harryf

It's a fair point. Most of our customers work with CPP, C# and Java in enterprise / back office contexts, which is why no PHP or Javascript right now - we've been tied up with other priorities. That said we just added Python to our main SDK and PHP is coming.

Plus our enterprise automation product can basically talk to anything via REST API ( https://www.pdf-tools.com/docs/conversion-service/api/conver... ).

But yeah - now you got me fired up to annoy some colleagues ;)

EasyOCR looks like it's more focused on the mobile use case of extract text from photos. That's a little bit different from extracting text from scanned documents, where document structure is an important aspect, and Tesseract is the devil we know. In the commercial space ABBYY Finereader still dominates - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBYY_FineReader

But perhaps I'm wrong...

I work at https://www.pdf-tools.com and we hear this again and again.

Despite the proliferation of cloud services, most large enterprises DO NOT want their sensitive documents entering the cloud. And in some cases, e.g. patient medical records, there are strict regulations about how those documents can be stored, which means on-premise is a requirement.

Good news for us, as that's what we specialise in, but also perplexing how trends in the software industry can completely ignore what customers actually want.

For me it was my mum turning on the vacuum cleaner would cause a spike that could reboot the Spectrum 48K. The 128 model had a better power supply as I remember. Also the ZX81 I had before that (think I was 8 at the time) was extremely sensitive to the state of the current in the house...

To me Redis has always seemed like a Trojan Horse for developers. The first impression is its this simple key-value database, so easy to use. Oh wait... it's also a cache, nice! Let's cache all the things too! And look... all the cool kids are are using it too, so it must be cool, meanwhile the old Unix mantra of make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features. ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html ). Fast forward 10 years and you need to download it's Enterprise Whitepaper ( https://redis.com/solutions/use-cases/caching/ ) to make the right caching decisions.

Where this is coming from is having worked on a project where Redis was being used as a database and a cache, on different ports. And of course most of the dev team hadn't read the the manual because Redis "is simple and just works". And of course someone forgot to actually configure the Redis instance that was supposed to be a cache to actually _be_ a cache. And someone else thought the instance that was supposed to be a cache but wasn't was actually a database. And yet another had used TTL caching to solve all their performance issues. And pretty soon mystery bugs start showing up but sadly no one can actually REASON about what the whole thing is doing any more, but there's no time to actually clean up the mess because it's a startup struggling to stay afloat.

And I remember asking "why didn't you memcached for caching?" and the response was "Dude! No one is using memcached any more". So the technical decision for Redis was based on "what's cool right now".

Anyway... I feel a bigger rant brewing so I'll stop here.

>> print(“Hello, world!”.ai_reverse()) world, Hello!

Wow. This actually "just worked" for me as in followed the instructions and got a result. Meanwhile the words "jupyter notebook" I've come to associate with python dependency hell.

To be fair I work as a PM and I rarely get more than about 60 minutes to play around with anything involving code, which has blocked me on getting hands dirty with anything AI related.

One issue is the way taxes work in Germany that disincentives entering the middle rungs of a career ladder. Like if you’re a software engineer and want to become an engineering manager, you might end up earning less after tax as a manager than you did as an engineer as your salary increase puts you in a new tax bracket.

Otherwise Germanys economy is optimized to support medium to large German companies with export businesses. Little attention has been given to support new business ventures, so for young people becoming an entrepreneur makes little sense when you can earn more and have less stress with a normal job.

full disclosure: this is based on personal experience and observation as a Brit that worked in Germany for a while and ended up in Switzerland

I used to work at https://www.local.ch/en and know Vasile, the guy that built this map.

The situation with trains (and data) in Switzerland is complicated as each Kanton has it's own rail network. In 2016 the SBB _finally_ started making it's train timetable officially available (some info on that here - https://www.itmagazine.ch/artikel/64746/Open-Data-Plattform_... ) which is I believe what this map uses, after shutting down people scraping the data.

That said, what has always irked me is they gave the data to Google as far back as 2007, while refusing to make anything available for sites like local.ch and map.search.ch (who's map was partly basis for the original Google maps). Refusing may be a leading term but certainly there was no help given to local Swiss companies, while Google already had the train times in maps.

To prove we’re human, we need to behave in vulgar ways that generative AI is prevented from. https://youtube.com/shorts/uWgEofct9Rw?si=nE4lDqVYKa1a7XhR

In this case it would be crocheting a swear word on your design.

In the spreadsheet the total of ALL the hours is 93,455,200,000 or ninety-three billion, four hundred fifty-five million, two hundred thousand hours.

And that's between January and June 2023.

If we say the typical working day is 8 hours and the week is 5 days and a typical full time worker works 42 weeks a year (factoring in holidays and sick leave), based on this report 55,628,095 or about 56 million years of human productivity spent staring at Netflix in the 1st half of 2023

Looking at it another way right now we have almost 8.1 billion people on the planet. The total hours reported in this spreadsheet averages to about 12 hours per person on the planet for the 1st 6 months of 2023.

Pretty mind boggling, especially when you consider this is only part of the story, compared to all the other entertainment media we spend time on (TikTok, Instagram etc.)

To me the interesting thing is how this plays out vs. commercial real estate market. Rentals in commercial real estate are generally long term (e.g. 3 years or longer). In general companies probably only started serious decision making in 2022 after it become clear "work from home" was not going away after seeing that offices are still partly empty most of the time.

