Mathesar repo is heavily optimized for commit count. Large number of commits are spelling/padding changes. This should set off alarm bells for anything looking to use this.
These are bizarre claims. Go look at the commits. It's quite reasonable for a serious software project to have a feature freeze and lots of documentation-related optimizations before a release.
If you go back about a week, all of the commits relate to adding and modifying app functionality.
Project activity is indicative of whether it will be supported in the long run. The fact that Mathesar's admin hid the line change count under insights, and padded the commits looks like a feeble attempt to impress investors.
Scaling compute can only be taken so far. True advancement in AI comes from optimizing compression of human knowledge. Altman missed the first principle by a mile.
Whereas, Marvin Minsky promised a PhD from an AI at the end of a decade, he would have done it again, but he passed away. He did this in 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, he forgot about it in 2000, but made the claim again in 2010.
Ironically it's largely Minsky's fault that it hasn't happened. Too many people listened to him.
It probably will happen by the end of this decade, or not too long afterward. Within the next few generations, a CoT mechanism like R1's (and presumably o1's) will be capable of originating, directing, and documenting original scientific work, doing so with no more guidance than a typical PhD candidate would receive from their advisor.
Fal wants to sell compute, and since they're straggling behind the compute-as-an-API leaders they've attached their cart to the art, image, and video subset of the market.
They think they've got a leg up on their model partners. That the foundation model companies will mostly become generic copies of one another, servants of the compute layer. There are so many foundation video models now, and they'll battle it out over dwindling margins. Pika, Runway, Kling - they're all the same. And there's also growing open source foundation models.
The thing that stands in Fal's way is that the future of AI video for artists is local. Hunyuan and Comfy can run on desktop machines, and real artists hate the SaaS model and non local stuff. It doesn't look like we'll even need A100s to reach Pixar levels of quality.
The ones to watch in the art space are Comfy and Invoke. And Adobe.
Fal probably has a future in powering the API-driven YouTube Shorts slop, though there's probably an upper limit to the number of talking head startups.
But there's no way they win artists over to cloud. Sophisticated tools are going to be local. Any SaaS art tools that do achieve escape velocity will buy and manage their own compute and won't go through Fal as a reseller.
Call me thick, but it's like back in the day, rich bored person goes to an artist and says "paint me this and that". Except now the "rich" person calls themselves an artist and "actual" artist is replaced by AI contraption that basically regurgitates real artist works. It's kind of comical.
But also makes sense. If you wanted e.g. music, you could either look at catalogue of what's out there or try to make your own. But if no one is making what tickles you and you yourself have no talent to make what you would like to listen, the AI comes to rescue.
People don't want to watch two chess computers play even if they can both smoke Magnus Carlsen.
Art is an even more extreme version of this. Part of what makes a Dali painting a Dali painting is the mimetic desire of the general weirdness of the human Salvador Dalí.
AI can't displace human mimetic desire. AI art is just worthless muzak playing in the background at Dennys. Non-artistic/non-creative people right now are amazed at how they can make muzak but muzak is shit by its very nature.
I'm an engineer, filmmaker, and DiT researcher. I know thousands of people in this community and organize local AI film meetups and festivals. I've talked with decision makers from 100 person marketing firms all the way up to Disney execs and the CTO of Pixar.
You don't know.
Midjourney might have tons of revenue for being the first mover, but they're busy building VR headsets and generative world models for their metaverse thing.
Meanwhile everyone who is using these models for work - ie, making money with these tools - is clamoring for local execution and deep controllability. Midjourney won't give them that.
The top AI studios are all building on Comfy.
Don't write off Topaz, either. It's the last stage in the pipeline for everyone's workflow.
Stable Diffusion came before Midjourney. What first mover advantage?
Flux has been around almost a year, by your reasoning everyone should have switched. They didn't. Everyone who used Midjourney a year ago is still using it.
The Midjourney sub on reddit has 1.6M subs. The Stable Diffusion sub has 600k.
