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I used Tesseract almost 10 years ago to scan letters from a Words With Friends board. I was getting over 90% accuracy, but the letters with score values on them corrupted the letters and screwed up the detection. So I created a new "language" which Tesseract supports, that incorporated the score value corruption as part of the OCR translation. I got to over 98% accuracy with that which was about as good as I could get.

Overall I thought it was great and I wonder how good it would perform these days with 10 years of improvements!


You are assuming a professional is reading whatever the content is you are distributing and will make a rational, fair decision.

No.

It's going to be a minimum wage indentured Google servant that doesn't quite understand what they are reading but they have 17.5 seconds per case to make a decision. They will shoot first and ask questions later. What if the document is satire but they couldn't understand it? Oh well there goes one strike against your account, or maybe that's your third strike and now ALL your Google accounts are banned.

We already know what the appeals process is like. Unless you get it publicized on Hacker News et al, you won't get any chance to appeal.


You're definitely not thinking creatively enough.

You don't need to hit the planet directly with anything, all you need to do is destabilize the orbit of all the planets or even just the Earth itself. You could send a gravity wave for example, that would cause the Earth's near circular orbit to shift to a very eliptical orbit. The vast change in temperatures would kill all life on the planet, and then you could come and mine all the resources that you needed and leave.


If you have the capability of engineering such a gravity wave then Earth's resources aren't worth your time.


Resources not the point here, the point is removing the possibility that our civ could ever be a risk to them


> On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.

Forget about what monstrosities we have done to other human civilizations throughout history. Instead, think about what we have done to animals. We have hunted many animals out of existence, or we have farmed them and made them basically the equivalent of the Matrix, sources of energy and food.

We are trying to eradicate mosquitoes for crying out loud, and entire species, without giving it a second thought. I will use insecticide to kill today entire colonies of ants without blinking.

All it takes is for one advanced alien civilisation to come across us and deem us the equivalent of their mosquitoes to eradicate us and take all the resources from the Earth. That's the whole point of the Dark Forest theory. If there's an infinite number of civilisations out there, and one of them is so advanced that we are insects to them, why wouldn't they just exterminate us, or use us as food?


> If there's an infinite number of civilisations out there, and one of them is so advanced that we are insects to them, why wouldn't they just exterminate us, or use us as food?

We want to exterminate mosquitoes because they're actively detrimental. Nobody's advocating for the extermination of, say, daddy long-legs spiders even though they're everywhere; and nobody would be advocating for the extermination of mosquitoes if they were all located in Antarctica.

So it takes a very precise level of inferiority to be extermination fodder. If you're too unassuming, there's no reason and so it doesn't happen. If you're dangerous enough that you can fight back and hold your own, it doesn't happen either.

That aliens would find us just the right shade of annoying seems... implausible.


John Varley's Eight Worlds[0] series has an alien species called the Invaders. They invaded Earth to protect cetaceans from the effects of human civilization.

The Invaders divide sentient life into three tiers - species like themselves that evolve in gas giants, cetaceans, and vermin; we're in the third category.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Worlds


So now, a minimum wage drone at Google, or even worse an AI, will be able to shut down my entire account because they perceived my document that I'm sharing as "misinformation"? That's pretty fucking scary.


I mean they already could immediately shut down your account for suspicious activity with no resource so really this is less mild than that.


I took a year off and for fun, I spent 40 hours a week for 9 months on a website that used OCR and other packages for some games. It generated around $15/month in ad revenue, just enough to pay for my EC2 instance at the time. I kept it around but at some point the ad revenue I made dropped like a rock by 90% so I shut it down. It was fun nonetheless and I learned a lot, but it was not successful by any measure.


What is the separation between the Saudi government and MbS. Is it essentially the same and is it the case of MbS monetizing Aramco at the expense of the investors?


> What is the separation between the Saudi government and MbS

Nothing. The KSA is an absolute monarchy. L’etat, c’est il.


I’m on shaky ground correcting French, but I think that should be “c’est lui.” Moi, toi, lui,…


You are correct. To expand a bit:

French pronouns have four possible cases: as the subject, direct object, or indirect object of a verb, or not an argument of a verb at all. The declensions are:

je/me/me/moi

nous (colloquial: “on”)/nous/nous/nous

tu/te/te/toi

vous/vous/vous/vous

il/le/lui/lui

elle/la/lui/elle

ils/les/leur/eux

elles/les/leur/elles

In this example, the pronoun is not the argument of a verb, so the fourth case is used (moi, lui, etc.)


So it really is just a way for them to suck out the cash flow of Aramco and leave nothing but a husk for external investors?


Yes. Absent further evidence, this article is crap. It fails to incorporate the family-state-corporate nexus unique to Aramco.


Doesn't the portion of the dividend paid to themselves represent the amount they intend to spend on public services? I'm not sure it's correct to regard it as meaningless.

Sure, they could reduce government spending, or they could reduce the dividend, and reduce spending more, but in any case, the size of the dividend relative to cash flow or profits still says something about sustainability of the present course.

The KSA, after all, can't issue debt in its own currency, can it?


I think the point is simply if the dividend is paid to themselves then short of corruption or mismanagement they can always pump back that money into the company when needed.


Say you have a household budget, and you have separate "accounts" for different purposes.

If you pay money "to yourself" for groceries, sure, you can always take it back, but you still have to feed your family.

Writing down that your budget for groceries is $0 (or less than whatever is needed) doesn't give you additional freedom.


American Dad has 2 episodes dedicated to showing that Saudi Arabia is the worst place in the world. Your story just reinforces that idea.


[flagged]


Most westerner's views of Saudi Arabia are very much influenced by actions the country's government has previously taken [1]. It isn't so much propaganda, as much as it is the government, lead by MSB, taking actions that greatly offends our sensibilities, most notably the killing of Jamal Khashoggi among other smaller incidents and snafus which have made Saudi Arabia and MSB look horrible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi


This has nothing to do with someone who says "I always knew Saudi Arabia was bad because of a cartoon I watch."


Are you saying there isn't informative content on tv? That's pretty obviously false. There's a lot of misinformation too, but I don't see how the internet is better there either. You need good critical thinking skills period.


Right. They're isn't informative content on TV. There is infotainment and there is entertainment. Only a moron would base a world view around the low quality entertainment they kill time with.


> Only a moron would base a world view around the low quality entertainment they kill time with.

I think it's naive to assume it doesn't shape your world view in subtle ways, even if you understand it's a poor source of information.


I think if you're getting your knowledge of world events from a goddamn Seth McFarlane show you're out of your mind.


The numbers were self-reported, so it's not going to be very accurate.


I'm sorry but Covid wasn't in Osaka in November 2019. You definitely had some other disease like the flu.


Given it was in the US at least in December 2019 if not earlier according to the NIH retrospective serology study it doesn't seem to be completely impossible. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offe... Also similar Italian serology study by National Cancer Institute showed that sars-cov-2 was circulating in Italy as early as September 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...


No. It's impossible. There was no outbreak in Osaka. A disease as virulent as Covid with only a single person infected is not likely at all.


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