hunterloftis

Yesterday, we launched a generative image model that competes with the top of the field. I figured some HN folks might be interested in this deep dive from the research team.

Watching them figure out how to make the best use of our relatively-limited resources has demonstrated "necessity is the mother of invention" for me. Instead of just "pour more money on it," they came up with a different training strategy / hypothesis (the title's Layout Bet), and it's exciting to see that bet start paying off.

Also: free random house you didn't want, design, or ask for.

If you've held onto vacant property for years or decades, you may have a specific plan in mind for it (like retirement).

> Reynolds was in for yet another unwelcome surprise: The developer sued her for being “unjustly enriched” by the construction of the home on her land.

> The developers’ lawyer told SFGATE in March that Reynolds appeared to be taking advantage of the developer’s mistake. “Keaau Development Partnership is the only entity that has suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of losses,” Peter Olson said. “She’s trying to exploit the situation to get money from my client and the other parties.”

I'm glad the judge laughed that one right out:

> The court has dismissed that case.

> “The clear motivation of KDP and PJC was to cut corners to reduce construction costs,” the ruling read. “... The encroachment on Lot 114 is so great that the Court finds it has caused the complete destruction of Ms. Reynolds' estate as it had been originally held and enjoyed.”

In the context of laptops, I would agree (MBP's hardware just outclasses everything else, even if I prefer Fedora over macOS).

However, for phones, this just doesn't shake out. The Pixel 10 Pro for instance, has:

* A battery that outlasts the iPhone 16 Pro by an hour

* A slightly better display (higher brightness for outdoor use, higher PPI, higher color accuracy, same refresh rate)

* A better camera for still photography, especially HDR and low-light (although admittedly worse for video)

Given the weird take on x86 being inherently "more powerful" and the copy-pasted error from the marketing site (32W vs 32WH) this "article" looks like gently massaged advertising copy:

> Alternatively, HP’s EliteBoard will bring Windows and a more powerful x86 architecture to the keyboard-PC form factor. HP says the EliteBoard will support Windows 11 Pro for Business and an AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processor with an up to 50 TOPs NPU. The device will be sold with a 32 W internal battery and is part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program.

My takeaway from the read wasn't that it was trying to convince anyone to take any particular action, and even emphasized that the mediocrity of AI output as more people use it will be a benefit to the smaller number of people doing their own thinking.

That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.

Hey, I worked on this & totally agree - I want my tools to be editors, not slot machines.

My focus has been on the beta "Edit" feature, tucked away into the top-right when you're looking at a single image. It lets you directly manipulate the image as both a spatial canvas and a semantic structure.

TIL, thanks!

I still am not willing to migrate browsers in order to use Bing, however.

All good points.

I suspect preferences will hinge on peoples' budgets for personal responsibility. As my non-digital responsibilities have increased, I've found it nice to be able to delegate to "the cloud" - even at the loss of independence & control.

If there were a personally-owned "cloud" setup, I would prefer that. A box that plugs into my fiber connection and provides the equivalents of the cloud services I use, with data stored locally and backed up automatically to a secure server. A man can dream.

I fondly remember locally-executing software with local persistence by default.

To provide a counterpoint, though, during that time my entire family shared one desktop PC. Looking around me, right now: work macbook, personal linux laptop, smartphone, steam deck. I suspect that the workflows that were "fine" in 1995 would really wear on me today. Especially the ones that involve migrating documents from place-to-place for collaboration while trying to maintain a canonical master copy somehow.

Today, because of de-facto reliance on the cloud, "setting up" a new machine - regardless of its OS - takes me about 20 minutes. If my laptop fell off of my bike, that would suck, but I wouldn't irretrievably lose important data.

There are downsides to the current cloud-first paradigm too, of course. But I don't think it's _all_ downside.