I don't care what AI studios you know want to use. They use Premier Pro. Just like every film school in America does. Despite plenty of open source alternatives.
90% of people don't give a shit about running locally as long as it's high quality, easy to use and not expensive. And that's exactly why Midjourney is dominating.
Oh, and Runway is projecting to hit $150M in ARR this year.
And you're also underestimating how many billions of images have been generated with Flux. The marginal cost and value of these models will trend towards zero.
> The Midjourney sub on reddit has 1.6M subs. The Stable Diffusion sub has 600k.
So you're saying that they're within the same order of magnitude?
> I don't care what AI studios you know want to use. They use Premier Pro. Just like every film school in America does. Despite plenty of open source alternatives.
Premiere is local software. There's also Final Cut and lots of other alternatives. They're not using CapCut to edit their films.
We're also super early in this game. You're mentioning 20+ year old mature software.
> 90% of people don't give a shit about running locally as long as it's high quality, easy to use and not expensive.
They absolutely do care.
Right now 9 out of 10 generations are garbage, and that's being generous.
> Oh, and Runway is projecting to hit $150M in ARR this year.
That's a really ambitious target they set for themselves, and I think they're getting ahead of things. The field is full of much better competition now.
They also failed to raise their ambitious last round. They've raised too much and have too high a valuation, meanwhile smaller companies have caught up.
That's fair. But I know a lot of smart folks out there that have trouble building that "thin layer of UI". So if that helps them, mission accomplished.
Anyone can replace the AI layer with their own local models, other services... whatever suits your use case and preferences is fair game.
I don't know if they are more competent now. There are just fewer people willing to push back, and few to no guardrails in place for when the leader doesn't adhere to the usual governmental and ethical norms.
I guess it depends on what you mean with "competent". In essence their pitch is that government is bad, so from that sense "competent" means "able to burn these institutions down". From that perspective these people do seem more "competent" in various ways: there is less chaos, a better sense on how to use the legal means, more focus. Trump may be a unfocused bumbling fool, but the Project 2025 people aren't.
This is not my (and presumably your) definition of "competent", which would be "able to run these institutions well", or something along those lines.
And since it seems there isn't any real accountability any more other than anything that is strictly legally imposed, anything that goes wrong in this process is just blamed on the democrats, deep state, or whatever. Or its simply denied that the problems exists in the first place.
This was the sense in which I was using the word "competent", thanks for clarifying. What I meant was now they are better able to realize their destructive vision, but insofar as I can tell its mostly the same vision as it ever was.
I'm pretty sure the current administration has already shown themselves willing to abandon many previous established norms formed over the history of the US so I am not entirely convinced this is returning to "normalcy".
Well maybe authoritarianism is is the 'natural' place that the social order tends to.
It's weird that people like you use dyeing hair as some kind of shorthand for radical leftist ideology as if you stepped out of a time portal from the 1950s. Zoe Quinn really did a number on you guys, didn't she?
>Thank you so much for fucking up my son's future, and doing your best to destroy our country that you apparently have been groomed to hate so much. I literally just bought a new vertical tiller for some backyard food plots as a hedge against just how bad things may get, because you people couldn't be bothered to listen to reasoned criticism of what you were actually doing. And don't think I don't know your frustration - I've been reading reactionary analysis long before the term deep state entered pop culture.
This is the exact same screed I see from right-wingers write when the left gets elected, almost verbatim.
I put enough context in my comment that you should realize I'm not a blue tribe partisan. More like a libertarian who has become extremely conservative now that we're staring down fascism.
Republicans using that style of rant is hold over from when they were the conservative party. It also serves as a nice cover narrative to motivate the need for their radical agenda, to the large contingent of their supporters who are still blissfully thinking of themselves as conservative.
You also stripped the context where the person I was responding to was motivating their nonsense by referencing imagined harm to children in extremely rare cases, to justify this wholesale attack on our current society that will straightforwardly harm all of our children. That destruction of the present for a return to some imagined rosy past is one of the core tenets of fascism. A decade ago I would have been right with you pointing out the symmetry of the rhetoric, but at this point the Republican party has really gone off the deep end and only a fool ignores that.
