CanadaPlus

joined 2 years ago
[–] CanadaPlus 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess that makes sense, if you understand nothing about how any of the underlying technologies work.

Soon after launching, however, the company’s law enforcement clients started asking about the viability of running phenotype-generated faces through facial recognition tools. “We were surprised when we heard this,” Greytak says. “It’s just not the intended purpose of the composite images.”

... And I guess that makes sense if you know nothing about how people other than your colleagues work. Seriously, how did they not see that coming?

In another infamous example that Garvie cites in her report, a detective from the NYPD’s Facial Identification Section, after noting that a suspect looked like the actor Woody Harrelson, put a photo of the actor through the department’s facial recognition tool.

Actually, that just doesn't make sense, haha.

For anyone reading and confused, this face rendering thing probably barely works, and definitely isn't going to be accurate in just the right way to complement a blackbox face recogniser trained on actual photos. Before you even get close to "is it too powerful" questions about privacy and abuse, "does it work at all" has to be considered.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 1 year ago

I meant as an included topic for the new community, lol. But yeah, some are pretty gross. They used to all be gross before people like Beyond arrived.

[–] CanadaPlus 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Bullshit. They have flags, bureaucracies and a monopoly on the use of force within their territory. I will not argue semantics with you.

[–] CanadaPlus 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yeah, actually I'll just make one, assuming I don't find an old one.

Other cellular types for sure. I'm super pumped about the bacterial protein that grows on just synthetic hydrogen. What do you think about plant based substitutes? It's a different technology, and I don't know how much there is to say even at this point, but they fill the same product niche.

[–] CanadaPlus 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, maybe somebody can translate for you. I considered using something else, but it was already long and I didn't feel like writing out multiple loops.

No worries. It's neat how much such a comparatively simple concept can do, with enough data to work from. Circa-2010 I thought it would never work, lol.

[–] CanadaPlus 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Republican Spain and the "Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria" AKA Rojava.

Republican Spain had some communist factions too, but Rojava is explicitly built around a specific strain of anarchism, and is an "administration" instead of a government. I doubt it looks very anarchist in practice, but that's neither here nor there, and they're democratic enough the US has endorsed them in the past to Turkey's great displeasure.

[–] CanadaPlus 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly a general replacements community might be more sustainable. It would get my sub.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you're building something new, it's a no-brainer, even. You can use panels as the roofing material rather than an additional layer now. There's both fancy products like the Tesla one and more practical options.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 1 year ago

Wow, does that mean parity with FF cars? I seem to remember the (up-front) price gap was in thousands last I checked. Of course, it's already a better long-term deal.

[–] CanadaPlus 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they're super important. Nobody's hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody's contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.

The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that's not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.

[–] CanadaPlus 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

At the simplest, it takes in a vector of floating-point numbers, multiplies them with other similar vectors (the "weights"), sums each one, applies a RELU* the the result, and then uses those values as a vector for another layer with it's own weights (or gives output). The magic is in the weights.

This operation is a simple matrix-by-vector product followed by pairwise RELU, if you know what that means.

In Haskell, something like:

layer layerInput layerWeights = map relu $ map sum $ map (zipWith (*) layerInput) layerWeights

foldl layer modelInput modelWeights

Where modelWeights is [[[Float]]], and so layer has type [Float] -> [[Float]] -> [Float].

* RELU: if i>0 then i else 0. It could also be another nonlinear function, but RELU is obviously fast and works about as well as anything else. There's interesting theoretical work on certain really weird functions, though.


Less simple, it might have a set pattern of zero weights which can be ignored, allowing fast implementation with a bunch of smaller vectors, or have pairwise multiplication steps, like in the Transformer. Aaand that's about it, all the rest is stuff that was figured out by trail and error like encoding, and the math behind how to train the weights. Now you know.

Assuming you use hex values for 32-bit weights, you could write a line with 4 no problem:

wgt35 = [0x1234FCAB, 0x1234FCAB, 0x1234FCAB, 0x1234FCAB];

And, you can sometimes get away with half-precision floats.

[–] CanadaPlus 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Off the top of my head, 2. One with no UN seat and one long gone, to be fair, but they still exist and are/were sovereign. You can't say either turned into totalitarianism.

Maybe you could say they would have or will, but that's just your guess. I could say the same thing about liberal democracy and be equally as well supported.

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