what’s the purpose of holding the most important job in the world, if you constantly have to worry about going to prison? Ridiculous.

Big yikes there. The purpose is to serve the American people.

The President is not the King of America, and its easy to not have to worry about going to prison - just don’t commit crimes. Before Trump, the question wasn’t even relevant.

The interesting thing to me regarding both power and blasphemy is that by the fact that it was on display in a major cathedral, those in charge have already given it their blessing. Anyone calling “blasphemy” only looks like a fool.

So you have these “traditionalists” wanting to drag the Church backwards. But due to the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church that’s just not how it works. Church leadership has made significant progressive strides over the last decade, leaving people like this Tschugguel with only impotent rage and vandalism as their options. And as you state this only adds new context to the art, giving it more power and ensuring that their regressive goals are not taken seriously.

Meanwhile the Evangelicals have gone absolute nutters, I never thought I would see the day where the Catholics were the “progressive” church. But they play the long game, and have always changed along with society over the millenia.

The work had drawn criticism from some Catholics, who said it was blasphemous.

I won’t deny it’s kind of an odd idea for a sculpture and clearly designed to create controversy, but claiming that it’s blasphemous just confirms the fact that they don’t know the definition of the word. It just depicts a defining moment in Christian history, whether you like the aesthetics or not… The Catholic church has definitely celebrated weirder things.

I don’t see how people like you miss the entire concept of “base load”.

I live in a region with vast amounts of renewable energy resources. It’s always windy and the sun shines almost every day. I have solar panels on my house that cover most of my DHW and a large fraction of my summer cooling load, and keep most of my appliances running.

But right now, the sun is down and the wind is flat. And I still need power. My battery storage would be depleted by morning, damaging it through overdischarge if I don’t buy power from the grid instead.

And it’s a lovely summer evening with no heating or cooling demand! What about midwinter, -35C and dark and snowy? Where is my power coming from on that day, after a month of days just like it?

Nuclear.

Sure lasers don’t have recoil, but I see no reason a laser gun can’t have recoil.

Anything from flywheel energy storage, a lasing medium compressed by pistons, massive magnetic fields created by high currents, who knows what’s inside that thing.

A handheld laser gun has to generate a beam of such unrealistic intensity that I’d be surprised if the power stage didn’t buck in some manner.

Thanks for the American context as I’m a Canadian and our systems are different here. I didn’t realize the risks involved and the motivation behind it. I think this might be my least popular comment on Lemmy ever😅

The USA as a battleground between religion and atheism changes the context as I would shrug most of this off here in Canada as harmless. Like the 10 commandments? Most of them are good advice, basically just “don’t be a piece of shit” and i wouldn’t have a problem teaching them to kids… Unless the goal is to teach them actively as the word of God and marginalize non-believers as sinful, in which case this is absolutely criminal. That is church, not school.

We have a more robust separation of church and state to the point where when I read “teaching the Bible in school” I hear “robustly secular, historical and cultural study” which as I stated I believe would be a valuable learning experience. In Quebec there are even rules that public servants can’t display any religious symbols at all, even as small as a cross on a bracelet. The leader of our Conservative party recently made a statement that both abortion and gay rights were “a closed issue” and he would not stand for any attacks on them.

So personally my wife and I made the hard decision this year to send our daughter to a Catholic school next year due to the rapidly declining quality of public education. However the Catholic school district here is publicly funded and staffed, with strict regulations that any religious content is optional and that respect must be given equally to those who choose it or do not choose it.

Many of her friends have already made the switch (regular school is quickly emptying out of smart kids and turning into a zoo as parents pull their kids) and stated this is exactly how it works, most of them being non-religious as well but impressed with the discipline and learning outcomes. My wife teaches college and said the difference is night and day with some kids even making it out of public highschool unable to read. Meanwhile my daughter’s new school has won awards for the achievements of its graduates and their placement in top schools and in industry.

So you see I’m comfortable enough with our dedication to secularism here in Canada that I am willing to send my daughter to an actual Catholic school with no fear that she will be brainwashed… Obviously a bit of bible study doesn’t scare me but in the context of the USA culture war it’s clearly a much bigger deal.

Forcing it as a belief system is definitely wrong, but we were forced to study plenty of literature when I was in school, much of it far less relevant. I don’t see the difference with the Bible, especially if presented as a historical document and prototypical collection of stories?

I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious family, but when I decided to pick up a Bible and read it as a teenager I couldn’t believe how much context it gave me on our culture and its origins.