Indeed, just because one dellusionally believes they are presecuted, does not mean they are. People have been memeing and satirizing leftist about this for decades at this rate, "oppression Olympics" and such. More recently, "Rugged. Vegan. Compassionate. Victim": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=arw1pcqLI_M
The point of the clip/episode is you should "brand" yourself as a "victim" (even though you're not) because it's in vogue and perceived as "cool." For leftist, it's virtuous to be a "victim", so people pretend they're being persecuted or victimized to gain clout.
How is one pretending to possess a quality that is viewed by society at a given place in time as being "virtuous" related to someone suffering from a delusion that they're being persecuted and also related to someone actually experiencing persecution?
Furthermore, I am still confused how you can conclude it's tied to a particular area on the political spectrum.
To be clear, if there's evidence of someone is being persecuted then that is it likely real while in the absence of evidence it is likely that they are suffering from a delusion.
>How is one pretending to possess a quality that is viewed by society at a given place in time as being "virtuous" related to someone suffering from a delusion
One in the same. They delusionally believe it, their make believe (pretending) becomes their delusional "reality".
>Furthermore, I am still confused how you can conclude it's tied to a particular area on the political spectrum.
I did not make this claim.
>To be clear, if there's evidence of someone is being persecuted then that is it likely real while in the absence of evidence it is likely that they are suffering from a delusion.
People will delusionally believe fictional things as "evidence" that they are being persecuted.
Using an analogy: If I believe that society sees those with tan skin as being more valuable and successful, and I spray tan in order to match that appearance, then I am delusional? (Regardless of whether I sincerely believe my spray tan is believable or not)?
> I did not make this claim
I mean, you specifically pointed towards the "left" in particular, multiple times... Whatever.
> People will delusionally believe fictional things as "evidence" that they are being persecuted.
We're talking about observing someone that's claiming to be persecuted...
>Using an analogy: If I believe that society sees those with tan skin as being more valuable and successful, and I spray tan in order to match that appearance, then I am delusional? (Regardless of whether I sincerely believe my spray tan is believable or not)
If you sprayed your skin purple and think it is tan, that is delusional. If you didn't spray your skin at all and now magically believe it is now tan, that is delusional. If you believe your fake tan is natural, that is delusional.
>I mean, you specifically pointed towards the "left" in particular, multiple times... Whatever.
And? That's not the claim you made earlier.
>We're talking about observing someone that's claiming to be persecuted...
> If you sprayed your skin purple and think it is tan, that is delusional. If you didn't spray your skin at all and now magically believe it is now tan, that is delusional. If you believe your fake tan is natural, that is delusional.
Good. So we understand there's a difference from a delusion and one branding themselves.
> And? That's not the claim you made earlier.
It was queried a couple times.
> Yes, we can observe delusional people.
Good. Maybe you understand the difference between someone whom is actually being persecuted and someone whom is suffering from a delusion. I'm glad you got there!
The position they've taken is that they want to shift cancer funding from treatment to prevention. I have no idea whether this makes any sense or if it will actually happen but that is the current messaging.
There is no prevention strategy that will prevent all cancers. Even people with the most healthy lifestyle can get a cancer. That's why you have to do both.
Just to give one example: the majority of men will get prostate cancer if they live long enough (~70% of men over 80). It's just that other things tend to kill people before the cancer.
Democrats need to put these messages out hard. If they win the 2026 election we might even have a chance at putting a brake on Trump's idiocy. (I know, I know, trust Democrats to shoot their own foot in the most crucial moments, but one can hope...)
For a short time maybe, but that kind of activity might look like something interesting enough for someone to target you and remove all privacy from your entire existence.
If it takes a felon winning an election for you to come out and write this then you are a coward. Where were these deep thoughts when BLM was blocking public roads and emergency services. I'm impartial to both sides simply making an observation.
Most people were cowards then, and now too. It's nice to finally get these leaders sharing what they actually think again. After biting their tongue for what a decade?
