Automat (runautomat.com) | San Francisco (In Person) | Multiple Roles
Automat (YC W23) - the simplest way for companies to create AI agents that take on repetitive, tedious tasks — from navigating complex user interfaces to reading and processing documents. Our technology helps some of the world’s largest companies streamline their operations.
We’re a small talented team still in the early days of building, and your contributions will go beyond just code. You’ll have the opportunity to actively shape technical solutions, influence product direction, and contribute meaningfully to all aspects of our engineering culture.
It doesn't seem to exist yet. The specifications are not specifications, they are design goals. I don't see how they can get the color coverage they're claiming with RGB LEDs.
Seems about as credible as a lot of the crowdfunded stuff.
Strobing RGB LEDs is how Epson's professional flatbeds do color. That's one of the more plausible aspects of the design, I think. No mention of IR though, so I suppose that means no dust correction.
The custom software package is clearly in its foobar stage. Loving the word "TextLabel" surrounded by a bunch of padding.
The issue with LEDs, is very pure colors. That’s actually a bit of a problem, with film scanners. You need a smooth curve, and it needs to extend out a bit. You don’t want areas of color being missed.
The Coolscans had a light color response (think the “levels” screen, in Photoshop) that looked like three steep hills, with minimal overlap, but they were able to make them wider than a “pure” LED. Coherence is a feature of LED lighting.
Most previous light sources used filters over a white light, and they looked “sloppier,” with a lot more overlap, so there was more coverage. We had to correct for the unusual color coverage of LEDs.
One of the things that the Coolscan did well from a hardware perspective was that it made the transport sprocketless which allowed damaged film to be easily scanned, and it also allowed non-standard formats to be scanned easily as well. I’m curious if they have a sprocket driven system for this or if it utilizes a similar system as the Coolscan - I’ve used many scanners and the Coolscan is still the best/most convenient because of being able to just sequentially scan an entire roll of negatives.
I assume the LEDs were matched to the typical pigments used in films though? Because otherwise metamerism just wouldn't work, RGB mixed to some CCT is not white light and can't illuminate arbitrary pigments with any kind of good color reproduction.
I assume so. The folks that designed the scanners were no slouches. I suspect that they never completely turned off any LEDs, so there was always some deliberate “slop.” With LEDs, however, you can explicitly control that. They probably had some kind of filter, also. I never took one apart, though.
I got the response curves by feeding in a special slide with a diffraction grating.
The curves were markedly different from an incandescent light source.
It seems like folks buy a used Coolscan, scan their stuff, then sell it. They seem to last pretty well. I'm about to buy a used one to scan my Dad's old slides. And then sell it.
The slide feeder is good but it's worth being aware that if you have slides mounted on cardboard (I had a lot of old family photos like this I used it for) it will often grab a couple at once. You can fix that by clipping eg a driver's licence in the right place to narrow the gap it pulls the slides through, but it will still need some manual supervision.
If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.
They also sucked. I had an LS-2000 and the images were noisy as hell and it couldn't scan negatives for shit. I sold it on eBay. It's incredible how overrated the Nikon scanners were.
In the end I found a new in-box Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 II, pretty much the end of the line for film scanners. I haven't tried it yet!
The 4000-5000 series Nikon Coolscans sell for about the same price they did 20 years ago because they still produce excellent scans and there’s nothing quite as good for that $1000-$15000 price out there.
I feel like its best to have a project first where you need 3d printing and then buy a printer. Just getting a printer in and of itself is kinda boring after finding some random crap on thingiverse and printing it out.
I've heard that feedback before, but I couldn't quite understand what was wrong. I'd really appreciate your help in troubleshooting.
My understanding is that Shift + G should be absolute positioning, so 12G will bring you to the twelfth line.
I do deviate slightly from default VIM in that relative lines are one, so the line count starts at 0, respective to your cursor. Is there a chance that this plays into your experience of the bug?
Not the person you're replying to, but I agree that for me (as another heavy shift-G user), vim-racer having `:relativenumber` turned on is where my own troubles are coming from.
I'd really love to be able to specify whether I want absolute or relative numbering (or both or neither); the :set commands don't seem to be implemented?
Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
> Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either.
People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
Automat (YC W23) - the simplest way for companies to create AI agents that take on repetitive, tedious tasks — from navigating complex user interfaces to reading and processing documents. Our technology helps some of the world’s largest companies streamline their operations.
We’re a small talented team still in the early days of building, and your contributions will go beyond just code. You’ll have the opportunity to actively shape technical solutions, influence product direction, and contribute meaningfully to all aspects of our engineering culture.
Roles:
Full Stack Software Engineer
Forward Deployed Engineer
Applied AI Engineer
And More! See all roles here: https://www.runautomat.com/careers#roles