Having to read and study the whole thing would also help rein in overzealous religion IMO. The #1 reason I’ve heard from evangelicals who left their church was “I decided to read the Bible for myself”

The simple solution sounds like it should be shipping more panels to the rest of the world?

Solar panels are still excessively expensive here in Canada

Not just American history, the Bible is the absolute cornerstone of our entire culture. As the one book that every household owned for much of recorded history, the amount of biblical references and reused stories is ridiculous.

I have absolutely no problem with the Bible being taught in schools as it’s an incredibly important document. I find it odd that it isn’t, because the separation of church and state shouldn’t prohibit the study of old books in any way.

I was talking about this with my wife who came from Taiwan at 16 and was sort of second hand exposed to Western culture. She said everything can’t be a bible story can it? I dug out a Bible off the shelf and flipped through, well you know David and Goliath, you know Samson, Jonah and the whale yeah these are classics right?

She says no, so I ask if she knows the story of Pinocchio or why her luggage was made by “Samsonite”. And the truck that we saw yesterday with the “G0L1ATH” license plate?

Yeah it’s everywhere

It’s complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50’ tower with booster.

However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.

So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.

Now the issues. RCS won’t work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there’s no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.

This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I’ve got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.

Even worse, I’m migrating to an all-Voip solution because my carrier refuses to support VoWifi/VoLTE and it solves my coverage issues.

The only disadvantage is I’m forced to fall back all the way to SMS. No MMS even, and what about RCS, the new texting system that works through your data connection well there’s no support for that aside from using Google Messages and the SIM that’s in the phone!

Worst “open standard” ever

Reaction control system to me, lol

Right, we need to come up with better terms for talking about “AI”. Personally at the moment I’m considering any transformer-type ML system to be part of the category, as you stated none of them are any more “intelligent” than any others. They’re all just a big stack of tensor operations. So if one is AI, they all are.

Remember long ago when “fuzzy logic” was all the hype and considered to be AI? Just a very early form of classifier network but everyone was super excited at the time.

I’m just stating that “AI” is a broad field. These lightweight and useful transformer models are a direct product of other AI research.

I know what you mean, but simply stating “Don’t use AI” isn’t really valid anymore as soon these ML models will be a common component. There are even libraries and hardware acceleration support for tensor operations on the ESP32-S3.

It’s possible for local AI models to be very economical on energy, if used for the right tasks.

For example I’m running RapidOCR which uses a modern transformer architecture, and absolutely blows away traditional OCR at capturing data from character displays.

Doesn’t even need a GPU and returns results in under a second on a modern CPU. No preprocessing needed, just feed it an image. This little multimodal transformer is just as much “AI” as bloated general purpose GPTs, but it’s cheap, fast and useful.

As a farmer, especially during something like seeding or harvest where focus and not making mistakes are critical.

Fortunately I got my doc to prescribe me XR dexadrine + IR to use as a top up/enhancer. I rarely take the IR or just add a half pill on long days, but always fill the prescription as if I take it every day, giving me a large supply to ride through shortages.

Look at Saskatchewan, Canada. We’re the only province with a public telecom, SaskTel.

Most people in the cities and even larger towns have fiber, and our cell plans are significantly cheaper than anywhere else in Canada despite being a rural province with a large coverage area to population ratio.

We also have decent electricity rates considering we have no hydro, and the cheapest natural gas in Canada. Thanks to SaskPower and SaskEnergy.

Public utilities are the only way to do it, I’m always shocked to see people defend privatization in any way.

probably the best optical character recognition by far

I’ve actually just been working with OCR this week, trying to capture data off of the screen of a stupid proprietary Schneider device as that’s the only way to get at it.

Long story short Tesseract stinks at this task.

The Chinese designed PaddleOCR seems significantly superior as it runs a more modern neural net and requires a lot less preprocessing. I would class it as more of a “full service AI” and not just a simple recognition system like Tesseract, it can correct for skew and do its own normalization and thresholding internally while Tesseract wants a perfect boolean raster fed to it.

Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is a lot higher due to trying to understand their text vomit website and the fact that it seems prone to random segfaulting.

During the Cold War, Russia launched quite a few nuclear powered satellites, and I mean real fission reactors, not just RTGs. Apparently they’re still up there and possibly still generating power. So it’s pretty much a proven fact.

They want society to oppose immigration and work visas so that these people will have to work as illegals, for lower pay and worse working conditions.

Despite all the right wing wall talk, the wealthy actually benefit from a somewhat porous border for this reason.