I erred on the side of pithy to try to avoid derailing. I've never voted for him and there's a lot that I dislike about him; however…
There's a very credible argument that the DA overcharged the case so people who dislike him can try to ostracize him as a felon and make his supporters look unhinged. If your shorthand for "the less woke candidate won" is "the felon won," you don't get to credibly claim "I'm impartial" in a conversation about wokeness.
It's not a credible argument. The "overcharges" led to a guilty verdict and sentence. That could not have happened if they were truly as you portray. Believing that your less-informed opinion overrules those of everyone actually in the courtroom is pure hubris.
I think there are also open source tools to get a Safari remote debugger working on Linux and Windows. I would prefer that over an app on the tiny iPad screen.
Here is a thought experiment. What if 3D printers support implicit representation natively. Resin printers are basically physical marching cube machines. FSM would need an algorithm for following contours but should be doable.
I kinda tried doing this with a custom FDM slicer for SDFs a long while back. I hit some roadblocks, but the concept was pretty simple: slicers by definition need to know what exists in a 2d slice of a 3d object. So why not render an SDF directly as slices and then act on that? You're basically then just trying to turn a raster into a vector (a toolpath).
The code is simple and hacky as hell -- very much an experiment -- but I still think that it is a plausible route forward. https://github.com/daeken/AjaPrint
Ultimately you'll still need to further process it into a set of physical step by step instructions for the instrument. I'd still rather have the slicer be separate software step so you can tweak the physical properties of the process -wall thickness, infill, temperature and speed, etc. But yeah, it should be possible to input an implicit representation into a slicer.
Still very early work, mind you! This is mostly a proof of concept in its current state, but I will add more features if Fidget gets a 2D equivalent to Mesh, so I don’t have to worry about path extraction from meshes. Thanks for the mention! :)
After using FSD 13 for 2 weeks I'm convinced we are close to solving self driving. Too bad the everyone lost interest and now robotics is the hot new thing.
As someone who worked in V&V for AV systems for a decade, it’s exactly the kind of thinking displayed here that has held back real assessment of AV safety for years.
There is absolutely no meaningful signal about a system’s safety that can be derived from one person using a system for two weeks.
At best it can only demonstrate that a system is wildly unsafe.
There is a very large chasm of 9s between one person being able to detect an unsafe system in two weeks of use and actually having a truly safe system.
I’m not sure if you’re generalizing to a specific region in your assessment but regardless, I doubt this is anywhere close to a solved problem given the crashes/incidents (so far) still associated with the tech and the dependencies IIRC on street signs and other markers.
re: region, I’d like to see it take on more challenging conditions, like in India for example where things are chaotic even for human drivers. I doubt that it’ll survive over here.
Quite simple robotics actually. Especially if you use Lidar. Basically IF (object present) THEN (do not go there) style of simplicity. Of course in reality there are lots of cases to consider, but each one of these cases is not rocket science.
Building a robot that can cook or fold a t-shirt, for example, is much harder.
Note that Nvidia is also working on self driving. The Jetson robotics platform is based on the same SoC as the DRIVE platform, but is a separate product.
Although the idea of self driving is obviously cool I think it's good that robotics take priority (if such a thing is possible) e.g. think of it like the invention of the washing machine as a liberating force on the world.
Have you been a passenger in a Waymo? My only ride felt safer than every uber / Lyft driver I have ever had pretty much, so wondering how it compares to a beta thing you have to be able to take over in an instant.
Last time I was in SF I took 3 waymo rides and attempted a fourth. The attempted one was cancelled after 15 minutes of waiting for it being 2 minutes away. As best as I can tell, the waymo was stuck at an intersection where power had been lost and didn't understand it needed to treat it like a 4 way stop.
