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.
As a farmer, especially during something like seeding or harvest where focus and not making mistakes are critical.
Fortunately I got my doc to prescribe me XR dexadrine + IR to use as a top up/enhancer. I rarely take the IR or just add a half pill on long days, but always fill the prescription as if I take it every day, giving me a large supply to ride through shortages.
There are many people where there is no Canadian identity
There isn't really a Canadian identity left at this point. I live in a tiny rural community where we consider ourselves to be keeping the torch in a way... We don't lock our doors, we share and help each other, call each other on the phone just to chat, we sit around and drink too much coffee or beer and wrench on old junk. Drive around in winter plowing driveways and pulling cars out of the ditch. If a neighbour needs a tool it's just "let yourself into the shop and it's in the red toolbox, bring it back when you're done"
The cities though? I have friends there and that community attitude is long dead. Any available resources are exploited and nothing given in return, everyone is poor and desperate and barely making rent. Our country is very sick.
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.
During the Cold War, Russia launched quite a few nuclear powered satellites, and I mean real fission reactors, not just RTGs. Apparently they're still up there and possibly still generating power. So it's pretty much a proven fact.
Even as a rancher (native prairie, low input) I agree beef is way too cheap. Well, it was, now it's starting to be more appropriately priced.
Considering everything from the labour involved in raising it ethically to the nutritional value, the consumer pays very little for beef for what they're getting. Even if it means people eat less beef, the price should go up. It would also favour small farmers like me who would rather raise less cows sustainably on grass than overgraze chasing high volume sales.
This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their "body" that aren't connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.
Off road gasoline is rare and varies by district, here in Canada I grew up in BC and we had "purple gas" and "red diesel" but purple gas was only sold at very specific stations, usually near parks where people would put it in ATVs and boats.
Now I live in SK and we only have "dyed diesel" which is your standard red farm stuff. You can get a discount on gasoline delivered to a farm tank, but there's no colorant added and almost nobody does it anyways, since gasoline goes stale and isn't used in farm equipment.
Myself I converted my remaining gasoline equipment to propane and run heating propane in it. The only gas burners left are lawnmowers, quads and a farm truck.
There's a reason I farm with old relics, they aren't "optimized" like the new stuff but they're cheap and reliable to keep running.
Most of my implements don't even have an electrical connection and some of the tractors have literally a starter motor, alternator, battery. Maybe lights if you're lucky!
Yeah I know, but have you seen their site? It's like an old 90s static HTML page. The main thing I see is that it's clearly not a glossy "marketing first" service. They're surviving off of their actual product.
I draw the line at "overpopulated" when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.
It's commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn't result in eventual collapse.
We've cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.
It's been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
Might be something patched in Tiny10 but it even activated fine for me with the usual hack and hasn't caused any problems. I had to take it online momentarily on install to activate, but that was all.
Here in Canada, we have a loophole in the law where indigenous have the right to use tobacco without taxation due to tradition. Which is totally fair - but it also applies to modern mass produced cigarettes for some reason.
As a result of ever increasing taxes on tobacco, I would reckon that at this point 80% of cigarettes smoked in my community have been smuggled off of a reserve. The black market is booming with "Rez smokes" selling for $5-10 a pack while legal cigs go for ~$30.
The federal government recently introduced a regulation mandating a health warning printed on every cigarette. Most agree it's a transparent attempt for the police to spot an illegal smoke in your hand, as Rez smokes don't have warnings on them. They are losing a ton of revenue to the black market, and are trying to crack down with heavy fines for even possessing a pack off of a reserve.
Reaction control system to me, lol