QuestSpace

QuestSpace is a hackerspace & co-working in Košice where we cultivate a community of people with common interests such as computers, technology, science and art

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

Still very far from the end goal of WebXR with Project Northstar…

…but getting there!

Next steps: calibration

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

Catch me during next week @WebSummit if you want to talk about XR, AI, crypto, freedom, SaaS, etc.

https://t.co/5xm2EbMjdp private beta launching over beers at Night Summit 🔥

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

New startup is cooking at @parallelpoliske and @questspacesk hackerspace!

We love to provide the XR headsets for testing to the community 🙌 to support awesome projects.

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

First version of https://t.co/5xm2EbMR2X is focused on helping you build all kinds of WebXR apps, together with hosting them. You would be able to collaborate with your friends on your projects in real-time.

For the second version… well let’s say I’m cooking something cool!

[Signal @signalapp]

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe.

https://t.co/015qmQnIS2

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

A lot of excitement here! Many experiments were done in @questspacesk which is part of @parallelpoliske and we hope that https://t.co/uhwUeLw5Ja will be very useful for building WebXR apps as part of our “hackerspace digital overlay” a.k.a. Jarvis for building hardware projects

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

After a lot of experimentation and night sessions during the past few months, the PoCs I worked on in 2023 and XR experiments from last few weeks, finally converging into a new product.

Lauching soon -> https://t.co/zpRqCnuK9H

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

3D sensors for the Project Northstar Next arrived in @questspacesk hackerspace!

Let’s build!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

The (true) story of development and inspiration behind the "attention" operator, the one in "Attention is All you Need" that introduced the Transformer. From personal email correspondence with the author @DBahdanau ~2 years ago, published here and now (with permission) following some fake news about how it was developed that circulated here over the last few days.

Attention is a brilliant (data-dependent) weighted average operation. It is a form of global pooling, a reduction, communication. It is a way to aggregate relevant information from multiple nodes (tokens, image patches, or etc.). It is expressive, powerful, has plenty of parallelism, and is efficiently optimizable. Even the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) can actually be almost re-written as Attention over data-indepedent weights (1st layer weights are the queries, 2nd layer weights are the values, the keys are just input, and softmax becomes elementwise, deleting the normalization). TLDR Attention is awesome and a *major* unlock in neural network architecture design.

It's always been a little surprising to me that the paper "Attention is All You Need" gets ~100X more err ... attention... than the paper that actually introduced Attention ~3 years earlier, by Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, Yoshua Bengio: "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate". As the name suggests, the core contribution of the Attention is All You Need paper that introduced the Transformer neural net is deleting everything *except* Attention, and basically just stacking it in a ResNet with MLPs (which can also be seen as ~attention per the above). But I do think the Transformer paper stands on its own because it adds many additional amazing ideas bundled up all together at once - positional encodings, scaled attention, multi-headed attention, the isotropic simple design, etc. And the Transformer has imo stuck around basically in its 2017 form to this day ~7 years later, with relatively few and minor modifications, maybe with the exception better positional encoding schemes (RoPE and friends).

Anyway, pasting the full email below, which also hints at why this operation is called "attention" in the first place - it comes from attending to words of a source sentence while emitting the words of the translation in a sequential manner, and was introduced as a term late in the process by Yoshua Bengio in place of RNNSearch (thank god? :D). It's also interesting that the design was inspired by a human cognitive process/strategy, of attending back and forth over some data sequentially. Lastly the story is quite interesting from the perspective of nature of progress, with similar ideas and formulations "in the air", with a particular mentions to the work of Alex Graves (NMT) and Jason Weston (Memory Networks) around that time.

Thank you for the story @DBahdanau !

[Wes Winder @weswinder]

Cursor is officially AGI.

Time for devs to pack their bags.

Cursor agent with the 0.43.3 update is crazy.

You can just let it code while you go to the beach.

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

Yessss this is what we needed!

[TonyVT SkarredGhost @SkarredGhost]

CAMERA PASSTHROUGH API IS COMING EARLY NEXT YEAR!!!! We did it guys!!!

#Meta #MetaConnect #VirtualReality

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

cc @michaltakac

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

Large World Models is the future!

[World Labs @theworldlabs]

Hello, world! We are World Labs, a spatial intelligence company building Large World Models (LWMs) to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. Read more: https://t.co/El9rgi6bxQ

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

We're building a small-scale version of this at QuestSpace.

Plan is to leverage XR and as a first step, we'll build Smalltalk-inspired XR OS, which understands the QuestSpace's environment.

Come help us in Košice - we're part of @parallelpoliske 🚀

https://t.co/Y9mp6iY5jU

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

We're super excited that our 3D printers are printing again without a problem! Thanks to our amazing hackers from @parallelpoliske 🖤🤟

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

@TheDimensionLab has a new website!

We’ve made few adjustments to succinctly putting down what we’re doing and where we’re going / what’s the mission.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇧🇷 APPLE VISON PRO ADOPTED BY BRAZILIAN SURGEON

For the first time in Brazil, a surgeon successfully used an Apple Vision Pro headset to optimize a surgical procedure.

Surgeon, Bruno Gobbato:

"Shoulder arthroscopy surgery uses a camera inside the joint and surgeons perform it by looking directly at a screen. With this device, I was able to see the image on the size of a movie screen with high resolution, as well as being able to see the patient's exams and 3D models in real-time."

Experts expect the device to be used routinely in Brazilian healthcare soon.

Source: MacMagazine

[Nathan Odle @mov_axbx]

Please enjoy this SGI Indigo2 workstation from 1996 running llama2.c by @karpathy. 1.4 tokens/sec with the 15M TinyStories model!

Just a little porting for the big endian IRIX machine, all in an evening’s work.

What would ML researchers have thought 28 years ago seeing this?!

[Paralelná Polis Košice @parallelpoliske]

Chceš vedieť ako tvoriť AI produkty lacno a rýchlo s využitím serverless GPU?

Tak príď 15. februára do PPKE o 17:00, kde ti @michaltakac ukáže ako na to!

Lístky na https://t.co/MtNLNndG0d

[Diego @dmarcos]

Reminder Safari for Vision Pro is shipping WebXR (behind flag).

The fastest, easiest way to reach most of the VR audience.

Write code once, bypass all rules, approval red tape and platform revenue cuts. You’re free already and most still not aware.

[QuestSpace @questspacesk]

CryptoParty is happening on 27th of January in Paralelná Polis Košice!

The program will be packed!

We can’t wait to host @maltman23 in our small hackerspace 🚀

[Paralelná Polis Košice @parallelpoliske]

[ CryptoParty Program 27.1. ]
Mitch Altman, vynálezca, hacker a zakladatel hackerspaces (nie len) v San Francisco. Vo svojej prednáške predstaví svoje skúsenosti s technickými aj spoločenskými prekážkami, s ktorými sa tieto kumunity potýkajú.

https://t.co/ssI3DMM8uc

[Michal Takac @michaltakac]

PlotChat is the first side project I got to MVP first and then bought a domain.

First, a good walk with family.

Shipping first ugly version in the evening.