TrudeauCastroson [he/him]

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  • 26 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2021

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  • last two phones I bought were $250 off of aliexpress.

    Before that I got used phones from relatives who upgraded, but that was at the time when a newer model was actually a big improvement generation-to-generation. Then everyone started to use their phone until it became completely useless so I had to buy new.

    Aliexpress xiaomi/poco phones used to be better value, the next time I buy I phone I’ll probably get a previous generation or 2 flagship from a mainstream company because waterproofing would be nice.


  • I don’t really need the locally trained AI to recognize general handwriting, only my own.

    I could provide a few pages of my own training data (maybe write out a few pages of “quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and other stuff like that), and then ideally it flags stuff it’s unsure about and I clarify some more. Maybe find garbled nonsensical sentences, realize it’s probably a mistake, and try and fix it.

    I assumed the leaps in AI would have taken care of this by now, since detecting handwritten letters from touch pen-strokes existed in the 90s. But I guess handing it a chunk of text is too different of a problem, instead of feeding it stroke by stroke?



  • If you’re a convenience store but pallets of Coca Cola, then they kind-of can. They can just blacklist you from buying Coca Cola in the foreign country.

    It’s also different because they’re selling you continuous access one month at a time instead of a physical good you drink and they can’t take away from you. I’ve been to places where service costs are lower for locals than for tourists, and this is told to you outright. Stuff like museums, taxis, etc. It’s a similar idea YouTube has.

    Prices are also almost never based on cost, they’re based on what people will pay.

    I live in Canada, and cars are more expensive here than in the USA. US dealerships near the border refuse to sell new cars to Canadians, even though it’s legal for everyone as long as you make sure to pay duties on the way back. I’m guessing each brand has some rule against it.

    Ultimately VPN users aren’t a protected class so it’s legal to discriminate.


  • There is some problem with that as you say, but the company doing the poll is pretty well-respected by the west. They were also labelled a foreign agent by Putin at some point, so I looked at their opinion.

    This is an interesting op-ed by the guy who runs the polling company, talking about preference falsification.

    There’s an estimate that <10% of people in Russia have motive to lie because of power they’d lose if their opinion got out, and the theory is that this is usually constant. Unless Putin is scarier than 2 years ago you can still compare differences in opinion, even if you don’t trust the magnitude. The guy also said that you can look at the positive responses as having a share of neutral because people who aren’t informed just go with the majority instead of saying “idk”.

    But no matter how much lying in polls there is, the amount of people worried about sanctions went down compared to 2 years ago, and compared to 2015.

    Which makes sense considering how much physical capital western companies left in Russia, since VW can’t take an auto factory back to Germany with them even if they can take some equipment (but not all).


  • In Canada you have to pay extra for a 5G plan even if you have a 5G phone. And grandfathered plans/plans you’ve been on for a while keep the low speeds.

    I had a super cheap prepaid plan with 3g speeds until I switched last month because I was on it for so long.

    Some prepaid plans here just cut you off data completely unless you prepay for your overage. Others let you go over and charge you like $5 per 200mb over (ridiculous).

    There are post-paid monthly plans that don’t do overage charges, but they throttle you so much it’s not really useful.

    Edit: just checked, for 50 CAD (around 40 USD) you can get 100GB of 5G a month prepaid, for a plan that gives you complete US coverage as well.











  • The reason this corvid study is different from intuitively knowing that 10-10=no berries is where this 0/empty set is represented on the numberline.

    Considering 0 as a number vs the empty set are two different concepts. It’s the difference between having a bank account with $0, vs having no bank account. They don’t close your account when you have $0, so it’s still an amount of money.

    Crows considering 0 on the numberline, and differently from the empty set shows they have a more abstract concept of numbers than we thought.

    Idk who authored this study, seems like a very specific kind of person who is both into number theory and neural pathways of birds to design.