Random thought of the day
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@remi sorry, not doing that. It's a cross between a linguistic pun, visual pun, celebrity lookalike, cultural significance for inexplicable reason, and random internet bullshit. I'd rather play Gothic.
Yeah, cultural jokes are like that. When El Chavo apologizes for his latest hijinks with his catchphrase, "¡fue sin querer, quiriendo!", Spanish-speaking audiences crack up. But trying to unpack the multiple layers of nuanced ambiguity contained in those four words to properly translate the joke for an English-speaking audience would take a few pages at the very least, and would probably still lose something in translation...
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During the Great Depression, shanty towns sprang up housing the very poor and unemployed, and were quickly dubbed "Hoovervilles" to assign the blame for their existence on the president in charge.
I propose that the places where homeless people hole up in the next few years be called "Trump Towers".
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@da-Doctah a tower that doesn't rise above ground floor? Don't think it'd stick.
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@Gąska His Orangeness would probably encourage it. Imagine getting his name on something without having to put it there himself!
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In Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Vulture is played by Michael Keaton, who formerly played Batman.
Looks like he lived long enough to see himself become the villain!
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Maybe the reason I'm not very persuaded (or even impressed) by name dropping and appeals to (someone else's) authority is that I don't pay attention to names of people. This is especially true for actors, singers, and other celebrities. It takes a lot of effort for me to respond with anything other than "who?" in a very puzzled manner.
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How much space could be potentially saved if Twitter screenshot were compressed with an algorithm that can detect common fonts and OCRs the text, replaces it with single-color blob, and on render, superimpose the text back in the right places? Could it be worth it at all? Is this kind of OCR compression viable on shitty smartphones (the lowest common denominator of modern personal computers)?
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
How much space could be potentially saved if Twitter screenshot were compressed with an algorithm that can detect common fonts and OCRs the text, replaces it with single-color blob, and on render, superimpose the text back in the right places?
At most a couple terabytes, internet-wide.
Considering Google will happily build a new data center every week so they can store the many exabytes they have of YouTube videos that will get 3 views in their entire lifetime... probably not worth the effort.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
How much space could be potentially saved if Twitter screenshot were compressed with an algorithm that can detect common fonts and OCRs the text, replaces it with single-color blob, and on render, superimpose the text back in the right places?
At most a couple terabytes, internet-wide.
Considering Google will happily build a new data center every week so they can store the many exabytes they have of YouTube videos that will get 3 views in their entire lifetime... probably not worth the effort.
And we all know the probabilities of OCR-mangle completely altering the meaning of a text (and setting off a world war)
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You don't need OCR for that. As it is, Twitter is already enough to start a war, you just need to post something inflammatory.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
I don't pay attention to names of people. This is especially true for actors, singers, and other celebrities. It takes a lot of effort for me to respond with anything other than "who?" in a very puzzled manner.
I share this problem a little bit, but not quite as much (unless you count celebrities I don't know at all, not just not knowing their name. "What's a Kardashian?"). But I often struggle with this in movies, not with the name of the actors but the name of the characters. Like, even while I'm watching I often have no idea what the characters are called, which can get confusing when people talk about other people without it otherwise being clear who they mean.
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@topspin I have a slightly easier time with characters, but only slightly. I have a much better time if I see them in print first. So book characters I'm better at than movie ones. And authors, writers, actors, and singers? Yeah right.
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
You don't need OCR for that. As it is, Twitter
is already enough to start a war, you just need to post something inflammatory.already has the sourceIf people cared, they'd use a link. Not that that is necessarily preferable, of course, considering twitter is garbage.
Bonus thought of the day: I wonder at what point compressing an image over and over again actually makes it larger, since the encoder is trying to keep all the compression artifacts from the previous round.
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@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
How much space could be potentially saved if Twitter screenshot were compressed with an algorithm that can detect common fonts and OCRs the text, replaces it with single-color blob, and on render, superimpose the text back in the right places?
At most a couple terabytes, internet-wide.
Considering Google will happily build a new data center every week so they can store the many exabytes they have of YouTube videos that will get 3 views in their entire lifetime... probably not worth the effort.
And we all know the probabilities of OCR-mangle completely altering the meaning of a text (and setting off a world war)
This never made sense to me. Is it really that hard to match black-on-white symbols to the glyphs of a known font, or has it never been tried and everyone relies on what's being done for digitizing 19th century newspapers?
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
You don't need OCR for that. As it is, Twitter
is already enough to start a war, you just need to post something inflammatory.already has the sourceThat's only true some of the time.
Also, a few years ago someone started this extremely stupid fad of censoring Twitter handles and other kinds of usernames from funny images they share, ostensibly to prevent doxxing. That, of course, requires never linking to original Twitter posts. A significant part of the internet has become the opposite of what the internet was supposed to be.
