• 1 Post
  • 95 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • I daily drive Fedora and if I had to guess, it’s because you need to manually enable non free software repos and features. If you don’t know what to look for, you can easily get frustrated by things like poor hardware acceleration in browsers (due to some codecs being nonfree and hence not available OOTB) and worse driver availability. IIRC you need to manually add the repos, you can’t just toggle something in settings.

    Other distros tend to bundle these things (or give you a direct toggle).






  • I work in an area adjacent to autonomous vehicles, and the primary reason has to do with data availability and stability of terrain. In the woods you’re naturally going to have worse coverage of typical behaviors just because the set of observations is much wider (“anomalies” are more common). The terrain being less maintained also makes planning and perception much more critical. So in some sense, cities are ideal.

    Some companies are specifically targeting offs road AVs, but as you can guess the primary use cases are going to be military.






  • The general framework for evolutionary methods/genetic algorithms is indeed old but it’s extremely broad. What matters is how you actually mutate the algorithm being run given feedback. In this case, they’re using the same framework as genetic algorithms (iteratively building up solutions by repeatedly modifying an existing attempt after receiving feedback) but they use an LLM for two things:

    1. Overall better sampling (the LLM has better heuristics for figuring out what to fix compared to handwritten techniques), meaning higher efficiency at finding a working solution.

    2. “Open set” mutations: you don’t need to pre-define what changes can be made to the solution. The LLM can generate arbitrary mutations instead. In particular, AlphaEvolve can modify entire codebases as mutations, whereas prior work only modified single functions.

    The “Related Work” (section 5) section of their whitepaper is probably what you’re looking for, see here.



  • No they are not “a tool like any other”. I do not understand how you could see going from drawing on a piece of paper to drawing much the same way on a screen as equivalent as to an auto complete function operated by typing words on one or two prompt boxes and adjusting a bunch of knobs.

    I don’t do this personally but I know of wildlife photographers who use AI to basically help visualize what type of photo they’re trying to take (so effectively using it to help with planning) and then go out and try and capture that photo. It’s very much a tool in that case.


  • Unfortunately proprietary professional software suites are still usually better than their FOSS counterparts. For instance Altium Designer vs KiCAD for ECAD, and Solidworks vs FreeCAD. That’s not to say the open source tools are bad. I use them myself all the time. But the proprietary tools usually are more robust (for instance, it is fairly easy to break models in FreeCAD if you aren’t careful) and have better workflows for creating really complex designs.

    I’ll also add that Lightroom is still better than Darktable and RawTherapee for me. Both of the open source options are still good, but Lightroom has better denoising in my experience. It also is better at supporting new cameras and lenses compared to the open source options.

    With time I’m sure the open source solutions will improve and catch up to the proprietary ones. KiCAD and FreeCAD are already good enough for my needs, but that may not have been true if I were working on very complex projects.


  • Cute cat! Nevermore and Bentobox are two super popular ones.

    Since you’re running an E3 V2, first make sure you’ve replaced the hotend with an all-metal design. The stock hotend has the PTFE tube routed all the way into the hotend, which is fine for low temp materials like PLA, but can result in off-gassing at higher temperatures such as those used by ASA and some variants of PETG. The PTFE particles are almost certainly not good to breathe in during the long term, and can even be deadly to certain animals such as birds at small quantities.



  • Yeah, I agree. In the photo I didn’t see an enclosure so I said PETG is fine for this application. With an enclosure you’d really want to use ABS/ASA, though PETG could work in a pinch.

    I also agree that an enclosure (combined with a filter) is a good idea. I think people tend to undersell the potential dangers from 3D printing, especially for people with animals in the home.