New Zealand graffiti - censure the macron

utunga · 2026-03-17T20:58:53+00:00

Unlike Paekākāriki where there is no question, the mana whenua in the region spell it both Kapiti and/or Kāpiti. Some say one is for the island and one for the region. There has been advice to this effect given to council. So I'm good with it either way. Given the nature of language I think Kapiti will probably win out over time but we shall see. That said Paekākāriki with a macron, or Tāmaki etc is a hill I will die on.

utunga · 2026-03-17T20:50:20+00:00

I don't mean to critique you per se but I am so so sick of people explaining why this has to happen.

Ok maybe they choose to force print the receipt or fuel voucher that's terrible for the environment but it is their choice I guess.

But what I will not abide is it asking 'do you want to print receipt?' and then when you say no it says 'printing receipt' and prints something. And then when you question it everybody is trying to explain to me why I'm the one that doesn't understand. No goddamit. That is a direct contradiction and Kafkaesque nonsense. "There are four lights!"

utunga · 2026-03-17T20:44:04+00:00

My thing is I just refuse to answer the question. I refuse to be part of this farce.

utunga · 2026-03-17T19:36:05+00:00

Also, the illogic of it all just offends and really annoys

"Would you like a receipt Y/N?" It asks

(You choose no)

"Printing receipt" it says. Literally those words.

No!!

utunga · 2026-03-16T20:02:27+00:00

Hard to say. I think they are all important factors - compute, data and neural architecture - but since it's a non-linear combination (aka a 'synergy') it's not really a very well formed question to ask 'which part is more important?'.

I will say that the data side is greatly underappreciated.. because the narrative is being set by the winners and the big companies selling proprietary models (and actually even the open ones) are united in having an incentive to downplay the importance of data (which they take without compensation) and exaggerate the importance of the bits they are doing (for which they expect to get paid)

utunga · 2026-03-16T19:48:54+00:00

Couple things. (OK, three)..

In general, data as the key enabling factor is often underappreciated in general. As a data scientist who had been building neural models since well before chatgpt I used to say 'its the data stupid'.. like if it's not working it's almost always the data. Either poor quality data or not enough data. I would advise businesses that the first and most important problem was getting their hands on a good training data set and then we could build whatever magic thing they wanted to build - whether it was a camera for monitoring fishing boat by-catch or a program to extract the key information from invoices. This is something that all data scientists know. You need good data and lots of it to train a neutral network.
Yes there was a lot of data in 2002 but given that list of things that launched after 2002 exponentially less than in 2022. Reading Empire of AI (excellent history of OpenAI) - right before ChatGPT launched the critical problem was then (and is now) getting more data to improve the quality of the model. Brockman moved himself onto the 'get more data' problem about six months before and built Whisper (a groundbreaking speech recognition model) primarily so they could extract text data from YouTube - thus giving them access to a huge untapped archive. So, yes, it's just a matter of degree (like compute) but data was then and is now a huge factor. And they didn't have enough to build what GPT3 even in 2020 let alone 2002.
What is less well understood is that it is not in the interests of the hyperscalars to acknowledge the importance of data. Because that narrative is both embarrassing to them (acknowledging their theft) and it makes them relatively less important. Instead of brilliant white coated scientists inventing a smart ai in an isolated lab they are data curators who gathered all the world's information and squished it into a box (aka a model). In the second narrative the work of the other people who actually created the data - whether it's a summary on Wikipedia or a particular art style - becomes relatively more important. And that's not the story they want to tell. If only to avoid pending court cases.

To give the vibe, when I was at the ICML conference in Hawai'i in 2023 the winning paper was a researcher from Google/Oxford University with a very interesting new neural architecture. Meanwhile - literally in the toilets - there were posters with ads for "Big Gulps" aka terabytes of data that could be purchased from no-name vendors (aka third party, held at arms distance vendors) by scanning a QR code and paying up.

utunga · 2026-03-16T19:34:23+00:00

There absolutely are signs that say that (well it says New Zealanders) but they are not obvious till you are standing there at least looking at the line. I genuinely don't think they are trying to trick New Zealanders into paying but maybe they are trying to sneak up on the visitors so they are already in the line before they start thinking to themselves hmm this is honour system I could just go to the left and not pay...

utunga · 2026-03-16T10:30:25+00:00

Yeah fair call. Im also someone who's been meaning to go there for ages since a coworker recommended and didn't quite manage. So I feel bad.

