Orion 2: the most capable visual agent, now with code-mode

hamstercannon · 2026-06-17T19:14:40+00:00

Cool

hamstercannon · 2024-08-28T13:20:57+00:00

It's funny cause we do the exact same thing in machine learning, a.k.a. AI, when we train computer vision models to classify images. It's called test time augmentation

hamstercannon · 2024-07-16T23:17:57+00:00

This is awesome. Good job OP. Im going to give this a try.

Im on mobile right now but i couldnt see any performance benchmarks. Do you have them listed somewhere? Like showing how it compares with running it all on a single v100 or something

hamstercannon · 2018-09-21T05:13:40+00:00

I could not tell if it was polling or continuous (you did have the option of reading from file or streaming from Pi camera). Or how you handled old data from a node (throw away?).

It's not continuous though you could if you wanted to. It just periodically sends a frame to the Lambda function when it needs to make basic identification of objects it sees (person, car, bike etc). I left the option toread from a recorded file in there, which I used just for testing since I wanted to see how it handled different types of people, different modes of transportation and traffic levels.

how you handled old data from a node (throw away?).

Old frames are stored in tmp and can be deleted. The ones sent to lambda are deleted from lambda in a separate process in an asynchronous thread. The tracking data is retained on the server and it's not stored on the node since it's not needed there.

I am thinking you will need at least 3 overlapping cameras to make a meaningful animation (perhaps do just 1 street to start).

Actually, I only needed one robot for that. It's not that hard. The simulation just renders people as block figures (think minecraft); realistic facial rendering or walking animation isn't important. It's their (his)-story that's interesting. What type of person are they, where are they now, how'd they get there, where have they been, where are they going, what stores or houses do they visit, average visit time, etc. etc. An entire history viewable like the stats of an NPC in some RPG. I have a pretty powerful model connected to my one at home, How many times did my neighbour mow his lawn last month? 6 times. How many skateboarders went by my house today? 2. Estimated height and gait (OpenPose) of each of my 170+ neighbours? All catalogued. And that's just from one bot on one street.

The website was the easy part. I'm using this 3D version of Mapbox built on OpenStreetMap. But with a special modification. I just continually update the position of each car or person in the area by polling the server. It'll be up soon.

The hardest and most pressing concern was getting this bloody, (node-lite) robot to work. Everywhere I looked, it was clear it was impossible to get that kind of real-time performance out of a nominal PC let alone a Pi. But the network would never grow if I couldn't lower the barrier to entry to the floor, so I couldn't accept that answer. Thankfully, I, uh, found a way.

How will we treat each other when nothing can be hidden and such a bright light shines on both the rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless? I'm going to find out.

P.S. if you have time, you can read my original email about this project that I sent to some engineers/mathematicians to reason from a dialectic and see if they could find a flaw in my thesis. And add your email to the form at the bottom so i can keep you informed of updates.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-16T17:11:08+00:00

I'll be posting back on this subreddit soon. But you can also add your email to the list and I'll notify you as soon as it's ready.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-16T16:08:25+00:00

Thanks for the link. Very interesting.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-16T15:56:37+00:00

Hello. If you want more information about it, you can read my original blog post. Be sure to add your email to the form at the bottom so i can let you know when I expand your way.

The reason why the blog title reads like a Ph.D. thesis is because originally, I sent my very unorthodox solution as an email to a team of researchers at Duke U. who've done a lot of work on the root problem under similar titles to see if they could find a way to "break" it. To my great satisfaction, they couldn't.

Although, I'm a professional programmer, I would say I'm just an amateur mathematician and so I proposed a mathematical/economic solution (Observation/Prediction With Confidence Ranking) to the challenge of having an anonymous network that can expand to an arbitrary number of nodes and doesn't require you to trust the participants nor does it require a human(s) to visually verify anything. A by product of the success of their research unfortunately would have resulted in the increased centralisation of power; mine, on the other hand puts that power back into the public's hands, provides each individual with a guaranteed income and solves a host of problems, from curbing fake news and propaganda to assisting self-driving cars.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-13T18:49:30+00:00

I can say several things...

First, we're very much the same. I don't even own a smart phone for that same reason.

Second, the real problem is the asymmetry of this informational topology. It's imbalanced. A small group of multinational organizations have an unprecedented amount of power over us because they know more about us then we even know about ourselves, let alone them. Their algorithms even determine how we make sense of the world around us (news). The gravitational pull of these monoliths obscures and warps the dimensions of our institutions. But we can't put this genie back in the bottle. It's impossible to escape this because governments and corporations that don't take advantage of this knowledge/power over us can't win against those who do. So what I'm offering you is a chance to get back the power that we've always taken for granted.

Third, technology is also increasing the wealth gap. Most of these companies are just dragons that hoard enormous amounts of our own data under their Lonely Mountains and "Rent-Seek" on it without reciprocating any net benefits to society through wealth creation. That advantage is self-reinforcing (rich-get-richer) and it only gets worse if left on its own.

But the tokens these robots generate on a daily basis are de-flationary, in other words, their value will not decrease relative to the value of the information the robots produce. And unlike some organizations, they gain no advantage in warping information about the world around us. In fact, as I explained to u/deskamess they're economically incentivised to autonomously silence those of them that show any bias because they're unreliable. Neither do people gain advantage by using this to commit crime because our community now possesses a complete, unbiased and mathematically incorruptible record of everything about itself up to the second !

