TrudeauCastroson [he/him]

  • 4 Posts
  • 215 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2021

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  • 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?







  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.



  • It was Danish King Valdemar II, who had the flag fall from the sky to him as a sign. Some historians say it was a cross-battle dream, like Constantine, or like the 1217 Seige of Alcacer do Sal.

    I guess hallucinating crosses during or after battles was just a common thing for a while. Everyone who lost while hallucinating a cross probably died so there’s probably some confirmation bias there too. It’s like how praying for your team to win a superbowl only works if you end up winning, if you lose then I guess the other team prayed harder.


  • Now that you mention it, I see your point. The Southern cross is probably worse for being a symbol of the explorers who discovered land to be colonized than for the cross itself IMO.

    Meanwhile the Nordic countries have sideways crosses because one of them started it since they had a king see a cross or something in a battle, and then they copied each other’s homework. The king didn’t even meet Jesus, he just hallucinated a cross. If you met the guy then at least that’s a story. That’s like putting Elvis on your flag because you saw him in a potato chip.


  • My top concern in switching to electric lawn equipment is removable battery storage in the winter, and battery degregation/range concerns.

    I bought a used 4 stroke lawnmower from someone moving away, and it mows my whole lawn.

    Considering the rate at which my laptop battery deteriorated, I don’t think the lawn mower battery would last 2 years if I want to do my whole lawn at once.

    Electric replacements for 2 stroke stuff is definitely way better, I love my electric trimmer/edger. It’s easier to charge a battery than mix the oil/gas and smell all that purposely burned oil.

    I hope you live somewhere you can sell that solar energy back to the grid, batteries are the worst part of electrifying stuff. I wonder if anyone’s built a water tower in their backyard for energy storage. Pump it up during the day, release the water down into a cistern at night.