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   Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉 (migueldeicaza@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 00:45:50 JST Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉

   • Thomas 🔭🕹️

   @thomasfuchs to the extent that computers are just large collections of on/off switches, yes. But those descriptions hide in both cases the tremendous tapestry of ideas and power that come from the master of how things connect with each other.

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     Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉 (migueldeicaza@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 00:54:54 JST Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs yes it has limitations, but even the proximity is governed these days by very interesting and sophisticated systems - it is now very far from “what’s the most likely word given the words behind me”

     Like video games that are just a pile of hacks combined, but are able to deliver an immersive experience - these piles of hacks amount to very useful tools.

   • Embed this notice
     Justin 🌻 (onyxraven@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 07:32:39 JST Justin 🌻

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza yes but the search index is lossy-compressed. It pulled the factual pixels into more layers of search. It encoded ‘the world’ with 2000 era mp3s stolen from limewire

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     Justin 🌻 (onyxraven@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 07:49:00 JST Justin 🌻

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza agree - these are some of the amazing uses of vector encodings and transformer - expanding actual relevancy in the search index, related terms, etc - a better paradigm then just tf-idf alone. The problem is that the attention is on using JUST the compressed data :/

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     Justin 🌻 (onyxraven@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 29-Mar-2026 08:16:13 JST Justin 🌻

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @Migueldeicaza oof. Yeah. It felt like they were getting so good.

     I’ve dealt with two kinda difficult search domains in my career. I kinda want to try again.

     First was helping at photobucket - we were trying to blaze a new path with a distributed compute index. Had solr atop hbase and did some pretty cool stuff. There was a lot more we could have done there as those domains really matured.

     Now we have a tough domain in consumer products at Ibotta - we are absolutely leaning in on the vector relativity stuff. Inference/imputing in sparse input data is really interesting.