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I'm into book restoration, here's a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1oNxCfKJp4k6yjoZ9

Much less niche, but I'm also really into acting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=do5PicgU0Jw


Hi! I've been interested in starting book restoration as a hobby as well, are there any resources you recommend to start learning?

I learned primarily by trial and error, haven't found any good articles or videos :(

That's impressive work! But how come the books are in mixed languages? Are they your books? Do you fix books for random people?

Hahaha, good observation :) I ran out of my childhood books (in Spanish) to fix, then I ran out of my GFs childhood books (in Latvian), so at that point I offered my services to anyone in the Google Zürich office. I got books in all kinds of languages I couldn't read, and a few chocolates and bottles of wine for my troubles :)

Some of the most interesting books were especially challenging. One in old German that was missing a couple of pages. It was a popular fairytale so I found the missing content online and a closely matching font, and reconstructed the pages. Another was in an Asian script I not only couldn't read, I didn't know how to sort or even properly rotate some loose pages, so I had to ask the owner. In a few cases when bits of the cover were missing, I found photos online, and printed a patch. Fun times!


that seems wonderfully varied and entertaining :)

Can we also ban anything where the second line is "let that sink in"? And anything claiming that "X is a masterclass in Y" (especially for (tweet, empathy))?

Can't help but think of George Clooney orchestrating the heist from his villa in Lago di Como (with a perfect alibi somehow). Maybe Brad Pitt was hungry.

That's just, like, your opinion, man. I loved the book and I loved the movie.


I do not deny that people enjoy it. I am saying that the film humor, dialogue, and emotional treatment strike me as pitched at a comparatively childish level.... ;-)


Nice, but I'm going to need some ND filters :)


"Brute force" would be trying random weights and keeping the best performing model. Backpropagation is compute-intensive but I wouldn't call it "brute force".


"Brute force" here is about the amount of data you're ingesting. It's no Alpha Zero, that will learn from scratch.


What? Either option requires sufficient data. Brute force implies iterating over all combinations until you find the best weights. Back-prop is an optimization technique.


In context of grandparents post.

     > You determine the weights via brute force. Simply running a large amount of data where you have the input as well as the correct output 
Brute force just means guessing all possible combinations. A dataset containing most human knowledge is about as brute force as you can get.

I'm fairly sure that Alpha Zero data is generated by Alpha Zero. But it's not an LLM.


No, a large dataset does not make something brute force. Rather than backprop, an example of brute force might be taking a single input output pair then systematically sampling the model parameter space to search for a sufficiently close match.

The sampling stage of Evolution Strategies at least bears a resemblance but even that is still a strategic gradient descent algorithm. Meanwhile backprop is about as far from brute force as you can get.


May I add Computer Graphics From Scratch, which covers both rasterization and raytracing? https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/i...

I have to admit I'm quite surprised by how eerily similar this website feels to my book. The chapter structure, the sequencing of the concepts, the examples and diagrams, even the "why" section (mine https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/0... - theirs https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/implementing-a-tiny-cp...)

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe there's nothing to it. But I feel uneasy :(


Ah yes, great book; thanks for pointing it out. Added to the list.

As for similarity, I think the sections you've highlighted are broadly similar, but I can't detect any phrase-for-phrase copy-pasting that is typical of LLM or thesaurus find-replace. I feel that the topic layout and the motivations for any tutorial or course covering the same subject matter will eventually converge to the same broad ideas.

The website's sequence of steps is also a bit different compared to your book's. And most telling, the code, diagrams, and maths in the website are all different (such assets are usually an instant giveaway of plagiarism). You've got pseudocode; the website uses the C++ standard library to a great extent.

If it were me, I might rest a little easier :)


Hi! Blog post author here. I have heard the "Computer Graphics from Scratch" book before, but I haven't read it myself, so it would be quite hard for me to plagiarize it. I guess some similarities are expected when talking about a well-established topic.


its a standard pipeline, everything from everyone will look roughly similar. your book likely looks something like previous work. i wouldnt worry about it, ps i really loved your web tutorials back in the day


I used ordered dithering in my ZX Spectrum raytracer (https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html#fourth-iterati...). In this case it's applied to a color image, but since every 8x8-pixel block can only have one of two colors (one of these fun limitations of the Spectrum), it's effectively monochrome dithering.


Spectrum Basic was my first programming language, so that gives me all sorts of nostalgia feels. Your work is awesome.


https://gabrielgambetta.com - home of Computer Graphics from Scratch, the Client-Side Prediction & Server Reconciliation series, and some more misc things.


I switched to Gmail in 2007 or so. I used to have a gzipped mbox of my previous emails, dating back to maybe 1996 or 1997 when I got my first email account. This file was lost at some point, and I'm really sad about it. In some ways, it's like losing years and years of a journal, conversations I had with people, how I thought about the world at that age, etc. It's a huge loss to me.

About OP's tool, I also back up my Google account to an external disk periodically. Gmail is ~8 GB so it's manageable. But Google Photos is a pain. They recently removed most of the useful APIs, so AFAIK the only way to backup is via Takeout. It's terrible. Pictures in multiple albums are included as copies every time, so I had to make a script to find duplicates and replace them with symlinks. Just downloading the whole thing is a PITA (multiple 50 GB zip files). I get that Google has little incentive to make this better, in fact they might have an incentive to make it as inconvenient as possible, but I really wish they made it easier.


I'm really hoping you're wrong about the removed APIs as I recently tried doing a takeout and about 1/3rd of every album I checked was missing. Was really hoping I could find another tool to get my photos downloaded and moved out/backed up.


Pretty sure they're gone, that's why gphotos-sync and the like have stopped working (https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync-discussion/discuss...)


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