I've once received "first and last" warning on one subreddit for linking a Twitter account. A business Twitter account. Of a restaurant. One that was actively talked about in that thread. One that was already mentioned by name and had it location specified in another comment. And it was in a positive light. There was literally no harm at all in linking a Twitter account, especially considering that account was created specifically so people share it around (free advertisement!). Businesses want to be publicly known! But no. Linking to Twitter is bannable offense because doxxing, no exceptions.
But when I linked to their homepage - which contained even more "doxxing" information, like a Google Maps pin with precise location - everything was fine.
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I'm sorry, I might be understanding this wrong. Were you expecting an intelligent behavior from Reddit moderators?
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51, 52 and 53 all have prime factors larger than 10. To make flag design easier, it's best to create 4 new states at once.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
How much space could be potentially saved if Twitter screenshot were compressed with an algorithm that can detect common fonts and OCRs the text, replaces it with single-color blob, and on render, superimpose the text back in the right places?
At most a couple terabytes, internet-wide.
Considering Google will happily build a new data center every week so they can store the many exabytes they have of YouTube videos that will get 3 views in their entire lifetime... probably not worth the effort.
And we all know the probabilities of OCR-mangle completely altering the meaning of a text (and setting off a world war)
This never made sense to me. Is it really that hard to match black-on-white symbols to the glyphs of a known font, or has it never been tried and everyone relies on what's being done for digitizing 19th century newspapers?
No, it’s not (although the font for Twitter depends on who takes the screenshot).
We did a project for our pattern recognition class doing basically that, OCR text from a screenshot using a really simple hidden Markov model. Although for simplicity we only did one line of text without any other garbage. That is many orders of magnitude easier than “real” OCR where you have to deal with noise, layout, transformation/warping, background, etc.In the Twitter example you’d have to detect the text and split the lines first, but that again is pretty simple as the layout is trivial. It gets harder once you get to the stage where you have 10 rounds of compression artifacts.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
51, 52 and 53 all have prime factors larger than 10. To make flag design easier, it's best to create 4 new states at once.
Fifty-one is a pentagonal number. This means that you could arrange fifty-one stars in a pattern of nested five-pointed stars. #flagception.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
51, 52 and 53 all have prime factors larger than 10. To make flag design easier, it's best to create 4 new states at once.
Fifty-one is a pentagonal number. This means that you could arrange fifty-one stars in a pattern of nested five-pointed stars. #flagception.
There is historical precedent for this, although none of the "great star" flags were official designs.
TIL the arrangement of stars was not specified on flags prior to 1912, except for flags for the Navy; today, it's specified to 4 significant digits of precision, and the exact colors are defined in terms of the Color Association of the United States Standard Color Reference of America, which applies specifically to textiles, and in which "white" is decidedly off-white compared to a true white, and the corresponding CIE color coordinates (although technically this only applies to flags made for Federal government use, and even then there are officially specified sizes that don't adhere to the overall 1.9:1 aspect ratio).
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@HardwareGeek this is what happens when two WTDWTF members meet each other.
: The flag is 50 stars and 13 stripes. 
: You didn't specify that the stars are not aligned as a 
.
: Here is the exact definition and layout of the flag, specified to 10-12 precision for the geometry and 10-6 precision for the color space.
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@topspin Or just standard government work.
Although this is inactive (having been superseded), you can download it. It's a 23-page pdf.
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And given it's military, respecting those 23 pages to the letter probably gives you cookies that taste awful.
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@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
And given it's military, respecting those 23 pages to the letter probably gives you cookies that taste awful.
“I didn’t think the Roman army was that strong!”
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The longer a video game series runs, the less original it becomes.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
51, 52 and 53 all have prime factors larger than 10. To make flag design easier, it's best to create 4 new states at once.
It doesn't have to be an m × n grid. The current one isn't, and 51 fits nicely into alternating rows of 9 and 8:
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@hungrier
Oi! No logic in the random thought thread!
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@izzion I find it very interesting that everybody acts as if I wrote "it's impossible to arrange 51 stars in a regular pattern" when all I said was "54 would be easier".
By very interesting, I mean totally expected.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
everybody
I didn't react other than an upboat.I'm kinda interested in others' ideas for a new flag. Will it be less or more equal, and will it represent non-white races more?
I bet this discussion is already happening in the Garage but I don't want to look...
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@izzion I find it very interesting that everybody acts as if I wrote "it's impossible to arrange 51 stars in a regular pattern" when all I said was "54 would be easier".
By very interesting, I mean totally expected.
The actual problem is with the fuzzy concept of "easier". If all you can imagine is either square or hexagonal close-packing, some numbers are just hard to represent, but if you're able to let your wings take dream, all sorts of options open up.
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@da-Doctah a number with more divisors always has more kinds of nice regular patterns than a number with less divisors. And it just so happens the next three numbers are very low on divisors (4, 6 and 2, respectively).
