My first job was extracting text from pdfs, in the end OCR was the most reasonable way. This was back in like 2010 when it was waaaaay harder.

Everyone who enjoys cosmic horror should read the PDF spec. https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-specification-archive/

You can embed 3d models in PDF.

You shouldn’t but you can!

Yeah it sucks. Between crypto and machine learning hardware is absolutely fucked. I’m hoping it’ll settle down a bit when people realise that llm’s are not going to make god from a machine but we shall see.

Hadn’t considered Singapore, assumed it’d be expensive since land is and they’re rich as fuck. I guess power is cheap since their billionaires are taking all the gas here and selling it back haha. Compute seems relatively affordable for a RTT of 110 ms.

Probably rules out like fighting games and other similar frame perfect stuff but that’s definitely not too bad. 6 frame delay probably isn’t noticeable on anything turn based, or many RPGs and the like.

Tell me more of this frankencomputer.

I’m not broke by any means, but lower end of average household income in an extremely expensive place. Groceries have gone up about 4 fold in the last 5 years (50 bucks used to feed 2 for a week, lol lmao now. Beans went from 3 dollars a kg dry to 11 etc) so certain things are on the chopping block.

I was looking at the cost for a “2k” oled monitor and appropriate computer and haha, hahaha, hahahahahahahaha I have medical bills and shit lmao. Not paying like 3-5k to play the 1 or 2 increasingly bad modern games I want to.

Since Google has infinite money they probably ran local compute.

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

I think it’s tempting to try and be pithy but freedom is complicated. For some people freedom is an absolute, do what you want when you want. For some it is about theoretical possibilities, for example if you ask if people are free to quit there job the answer heavily depends on how someone balances theory vs practice. Others take a practical lens, freedom only counts if it’s plausible to do.

Sometimes freedom is about ideals. you are free to read all the political theory you like, you umm wont because it’s boring but if someone threatened that would you be upset? At other junctures freedom because pragmatic, “what use is freedom to read if I don’t have freedom to eat? I’ll trade one for the other” someone might say.

Some people rate permissions more than restrictions, some the opposite.

I don’t think it’s a concept we can really pin down. Everyone has their own interpretation and it’s not universally values: much as dominant ideologies often insist it is, the rise of fascism should hint that others care much less about it.

Sigh, I’ll wade into this river of shit.

Liberalism is broadly understood as neoliberalism, which is an ideological descendant from classical liberalism. This ideology positions itself as being broadly in favour of individual freedom within a rather tight definition of freedom. Namely liberals are concerned with the ability of people to read what they like, own what they like, marry whomever they like and so on provided they do this inside of a system of capitalist free market exchange.

Modern liberalism tends to frown on heavy government intervention in market affairs, which they see as representing the free (and thus good) exchange of goods between individuals. They also tend to be broadly in favour of the militaristic western global hegemony.

Criticism of this attitude comes from 2 places.

1. too much freedom.

2. not enough freedom.

(1) is people that want women bound up in the kitchen and walk around with an odd gait that makes you remember Indiana Jones films

(2) are people (I’m in this camp) who see liberalism as a weak ideological position that favours stability over justice and, in so doing, ignores the suffering of billions.

Lots of people are wrong. The stuff in Nair attacks sulfur bridges in keratine. This makes it physically fragile so you can scrape it off.

It doesn’t dissolve the keratin though.

In theory you could break it into lots of small pieces by say pointing a water jet down the drain (or plunging or whatever) after treatment. Whether this is enough to loosen it will have a lot to do with other stuff in the drain/geometry/penetration depth. It may just make a gel that plugs the drain.

It’s reasonable to pay other countries for the damage already done to our collective world and to share around the wealth gained.

Of course rich countries aren’t doing that so here we are.

Yeah but you understand the difference between the state and the people who lived there right? Like Jewish settlers came from Europe, to the place Palestinian people were and had been living in.

They have a connection to the state of Palestinian (inasmuch as it exists given differing degrees of recognition) by way of having moral rights to continue living on the land they live on regardless of what some lines on a map call it.

it’s just such a pathetically juvenile way to describe politics. “mr big punches women in face man going to tackle mr hires assassins brutal dictator of maybe the third most powerful country in the world man”. Uh huh, I bet he is. As we all know politics is about how much testosterone you can smear from your glands on each other while wrestling and not a largely redundant performing into being of relationships between people orchestrated by thousands.

It makes me think of the awful time when Australian news became obsessed with “shirtfronted”. Shit like this makes a little piece of my brain die every time I remember it.

It challenges something people have been indoctrinated with and causes them to question their moral character.

lmfao people have been vegan thousands of years ago e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ma'arri

beans and rice are poverty foods, not luxury. Meat is a luxury food.

People read this stuff, get mislead, and get fucked up for the crime of wanting to watch a film from 60 years ago.

Using a condom doesn’t require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.

Assuming the government defs doesn’t care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you’re buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren’t expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you’re using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it’s not much of a risk.

If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can’t or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else’s by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you’re antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.

A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn’t mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It’s better than nothing, but shouldn’t be over emphasised.

Sorry, could you be a little more explicit in terms of how you’re answering my questions? I don’t really want to get drawn in to some aimless rambling bullshit.

I haven’t mentioned tribalism, I don’t even know what you’re referring to or why you’re bringing it up.

I don’t know what you mean by how society is these days. Are you saying society has changed fundamental human nature? what is the relevance please?

With an authority or controlling wealth, everything results in an elite of some form to try keep a system in place, and that’s the start of failure.

you’re talking to an anarchist so I have no disagreement there. I do wonder if you’ve ever read Marx though. Could you please honestly answer with what publications of his you’ve actually read? if none, what publications about Marxism have you read? if that list is exhaustive the three most recent?

If a village of 100 has just 1 asshole, things can be ruined. Scale up to global populations and you’ve got your answer. No ism can keep the psychopathic, narcissistic, or competitive nature of these people from ruining whatever ism it is you’d like to have.

???