Deepseek via their API also has cached context, although the tokens/s was much lower than Claude when I tried it. But for background agents the price difference makes it absolutely worth it.
Beautiful demo, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to call dithering an “illusion” of more shades than is available?
If you apply a low pass filter to a dithered image, and compare it to a low passed filtered thresholded, you’ll see that the “illusory” shades are really there in the dithered version, they’re just represented differently in the full resolution image.
Similarly, a class D amplifier emits purely off/on pulses before a low pass filter is applied, but no one would call the output an auditory “illusion”. In the case of image dithering, isn’t the low pass filter your own vision + the distance to the screen?
I would call it an illusion because if you pay attention you can clearly see that the color you perceive isn't actually present. You can see white on an RBG computer screen since your eyes simply don't have the resolution to discern the subpixel colors. However, in a dithered image with only black and white, you perceive gray, but you can also tell what the reality is without much effort. Personally, I think that fits the definition of an illusion.
In the case of dithering, that’s only because the monitor has insufficient resolution. Put a 1:1 Floyd steinberg dithered image on your phone, hold it at arm’s length, and unless you have superhuman vision you’ll already start having a hard time seeing the structure.
If you look at analogue B&W film for instance (at least the ones I’m familiar with), each individual crystal is either black or white. But the resolution is so high you don’t perceive it unless you look under a microscope, and if you scan it, you need very high res (or high speed film) to see the grain structure.
Dithering is not an illusion because the shades are actually still there. With the correct algorithms, you could upscale an image, dither it, down res it, and get back the exact same tones. The data isn’t “faked”, it’s just represented in a different way.
If you’re calling it an illusion, you’d have to call pretty much every way we have of representing an image, from digital to analog, an illusion. Fair, but I’d rather reserve the term for when an image is actually misinterpreted.
I would define an illusion as something where your perception of a thing differs from the reality of the thing in a way that matters in the current context. If we were discussing how LCD screens work, I would call the color white an illusion, but if we were discussing whether to make a webpage background white or red, I would not call the color white an illusion.
That's verisimilitude. We were doing that with representational art way before computers, and even doing stipple and line drawing to get "tonal indications without tonal work". Halftone, from elsewhere in the thread, is a process that does similar. When you go deeper into art theory verisimilitude comes up frequently as something that is both of practical use(measure carefully, use corrective devices and appropriate drafting and markmaking tools to make things resemble their observed appearance) and also something that usually isn't the sole communicative goal.
All the computer did was add digitally-equivalent formats that decouple the information from its representation: the image can be little dots or hex values. Sampling theory lets us perform further tricks by defining correspondences between time, frequency and amplitude. When we resample pixel art using conventional methods of image resizing, it breaks down into a smeary mess because it's relying on certain artifacts of the representational scheme that differ from a photo picture that assumes a continuous light signal.
Something I like doing when drawing digitally is to work at a high resolution using a non-antialiased pixel brush to make black and white linework, then shrink it down for coloring. This lets me control the resulting shape after it's resampled(which, of course, low-pass filters it and makes it a little more blurry) more precisely than if I work at target resolution and use an antialiased brush; with those, lines start to smudge up with repeated strokes.
Same. A fun fact about this is as you increase the bit depth, the percentage of faked outputs actually increases as well. With just 8 bits, you have more 9's than AWS this year!
Vibe coding large projects isn’t feasible yet, but as a developer here’s how I use AI to great effect, to the point where losing the tool greatly decreases my productivity:
- Autocomplete in Cursor. People think of AI agents first when they talk about AI coding but LLM-powered autocomplete is a huge productivity boost. It merges seamlessly with your existing workflow, prompting is just writings comments, it can edit multiple lines at once or redirect you to the appropriate part of the codebase, and if the output isn’t what you need you don’t waste much time because you can just choose to ignore it and write code as you usually do.
- Generating coding examples from documentation. Hallucination is basically a non-problem with Gemini Pro 2.5 especially if you give it the right context. This gets me up to speed on a new library or framework very quickly. Basically a stack overflow replacement.
- Debugging. Not always guaranteed to work, but when I’m stuck at a problem for too long, it can provide a solution, or give me a fresh new perspective.
- Self contained scripts. It’s ideal for this, like making package installers, cmake configurations, data processing, serverless micro services, etc.
- Understanding and brainstorming new solutions.
- Vibe coding parts of the codebase that don’t need deep integration. E.g. create a web component with X and Y feature, a C++ function that does a well defined purpose, or a simple file browser. I do wonder if a functional programming paradigm would be better when working with LLMs since by avoiding side effects you can work around their weaknesses when it comes to large codebases.
