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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Used to do this to my shooting glasses, just put Scotch tape on my non-dominant eye so I could leave it open while shooting open sights.

    I’m “wrong eyed” so my brain always tried to look down my gun with my left eye. The tape solved it. With practice I can now shoot well with regular glasses, though it’s still more comfortable to use taped glasses.

    Don’t listen to the wrong prescription talk as it will hurt your eyes. Tape is cheap and safe.


  • No I’m serious, I’m here in SK and we’re trying to push Moe and his cronies out for the NDP this fall, and our biggest problem is the federal NDP damaging the brand by backing Trudeau. All we say all day is “The SK NDP is not affiliated with the federal party, we stand for working Canadians, vote Moe out”

    If you think $500 for low income and seniors is anything other than a bone thrown to pacify the poor then Singh has pulled the wool over your eyes.

    The requirement for “no access to insurance” absolutely torpedoes the entire thing. Private insurers need to fall, universal coverage is the only way. Dental is the Canadian equivalent to the entire USA health insurance racket.

    Congrats on living in the one green riding, which does give you some power over your single seat party… Which ultimately holds no power at all in our broken system.

    I’m sorry to say I voted Trudeau on the promise of electoral reform, which he then told us we didn’t want. I’m in a safe blue riding which means my vote is pointless, so I’m going full protest vote next time for the PPC 🤣 Max is laughable, especially his obsession with dairy supply management, but enough votes for “burn it down” will hopefully send a message.


  • Trudeau over Biden?

    Trudeau is importing the world’s problems in the name of propping up the real estate investor class (of which he is a member) and pumping up fake GDP numbers. GDP per capita is plummeting in Canada with excess immigration.

    Singh is in his pocket, a waste of a vote. I was an NDP voter all my life, I’m done.

    Polliviere is an absolute idiot who will ride a wave of hatred for Trudeau into office.

    Voters in Canada have no power and no representation as all votes are whipped. Your MP is a seat filler. We have no ballot initiatives or direct democracy options that America has, and reform will never come.

    Biden listens to people who know what they’re doing and stands out of the way… Passed legislation supporting workers and unions, energy infrastructure etc. meaning he’s both more left than Singh and more business-friendly than PP



  • America needs some perspective. You complain that your only choices are a doddering fool or a toxic narcissist who wants to actively destroy the nation.

    Here in Canada we look at our options and think “America is so much better, I wish we had an option to vote for a doddering fool. All we have are narcissists”

    No joke I wish we had a leader as good as Biden. The bar is so low that the devil is doing the limbo with it down in Hell.


  • It’s complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50’ tower with booster.

    However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.

    So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.

    Now the issues. RCS won’t work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there’s no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.

    This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I’ve got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.




  • Right, we need to come up with better terms for talking about “AI”. Personally at the moment I’m considering any transformer-type ML system to be part of the category, as you stated none of them are any more “intelligent” than any others. They’re all just a big stack of tensor operations. So if one is AI, they all are.

    Remember long ago when “fuzzy logic” was all the hype and considered to be AI? Just a very early form of classifier network but everyone was super excited at the time.


  • I’m just stating that “AI” is a broad field. These lightweight and useful transformer models are a direct product of other AI research.

    I know what you mean, but simply stating “Don’t use AI” isn’t really valid anymore as soon these ML models will be a common component. There are even libraries and hardware acceleration support for tensor operations on the ESP32-S3.


  • It’s possible for local AI models to be very economical on energy, if used for the right tasks.

    For example I’m running RapidOCR which uses a modern transformer architecture, and absolutely blows away traditional OCR at capturing data from character displays.

    Doesn’t even need a GPU and returns results in under a second on a modern CPU. No preprocessing needed, just feed it an image. This little multimodal transformer is just as much “AI” as bloated general purpose GPTs, but it’s cheap, fast and useful.


  • Look at Saskatchewan, Canada. We’re the only province with a public telecom, SaskTel.

    Most people in the cities and even larger towns have fiber, and our cell plans are significantly cheaper than anywhere else in Canada despite being a rural province with a large coverage area to population ratio.

    We also have decent electricity rates considering we have no hydro, and the cheapest natural gas in Canada. Thanks to SaskPower and SaskEnergy.

    Public utilities are the only way to do it, I’m always shocked to see people defend privatization in any way.


  • 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.