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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • This video says it both ways I’ve heard. The white people around me pronounce it like the one with the union jack (heavy emphasis on the B), the Spanish speakers pronounce it more like the version with the American flag background (ironic). Most of the other pronunciation videos I could find seem to be made by AI voices and mangle the pronunciation in a myriad of ways. This other video has an actual person speaking well (I can’t speak to the rest of the content of the video).











  • Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

    Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

    You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.


  • The tracksuit and matching Adidas sneakers are kind of a give-away. Anyone can buy a hi-vis vest. No way a security guard or worker would be dressed like that to do any real work up there. And absolutely no way they would risk their life or their job to stop some nutter getting their Darwin award. Even if successful, they’d be fired for exposing the company to liability. They’d just wait by the door and have them trespassed on their way out.




  • It’s obvious now that you literally don’t have any idea how programming or machine learning works, thus you think no one else does either. It is absolutely not some “black box” where the magic happens. That attitude (combined with your oddly misplaced condescension) is toxic and honestly kind of offensive. You can’t hand waive away responsibility like this when doing any kind of engineering. That’s like first day ethics-101 shit.


  • Whether you call in it programming or training, the designers still designed a car that doesn’t obey traffic laws.

    People need to get it out of their heads that AI is some kind of magical monkey-see-monkey-do. AI isn’t magic, it’s just a statistical model. Garbage in = Garbage out. If the machine fails because it’s only copying us, that’s not the machine’s fault, not AI’s fault, not our fault, it’s the programmer’s fault. It’s fundamentally no different, had they designed a complicated set of logical rules to follow. Training a statistical model is programming.

    You’re whole “explanation” sounds like a tech-bro capitalist news conference sound bite released by a corporation to avoid guilt for running down a child in a crosswalk.


  • I also have strong opinions about Christmas lights.

    Unfortunately, they do not perfectly align with Technology Connections. We agree is almost all respects: flickering is bad, purple is not a valid Christmas color, white lights should be warm and not bluish. I just can’t agree about this one thing though, I LOVE the super saturated colors of LEDs for the red, blue, and green lights. I care much less about the saturation of the yellow and/or orange lights.