TrudeauCastroson [he/him]

  • 3 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 6th, 2021

help-circle
  • 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 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.


  • 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.



  • 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).


  • In Canada you have to pay extra for a 5G plan even if you have a 5G phone. And grandfathered plans/plans you’ve been on for a while keep the low speeds.

    I had a super cheap prepaid plan with 3g speeds until I switched last month because I was on it for so long.

    Some prepaid plans here just cut you off data completely unless you prepay for your overage. Others let you go over and charge you like $5 per 200mb over (ridiculous).

    There are post-paid monthly plans that don’t do overage charges, but they throttle you so much it’s not really useful.

    Edit: just checked, for 50 CAD (around 40 USD) you can get 100GB of 5G a month prepaid, for a plan that gives you complete US coverage as well.




  • I had similar issues, I started pre-crastinating.

    By that I mean artificial deadlines that I set for myself (I need to get this assignment done 1-3 days before it’s due so I have time to take a quick glance at it right before I hand it in). These were hard deadlines that I pulled all-nighters for. I didn’t actually change any habits to become a model student, I just changed the order in which I did unhealthy things.

    This eventually lead to me being able to get into the habit of breaking up homework into doing x amount of problems per night, like the top students in my class usually did.

    For final projects with less discrete milestones than answering some problems, I still found it difficult and never got used to that. I still pulled all-nighters but aimed my fake due date to a week before, and made it a bit softer so it was okay to sleep if I was more than half done.

    I raised my grades from barely passing to decent student. Never got to A+ student but I think was getting there.

    I used to never stick to to-do lists, and I still don’t like them. I don’t like the obligation and feeling like a failure when it’s left not completed. I have to do stuff as it comes to me, or know I’m setting out a block of time to do it later that day.



  • I wouldn’t believe you because the beat/instruments are very 2000s Timbaland-y.

    I now looked it up and The Neptunes (Pharrell) produced it, which makes sense because of the weird, idk, syncopation on the beat. I take back Timbaland because if he made the beat the instruments would stand out more and be more annoying (not that I’m annoyed, I just don’t know how else to describe it).

    I’m not music educated, so idk if my words are right.

    I also feel like the singing is 2000s RnB style, but idk if that’s just bias from knowing it’s old, the instrumentation, or how the vocals are produced. I can’t really name that many modern RnB woman singers so I don’t have a good comparison frame. Compared to HER or SZA the vocals aren’t that produced, Kelis is more imperfect and slightly raspy which i think would be edited more these days.


  • Right now I’m looking for something with a similar to a vintage omega seamaster, because I love how thin and small it is. Only problem is price, I’m looking for something cheaper and similar. My wrists aren’t wide enough for a lot of watches.

    Daily I rock a casio with a stainless steel band that has a clasp. The band held up really well over the years, and it doesn’t pinch you like the non-clasp more adjustable casio metal bands do.




  • RIP Watch Underscore Dogs.

    It’s weird not paying attention to gaming for a while, and then seeing that we don’t really have AAA open-world games that are that much better than the late Xbox 360 versions of that genre. How is far-cry still going?

    It’s like if Nintendo kept releasing level packs for Mario (like the Japan version of SMB2) instead of making new ones that are actually different. If they were Ubisoft they would’ve kept making SM64 levels and SMW levels with maybe a few added mechanics like how romhacks work.