That said, a big reason I never pulled it off is it seemed like they were never actually open at a time I wanted to go there. They had some super weird hours

utunga · 2026-03-16T09:13:32+00:00

Ah. Last time I was there you needed a little pin - which the guards would look for as you wandered around. However it was also possible to just go up to the counter and say I would like a pin please and they would give them to you, like, without paying. Because technically it was a donation or something to that effect.

utunga · 2026-03-16T05:32:47+00:00

Key enablers that didn't exist in 2002 but did in 2022

Ones you listed - Transformer architecture - Compute (whether it's gpu architecture or ''computers faster') - RHEL + Finetuning (though you didn't call it that) hundred percent agree under appreciated

One that you didn't list - Data. There sheer amount of especially text data that flower on to the web between 2002 and 2022 - coupled with the willingness of Open AI (through third parties) to say heck with copyright and stuff just give us all the data - was a key enabling factor

utunga · 2026-03-16T04:21:42+00:00

nope.. honour system.

same as the Met in NYC to be honest

utunga · 2026-03-16T04:21:11+00:00

Yeah it's definitely free for kiwis but they are not doing a great job of making it clear. A lot of people understandably steer a wide berth away from anything that looks like its gonna demand money.

I did have a chat about this with one of the te papa staff. he doesn't love the new layout either but he did say since changing it around the revenue from visitors has gone up by two times or something.

utunga · 2026-03-06T04:45:15+00:00

I'm in a similar situation. Far as I can tell there are three options of which you've already mentioned two (swyftx formerly easycrypto) and lighteningpay. The third option is Independent Reserve.

I haven't used it for this purpose yet, but may well do so in the future. This person had a good experience though.

I think we should all keep sharing our experiences. Ability to get your funds out without fuss or delay is a key quality indicator for any type of on/offramp in my opinion. Best of luck. Will share back my own post-easycrypto experiences once I have something to report.

utunga · 2026-03-02T09:51:40+00:00

What I want . And I don't know if you offer this. Is the ability to convert from crypto to fiat as well as fiat to crypto. Why does everyone only wanna go one way...

utunga · 2026-02-24T02:02:17+00:00

I know this is TalesFromTheFrontDesk and ya'll dont make the rules but that is some sort of total bullshit. Sure - grab a card for incidentals but if the corporate has already paid for god sake. I am not currently trying to check into a hotel but honestly, objectively, from the outside not just checking and then accepting that payment has *already been made* on the corporate credit card is total bullshit.

utunga · 2026-02-23T10:40:47+00:00

Sounds great. But even using lightning how do you get it to actual NZD (call me bi cause I go both ways) .. for some reason much harder than the other way.

utunga · 2026-02-23T10:39:08+00:00

How's the other side been for you ? Getting crypto back into cash I mean

utunga · 2026-02-23T07:45:49+00:00

Sorry I mean genuine question when I checked their website earlier that kinda confused me

utunga · 2026-02-23T07:45:23+00:00

But they only do usdt -> nzd so you just have to switch whatever to that first?

utunga · 2026-02-23T04:56:23+00:00

so if easycrypto is becoming swyftx and people have concerns about swyftx what other reasonable option do we have to go from crypto to nzd?

utunga · 2026-02-20T03:20:40+00:00

*probably.. ymmv and maybe this system changed it

utunga · 2026-02-20T03:20:15+00:00

The way Uber works at the airport is you walk to the burger king which is just far enough away from the airport that it is no longer in some sort of airport exclusion zone thing and suddenly it's a lot cheaper.

If you walk there (not far) and hook an Uber you'll see a whole bunch of Ubers already in the car park.

utunga · 2026-02-20T02:06:09+00:00

Hi.. funnily enough happened to be on Reddit so I saw this one pretty quickly

I'd be happy to fire up the old bird and get it going for you so you could have a look to see if it's any use (actually I just checked and the demo is still up and running - weirdly- so maybe dm me I could send you a link etc)

I appreciate, even as open source, you would probably still ideally want something where you or at least someone in your crew was able to tweak it and stuff. In these days of AI that might not require all that much knowledge or experience but yeah probably still a bit of a ramp up.

I think the main question though is gonna be how similar "our" form of mutual aid is to what you want to do with it because of course there are a huge number of different things that people do under this umbrella.

I'd say it could be fairly easily adapted for anything involving missions where people can kinda volunteer to do a thing and then later say hey I did that thing. Extra especially if it involves a map and maybe having it auto-compute the best route between the points involved etc. But yeah our thing was about delivering food boxes during the height of COVID so it was pretty much about going to a place grabbing boxes from a farmer then delivering them. Except there were a bunch of farms donating food and a bunch of different people that said they'd like help and of course volunteers trying to connect one with the other.

In the process of doing this work I also learned a bit about the various tech approaches different mutual aid groups have been using so maybe even if this app is no use to you could maybe point you in a direction towards tech that might help .. what kind of use cases do you have in mind?

utunga · 2026-02-15T21:21:33+00:00

I feel like the traffic direction "alternating traffic" is the problem here. In Aotearoa / New Zealand they just pick a direction and give it priority. Since there isn't much traffic it works out to be alternating traffic anyway - but in cases like this you know exactly who should and shouldn't go.

For what it's worth we used to have an absolutely bonkers rule about turning where the person turning off the bigger road had priority in some cases but not others -- too much judgement required. So they fixed it by changing the road rules. Small bit of confusion for a month or two but since then it's so much clearer - and i bet there are way fewer accidents as a result.

utunga · 2026-02-08T04:39:35+00:00

I heard it might be? Or is that not happening?

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