I’m someone with ADHD who takes prescribed stimulants and they don’t make me work faster or smarter, they just make me work. Without them I’ll languish in an unfocused haze for hours, or zone in on irrelevant details until I realise I have an hour left in the day to get anything done. It could make me 20% less intelligent and it would still be worth it; this is obviously an extreme, but given the choice, I’d rather be an average developer that gets boring, functional code done on time than a dysfunctional genius who keeps missing deadlines and cannot be motivated to work on anything but the most exciting shiny new tech.
I have family that had ADHD, as a kid (they called it “hyperactivity,” back then). He is also dyslexic.
The ADHD was caught early, and treated, but the dyslexia was not. He thought he was a moron, for much of his early life, and his peers and employers did nothing to discourage that self-diagnosis.
Since he learned of his dyslexia, and started treating it, he has been an engineer at Intel, for most of his career (not that I envy him, right now).
I’ve tried it in the latest plug-in I’ve worked on - it’s just a webview embedded in the window. It’s really great for faster development of more complex plug-ins but there’s some downsides when it comes to performance and integration with the DAW (I had to do some nasty hacks to get handle mouse clicks and keypresses properly).
I think it would be possible to have those advantages in JUCE/C++ without a webview tho. Maybe just moving to a declarative UI approach for positioning and styles with the ability to refresh (something like litehtml could be handy for that)?
This type of anti-AI article is as vacuous and insipid as the superficial hype pieces peddled by pro-AI influencers.
Saying generative AI is inherently shit, that there is 0 future in it, that it’s not good at anything, that it hasn’t improved since GPT3, calling it all a con? Just launching insults at anyone working in tech?
This is the same kind of person that would have poo-pooed the internet in the 90s, saying 64kbps mp3s sound like crap and to just stick to CDs, downloading a 144p video takes ages, and who would even trust a website enough to put their credit card number on it? All of those dotcoms are worthless and are going to be bankrupt in a year, and we’ll go back to mail order catalogs and fax machines in no time.
Or worse, because they’re saying outright falsehoods that anyone who’s used Claude to generate a single python script can easily debunk. I get that the hype over AI is annoying, that people are trying to shoehorn the tech into places where it’s not ready for yet, that it doesn’t do everything the marketing says it can, but just reversing the claims and saying it can’t do anything is profoundly stupid. Especially when it’s accompanied by so much vitriolic hatred that makes the writer blind to reality.
Autism is a spectrum disorder and I don’t think it should be controversial to cure low functioning autism. However, high functioning autists can be argued to be more of a personality variant than a disability, with different strengths and weaknesses compared to neurotypical people. Society benefits greatly from supporting high functioning autistic people in say, technical fields where hyperfocus, narrow obsessions and systemising thinking are an advantage.
Meanwhile, having a genetic condition like haemophilia doesn’t give you any conceivable advantage.
I don't even think there should be a conversation around high functioning autistics. My kid suffers from autistic catatonia. She's also extremely high functioning. I'm sorry, there is no world where I'm going to say no thanks to a cure for my daughter's body suddenly locking into place for an unknown period of time or losing the ability to speak or function randomly or hell just understand human expression without intense intervention. We can argue about their special brain powers or whatever, but all I'm seeing is that high functioning autistic have a much higher rate of self-harm and suicide. It can't be that great.
> Society benefits greatly from supporting high functioning autistic people in say, technical fields where hyperfocus, narrow obsessions and systemising thinking are an advantage.
At the expense of those people having to live with all the unmentioned negative aspects of autism.
(To say nothing of whether those are actually positives or not. Personally, I don't see how hyperfixating on something for a few weeks at a time at the expense of all my other responsibilities is a superpower, but hey)
> Meanwhile, having a genetic condition like haemophilia doesn’t give you any conceivable advantage.
Sickle-cell anemia does though. I wonder if some day there could be a survival advantage for haemophilia. What if we erase the genetic code that ends up saving us from some alien virus, you know?
I'm not saying this is a good argument, just something interesting to think about.
While true in a theoretical sense (an MLP of sufficient size can theoretically represent any differentiable function), in practice it’s often the case that it’s impossible for a certain architecture to learn a specific task no matter how much compute you throw at it. E.g. an LSTM will never capture long range dependencies that a transformer could trivially learn, due to gradients vanishing after a certain sequence length.
That’s not at all how multi-modal LLMs work - their visual input is not words generated by a classifier. Instead the image is divided into patches and tokenised by a visual encoder (essentially, it is compressed), and then fed directly as a sequence to the model.
Not all vision transformers have weak priors. Shifted-window transformers and neighborhood attention have priors well suited to images; the latter is showing extremely strong performance in image generation (such as the recent hourglass diffusion which allows pixel space diffusion to be trained orders of magnitudes faster than vanilla attention) and general image classification, and certainly does not need the same dataset size of classical ViTs.
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