ping_pong

I used Tesseract almost 10 years ago to scan letters from a Words With Friends board. I was getting over 90% accuracy, but the letters with score values on them corrupted the letters and screwed up the detection. So I created a new "language" which Tesseract supports, that incorporated the score value corruption as part of the OCR translation. I got to over 98% accuracy with that which was about as good as I could get.

Overall I thought it was great and I wonder how good it would perform these days with 10 years of improvements!

You are assuming a professional is reading whatever the content is you are distributing and will make a rational, fair decision.

No.

It's going to be a minimum wage indentured Google servant that doesn't quite understand what they are reading but they have 17.5 seconds per case to make a decision. They will shoot first and ask questions later. What if the document is satire but they couldn't understand it? Oh well there goes one strike against your account, or maybe that's your third strike and now ALL your Google accounts are banned.

We already know what the appeals process is like. Unless you get it publicized on Hacker News et al, you won't get any chance to appeal.

You're definitely not thinking creatively enough.

You don't need to hit the planet directly with anything, all you need to do is destabilize the orbit of all the planets or even just the Earth itself. You could send a gravity wave for example, that would cause the Earth's near circular orbit to shift to a very eliptical orbit. The vast change in temperatures would kill all life on the planet, and then you could come and mine all the resources that you needed and leave.

> On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.

Forget about what monstrosities we have done to other human civilizations throughout history. Instead, think about what we have done to animals. We have hunted many animals out of existence, or we have farmed them and made them basically the equivalent of the Matrix, sources of energy and food.

We are trying to eradicate mosquitoes for crying out loud, and entire species, without giving it a second thought. I will use insecticide to kill today entire colonies of ants without blinking.

All it takes is for one advanced alien civilisation to come across us and deem us the equivalent of their mosquitoes to eradicate us and take all the resources from the Earth. That's the whole point of the Dark Forest theory. If there's an infinite number of civilisations out there, and one of them is so advanced that we are insects to them, why wouldn't they just exterminate us, or use us as food?

So now, a minimum wage drone at Google, or even worse an AI, will be able to shut down my entire account because they perceived my document that I'm sharing as "misinformation"? That's pretty fucking scary.

I took a year off and for fun, I spent 40 hours a week for 9 months on a website that used OCR and other packages for some games. It generated around $15/month in ad revenue, just enough to pay for my EC2 instance at the time. I kept it around but at some point the ad revenue I made dropped like a rock by 90% so I shut it down. It was fun nonetheless and I learned a lot, but it was not successful by any measure.

So it really is just a way for them to suck out the cash flow of Aramco and leave nothing but a husk for external investors?

No. It's impossible. There was no outbreak in Osaka. A disease as virulent as Covid with only a single person infected is not likely at all.

What is the separation between the Saudi government and MbS. Is it essentially the same and is it the case of MbS monetizing Aramco at the expense of the investors?

American Dad has 2 episodes dedicated to showing that Saudi Arabia is the worst place in the world. Your story just reinforces that idea.

The numbers were self-reported, so it's not going to be very accurate.

I'm sorry but Covid wasn't in Osaka in November 2019. You definitely had some other disease like the flu.

Wow, my kid was complaining that he couldn't access a page a couple of hours ago and I dismissed it as him making a mistake somehow. I guess this is must be a pretty huge outage for it to be across all the products!

Every couple of years? But I do think the frequency of straight up comedies being produced is dwindling, and aren't popular enough to go to a movie theatre for.

> they want guaranteed returns and they do not want to gamble about it

This is how Hollywood is. It's the same as Silicon Valley. They don't want to gamble if they don't have to, they both just want as much money as possible.

Better Call Saul at its best is as good, if not better, than 99% of Breaking Bad. Of course, the best episodes of BB are among the best in TV history.

When was the last great comedy movie you've seen in the movie theatres? I posed this question to my buddies and we were genuinely stumped. For me it was probably early 2000s, but nothing in the last 15 years that's for sure.

I love it. They don't even care now, do they? Private jets are the most obvious targets of carbon tax because they are completely unnecessary, and the politicians decided to carve out the tax only for them. The world we live in is truly wonderful.

I'm pretty desensitized to stuff, but this study is a horrifying. They basically mutiliated a rat by connecting it to another rat's circulatory system, implanted a uterus and then impregnanted it. It feels like this has crossed some boundaries of ethics. It's like that Russian experiment that decapitated a dog, connected it so that blood was recirculating through its brain, and then let it wake up. It's horrifying to think we can allow this in the name of science.

