Hello from Siem Reap, Cambodia! Awesome to see a fellow tech enthusiast from Cambodia.
I actually found Facebook’s translations pretty good (better than Google Translate for things longer than a sentence). From my understanding of Khmer, Khmer is a bit more verbose and context dependent, hence LLMs in Khmer would be a big help understand those nuances.
In the inverse case (LLMs generating khmer from English) I heard from locals that it sounds formal and “robotic” which I found quite interesting.
Awesome! This is a huge opportunity to help a lot of people (clients, subcontractors and builders). A lot of money and time is wasted by the current inefficiencies. We gave takeoff construction plan parsing a go in 2022-2023 but couldn’t get the AI part to work well enough (and still haven’t been able to even with the latest ViT/ CLIP models). There was a lot of interest though!
- You’re right, data is very hard to come by. I’m curious, how do you plan to get around this? Outsourcing human labeling? We found it to be a very difficult task.
- The subcontractors and local construction companies we talked to were overwhelming excited about the idea.
- It’s entire people’s jobs to get this done and done correctly. They sit on site holding the pdfs in their hands, manually counting and calculating. You bet a lot of mistakes occur. They would absolutely love to have a digital assistant for this.
- Some of them (especially managers and owners) are quite technical and are using software such as BlueBeam and other CAD software to make these calculations. It’s quite manual currently, but gives great insight into a better solution. This led us to having the user manually select the symbol they wanted counted (which ML struggled to get right). Just getting the part counts (and highlighting them in the pdf) was a huge help!
- Impressive you got square footage calculations correct! In our experience, there was way too much variation between architects (and multistep dimension labeling) which made it hard (even for humans) to get right. How has your model generalized OOD thus far?
- Are you planning to integrate voice? Many of the subcontractors we worked with are very low tech. They usually talk with their clients in person, on the phone, or maybe text. But they don’t use email or their smart phones for much.
I will be following your work! I have friends who would love to use this once it passes the human threshold.
I think parsing a whole blueprint with monolithic models is really difficult, but the constrained object detection/semantic segmentation problems are significantly more tractable. You can chain those CV models with VLMs to do things like get scale right. I'm always interested in novel HCI paradigms like voice!
They might be trying to create toxic back links to their domains and if those domains 301 to your domain, I believe this can negatively impact the SEO of your domain (from what I read). If so you can try to disavow them https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
> So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters.
I’d take this with a grain of salt (pun intended). There’s a lot of bugs that you cannot reproduce without certain permissions or a particular environment. Let alone the race conditions or user setup. In my experience, most bugs would not have been uncovered using this brute force approach. A few tests using your understanding of the code and critical thinking goes a lot further in my opinion.
“Sanding” shouldn’t be the only approach to testing an app. Developers should test using a variety of techniques. Some bugs are discovered through unit or integration tests, others by brute force, others still from end users
Come to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Start your day with a sunrise walk to the gym ($40/month). Grab an omelette and coffee for $3. Head home by 9am before it gets too hot. Work/learn/read/nap in the AC until 5pm. Take a sunset bike ride through the temples of Angkor Wat. Grab dinner downtown at the open breeze restaurants while people watching ($2-3 for a healthy meat and vegetable stir fry, $1 for pancakes, $2 for fried rice). Grab some drinks ($1) and play billiards with some friends. Head home to your modest 1 bedroom apartment for the night ($300/month). Not to mention the locals are really friendly here and if you’re in to helping out in some of your free time, you will be greatly valued and appreciated!
There’s a few other expenses and some cons of living here but some research and YouTube videos will help you figure out if it’s right for you. And of course you can ask me :)
I would say “hey, I’ve proven to be a critical part of this company since the beginning and I’d like a seat at the table to take this company to the finish line.” Then ask for 5-10% equity in addition to your salary.
I’d also say £40k was way too low. I’d guess the founders have significantly higher upside. It would be worth asking for transparency in order to determine fair compensation.
Thanks for the link! I’ve been trying to figure out how to buy/make a Raman spectrometer for cheap (currently in a third world country too!). Have you built one yet? I’m having trouble finding the lenses needed (mostly because of my lack of knowledge). Any chance you know what to use?
I haven't found the lenses yet although supposedly https://www.thorlabs.com/ has them and someone else recommended these guys to me for finding more high quality diffraction gratings than the 'rave goggles' quality you can find on amazon https://www.edmundoptics.com/
M1 Max: FP16 hardware support, FP8 and Bfloat16 emulated in software (via dequantization)
H100: FP16 and FP8 hardware support
> which I ran both on a MacBook Pro M1 Max and a rented H100 SXM GPU
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