That suggests we're probably going to start seeing a commercial real estate collapse, beginning some time in 2024 as significant numbers of rental agreements expire.

If that's true, I wonder what impact this will have on cities in general? There are so many potential knock-on consequences it's hard to predict outcomes.

When I read The Invention of Sound I assumed it was largely fiction, perhaps inspired by real events. So it's not that I didn't believe is was real exactly. I hadn't considered certain sound effects might be re-used in multiple movies or been down this particular rabbit hole. Discovering now the sound effect is real makes the book way more chilling and increases my respect for Chuck Palahniuk

Oh wow. Chuck Palahniuk mentions this scream in The Invention of Sound. Hadn’t realized it’s actually real

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage.

For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok.

The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

You might find https://globalhealthproject.org is going some of this direction.

> We’re building a community of doctors and patients affected by medical tyranny. Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.

> Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements.

This wasn’t explained either…

Nutrition tip of the day: if someone is spending serious ad money to try to get you to eat or drink something, don’t. What ever it is. Don’t. It’s not going to be good for you

Once upon a time consumers were being encouraged to “drink radium water” https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...

… as a species we have not become significantly smarter since then

In the end there’s actually doing stuff. And there’s putting it on a TODO list. Both are types of activity but only one actually got something real done

This is a discussion that leads to regulation. But clearly the only way to regulate AI... is with AI.

It has the potential to automate the process of monitoring and detecting potential risks or violations in AI systems, which could be difficult or impossible for humans to do manually. For example, AI systems could be programmed to monitor themselves and other AI systems for potential biases, security vulnerabilities, or other potential risks.

Additionally, AI could be used to develop and enforce regulatory frameworks, such as standards for data privacy, transparency, and algorithmic fairness, which could be more easily implemented and enforced through automation. However, there are also potential risks and challenges associated with using AI to regulate AI, such as the potential for errors or biases in the AI systems used for regulation, the difficulty of defining and enforcing ethical or legal standards for AI, and the potential for unintended consequences or harmful outcomes from AI-based regulation.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of AI in regulating AI will depend on a range of factors, including the design and implementation of AI-based regulation frameworks, the capabilities of AI systems themselves, and the willingness of stakeholders to engage in ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure that AI serves the best interests of humanity.

From hacking with XUL at around that time too, it could have been a contender if Mozilla had made more effort to document and promote it.

The developer experience was like “oh this could be cool to build in XUL” … spend some frustrating days scouring the code of different Firefox extensions to figure out how to do anything … produce an ugly UI that barely serves the purpose … realize XUL was completely unsuited for the purpose.

Am I missing something or where is the part where he contacted the school or spoke to his daughter about it, _before_ writing blog posts and getting on Twitter?

It's strange to me to take the discussion like this to public forums before talking to the people involved. It could be his daughter "gave" it to the school as an act of generosity for example.

With all due respect, you sound like someone who doesn't have children. Most of the argumentation for "parents should stay at home and care for their kids" is based a different world to the one we now live in - a throwback to times where we lived in small communities and child raising was more a group effort with grandparents and relatives helping out.

Today 56% of the worlds population lives in cities. That means childcare is essential for socialising a child.

A child at home with a parent until kindergarten is probably going to spend the first 4 years of their life in a small apartment with one adult, bearing in mind that many young parents are generally not well off. This is not healthy situation for the child or the adult.

The whole "code is a liability" mantra needs challenging IMO - it's too simplistic and "cargo culty". It's a misappropriation of a financial accounting term (where Assets = Liabilities + Equity) and liability also carries with it all kinds of negative associations.

It has a value in making businesses aware that production code has an operational cost just to keep it "alive". And it's useful for tempering junior developers who haven't yet absorbed principles like KISS and YAGNI.

But it fails to factor in the relation between code and an organisations ability to make (or save) money from that code. For example the capabilities of your code may be a competitive edge for your business. 10 lines of code which uses CPU and memory inefficiently may end up being more expensive than 1000 lines of code which uses CPU and memory _efficiently_ and leads to lower infrastructure costs as usage grows.

As far as I'm aware the term goes back to 2007 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070420113817/http://blog.objec... - a time where businesses hadn't really understood how to manage software based businesses, so it was a useful concept to help management become more mature about how they think about software.

But these days knowledge of how to run software based businesses is far more widespread - we don't need to simplify our thinking to "code is a liability".

> That we’re still debating this stuff is ridiculous

That people are still using “move along nothing to see here” is ridiculous.

The world just went through an event of a historical significance comparable to a World War. And there are still new books, movies and documentaries being made about World War 1 and 2…

There are a lot more questions to be asked and lessons to be learned about how COVID was handled. For example we’ve yet to have accurate public data on suicide rates during the lockdowns…

Centralized authentication systems. What could go wrong ?

It’s for people that find other forms of social media too slow and like a more panic inducing, crack-fueled experience

The real question that needs answering is what the cost of lockdowns was and for that we’d need to compare to suicide statistics for the same period.

Misleading title. It's not all of Germany it's one state AND it's not a general ban just a ban from schools.

> "The central German state of Hesse’s local Data Protection Authority (DPA) has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools, citing concerns over privacy violations"

The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS. E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of meeting the requirements of the contract, the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.

The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms - Decentralized autonomous organizations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... - this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but some kind of smart contract would be required.