I don’t really need the locally trained AI to recognize general handwriting, only my own.

I could provide a few pages of my own training data (maybe write out a few pages of “quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and other stuff like that), and then ideally it flags stuff it’s unsure about and I clarify some more. Maybe find garbled nonsensical sentences, realize it’s probably a mistake, and try and fix it.

I assumed the leaps in AI would have taken care of this by now, since detecting handwritten letters from touch pen-strokes existed in the 90s. But I guess handing it a chunk of text is too different of a problem, instead of feeding it stroke by stroke?

This is a pretty comprehensive article about the type of scamming the guy who got killed allegedly did, from 2018, but somehow he kept getting away with stuff and didn’t get convicted yet. I guess he afforded good lawyers and nothing caught up to him yet until this one disgruntled guy.

When I first heard about the shooting I assumed it might’ve been a scammer who got killed, because those small-time mortgage brokers can get really sketchy really quickly.

Canada has the same vehicle size issue. Large pickup trucks/SUVs are similarly popular. Everyone here goes 15km/h over, unless there’s speed cameras which are only by schools.

I wouldn’t be surprised if impaired driving was a big factor, in Canada it’s the equivalent of a felony even if you don’t hit anyone. In the US it seems like people treat it closer to being a speed ticket.

I was thinking something like “wascal” but with the real r-word slur.

The n-word hard-r is definitely worse than the n-word soft-r/a, but Linus’ definition of hard vs soft r is more ambiguous as to which one is worse if used in a sentence.

It’s funny what this implies he thinks a “soft R” means

Now that I read that thread I get what you’re saying. I thought they were making the point that you don’t know how things would go down if you did succeed in killing Hitler, it might do nothing, is fair.

But the counter to that just being , when we know that less than nothing would’ve changed was funny. They clearly just worked backwards from saying “assassinating politician is bad” and then couldn’t admit they were wrong when it came to Hitler.

They simplified killing Hitler to the trolley problem and decided to definitely not ever pull the lever, and instead just hope the lever pulls itself.

Lib on the reason why the assassination wouldn’t work (fear, martyr, blah blah blah), but there’s a not-bad point buried somewhere in there.

It avoids great man of history-ing Hitler, since killing him wouldn’t change the material conditions of Germany that lead to Hitler. The Holocaust is probably the worst-case scenario for what could happen (idk if Hitler 2 does the super Holocaust), and idk enough about intra-party politics of the Nazis other than the purges they did.

Maybe the second in command of the party wouldn’t be as effective of a leader and fizzle the nazi party out and we instead get the moderate nazi party, and who knows how that would end up. Communism was spreading at that time, and fascism was going to pop-up regardless in response to this, but the exact shape of what happens would be slightly different and maybe the genocide wouldn’t be as bad.

Also why imply someone with a time machine couldn’t make it look like an accident. They could just drop a piano or anvil on his head and everyone would see it as a common hazard and think nothing of it.

This is actually a bigger deal than the headline suggests if the claims are to be believed. Hopefully the licensing isn’t too expensive for it to be widely adopted if manufacturing at scale is easy.

They don’t say how it degrades in water, but if it can degrade in ~2months outdoors then that’s actually pretty good.

Most biodegradable eco-plastic is a scam because it’s either only partially degradable, or only degradable in industrial facilities. If I can throw this packaging in my own compost bin then that would be a huge way to get rid of single-use plastic.

That’s very dubious, since where I live they have to honour the shelf price even if it’s wrong.

What happens when they raise the price while I’m on the way to the register? How can I possibly counter this?

I actually had something similar happen to me. I grabbed something, I was mischarged, I told the cashier who told the manager who checked, and the manager changed the price while I was standing at the checkout and claimed it was always that price. I usually check the UPC when something is on clearance so I know I’m buying the right thing. I didn’t buy the item.

Now I always walk with them to the aisle to see the price so they don’t pull that on me.

If you’re a convenience store but pallets of Coca Cola, then they kind-of can. They can just blacklist you from buying Coca Cola in the foreign country.

It’s also different because they’re selling you continuous access one month at a time instead of a physical good you drink and they can’t take away from you. I’ve been to places where service costs are lower for locals than for tourists, and this is told to you outright. Stuff like museums, taxis, etc. It’s a similar idea YouTube has.

Prices are also almost never based on cost, they’re based on what people will pay.

I live in Canada, and cars are more expensive here than in the USA. US dealerships near the border refuse to sell new cars to Canadians, even though it’s legal for everyone as long as you make sure to pay duties on the way back. I’m guessing each brand has some rule against it.

Ultimately VPN users aren’t a protected class so it’s legal to discriminate.

There is some problem with that as you say, but the company doing the poll is pretty well-respected by the west. They were also labelled a foreign agent by Putin at some point, so I looked at their opinion.

This is an interesting op-ed by the guy who runs the polling company, talking about preference falsification.

There’s an estimate that <10% of people in Russia have motive to lie because of power they’d lose if their opinion got out, and the theory is that this is usually constant. Unless Putin is scarier than 2 years ago you can still compare differences in opinion, even if you don’t trust the magnitude. The guy also said that you can look at the positive responses as having a share of neutral because people who aren’t informed just go with the majority instead of saying “idk”.

