peterstjohn

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
155
Submissions
73
Member since
Aug 25
DL/ML in Cincinnati

email: ian [at] snappishproductions.com twitter: @carsondial

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Recent submissions

Comment · 15 hours ago
One thing I will say about the Yoto player is that there is an API: https://yoto.dev/api/ . You can do all sorts of things: get button presses over a MQTT queue, redirect the player to download audio from a server that _you_ host, and even dynamically update the playlist behind the scenes. Oh, and add static or animated GIFs for display on the device. It's really fun to mess around with - I created a travelogue for my daughter when I was away for a work trip a couple of months ago…
Comment · 4 months ago
Okay, a couple of hours later…thanks for the hint as that's fucking dark magic ;) and I now have access to the entire New Yorker again after around 15 years :)
Comment · 4 months ago
Ooooh, you don't happen to have the code for the New Yorker decryption in a form you could send, do you? Or put up on github or even just give me the starting prompt…
Comment · 1 year ago
Try Hey Duggee - it's not as explicitly British-coded, but there's a ton of stuff in there if you were watching Spaced in your late teens and now find yourself a parent…
Comment · 1 year ago
For my sins, I didn't actually realise how great that was until quite a bit afterwards! ;)
Comment · 1 year ago
Ha, same here! It really helped my imposter syndrome, as I overheard a couple of guys talking about the ARM assembly they were doing on their Archimedes on the first day…and I hadn't written anything fancier than QuickBASIC at the time…
Comment · 1 year ago
I even hosted a mirror of the original Mozilla source code dump from St. Anselm Hall, and nobody ever complained ;P
Comment · 2 years ago
If you think that of Owen's output, for heaven's sake I fear for you if you ever read a Jonathan Meades article…
Comment · 2 years ago
You would just film almost _directly_ across the river and shoot on the South Bank, one of the major brutalist outposts in London. It's lovely.
Comment · 2 years ago
I no longer work there, but Lucidworks has had embedding training as a first-class feature in Fusion since January 2020 (I know because I wrapped up adding it just as COVID became a thing). We definitely saw that even with just slightly out-of-band use of language - e.g. in e-commerce, things like "RD TSHRT XS", embedding search with open (and closed) models would fall below bog-standard* BM25 lexical search. Once you trained a model, performance would kick up above lexical search…and if you combined lexical _and_ vector search, things were great.

Also, a member on our team developed an amazing RNN-based model that still today beats the pants off most embedding models when it comes to speed, and is no slouch on CPU either…

(* I'm being harsh on BM25 - it is a baseline that people often forget in vector search, but it can be a tough one to beat at times)

Comment · 2 years ago
Well, why wouldn't they sell (license) the rights to make Transformers films (which as far as I know is just extending their existing contract with Paramount)?

They still own the underlying IP[^1], so as long as the contract is a decent one, Paramount has to deal with the actual making/distributing the film, and Hasbro just gets the money, and a toy line off the back of the film. Feels like an easier set up than taking the risk on movie-making yourself (which they did attempt with eOne for other properties, but seemingly have decided that it's probably not a good deal with them)

[1] yes, yes, it's a bit more complicated with Takara in the mix too, but you can essentially view it as a Hasbro-owned property

Comment · 3 years ago
+1 to everybody that mentioned that Vespa has great vector support _and_ lexical filtering. And you likely will end up needing both.

Don't sleep on some of its newer features like multi-vector document fields, either…

Comment · 3 years ago
That paper does a terrible job of making Lucene look useful, though. 10qps from a server with 1TB of RAM is not great (and I know Lucene HNSW can perform better than that in the real world, so I am somewhat mystified that this paper is being pushed by the community).
Comment · 3 years ago
It definitely depends on your use case. If you are just searching through the entire array at all times, then this is certainly an acceptable option (you could even flip it all onto a GPU too).

But when you start to require filtering or combining the vector search with a lexical search, then something like Pinecone, Vespa, Qdrant, Lucene-based options (e.g. Solr and ES) etc. become a lot more practical than you building all that functionality yourself.

Comment · 3 years ago
Yes! We've been running Milvus in production for about three years now, powering some customers that do have queries at that scale. It has its foibles like all of these systems (the lack of non-int id fields in the 1.x line is maddening and has required a bunch of additional engineering by us to work with our other systems), but it has held up pretty well in our experience.

(I can't speak to Milvus 2.x as we are probably not going to upgrade to that for a number of non-performance reasons)

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