Used to do this to my shooting glasses, just put Scotch tape on my non-dominant eye so I could leave it open while shooting open sights.

I’m “wrong eyed” so my brain always tried to look down my gun with my left eye. The tape solved it. With practice I can now shoot well with regular glasses, though it’s still more comfortable to use taped glasses.

Don’t listen to the wrong prescription talk as it will hurt your eyes. Tape is cheap and safe.

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.

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

The volume could definitely be higher now, since the box sides are so bloody high that you can’t actually put anything in the truck without a ladder.

As a farmer and actual truck user everyone I know has a beat up farm truck from the 80s for actual truck use, modern truck is just a big car for comfortable city trips

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.

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.

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.

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.

I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.

Any reason you can state not to use AirVPN? I switched to them from Mullvad because they support port forwarding. So far I’ve been very happy with their service.

Having ads and sponsors blocked I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think they advertise at all. I only tried them because of a recommendation on Lemmy. Their site design is very old school which really says “run by nerds and not marketers” to me.