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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There is this thing that I feel is most prevalent in the USA, to call any attraction to a girl under the age of 18 pedophilia. Because that’s the age to star in porn. The term should truly be used for attraction to children. I think it’s an extension of the “pedo panic” where every man is assumed for some reason to be a child rapist now.

    As such almost every young man could at some point be caught as a “pedophile”- 17 year olds sneak into clubs all the time, for example. 20 year old hooked up with one? Now he is considered a pedophile even if the actual age of consent is lower.

    Meanwhile the porn industry glorifies “barely 18” girls as something highly desirable. It’s a little messed up to say the least.

    Actual pedos who are into kids should be put in mental institutions. But I would strongly suspect that 15% stated just includes honest young men and creepy old men, none of which are truly pedophiles. That number is way too high.


  • beats dealing with android studio

    It’s been years since I went near Android for this reason, I’ve had some decent ideas for stuff I’d like to do on mobile but was so turned off on developing for the entire platform. Maybe I’ll have to take a look at some of the new frameworks.

    My trouble is I would prefer to write in an embedded style C/C++ for the agricultural stuff I want to do, and all this Java/JS stuff and heavy focus on fancy UX is really not my vibe.



  • evranch@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    You don’t understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are “self-cleaning”.

    Kessler Syndrome doesn’t even mean that we can’t fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.

    In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.

    I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I’m able to post this. It’s been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I’m all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I’m less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.


  • Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

    It’s a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

    And yes, it’s terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it’s interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

    It’s also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I’m sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.



  • The problem is the “race to the bottom”. Sure, some grindy desk jobs can gladly be taken by AI.

    What about the jobs that AI does poorly, but when the low cost is taken into account it’s still seen as feasible?

    Think of all the horrid DTMF phone menus and barely functioning voice recognition systems. We hated these as customers, colleagues, anyone who had to use them despised them

    Cheaper than a receptionist, though.

    Now imagine that level of frustration and poor service spread across every industry at every level. We’re talking about a total collapse of productivity across the entire economy. Not only do people lose their jobs, but the work isn’t even getting done to any standard, either.


  • I don’t see how people like you miss the entire concept of “base load”.

    I live in a region with vast amounts of renewable energy resources. It’s always windy and the sun shines almost every day. I have solar panels on my house that cover most of my DHW and a large fraction of my summer cooling load, and keep most of my appliances running.

    But right now, the sun is down and the wind is flat. And I still need power. My battery storage would be depleted by morning, damaging it through overdischarge if I don’t buy power from the grid instead.

    And it’s a lovely summer evening with no heating or cooling demand! What about midwinter, -35C and dark and snowy? Where is my power coming from on that day, after a month of days just like it?

    Nuclear.




  • 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.


  • evranch@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
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    8 months ago

    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.



  • Not a Catholic but fairly knowledgeable about the religion. I believe your transition would be accepted as long as you don’t live in sin by performing any acts of sodomy. The Catholics study theology relentlessly, and I’m sure they already had a way of dealing with the fair number of intersex babies born without dooming them to a life spent in unintentional sin.

    The church has never expressed an issue with homosexuality, only homosexual acts. And even those acts aren’t a sin due to the homosexual intent, they’re a sin because of the sodomy.

    Remember though, sodomy is a blanket term here for “sex acts not capable of producing children” so for you that would be… All of them I suppose.

    I suspect that the suggested answer would be the one they give to all gay men, for you to live as a man, but be celibate. Devote your life to God, maybe even become a monk back in the old days. A lot of monks were “confirmed bachelors”