tesseractcat's recent activity

  1. Comment on Libertarianism is dead in ~humanities

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    If the only natural laws are anarchy, then don't you already have it? No need for a political movement.

    If the only natural laws are anarchy, then don't you already have it? No need for a political movement.

    4 votes
  2. Comment on The fetch()ening (plans for HTMX 4) in ~comp

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    The HTML standard included application-like capabilities from the beginning using the form element and the iframe element. You might be thinking of XML?

    The HTML standard included application-like capabilities from the beginning using the form element and the iframe element. You might be thinking of XML?

    4 votes
  3. Comment on The fetch()ening (plans for HTMX 4) in ~comp

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    Ultimately HTMX is just an extension of existing web ideas. Previously it was link/form -> whole new page, but with a few tweaks it's possible to do link/form/button -> partial new page. Just that...

    Ultimately HTMX is just an extension of existing web ideas. Previously it was link/form -> whole new page, but with a few tweaks it's possible to do link/form/button -> partial new page. Just that enables 80% of what SPAs are typically used for.

    2 votes
  4. Comment on The fetch()ening (plans for HTMX 4) in ~comp

    tesseractcat
    Link
    Not much to say, but HTMX is terrific, and really should be integrated into the HTML standard.

    Not much to say, but HTMX is terrific, and really should be integrated into the HTML standard.

    8 votes
  5. Comment on Body time and daylight savings apologetics in ~life

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    What system that replaces capitalism would prevent the controversy about whether to have daylight earlier or later in the day? Even in a totally socialist country with worker owned production,...

    What system that replaces capitalism would prevent the controversy about whether to have daylight earlier or later in the day? Even in a totally socialist country with worker owned production, this would still be a problem.

    12 votes
  6. Comment on What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga) in ~anime

    tesseractcat
    (edited )
    Link
    I've been watching City (The Animation). It's the next series by the guy who made Nichijou. To be honest, this caught me by surprise. I hadn't really been following the anime adaptation at all. I...

    I've been watching City (The Animation). It's the next series by the guy who made Nichijou. To be honest, this caught me by surprise. I hadn't really been following the anime adaptation at all. I had read and mostly enjoyed the manga, but the anime is like 10x better. It's possibly one of the best animated anime I've watched, period. Not to mention that they are nailing the timing of the comedy (which can sometimes suffer in comedic manga adaptations).

    It sucks that it doesn't look like it's catching on that much. It's obvious that KyoAni is spending a lot of money on the show, so unless it's a big hit it probably won't be getting a second season. It's hard to tell if it's just that the western audience doesn't care as much though. It's definitely a style of comedy that I don't think will appeal to everyone.

    I'd recommend City if you enjoyed Nichijou. City is more ambitious with it's scope, it has a much larger cast, with a lot of clever intertwining of storylines. It takes the same kind of approach as Nichijou and uses it to quickly jump between set pieces all over the City, which can be a little jarring, but generally comes together well. The latest episode featured a really impressive simultaneous cut of like 8 different character groups all at once, plus some claymation/stop motion smoothly blended with animation.

    6 votes
  7. Comment on Kindle modding wiki in ~books

    tesseractcat
    Link
    If you don't already have an ereader, consider getting a Kobo device, instead of a Kindle. The Kobo ereaders are much more modding friendly, so there's no need to jailbreak or worry about an...

    If you don't already have an ereader, consider getting a Kobo device, instead of a Kindle. The Kobo ereaders are much more modding friendly, so there's no need to jailbreak or worry about an update bricking your device.

    16 votes
  8. Comment on Looking for the PC equivalent of Garage Band in ~creative

    tesseractcat
    Link
    Unfortunately there aren't that many good DAWs targeted at novices. If you do want to dive into a DAW however, I recommend Reaper (which is the WinRAR of DAWs, aka it has an indefinite evaluation...

    Unfortunately there aren't that many good DAWs targeted at novices. If you do want to dive into a DAW however, I recommend Reaper (which is the WinRAR of DAWs, aka it has an indefinite evaluation period). It's not super easy to use, but also not terribly hard to learn, especially if you're not doing anything complex. If you do go this route, I also recommend the synth/plugin Dexed.

