dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.

Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)

Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.

I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.

Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…

You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.

What you described as impossible to find is how basically every security DVR system has worked for decades. I have two Lorex branded boxes at work and a Night Owl one at home, and neither of them require anyone’s “cloud.”

They’re remotely accessible via your browser or a smartphone app although, yes, you do need to know your public facing IP address and poke the appropriate hole in your firewall for it.

Every X seconds is pretty generous. My Subaru only seems to poll the sensors every few minutes, and only when the wheel speed is above 35 MPH or so, at least via what I’ve observed with my diagnostic tool. The sensors are battery powered and I suspect the low refresh rate is a deliberate gambit to conserve battery life.

You are correct on the ID point, though. They can contain up to 16 hexidecimal digits as far as I’ve seen, and while there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for truly enforcing uniqueness the chances of an ID collision are so low that you may as well consider it impossible. Some aftermarket sensors can be wirelessly reprogrammed with an arbitrary ID, though, which may be of marginal utility for the truly paranoid. (My diagnostic tool can do this, too. The intended use case is cloning the ID from an OEM sensor for a car whose TPMS relearn procedure is more trouble than it’s worth.)

Regardless of your vehicle’s polling frequency, most sensors can be woken up any time by a specific radio pulse, which my diagnostic tool can also do, and the range is surprisingly long. Just my car’s own BMS where the receiver is (above the rear left wheel well) can pick up the sensors in my snow tire rims even when said rims are sitting in their storage rack inside my garage, about three car lengths away.

Some of them certainly are. You can also get air rifles with built in “moderators” (i.e. suppressors) that are surprisingly quiet. Precharged pneumatic air rifles can be very powerful and also extremely accurate. I have a relatively cheap Hatsan that can, provided I’m using pellets that it likes, repeatably put pellets through the same hole in my target from as far away as I can get from it in my yard (probably about 20 yards) and do so about 30 times in succession before I have to pump it back up again. Its built in moderator makes it quiet enough at the muzzle that the sound of the hammer hitting the gas valve is actually louder than the report from firing.

Watch out: Researching this type of thing may send you tumbling down the rabbit hole of big bore air rifles and entice you to spend a lot of money. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

It’s easy: The input side is the high voltage socket, and the output side is an abyssal cable squid nightmare that sprays out into 128 individual male type C plugs, each on the end of about a 6" long pigtail. By the time you’re done plugging all of them in, your vehicle is charged.

Oh, there are vanishingly few hardware vendors I hate with a greater burning passion than Sony. Over the span of literal decades, Sony has consistently and systematically found so many ways to piss me off that I will never give them another red cent so long as I live. I will happily pay slightly more money for a slightly inferior version of whatever gadget from somebody else rather than deal with Sony’s bullshit.

So in other words, what else is new?

The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.

It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.

Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.

Prusa or Qidi. Avoid Bambu.

How many other games from 2011 just got re-re-re-released on the Switch 2 for a full $60, though?

Poorly. According to a random Wikipedia query, commodity lithium ion is ~270 Wh per kilogram. So this is around 20% of that, according to the above.

“Excellent” may be in comparison to other byzantine specialty battery chemistries, but lithium ion remains resolutely enthroned.

And not to mention those goddamned Anglo-Saxons.

(Riffling through my Rolodex of ancient webcomics.)

Ah, here we are:

The most succinct summation of this I’ve seen is a turn of phrase once again lifted from Daniel Rutter:

You are not your brain. You are something that your brain does.

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

He also imposed an import tax on motorcycles because Harley Davidson was deathly afraid that riders would rush out to purchase a Japanese bike that didn’t drip oil everywhere and reliably starts when you press the button.

Hey, man. I am four stars at least.

“Everything I don’t like is terrorism.”

What is this, 2001 again?

Elysium actually had some semblance of working technology, though.

That’s basically what it is. The stuff is incredibly sweet.