KingRandomGuy

@KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Interesting Intel tech for rendering graphics⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll need to give this a read, but I’m not super sure what’s novel here. The core idea sounds a lot like GaussianImage (ECCV '24), in which they basically perform 3DGS except with 2D gaussians to fit an image with fewer parameters than implicit neural methods. Thanks for the breakdown!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨tool to make an stl from 2D image?⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have multiple views of the object and can take a video, NeRF and Gaussian Splatting tools can form a 3d model if you have an NVIDIA GPU. I don’t know if there are good user facing tools for this though (I mess with these things in my research), if you have a technical background you might be able to get NeRF Studio to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need help with printer recommendations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s all fair! For myself I use a lot of PET-CF, especially annealed. For some applications you can get away with the stiffness and the creep resistance provided by annealed PET-CF rather than needing a machined part, so for me an air fryer or equivalent is a must (for both drying and annealing). I build stuff for astrophotography, so having a material that is heavily resistant to creep and is also stiff is a must.

  I’ll note that for PETG, if your print is under nontrivial load, it will probably start to deform well below the 80C mark. Continuous use I believe is about 70C. Though because PETG is so inexpensive, you can always just reprint as long as assembly isn’t too difficult.

  You’re right that PLA, PETG, and TPU are like 90% of anyone’s needs though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need help with printer recommendations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Having a way to dry filament is a good idea. You can do so with a cheap food dehydrator or a dedicated filament dry for the purpose.

  My favorite way is an air fryer, as it can actually hit the temperatures needed for certain engineering filaments (ASA-CF, PET-CF, PPS-CF) and the forced air combined with the fact that they aren’t sealed tends to be more effective than the spoolholding dryers. I then print from a dry box made from cereal boxes with molecular sieves. This is overkill if you are just printing standard filaments though (PLA, PETG, TPU, etc.)

  I’ll add that there are still fairly common situations when you’ll want ABS/ASA: If you’re building something with stepper motors (say parts for a printer), ABS/ASA’s higher temperature resistance means you can push more current through your motors without deforming the print where the motor is mounted. This is of course especially helpful if you’re putting parts into a heated chamber, where PETG will likely start to deform under prolonged use at 60C+ temperatures. ABS/ASA are also more rigid, so they’re better for high speed printer parts. Finally, if you’re putting something in a car in a hot environment, PETG will not really hold up, but ASA will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need help with printer recommendations⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  W.r.t your spool question, ABS is still a great material choice for a lot of applications since it has pretty well rounded properties. Reasonably strong, reasonably rigid (but not brittle), reasonably creep resistant, and fairly temperature resistant (probably the cheapest filament that can withstand a hot car). It’s generally a bit tricky to print though. You need an enclosed printer for good results (much better layer adhesion and less risk of warping and cracking) and it’ll emit styrene fumes which you don’t want to be breathing. I always put my printer outdoors if I’m printing ABS or its replacement in ASA.

  If you don’t care about that high temperature resistance and just want decent impact strength, then PETG is an acceptable alternative. It’s pretty cheap, easy to print, but is a little more flexible than ABS. It has decent creep resistance as well, unlike PLA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there no good inexpensive CAD software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s absolutely not at the level of beginner and user-friendliness that you’d expect out of a professional CAD package yet, so it’s understandable you had a rough experience. I think we’re all hoping that FreeCAD will eventually see a similar level of improvement that Blender and KiCAD got in this area. Both of them were originally much worse in terms of usability, but after enough effort (and investment from major players like CERN in the case of KiCAD and community members), they ended up being really competitive packages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye Intel, hi AMD! I’m done after 2 dead Intels⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Their GPU situation is weird. The gaming GPUs are good value, but I can’t imagine Intel makes much money from them due to the relatively low volume yet relatively large die size compared to competitors (B580 has a die nearly the size of a 4070 despite being competing with the 4060). Plus they don’t have a major foothold in the professional or compute markets.

  I do hope they keep pushing in this area still, since some serious competition for NVIDIA would be great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  GrapheneOS patches this behavior if apps match their Google play signature IIRC. This is a behavior that apps on the play store can opt into (basically they block operation if they aren’t installed via Play).