I worked on a visual programming tool from the late 90s to the early 2000s. The same problems apply then as they do now.

There's an unwinnable war between keeping things simple and being complex-enough to do useful things. Visual stuff is great for simple things, but simple things aren't very useful. When you really need to do more complex things, you reach a limit very quickly. It becomes pretty unmaintainable very quickly and then people will "graduate" from it and go to something more convenient.

My kid is learning Scratch right now, and it's taught him a lot of great stuff. But after about a year, he's ready to move onto Python. Scratch has taught him some very valuable concepts and he was able to jump into some Python concepts with ease (others still escape him). But you can only go so far with Scratch vs other programming languages.

The same goes for other visual tools. In the end, people graduate from the visual style because it ironically becomes too complex because they want to keep things simple, and then you've lost a customer.

The funny thing is that someone could openly start wearing a bodycam for themselves and record everything for leaks, and no one would know that it wasn't authorized.

It's funny how quickly forget about Stephen Harper and how he tried desperately to turn Canada into its anti-thesis.

The same laws that protect speech that you may not agree when your party is in power, protect your speech when the opposite party is in power. And the way things are going with Trudeau, I really don't expect him to survive the next election.

It sounds like you are lonely and consumed by work.

The last 1.5 years has been extremely lonely time for a lot of people around the world. Take a little bit of relief in knowing a huge percentage of the entire world is in the same boat as you. You're not alone, you're not unique in this loneliness.

Forgive yourself. This is the most important part. I don't believe you're a complete failure in life, but even if you are, FORGIVE YOURSELF. Tell yourself, okay you made a mistake and you're human, but you forgive yourself and move on. Drop the shackles of shame and anger at yourself by forgiving yourself and move on. Otherwise the shame you feel will never go away. You're exceedingly young, and you can motivate yourself to put yourself in a position to be happy.

As the world starts opening up through the rest of this year, do your best to get out and socialize. Understand that the next couple of years will be hard but learn how to socialize the same way you learn mathematics and programming. Trial and error and many, many attempts. You will get better at it.

You need to find your people. Those that share similar interests or similar sense of humor, etc. People you can talk to in real life. If you can work in person, do this.

Tinder and all online dating apps are 100% based on looks. I am not particularly good looking and when I tried match.com (I'm over double your age) it was a disaster. If I needed to use Tinder today, it would be a disaster as well. But I've been able to find my fair share of girlfriends because I can carry a conversation and I inherently like talking with people. Find others that you can talk to and then try to meet people that way. It sounds hard, and it is. But keep on trying over and over and over again. That's the way you get better.

Oh, are we supposed to be in it to "make the world a better place"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

Founders made 8 figures, most employees including early ones got less than 100k. Back during the dotcom boom, options were distributed a lot more generously. At the first company I joined, the admin assistant made enough from the IPO to buy a vineyard and retire.

Anything food related should be compostable, including in supermarkets. If it means we can't store food for months, the good. It means we can compost them as fertilizer so the planet is still okay.

Without getting draconian on companies who don't give a shit about anything except for profits, they won't lift a finger to do anything about it.

Non-recyclable plastic should be banned immediately. The fact that we let it persist is ridiculous. I don't care how much costs go up.

We should also limit the types of plastic to a handful, and they should all be recyclable in-country. If we can't recycle it, ban it. Let it get replaced by glass or metal. Again, I don't care how expensive it is. Just like climate change prevention, it's something that needs to happen otherwise we are killing humanity.

Over a decade ago, I worked at well-known web site in one of the smaller properties. The site looked like it was from the mid-90s. A year-long effort was made to upgrade the site to something more modern, and it was beautiful.

It went live, and almost immediately the number of ad clicks dropped significantly. It turned out that the older site was so hard to use that customers would inadvertently click on ads, bringing up the revenue. The new site was so much easier to use that customers clicked on less ads.

The changes were almost immediately rolled back.

I think eventually the new site was put back in, but only after they ensured that ad clicks wouldn't go down precipitiously, but I had after by then.

He has lived a very interesting life, to say it mildly. I can think of worse lives to have lived, especially considering how rich he was, how salacious a life he lead with his drug-and-sex filled decades and even killing someone. Ending it via suicide in a Spanish prison seems just about par for the course given the rest of his life.