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Seconding this, Greg Egan is one of the best of all time.

The short stories "Luminous" and "Dark Integers", the novels "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder". So good.

qntm (another author) hits somewhat similarly.


I don't know if I would trust the implicit editorial lens of popularity on Wikipedia as my only window into the world.


Who said "only"?



I am adding more sources asap. As many readers have pointed out the wikipedia event source is very negative news indeed


Interesting. I've tried to use it for a few things, it works where I'd expect -- make a scaffolding for a simple Java project, edit this English -- but whenever I then try to use it for Real Work, things that require some thought and don't have lots of examples in the training set, it fails. It didn't help me as much implementing some ideas from an academic paper about compilers, or on using AF_XDP sockets.

It's interesting that it has the property of always returning _something_, so you have to be careful how you phrase. And the something returned will be optimized for looking right, but might only be so by accident.


IYKYK


Damn, I would really like such a thing, if it was just the hardware and not the associated lock in to a third party getting their grubby hands on my internal metrics.

I'd pay a premium for it even, which makes you wonder just how much money Oura must be making off the data of its users... (if they weren't, there'd be an incentive to sell the hardware)


https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807567908753.html

You can get similar HW for $10-$15, and not the easiest hack but looks doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w90RVspTkt8

I'm surprised Oura hasn't pursued using the ring as an input method as the guy suggests in the video. It'd be super cool to like double-tap the ring then use it as a scroll wheel when running and listening to music/podcasts, interact with AI models, etc.


Looks like those generic rings are supported by gadgetbridge[1] so barely any hacking needed for 100% on device processing and storage.

I have a miband I use with gadgetbridge. I'm reasonably happy with the app, and it has visibly improved over the last year (it also wins by default being opensource + the only option for keeping data private) but the watch is a bit bulky when sleeping or typing so I stopped wearing it.

I can't imagine $10 hardware will be particularly accurate, but cheap price + data control is enough to give me an excuse to play with one.

[1] specifically rings intended to be used by the QRing app - https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/colmi/


From all the alternatives linked to the listing it seems like it may be pretty generic hardware under a bunch of names. Would be interesting to see if the accelerometer in it could be used for gesture detection, and if the rings could be used for Bluetooth presence detection (e.g. for automatic screen locking).


It's quite good at following a detailed paragraph long description of an scene, which is a double edged sword. A lot of the fun for me with early text to image models was underspecifying an image and then enjoying how the model "invents" it. "Steampunk spaceship", "communist bear", "glass city".

flux is amazing, but I find it requires a very literal description, which pushes the "creative work" back to the text itself. Which can certainly be a good thing, just a bit less gratifying to non visual types like myself. :)

I wonder, only somewhat jokingly, if one could make text generators which "imagine" detailed fantastical scenes, suitable for feeding to a text to image model.


That's what Fooocus is - it allows you to specify a "text expander" LLM that sits in between the input prompt and the diffusion model.

https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus


Prompt enhancement is now a standard feature in many image generation tools.



Can I please, please, please, have C++ or at least C bindings? :) Or the desired way to call Rust from another runtime? I don't know any Rust.


Rust is just another programming language that’s quite similar to C++. The main difference is there’s like 4 types for String (some are references and some are owned) and methods for a struct go in a `impl StructName` block after the struct definition instead of inside it.

I don’t really know rust either but I’m currently writing some bindings to expose Rust libraries to NodeJS and not having too much trouble.

For rust -> c++ I googled one time and found this tool which Mozilla seems to use to call Rust from C++ in their web browser, maybe it would “just work”: https://github.com/mozilla/cbindgen?tab=readme-ov-file


Although the borrowing rules will make you feel is quite a different language than others.


> there’s like 4 types for String

Try 12.


Just offering another point of data, your observation of the "same space with no overlap" and the anecdote about the restaurant hits so true for me! Almost the exactly same thing happened to me, Spanish nearly the whole time. Later, with a coworker, 100% gringo experience. Hilarious! The alternation between places like this as you walk up 24th always struck me as notable.

This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)


Had to re read that last sentence several times, initially assuming you were talking about the biker/dive bar down on Valencia and Duboce.


That's funny, I was heading uptown the other day, sipping on an elixir and thinking about shaving another kilowatt off my bill, when some casanova got out of a phone booth and asked me for directions to the daytona 500 club or some other make out room. I lolo'd out loud and docs clocked him in the teeth. Pretty sure he had to change his napper tandy after that.


you really clinched the zeitgeist of the mission district, are you a professional writer, part time? I'm just grateful to be in your orbit. that kind of success will cost you a mint. I'd wake up in a fit of delerium. What's the ABV of that drink you just gave me? But okay, let's get down to brass tacks. it's last call, and I've got work to so I'm not going to go on a bender. I'm not a flying pig so let's just sit down where the willows and the sycamore trees meet and hideout there and wait for someone to give us last rites.


Second the desire for C bindings! (or someone showing how to wrap and call the rust bindings?)


The previous implementation we built at VMware went from datalog -> Rust, and we supported other language bindings using C bindings and FFI. The same ought to work here too.


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