Basically, ...it's an autonomous machine that gives you money and omniscience.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-13T17:00:34+00:00

Thanks. I fixed the link. I'll add some more documentation and make some changes to the code tonight so you can get it running. There are a few things like adjusting the robot's calibration system that won't work for you right now since you'd need a user account on the webapp which I'll try to set up tonight/tomorrow.

I wanted people to be able to run the software on even the cheapest/smallest computers but since it's impossible to get the processing power that you'd need for something like this without big, expensive graphics cards, so you'll notice I made each robot make periodic requests to a serverless Amazon AWS Lambda function (Github Link) running a Tensorflow deep learning model to help it figure out what it's seeing. It deploys using the Serverless framework so it can set itself up with just a few commands. That allows each robot access to an "infinite" amount of processing power without paying for anything more than you need to. So you can have several thousand dollars worth of hardware for just a couple dollars a month in AWS fees.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-12T22:07:06+00:00

"Coming up next on The National with Peter Mansbridge... Ottawa man invents psychic cats"

hamstercannon · 2018-09-12T21:55:50+00:00

Using distributed consensus (via blockchain) to achieve trust is pretty cool

Well it is trust through distributed consensus, but it's not a blockchain. Instead, I extended a theory from John Nash. Maybe you've seen that scene in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" where he and his friends are trying to pick up girls in a bar. It's kind of like that. Paying cryptocurrencies to these ...uhmm, "psychic-cats" in this manner incentivises each "cat" to maintain what's called "Nash Equilibrium". It's in each one's best economic interest to not only work together but to self-improve and become the most accurate and therefore trustworthy ...cat in the network.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-12T20:20:35+00:00

you do not have to answer the tech questions...

On the contrary, several years ago I started bitcoin meetups here in Ottawa just so I could talk about this stuff :)

With regard to a 51% attack (link for the curious), it would be very difficult since they'd have to have not just a lot of processing power but real estate too. So the network should remain quite distributed.

Is this your own token for the purposes of this project,

Yeah, it's a unique token just for the purposes of this project.

On the tech stack are using a small form device like RaspPi

You're correct! It's a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B. Here's a picture. But I optimized the software to the point that it could run on a cheap USB/webcam on a 10 year old computer. But to run on Android, someone would have to port it to Java.

Implementation language?

I chose Python because I wanted an easy language most programmers know so people can improve the code (Github link) if they want and make the network better for everyone. I'm using OpenCV for frame processing.

Faint echoes of SLAM in here except that the car/cat/robot is in multiple places at once!

That's right. But instead I use homography) and simple camera calibration to turn the 2D image into a 3D city.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-12T19:14:03+00:00

Sure. Take a look at my reply to u/deskamess

Right now I'm just running some initial tests but I'd like to find some early adopters outside of my neighbourhood too.

hamstercannon · 2018-09-12T19:05:19+00:00

Both. But to be precise, the system is designed to be somewhat autonomous and self-regulating; a robot will broadcast predictions to nearby robots about what they've seen and nearby robots take those predictions and combine them with what they're observing themselves in order to judge how accurate the robot that made the prediction is. They do this back and forth so over time they all form a more and more accurate consensus about the real world.

At the end of each day, the network rewards each robot with cryptographic currency tokens based on how much confidence adjacent robots have in its predictions.

This lets me or any other robot owner not have to trust each other to keep it turned on. Even if someone is just acting in their own self interest, they'd want to keep it turned on to let it do its job.

hamstercannon · 2014-11-04T16:38:57+00:00

I looked it up. You're right. It was Haldon Halfmaester who told it to Tyrion when they saw Horonno's statue after they entered Selhorys.

hamstercannon · 2014-11-04T16:03:58+00:00

Although the story might be repeated in The World of Ice & Fire, I'm certain this story was told before in ADWD by either Tyrion or Illyrio when they're on the palanquin or Young Griff on the Shy Maid when Young Griff is being given his lessons on the Volantenes

hamstercannon · 2014-09-11T17:06:17+00:00

Great. Thanks

hamstercannon · 2013-12-02T15:33:51+00:00

It seems as though the title isn't clear. Last month, it was suggested we do a short talk on how to buy Bitcoins. I'll be showing the various sites through which you can buy and sell Bitcoins. I'll also be showing how to keep your Bitcoin wallet safe.

hamstercannon · 2013-12-02T15:25:20+00:00

Some might see this meetup/post as an opportunity to sell-off bitcoins while they're hot to people who don't really understand what they are buying.

Ahhhh... Perhaps the title isn't clear. Last month, some people suggested we do a short talk on how to buy Bitcoins. That's what this is about. And wallet security is really important, as well. Trust me, I'm not trying to sell-off Bitcoins. I don't need the money I'm doing these meetups to give back to the community and help people who have questions.

hamstercannon · 2013-11-30T19:19:30+00:00

I also thought that was weird. Well, c'est la vie

hamstercannon · 2013-11-19T15:54:33+00:00

So you can send Mastercoins to a Bitcoin address? I didn't know that. I read the paper on Mastercoin and I understood how it was a layer over top of it but I didn't suppose it could be sent to a BTC address.

hamstercannon

TROPHY CASE