Thanks for the American context as I’m a Canadian and our systems are different here. I didn’t realize the risks involved and the motivation behind it. I think this might be my least popular comment on Lemmy ever😅

The USA as a battleground between religion and atheism changes the context as I would shrug most of this off here in Canada as harmless. Like the 10 commandments? Most of them are good advice, basically just “don’t be a piece of shit” and i wouldn’t have a problem teaching them to kids… Unless the goal is to teach them actively as the word of God and marginalize non-believers as sinful, in which case this is absolutely criminal. That is church, not school.

We have a more robust separation of church and state to the point where when I read “teaching the Bible in school” I hear “robustly secular, historical and cultural study” which as I stated I believe would be a valuable learning experience. In Quebec there are even rules that public servants can’t display any religious symbols at all, even as small as a cross on a bracelet. The leader of our Conservative party recently made a statement that both abortion and gay rights were “a closed issue” and he would not stand for any attacks on them.

So personally my wife and I made the hard decision this year to send our daughter to a Catholic school next year due to the rapidly declining quality of public education. However the Catholic school district here is publicly funded and staffed, with strict regulations that any religious content is optional and that respect must be given equally to those who choose it or do not choose it.

Many of her friends have already made the switch (regular school is quickly emptying out of smart kids and turning into a zoo as parents pull their kids) and stated this is exactly how it works, most of them being non-religious as well but impressed with the discipline and learning outcomes. My wife teaches college and said the difference is night and day with some kids even making it out of public highschool unable to read. Meanwhile my daughter’s new school has won awards for the achievements of its graduates and their placement in top schools and in industry.

So you see I’m comfortable enough with our dedication to secularism here in Canada that I am willing to send my daughter to an actual Catholic school with no fear that she will be brainwashed… Obviously a bit of bible study doesn’t scare me but in the context of the USA culture war it’s clearly a much bigger deal.

No I’m serious, I’m here in SK and we’re trying to push Moe and his cronies out for the NDP this fall, and our biggest problem is the federal NDP damaging the brand by backing Trudeau. All we say all day is “The SK NDP is not affiliated with the federal party, we stand for working Canadians, vote Moe out”

If you think $500 for low income and seniors is anything other than a bone thrown to pacify the poor then Singh has pulled the wool over your eyes.

The requirement for “no access to insurance” absolutely torpedoes the entire thing. Private insurers need to fall, universal coverage is the only way. Dental is the Canadian equivalent to the entire USA health insurance racket.

Congrats on living in the one green riding, which does give you some power over your single seat party… Which ultimately holds no power at all in our broken system.

I’m sorry to say I voted Trudeau on the promise of electoral reform, which he then told us we didn’t want. I’m in a safe blue riding which means my vote is pointless, so I’m going full protest vote next time for the PPC 🤣 Max is laughable, especially his obsession with dairy supply management, but enough votes for “burn it down” will hopefully send a message.

Trudeau over Biden?

Trudeau is importing the world’s problems in the name of propping up the real estate investor class (of which he is a member) and pumping up fake GDP numbers. GDP per capita is plummeting in Canada with excess immigration.

Singh is in his pocket, a waste of a vote. I was an NDP voter all my life, I’m done.

Polliviere is an absolute idiot who will ride a wave of hatred for Trudeau into office.

Voters in Canada have no power and no representation as all votes are whipped. Your MP is a seat filler. We have no ballot initiatives or direct democracy options that America has, and reform will never come.

Biden listens to people who know what they’re doing and stands out of the way… Passed legislation supporting workers and unions, energy infrastructure etc. meaning he’s both more left than Singh and more business-friendly than PP

Forcing it as a belief system is definitely wrong, but we were forced to study plenty of literature when I was in school, much of it far less relevant. I don’t see the difference with the Bible, especially if presented as a historical document and prototypical collection of stories?

I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious family, but when I decided to pick up a Bible and read it as a teenager I couldn’t believe how much context it gave me on our culture and its origins.

Having to read and study the whole thing would also help rein in overzealous religion IMO. The #1 reason I’ve heard from evangelicals who left their church was “I decided to read the Bible for myself”

The simple solution sounds like it should be shipping more panels to the rest of the world?

Solar panels are still excessively expensive here in Canada

Not just American history, the Bible is the absolute cornerstone of our entire culture. As the one book that every household owned for much of recorded history, the amount of biblical references and reused stories is ridiculous.

I have absolutely no problem with the Bible being taught in schools as it’s an incredibly important document. I find it odd that it isn’t, because the separation of church and state shouldn’t prohibit the study of old books in any way.

I was talking about this with my wife who came from Taiwan at 16 and was sort of second hand exposed to Western culture. She said everything can’t be a bible story can it? I dug out a Bible off the shelf and flipped through, well you know David and Goliath, you know Samson, Jonah and the whale yeah these are classics right?

She says no, so I ask if she knows the story of Pinocchio or why her luggage was made by “Samsonite”. And the truck that we saw yesterday with the “G0L1ATH” license plate?

Yeah it’s everywhere

America needs some perspective. You complain that your only choices are a doddering fool or a toxic narcissist who wants to actively destroy the nation.

Here in Canada we look at our options and think “America is so much better, I wish we had an option to vote for a doddering fool. All we have are narcissists”

No joke I wish we had a leader as good as Biden. The bar is so low that the devil is doing the limbo with it down in Hell.

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.

Even worse, I’m migrating to an all-Voip solution because my carrier refuses to support VoWifi/VoLTE and it solves my coverage issues.

The only disadvantage is I’m forced to fall back all the way to SMS. No MMS even, and what about RCS, the new texting system that works through your data connection well there’s no support for that aside from using Google Messages and the SIM that’s in the phone!

Worst “open standard” ever

Reaction control system to me, lol

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.

Correct, but often the actions of CEOs are performative and don’t actually support the goal of bringing money in. They like to put on a show of being ruthless, and often behave more psychopathic than an “optimal” business AI would.

For example, it’s been proven that employee retention is one of the #1 ways to boost productivity. Costco is one of the few companies with a CEO which truly believes in this and despite paying higher wages than any other grocer they are one of the top performers in my investment portfolio.

Remote work? Totally profitable and AI would maximize it instead of forcing workers back to the office to “put them in their place”

4-day week? Also proven to be a net gain as workers are rested and motivated.

A “cold and calculating” AI would be far more likely to make reforms that benefit both the company and the employees, as it isn’t motivated by power structures or the need to look ruthless. Cutting pay is a losing move as it loses talent more than it saves money, and deep learning algorithms would realize this easily.

Also the “person who owns the AI” would actually be the shareholders, who are often ordinary investors. Rather than funneling money to bloated C-suites, the money would be more likely to circulate in the economy through dividends.

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.

Hard to see how it could perform any worse, and the wage savings could be allocated to the people actually doing the work.

Yeah sure… The savings would go to buybacks or dividends, of course.

And that’s still a better use of funds than wasting them on an overcompensated CEO.

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.

Best be careful with that sort of talk, I heard there are guys out there who would set a couple bears after you