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@Gąska said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
[I] especially [miss] heated discussions about programming. They used to be plentiful, and now we have maybe 2 per year.
@Carnage said in Favorite Anti-Pattern:
The last few years I haven't actually seen many anti-patterns. Not sure why. Mid 2000 I kept running into people that had read about this or that pattern and then proceeded to hamfist it into everything they touched for the next few months until they read about another pattern. I haven't run into that in years.
I wonder if these two things are related.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
The last few years I haven't actually seen many anti-patterns. Not sure why. Mid 2000 I kept running into people that had read about this or that pattern and then proceeded to hamfist it into everything they touched for the next few months until they read about another pattern. I haven't run into that in years.
Possibly. The pendulum is swinging back from "let the silly programmers do whatever!" to "Lets micromanage the living bejeezus out of all the programming!" so much of the discussions and complaints seem to be about all the dumb processes instead of all the dumb code. And instead of discussions about how to solve problems, there are discussions about how to organize.
In my opinion and experience, that is.
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@da-Doctah a number with more divisors always has more kinds of nice regular patterns than a number with less divisors. And it just so happens the next three numbers are very low on divisors (4, 6 and 2, respectively).
Thing is, we've been doing those patterns of alternating n and n-1 (like the current 50, which has been in effect for a record 62 years) for ages already in addition to the straight rectangles (like 48, which prevailed for the previous record of 47 years). Get to 52 and you can arrange them as four pairs of seven- and six-star rows (leaving off the extra long row we're using now). Fifty-three can be done as three pairs of eight- and seven-star rows, plus a further 8-star row to finish it off. After that, doing 54 as a simple six-by-nine rectangle actually seems a little simple-minded.
And going on from there, 55 is five pairs of six- and five- star rows, or turn it sideways and run five across in each of eleven rows, with alternate rows offset so they fall between the stars in the rows above and below.
Nested pentagrams for 51 actually affords the rare opportunity to break from the tyranny of rectangularity and do something truly imaginative. It's just too bad they've already established what a 51-star flag should look like (three pairs of alternating 9- and 8-star rows), and they didn't do it that way. Meh.
Well, maybe they'll try it my way when we get to 70 states (the next pentagonal number).
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@boomzilla was reminded of an old meme (from before they were called memes).
"There are 100 beers here. Will you just put it in or do you want to count?"
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@boomzilla was reminded of an old meme (from before they were called memes).
"There are 100 beers here. Will you just put it in or do you want to count?"
I once bought 72 cans of Arizona Green Tea at a Big Lots store and they wanted to count. to be fair, I asked why and was told that the company honchos forbid them from using the "multiplier" key on the register. Apparently this rule changed not long after because on a subsequent visit to the same store I got in line behind a couple buying 200 cans of sardines (some kind of church-group picnic thing, I think) and they were able to use the multiplier then.
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@da-Doctah if I had a dollar for every time I'm told that something that I've done many times at the particular place cannot be done...
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@Gąska ... they'd tell you they can't give you a dollar, it's policy
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@boomzilla was reminded of an old meme (from before they were called memes).
"There are 100 beers here. Will you just put it in or do you want to count?"
I once bought 72 cans of Arizona Green Tea at a Big Lots store and they wanted to count. to be fair, I asked why and was told that the company honchos forbid them from using the "multiplier" key on the register. Apparently this rule changed not long after because on a subsequent visit to the same store I got in line behind a couple buying 200 cans of sardines (some kind of church-group picnic thing, I think) and they were able to use the multiplier then.
I'd hazard if you showed up with around a hundred cans loose in the shopping cart like that you'll get a different response than when you've stacked them in trays. Also makes it easier to load into your car/bicycle/other mode of transport afterward.
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@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
I once bought 72 cans of Arizona Green Tea at a Big Lots store and they wanted to count. to be fair, I asked why and was told that the company honchos forbid them from using the "multiplier" key on the register. Apparently this rule changed not long after because on a subsequent visit to the same store I got in line behind a couple buying 200 cans of sardines (some kind of church-group picnic thing, I think) and they were able to use the multiplier then.
I'd hazard if you showed up with around a hundred cans loose in the shopping cart like that you'll get a different response than when you've stacked them in trays. Also makes it easier to load into your car/bicycle/other mode of transport afterward.
They were stacked in trays. That's why I wanted 72 and not some random non-pentagonal number like 69 or 78.
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I wonder what percentage of my posts starts with "Well, ".
Is data export still disabled?
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder what percentage of my posts starts with "Well, ".
Is data export still disabled?
Only the stupid profile one, not the post export.
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@loopback0 dammit. One less excuse for
.
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@Gąska
is its own excuse; it needs no additional excuses.
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#BoomzillaLazinessMatters
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Orange lives matter.
Just not in a good way.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
Orange lives matter.
Just not in a good way.
Orange lives anti-matter?
