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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • probably the best optical character recognition by far

    I’ve actually just been working with OCR this week, trying to capture data off of the screen of a stupid proprietary Schneider device as that’s the only way to get at it.

    Long story short Tesseract stinks at this task.

    The Chinese designed PaddleOCR seems significantly superior as it runs a more modern neural net and requires a lot less preprocessing. I would class it as more of a “full service AI” and not just a simple recognition system like Tesseract, it can correct for skew and do its own normalization and thresholding internally while Tesseract wants a perfect boolean raster fed to it.

    Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is a lot higher due to trying to understand their text vomit website and the fact that it seems prone to random segfaulting.




  • I feel the OOP debate got a bit out of hand. I hate OOP as well, as a paradigm.

    But I love objects. An object is just a struct that can perform operations on itself. It’s super useful. So many problems lend themselves to the use of objects.

    I’ve been writing a mix of C and C++ for so long I don’t even know where the line is supposed to be. It’s “C with objects”. I probably use only 1% of the functionality of C++, but that 1% is a huge upgrade from bare C IMO.





  • Do it, it’s easy and fun and you’ll learn about the actual capabilities of the tech. Started a week ago and I’m a convert on the utility of local AI. Got to go back to Reddit for it but r/localllama has tons of good info. You can actually run useful models at a conversational pace.

    This whole thread is silly because VRAM is what you need, I’m running some pretty good coding and general knowledge models in a 12GB Radeon. Almost none of my 32GB system ram is used lol either Microsoft is out of touch or hiding an amazing new algorithm

    Running in system ram works but the processing is painfully slow on the regular CPU, over 10x slower



  • I would argue that AI possibly makes a better companion in some ways when it’s a little stupid. I’ve mostly ignored AI but have been experimenting with local models a bit the last couple days while stuck hiding from the cold.

    I found I like AI best around the “talking dog” level of intellect. Kind of like the Titanfall AI, he’s friendly and eager to uphold the mission, very competent at his job, but clearly not a human and kind of charmingly foolish. A dog is also a good companion, while clearly not a human and honestly a lot dumber than many AI models now.

    Using it as an answer engine or to write code snippets feels like working with a dog on the farm, you talk to it but don’t expect too much back. It doesn’t give that uncanny feeling, just provides some company without feeling like something you’re trying to replace other humans with.

    I’m a lot more accepting of talking dogs than something that pretends to be your girlfriend. That just comes off weird and creepy, to me.

    For some reason having it running on my machine made it feel more like a real entity than typing into the cloud. Hard to explain, but I found I treated it with a lot more dignity than a cloud based AI.




  • Boo hoo, clearly you didn’t read about how shipping is the lifeblood of the world, and it’s not about some “stuff” not arriving. It’s about not setting a precedent that anyone with a rocket launcher is allowed to take potshots at civilian vessels.

    Without nuts and bolts and cultivator shovels and sickle knife sections Canada won’t have grain to export to the rest of the world. Oh no, we don’t make any of those ourselves? The world is extremely co-dependent now, which is part of the reason that we don’t have any major wars going on.

    You know who can stop this right now? Hamas can stop this right now. They are clearly not going to “win”. Their prolonged actions are only causing suffering to their own people. They could do the honourable thing and SURRENDER which would end the war right now. But they aren’t going to do that, because they aren’t fighting for benefit of the Gazan people. They’re fighting because they hate the Jews.

    Israel walked away from Gaza many years ago, left it entirely under its own governance. If its people had put the past aside and chosen a path that led to alliances and peaceful cooperation with the world, it could be a bustling trade hub and a beautiful little vacation destination on the shores of the Mediterranean.

    Instead they chose their hatred of the Jews and spent decades launching rockets into Israel.

    The same applies to the Houthis. Yemen could be a prosperous nation like its neighbours. Instead it’s a war-torn dump in abject poverty. Ever wonder why we sell weapons to our questionable “ally” of Saudi Arabia to fight them? Because for all that SA is terrible, the Houthis are worse.

    Do you think their Iranian backers will tell them to back down once they learn that they have full control over a major shipping lane, and the ability to blackmail the world with it? That’s the true path that leads to WW3.


  • As ugly as it sounds? Yes. There are nearly 8 billion humans on a planet with finite resources, globally distributed. The resources, unfortunately, are more valuable than any specific subset of humans at this point.

    Without trade, billions would die. And they won’t be Westerners, they’ll be people who live in places where population exceeds carrying capacity. Namely, the ME and Asia.

    Yemen in particular is highly dependent on foreign aid. By blocking trade the Houthis are not looking out for the people of their country any more than Hamas is looking out for the people of Palestine. In fact they are the reason Yemen is starving. I’m not sure why so many people on Lemmy are professing support for an illegitimate, theocratic revolutionary force.

    “Arab countries and all Islamic countries will not be safe from Jews except through their eradication and the elimination of their entity.” - Al-Houthi

    Yes, the Houthi are real opponents of genocide.

    If the Houthis really feel like they have a dog in the fight, they could declare war on Israel and deploy and fight rather than harassing non-combatants. They’re nothing but terrorists, not combatants - and if the world agrees on one thing it’s that we do not negotiate with terrorists.


  • The crew members are there for a wage, and the ships themselves mostly have nothing to do with Israel.

    A huge portion of global trade runs through the area, and it’s not just “trinkets from China” as some like to say. It’s grain, fuel, steel, all of the things that keep the world running in a globalized economy.

    You can’t blockade the entire world and not expect retaliation. If anything, I’m surprised it took this long.


  • Why not ask the human lives on the trade vessels?

    If the US Navy wasn’t swatting missiles and drones, hundreds of sailors would be at the bottom of the sea by now.

    Don’t forget environmental damage from spilled fuel and actual oil tankers that would be damaged. You know, like the Russian tanker they accidentally fired on today even though it had even less to do with them than anyone else in the sea.

    Launching missiles at civilian ships is not a “protest”.




  • And it’s always been terrible at it. And it still is. Pairing issues, overcompressed audio, dropping connections, overcomplicated protocol without universal support… I have no idea how it didn’t get replaced by a competing standard.

    Like Wi-Fi, honestly. How is Bluetooth not just “USB over Wi-Fi”. Literally. Tunnel USB over a 2.4Ghz link. A transport layer that does transport, and then the endpoints can just… Talk to each other. It doesn’t sound hard…

    Instead we have a system where my wireless controller works great except with an Intel built-in BT chipset. So when I decided to play some games last night on my new TV and tried it out with my laptop, every 15 minutes or so the controller locks up and spins constantly to the right, and has to be re-paired.

    Or where if I play anything with any sort of bass in my truck the compressor flattens the mids so you can’t even hear the vocals, so I have to use a physical aux cord instead. Why is there dynamic range compression at all? Why is it not configurable? Why is this not just a raw PCM stream. WHY

    We have had this protocol for 25 YEARS and it still works like beta


  • Both are correct but it’s a misleading argument. Yes on a geological time scale volcanic eruptions have had a greater impact on the climate that humans have.

    However that doesn’t change the fact that we fucked up the planet for ourselves by effectively producing a slow burn volcanic eruption over the last century. This wouldn’t really be a big issue if we hadn’t also exploded our population to the point where we now need all of the land on the planet to feed everyone, and a drop in agricultural output would be catastrophic.

    It’s just that on top of that you can also lay awake at night concerned that the planet itself might decide to kill all of us at a moment’s notice and there would be nothing we can do about it. See: Permian extinction