  It was rather annoying until recently, since some apps require you to be on a certified Android install to find them in the Play store, but don’t actually check play integrity in the app. These apps when installed via Aurora wouldn’t work for me until Graphene patched this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there no good inexpensive CAD software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah 1.0 has been quite stable for me. I especially recommend the weekly releases with features planned for 1.1, like better sketch projection tools and snapping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there no good inexpensive CAD software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s dogshit as I’ve been enjoying the beta releases. What I will say though is that the workflow feels different enough compared to every other commercial CAD program I’ve tried (solidworks, fusion, inventor) that it required me to effectively re-learn the software rather than jump right in. Pretty much every other CAD program didn’t have this problem, in part because they’re more forgiving when you violate best practices.

  FreeCAD is much more rigid in comparison. If you follow its best practices, it works wonderfully, but when I came from another CAD program my previous experience kept making me run into issues.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember to dry your filament kids⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I strongly recommend printing out of a sealed dry box as well. There are lots of good designs based around cereal containers and molecular sieves. For extremely hygroscopic filaments like PET-CF, this is the only way I’ve been able to get good prints.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but at this point most specialized hardware only really work for inference. Most players are training on NVIDIA GPUs, with the primary exception of Google who has their own TPUs, but even these have limitations compared to GPUs (certain kinds of memory accesses are intractably slow, making them unable to work well for methods like instant NGP).

  GPUs are already quite good, especially with things like tensor cores.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, you can certainly get it to reproduce some pieces (or fragments) of work exactly but definitely not everything. Even a frontier LLM’s weights are far too small to fully memorize most of their training data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most “50 MP” cameras are actually quad Bayer sensors (effectively worse resolution) and are usually binned 2x to approx 12 MP.

  The lens on your phone likely isn’t sharp enough to capture 50 MP of detail on a small sensor anyway, so the megapixel number ends up being more of a gimmick than anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bambu Lab Controversy Deepens: Firmware Update Sparks Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with your thoughts. I hate what Bambu has done to the industry in terms of starting a patents arms race and encouraging other companies to reject open source, but I do love how they’ve pushed innovation and have made 3D printing easier for people just looking for a tool.

  I hope the DIY printers like Voron, Ratrig, VzBot, and E3NG can continue the spirit of the RepRap movement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom – Purism⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some apps only require ‘basic’ play integrity verification, but now check to see if they’re installed via the Play Store. They refuse to run if they’re installed via an alternative source.

  This has been a problem for GrapheneOS, since some apps filter themselves out of the Play Store search if you don’t pass strong play integrity, despite the fact that they don’t require it. Luckily Graphene now had a bypass for this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Color-correcting algorithm removes the effect of water in underwater scenes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, since this is using Gaussian Splatting you’ll need multiple camera views and an initial point cloud. You get both for free from video via COLMAP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google DeepMind unveils AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered AI coding agent that designs and optimizes advanced algorithms⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, in typical Google fashion they used to have two deep learning teams: Google Brain and DeepMind. Google Brain was Google’s in-house team, responsible for inventing the transformer. DeepMind focused more on RL agents than Google Brain, hence discoveries like AlphaZero and AlphaFold.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google DeepMind unveils AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered AI coding agent that designs and optimizes advanced algorithms⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The general framework for evolutionary methods/genetic algorithms is indeed old but it’s extremely broad. What matters is how you actually mutate the algorithm being run given feedback. In this case, they’re using the same framework as genetic algorithms (iteratively building up solutions by repeatedly modifying an existing attempt after receiving feedback) but they use an LLM for two things:

  1. Overall better sampling (the LLM has better heuristics for figuring out what to fix compared to handwritten techniques), meaning higher efficiency at finding a working solution.

  2. “Open set” mutations: you don’t need to pre-define what changes can be made to the solution. The LLM can generate arbitrary mutations instead. In particular, AlphaEvolve can modify entire codebases as mutations, whereas prior work only modified single functions.

  The “Related Work” (section 5) section of their whitepaper is probably what you’re looking for, see here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately proprietary professional software suites are still usually better than their FOSS counterparts. For instance Altium Designer vs KiCAD for ECAD, and Solidworks vs FreeCAD. That’s not to say the open source tools are bad. I use them myself all the time. But the proprietary tools usually are more robust (for instance, it is fairly easy to break models in FreeCAD if you aren’t careful) and have better workflows for creating really complex designs.

  I’ll also add that Lightroom is still better than Darktable and RawTherapee for me. Both of the open source options are still good, but Lightroom has better denoising in my experience. It also is better at supporting new cameras and lenses compared to the open source options.