    20 votes
  9. Comment on Have you made a video game? Can I play it? in ~games

    tesseractcat
    Link
    I've made a bunch of prototypes but never got all that close to releasing anything real. I'm pretty happy with what I've put up on my itch though: https://tesseractcat.itch.io/. I'd say I'm most...

    I've made a bunch of prototypes but never got all that close to releasing anything real. I'm pretty happy with what I've put up on my itch though: https://tesseractcat.itch.io/. I'd say I'm most proud of my concept for a flipnote style heist game, and a somewhat unique 3d modelling/drawing software.

    My new years resolution was to put a game on steam but I don't think that's going to end up happening -.-

    3 votes
  10. Comment on "The Bullshit Machines" - A free humanities course on LLMs for college freshmen from UW professors in ~humanities

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    I think you're right to be skeptical, and I didn't mean to present Andrej Karpathy himself as an unbiased figure, however I believe that if you watch the video you'll find that it is much less...

    I think you're right to be skeptical, and I didn't mean to present Andrej Karpathy himself as an unbiased figure, however I believe that if you watch the video you'll find that it is much less biased than the linked article.

    2 votes
  11. Comment on "The Bullshit Machines" - A free humanities course on LLMs for college freshmen from UW professors in ~humanities

    tesseractcat
    Link
    This course makes a number of claims about LLMs, mostly substantiated by repeating the claim that "they just predict the next token" which hides a lot of complexity and controversy behind the word...

    This course makes a number of claims about LLMs, mostly substantiated by repeating the claim that "they just predict the next token" which hides a lot of complexity and controversy behind the word "just". The course also takes a clear stance that LLMs cannot truly reason, understand, or have consciousness when all of these points are hotly debated in the field.

    If you're looking for an introduction to LLMs without such a heavy bias I would recommend this great video by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI.

    8 votes
  12. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    Fair, although to defend my point a bit, the hype is still because they replicated OpenAIs o1-style reasoning. DeepSeek v3 had been around for a month or so with little hype. Although maybe that's...

    Fair, although to defend my point a bit, the hype is still because they replicated OpenAIs o1-style reasoning. DeepSeek v3 had been around for a month or so with little hype. Although maybe that's just because it took a while to accrue publicity, so who knows /shrug.

    It would be really interesting to compare with how much money it's costing OpenAI to train their models, unfortunately to the best of my knowledge they're not open with that information.

  13. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    Maybe. From my perspective at least, it seems like OpenAI spends the money to make the expensive breakthroughs, and everyone else copies them 1-2 years later. After all, the hype around deepseek...

    Maybe. From my perspective at least, it seems like OpenAI spends the money to make the expensive breakthroughs, and everyone else copies them 1-2 years later. After all, the hype around deepseek is entirely because they replicated the new reasoning stuff that OpenAI was working on.

    I would be surprised if AGI (not my favorite terminology) wasn't some derivative of LLMs, although probably a more multi-modal model (audio/video/robotics/language/etc), and RL used heavily in training.

    2 votes
  14. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    Why do you think models will hit the point of "good enough" in the not-so-far future? OpenAI and co explicitly state their goal is AGI/ASI, which seems like an ambitious goal. Also, o1/o3/deepseek...

    Why do you think models will hit the point of "good enough" in the not-so-far future? OpenAI and co explicitly state their goal is AGI/ASI, which seems like an ambitious goal. Also, o1/o3/deepseek r1 are all starting to use RL techniques, which are very compute intensive.

    4 votes
  15. Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    This is only true if people decide that LLMs at the current level are good enough. Otherwise, more efficient training/inference will just result in bigger models with more capabilities (assuming...

    This is only true if people decide that LLMs at the current level are good enough. Otherwise, more efficient training/inference will just result in bigger models with more capabilities (assuming scaling laws hold).

    8 votes
  16. Comment on I hate 2FA in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link
    Recently my Google Authenticator randomly stopped generating a few different codes (notably the one for my google account). And I'm not the only one:...

    Recently my Google Authenticator randomly stopped generating a few different codes (notably the one for my google account). And I'm not the only one: https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/295605525/corrupted-google-authenticator-codes. I always write down the backup codes but 2FA just feels so dangerous to me, like there's no recourse if my phone dies or I lose my written down codes (fortunately this is unlikely). Anyway I don't really have a point but I wish I at least had the option to determine what sort of risk I'd like to take, hacking vs losing codes.