2 rides went fine though neither was particularly challenging. The third though the car decided to head down a narrow side street where a pickup in front was partially blocking the road making a dropoff. There was enough space to just squeeze by and it was clear the truck expected the car to. A few cars turned in behind the waymo, effectively trapping it in as it didn't know how to proceed. The dropoff eventually completed and it was able to pull forward
Waymo is pretty good (but not perfect) as far as safety, but there's too many ways it can get stuck. Including vandalism from humans like "coning". And if a significant number of them are on the road, it could gum up traffic when that happens.
I still think it'll do well because even if you need to hire 1 person to remotely monitor every 10 cars (I doubt Waymo has anywhere near that many support staff) it's still better than having to pay 10 drivers who may or may not actually be good at driving. But to really take over they'll need to be much more independent.
>n February 2024, a driverless Waymo robotaxi struck a cyclist in San Francisco.[132] Later that same month, Waymo issued recalls for 444 of its vehicles after two hit the same truck being towed on a highway
I am not entirely sure that is solved. And certainly not years ago. And it is only close in US where the data are trained. Doesn't mean it could be used in Japan ( where they are doing testing now ) driving on the different of the road with very different culture and traffics.
Citing a specific (tragic) incident isn’t really great evidence in re: safety. You have to normalize by something like accidents/mile driven and compare to comparable services (taxi/uber etc) - having said that I couldn’t quickly find any sources either positive or negative on those stats (besides Waymo PR docs) so I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong. just wanted to point out the obvious flaw with citing anecdotal evidence for something like this.
You could easily use the same logic to say humans haven’t solved driving yet either!
A big part of me believes the only extra safety they give is they drive much slower. This in itself might be the solution for human deaths on the road.
Crashes per mile is multiple times lower than the human rate for both Waymo and Tesla. If your definition of solved is that there will be 0 collisions ever then the problem will never be solved. But if we have a system that is much better at driving than most humans, I think that qualifies it as good enough to start using.
Baidu Apollo. They also have a commercial fleet without in-car safety drivers (they use remote operators for real time monitoring, though, so hard to say how hands-off it really is)
Why would waymo own the entire market? Sure, they might be the first ones there, but every year recreating what is "good enough" should be cheaper and cheaper.
Waymo works in US grid cities on highly modified cars. I know people love hating Musk, but it is still very much up in the air if Waymo will be a better solution than what Tesla or Wayve is doing.
What does "grid" have to do with anything at this point? Mapping was done a million years ago and try and see if "grid" helps you understand the lane and traffic light system in San Francisco (which tourists need to figure out in real time - they are hard enough on the locals.)
I ride Waymos in San Francisco that traverse longer twisting "two-way" roads in the San Francisco hills (look at the neighborhoods around Mount Davidson). In these cases, the road, while two way, more often than not only has space which allows a single car to pass at a time; the rest of the space is taken by cars parked on either side of the roadway. The Waymo cars. at least during my rides, handled these situations well.
While it's not Rome, the operating areas for Waymo, at least in San Francisco, are not all grids of modern wide streets either.
That’s not gonna impress me either. There were zoox cars on Lombard st in sf I think. Windy streets are not the challenge. Putting your money where your mouth is - that’s the challenge.
That seems to be thing now: get some deployed mass out there. And at this point it seems that each new city is still a significant investment (well within Waymo but still).
I'm still puzzled on why Waymo insists on not having any remote driving or any remote advising cars on where/how to get themselves out of a situation. Yes that would cost a little more - but this is early stages so it's just a little more money at this point (lol) - in exchange for avoiding embarassing PR bullshit about cars self-honking at each other or rides stuck in infinite hesitation loop or not knowing what to do when there is a traffic cone on the hood. I haven't seen any convincing arguments for not having that. Anyone heard a legitimately good tech or liability reason? I doubt I would have missed it but...
It 100% is a limiting factor, weather conditions and crazy roads/poor infra will definitely impact self driving cars, idk how it could not be a factor... Go drive in eastern Europe after a snow storm, you miss one snow covered sign and end up on the wrong side of a high speed road, &c.
It's like learning to code in JS on a 2024 MacBook pro and thinking you can "just" transfer your skills to cobol on 1970s hardware because both are "programming"
