They were right, they are an untrustworthy seller.

Reminds me of when all their customer data leaked, and obviously the people who pirated didn’t have that issue.

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?

This is actually a bigger deal than the headline suggests if the claims are to be believed. Hopefully the licensing isn’t too expensive for it to be widely adopted if manufacturing at scale is easy.

They don’t say how it degrades in water, but if it can degrade in ~2months outdoors then that’s actually pretty good.

Most biodegradable eco-plastic is a scam because it’s either only partially degradable, or only degradable in industrial facilities. If I can throw this packaging in my own compost bin then that would be a huge way to get rid of single-use plastic.

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).

The Chinese car thing is ‘funny’ in a glib way to me.

Neolibs can’t admit that unionized auto-manufacturing is one of the few well-paying factory jobs that still exist and need some sort of protectionism to still exist, because protectionism is bad.

Chinese phone companies collaborating with car companies to make a product that has a UI people like is actually because the Chinese are nefarious.

If there was a Chinese company 1/5th as evil as Nestle we’d never hear the end of it. American car companies have been purposely evil in the past in not fixing stuff to be recalled because the loss of life was less expensive than fixing stuff.

I’m not really hyped on these Chinese cars because of the union jobs that would be lost, and I’m automatically distrustful of cars that are more iPad than car (I don’t think I’d like Tesla’s even if they didn’t kill people because repairability is important).

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.

That seems like a pretty bad deal actually, you can probably find a better 4g or even 5g plan in the US for that.

Prepaid companies in Canada (who generally have worse pricing than the US because all the cell companies have agreements with each other) have 20-40gb/month for that price (depending on the limited time sales), but not unlimited w/ throttling like you have.

I’m surprised Arch is that high compared to other distros.

Also interesting that people are actually switching to windows 11, everyone I know is staying on win10 as long as possible because they’re more used to the interface.

Can you not do something with gparted on a live usb? Or are the files that fucked?

naps2 for printer/scanners. Better than anything I’ve used for scanning. Also great for arranging small documents.

• lets you rearrange page order easily before saving the scan as a pdf
• has OCR
• lets you import documents into the pdf so you can layer scanned notes/typed documents easily into a single doc
• quick interface

Software that comes with printer/scanners usually suck