that was approved just months before she started being treated with it.

At one point they told her to go home and get her affairs in order, but then her oncologist got the information they needed and changed her medication just in time.

Technology makes a real difference in people's lives.

urusan, to random
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APIs are basically the set of paper forms you use to talk to a bureaucratic organization, except it's for computer programs.

urusan, to random
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Wife: Just got home from a yoga class I need to lift weights for my upper body strength.
Me: What for?
Wife: To get up the pole more easily in pole class. It's like trying to climb a fireman's pole, have you ever tried that?
Me: Oh yeah, it's basically impossible.
Wife: No it's not, I see other ladies in my class do it all the time.
Me: So, you'd say this is
Wife: Yes

...Later...
Me: So apparently is not a thing on Mastodon...YET

urusan, to random
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Ok, this is a very clever idea
https://youtube.com/shorts/lBr8ZU3rJBM

They made a temporary rocket stove out of snow.

urusan, to random
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What little things do you do for quality of life that you are pretty sure many other people are not doing?

The example that got me thinking of this is that I go out of my way to name directories, functions, and commands so they have little to no overlapping prefix, so I can autocomplete with minimal typing: instead of "downloads" and "documents" I might go for "downloads" and "files". That way instead of "dowTAB" and "docTAB", they're just "dTAB" and "fTAB".

urusan, to random
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Kid: Can you bring me my table?
Me: What?
Kid: Put it here points in front of his chair
Wife: We are not rearranging our furniture. Provides a lengthy list of reasons why this particular rearranging of the furniture is absolutely terrible
Me: Yeah, those are all good points.
Kid: Ok, so can you bring me my table?

urusan, to random
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Realistic detail left out of pretty much all post-apocalyptic stories where the survivors hid out in underground bunkers for at least one generation:
Everyone wearing glasses!

urusan, to random
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I decided to open up a dedicated AI art account over at aipub.social https://aipub.social/@urusan

In the future I'll post anything I generate or do discussion of technical aspects like AI training or art technique over there. So if you want to see my generations or hear about technique, be sure to follow that account.

My fosstodon account will still be my main account, I'm not moving or anything like that.

Also, I will still talk about AI here, especially AI-related philosophy or musings.

urusan, to random
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Wife: Instagram is holding my friends hostage.
Me: Yup, that's their whole business model.

urusan, to random
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Someone posted a FOSS/Linux Laptop Alignment chart a while back, does anyone have that?

urusan, to random
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Do we know how water freezes?
https://youtu.be/24TB1vPuzIU

urusan, to random
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Post one or more old blog posts (or other articles) that have had a lasting impact on your thinking. (At least about one thing.)

urusan,
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Here's a blog post I still often think back to:
https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/

It's about finding a local maxima in skill learning.

urusan, to random
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If we met an alien species, would any of our units of measurement be the same?

urusan, to random
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I watched 2 videos that gave me a shift in perspective today (specifically in mathematics).
Vector multiplication: https://youtu.be/htYh-Tq7ZBI
A different way to view the Reimann Hypothesis:
https://youtu.be/dwe4-OiRw7M

urusan, to random
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Tell us about that one time that a slowly worsening issue vanished because you moved to a different home.

urusan,
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@lulu_powerful @WhippoorwillSong One more important note: it's easier to control a chaotic system than to predict it.

If you are exposed to a lot of hard radiation, your risk of cancer goes up, but predicting who gets cancer and who will be just fine is next to impossible.

In comparison, not exposing people to hard radiation is an easy and effective measure to avoid cancer.

We need a different strategy. Instead of understanding how things are we should focus more on what we want them to be.

urusan, to random
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This is a very interesting use case for Nix:
https://youtu.be/0ulldVwZiKA

urusan,
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The TL;DW version is that you can use nix along with nix-shell to create an ephemeral environment with whatever dependencies you might need for a specific task.

Crucially, this works on any Linux distribution and even MacOS (and Windows using WSL2).

Despite being ephemeral, it caches the dependencies so they load immediately after the first installation.

It's also something you can easily define and distribute, in the video's case along with a school class project.

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