    Be careful if you're using Google Authenticator.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on OpenAI is a bad business in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link
    I think this article is interesting, but a bit myopic considering that it's basically missing the biggest part of OpenAI's strategy. They're hemorrhaging money because they're betting that they...

    I think this article is interesting, but a bit myopic considering that it's basically missing the biggest part of OpenAI's strategy. They're hemorrhaging money because they're betting that they can train a model that is smarter. I think it's uncontroversial that the earnings potential increases the smarter the model gets (very few people would pay for a GPT-2 level model, for instance), so the only question is whether or not they can train a smarter model in time, and what people will pay for it at that point.

    One objection is that even if they do manage to train a smarter model, at that point there will be no differentiator from other companies who will also train equivalently smart models. I think this is sort of true, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI can exploit their lead, and then maintain it through network effects.

    11 votes
  18. Comment on Why AI isn't going to make art in ~arts

    tesseractcat
    Link
    Gwern made a comment on this article I thought was pretty insightful: I find myself a bit frustrated when people associate AI capabilities with the corporate sanitized outputs of...

    Gwern made a comment on this article I thought was pretty insightful:

    He's also, broadly speaking, wrong. The blandness he refers to has little to do with 'taking the average of the choices'. Base model output is not bland! It is often wacky, bizarre, hilarious, or unexpected. See the samples people have been generating with the new Llama base model, or just again, go back to my old GPT-3 samples - samples Chiang should've seen since he's been pontificating regularly about LLMs this whole time. (In considerable part because there is usually no such thing as 'taking the average of the choices' in text: what is the 'average' of two likely predictions like 'a' or 'b'? There is no such thing as a letter 50% of the way in between 'a' and 'b', the sampling process has to pick one or the other, and then it's committed.)

    The blandness he's referring to is the effect of the preference-learning/instruction-tuning made infamous by ChatGPT, which has no simple analogy but has little to do with "the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet" (in fact, this is the opposite of correct, as making the outputs unlike 'text found on the Internet' is most of the point). The point of the tuning is to collapse the LLM, which starts off as an extraordinary mimic of every style, onto a narrow range of styles & vocabs - yielding the ChatGPTese we know all too well now.

    I find myself a bit frustrated when people associate AI capabilities with the corporate sanitized outputs of ChatGPT/Dall-E/Bing Image/etc. Although it's not that surprising, considering that's the only way the average person will interact with AI.

    If you're interested in playing around with more authentic AI, I'd suggest a non-finetuned version of Llama, or Stable Diffusion (although the newer versions of Stable Diffusion are a bit sanitized as well, 1.5 is probably the best for wackier outputs). Prompting will be harder, but you won't get outputs that sound/look like AI.

    16 votes
  19. Comment on Grokking KOReader in ~books

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    For me the main thing is the ability to use regular folders to sort files. For the life of me I don't understand why none of the mainstream e-readers let me just use folders to sort books (they...

    For me the main thing is the ability to use regular folders to sort files. For the life of me I don't understand why none of the mainstream e-readers let me just use folders to sort books (they all want you to manually add everything to collections).

    Other than that it's nice to be able to launch an SSH server to remotely transfer files. And the reading stats are pretty thorough. Also, although it's kind of niche, when reading manga with a bunch of volumes, KOReader will give you an option to open the next volume once you finish the current one, rather than needing to go back to the file explorer and manually find the next one. Oh, and KOReader will give you an option to discard the embedded style in a book if you don't like it (which I often have to do since certain books have weird indentation/paragraph styles).

    Basically it's just a bunch of little QOL things that add up.

    2 votes
  20. Comment on Looking for a decent, but cheap-ass tablet in ~tech

    tesseractcat
    Link Parent
    I disagree, ipads tend to retain their resale value a lot better than android tablets. In this case, that means it's a lot better value to get a used android tablet than a used ipad. The (older)...

    I disagree, ipads tend to retain their resale value a lot better than android tablets. In this case, that means it's a lot better value to get a used android tablet than a used ipad. The (older) Samsung flagship tablets in particular are quite cheap now used and are great for the described use case.

    1 vote