But no matter how much lying in polls there is, the amount of people worried about sanctions went down compared to 2 years ago, and compared to 2015.

Which makes sense considering how much physical capital western companies left in Russia, since VW can’t take an auto factory back to Germany with them even if they can take some equipment (but not all).

If you’re using any hash smaller than your file (not just md5), then it’s always possible to have 2 different files that match. This is just from pigeonhole principle. No matter what you use there will be collision.

md5 is just bad because it’s small so it’s easier to generate this match. It’s also a question of how easy is it to reverse engineer a match, which apparently md5 is worse for on pictures than I expected.

I thought md5 is vulnerable to generating 2 colliding files, not to trying to generate a match to an existing file.

Edit: wow I didn’t realize md5 matching a picture was that easy, looks like you can make any image look enough like that twitter-deboonked one to generate a fake match. How has no one done this yet.

Thanks for the links, it’s pretty interesting stuff I haven’t kept up with for a while.

I didn’t hear about that potential apple attack, I wonder if you could generate a collision with a pic that looks close enough to the twitter image they auto-deboonk and a pic that’s completely unrelated, got twitter to add your new similar image to the auto-deboonker, and then troll on twitter by posting the unrelated image.

That’d be similar to that apple attack you linked, but it depends on how twitter auto-deboonking works and how easy you could get them to add a similar-but-different pic to their deboonker database.

If you have access to a quantum computer you could do this easily. With current computing it’s hard.

Linen is definitely under-rated. It’s nature’s underarmor. Except polyester always seems to smell eventually because of how it absorbs sweat-stink, unlike linen. I’d definitely buy a white linen 2 piece suit, or just the pants if I find a deal. If I found not-expensive linen boxers them I’d buy them too. Linen sheets in the summer are also unmatched but expensive, and you have to iron them if you don’t like a sloppy bed.

Thin merino wool socks are also pretty good, but usually I buy a merino-poly blend because it’s cheaper and they’re less likely to get stretched out of shape.

I also got some seersucker (which is a textured cotton) shirts which I’m excited for, and are supposed to keep you cooler because the texture creates less contact between fabric and skin, but idk about that in reality, i just like the texture.

I have no idea if rayon is actually good or not for heat.

I’m surprised peanuts are that high in protein, but the rest of the peanut is fat so it’s too calorie dense to use for protein goals if you eat badly otherwise.

I usually use g of protein/calorie to evaluate workout/diet food, while trying to keep relatively low cost.

Tofu/soymilk has been pretty good to me, but it’s hard to hit protein goals vegan without supplement. Vegan protein powders function fine even though I use brown-rice protein which is terrible-tasting. I prefer soy protein powder, but I eat too much soy otherwise and want to balance my amino acids because I heard that’s good to do.

The Chinese car thing is ‘funny’ in a glib way to me.

Neolibs can’t admit that unionized auto-manufacturing is one of the few well-paying factory jobs that still exist and need some sort of protectionism to still exist, because protectionism is bad.

Chinese phone companies collaborating with car companies to make a product that has a UI people like is actually because the Chinese are nefarious.

If there was a Chinese company 1/5th as evil as Nestle we’d never hear the end of it. American car companies have been purposely evil in the past in not fixing stuff to be recalled because the loss of life was less expensive than fixing stuff.

I’m not really hyped on these Chinese cars because of the union jobs that would be lost, and I’m automatically distrustful of cars that are more iPad than car (I don’t think I’d like Tesla’s even if they didn’t kill people because repairability is important).

The avg person can’t look at the recent influx of indian immigrants without being racist. Even other immigrant groups hate the influx of cheap exploited labour. By my arbitrary estimate of talking to people not born in Canada, people become Canadianized (racist) after 2-5 years.

We’re not that ‘urbanized’ really, more suburbanized which breeds its own brainworms that seems pretty similar to Alberta (car dependence, insane distance between stuff, horrible commutes). It also feeds into the real-estate bubble/crisis because most new builds are insanely inefficient suburban McMansion type houses that no one can afford.

Somehow most people have the politics of a hockey parent (idk where you’re from, they have similar class make-up to Trump’s big beautiful boaters), even if they’re proles.

Everyone hates the carbon tax, the conservative premier easily buys support with refunds/tax-relief that regressively benefits the rich more than the poor. We’re all primed to blame the wrong thing for affordability issues.

Condolences for you being in Calgary. I’m uncomfortable with how reactionary the avg Ontarian is, so I feel bad for you.

Economics is sold as the study of how limited resources are distributed, but the neolib approach is assuming infinite growth potential, and is terrible at dealing with supply shocks like this.

Everything inconvenient is a conspiracy because there’s no such thing as not having enough surplus to waste in the first world.

Idk if it’s everyone having to work to get paid, or actually everyone having to work to pay landlords (corporate and residential, and banks who hold mortgages of people who “own” houses). It’s crazy that Georgism as a class compromise hasn’t taken off yet.