  With time I’m sure the open source solutions will improve and catch up to the proprietary ones. KiCAD and FreeCAD are already good enough for my needs, but that may not have been true if I were working on very complex projects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cute cat! Nevermore and Bentobox are two super popular ones.

  Since you’re running an E3 V2, first make sure you’ve replaced the hotend with an all-metal design. The stock hotend has the PTFE tube routed all the way into the hotend, which is fine for low temp materials like PLA, but can result in off-gassing at higher temperatures such as those used by ASA and some variants of PETG. The PTFE particles are almost certainly not good to breathe in during the long term, and can even be deadly to certain animals such as birds at small quantities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience doing a bit more than 10% can be helpful in the event of underextrusion, plus I’ve seen it add a bit more rigidity. But you’re right that there are diminishing returns till you start maxing out the infill.

  4 perimeters at 0.6mm or 6 at 0.4 should be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I agree. In the photo I didn’t see an enclosure so I said PETG is fine for this application. With an enclosure you’d really want to use ABS/ASA, though PETG could work in a pinch.

  I also agree that an enclosure (combined with a filter) is a good idea. I think people tend to undersell the potential dangers from 3D printing, especially for people with animals in the home.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the respectful discussion! I work in ML (not LLMs, but computer vision), so of course I’m biased. But I think it’s understandable to dislike ML/AI stuff considering that there are unfortunately many unsavory practices taking place (potential copyright infringement, very high power consumption, etc.).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All good, it’s still something to keep in mind (especially if OP thinks about enclosing their printer in the future). Thanks for your comment!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO heat formed from stress will not be a big deal, especially considering that people frequently build machines out of PETG (Prusa’s i3 variants, custom CoreXYs like Vorons and E3NG). The bigger problem is creep, which suggests that you shouldn’t use PLA for this part.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ender 3 V2 damage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  PETG will almost certainly be fine. Just use lots of walls (6 walls, maybe 30% infill). PETG’s heat resistance is more than good enough for a non-enclosed printer. Prusa has used PETG for their printer parts for a very long time without issues.

  Heat isn’t the issue to worry about IMO. The bigger issue is creep/cold flowing, which is permanent deformation that results even with relatively light loads. PLA has very poor creep resistance unless annealed, PETG is a quite a bit better. ABS/ASA would be even better but they’re much more of a headache to print.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It appears like reasoning because the LLM is iterating over material that has been previously reasoned out. An LLM can’t reason through a problem that it hasn’t previously seen

  This also isn’t an accurate characterization IMO. LLMs and ML algorithms in general can generalize to unseen problems, even if they aren’t perfect at this; for instance, you’ll find that LLMs can produce commands to control robot locomotion, even on different robot types.

  “Reasoning” here is based on chains of thought, where they generate intermediate steps which then helps them produce more accurate results. You can fairly argue that this isn’t reasoning, but it’s not like it’s traversing a fixed knowledge graph or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement.

  I disagree. Scaling might seem trivial now, but the state-of-the-art architectures for NLP a decade ago (LSTMs) would not be able to scale to the degree that our current methods can. Designing new architectures to better perform on GPUs (such as Attention and Mamba) is a legitimate advancement.

  Furthermore, lots of advancements were necessary to train deep networks at all. Better optimizers like Adam instead of pure SGD, tricks like residual layers, batch normalization etc. were all necessary to allow scaling even small ConvNets up to work around issues such as vanishing gradients, covariate shift, etc. that tend to appear when naively training deep networks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beyond RGB: A new image file format efficiently stores invisible light data⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that pickle works well for storing arbitrary metadata, but my main gripe is that it isn’t like there’s an exact standard for how the metadata should be formatted. For FITS, for example, there are keywords for metadata such as the row order, CFA matrices, etc. that all FITS processing and displaying programs need to follow to properly read the image. So to make working with multi-spectral data easier, it’d definitely be helpful to have a standard set of keywords and encoding format.

  It would be interesting to see if photo editing software will pick up multichannel JPEG. As of right now there are very few sources of multi-spectral imagery for consumers, so I’m not sure what the target use case would be though. The closest thing I can think of is narrowband imaging in astrophotography, but normally you process those in dedicated astronomy software (i.e. Siril, PixInsight), though you can also re-combine different wavelengths in traditional image editors.

  I’ll also add that HDF5 and Zarr are good options to store arrays in Python if standardized metadata isn’t a big deal. Both of them have the benefit of user-specified chunk sizes, so they work well for tasks like ML where you may have random accesses.