rayiner

5 ms·

1.
by rayiner 4d ago
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure. I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, m
2.
by rayiner 4d ago
A “one time tax” is pure third worldism. It’s like Chicago trying to close its deficit by selling off its parking meters. But Brin should propose an alternative tax that is sustainable.
3.
by rayiner 4d ago
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate. > The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looki
4.
by rayiner 4d ago
Sounds like he wants to avoid the race to the bottom in terms of pricing that is resulting from AI becoming a commodity.
5.
by rayiner 4d ago
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. W
6.
by rayiner 4d ago
> Childfree/childless rates are up, and will continue to climb Desired family size is still 2.7 kids, and has been stable at that number for over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-idea
7.
by rayiner 4d ago
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. The same is true for the definition of “childless”
8.
by rayiner 5d ago
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where
9.
by rayiner 5d ago
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban ele
10.
by rayiner 5d ago
Yes, the tool I’m describing works on what the pdf_oxide crate returns, which includes glyph positions. Here’s a public appendix from a recent Federal Circuit case. It has a representative assortment of documents (opinions, briefs, patents,
11.
by rayiner 5d ago
> This is why LLMs / VLMs are so much better at this task, because they can look at the document holistically like we can. Totally agreed. But in this use case, PDFs are the working format, not just an archival format. An offline ba
12.
by rayiner 5d ago
A PDF is a command stream designed for rendering. Interpreting the command stream to get the positions of each glyph is deterministic and existing libraries (I use both pdf_oxide and lopdf) do that fine. Once you have glyph positions, you n
13.
by rayiner 5d ago
The use case is basically the same ones where a programmer would use grep on source files, and it’s too slow to run the model on it directly for the same reasons. Existing tools do text extraction (pdftotext) but not that great when there’s
14.
by rayiner 5d ago
Crazy, but not universalist so they can only harm themselves.
15.
by rayiner 5d ago
There was DOJ prosecution under the Biden administration: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28x187rmko . I'm going to believe Biden's DOJ over Iran...
16.
by rayiner 5d ago
Is coding "solved?" I've been using Fable and Grok to vibecode a library to improve text extraction for legal PDFs. (Which have things like line numbers in transcripts that messes up text extraction.) This is a simple, dumb p
17.
by rayiner 5d ago
> as for iran, they've been the picture of restraint since trump's first term. They tried to assassinate Trump, before he did any of this!
18.
by rayiner 5d ago
> All other nuclear nations behave (even Pakistan and India, which are at each other throat all the time). What makes you think that Iran won't? Because Iran's leadership is actually crazy.
19.
by rayiner 5d ago
> In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of
20.
by rayiner 5d ago
> A lot of Chinese do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "society needs their government to be a str
21.
by rayiner 5d ago
> First, the vast majority of the locals hated the protests and didn't support them. This isn't reported by the western media. The media reported it as all HK people were being wronged. Not everyone is an American, and that&#x2
22.
by rayiner 6d ago
Concrete example: I'm Bangladeshi, and our society has strict gender roles. When you visit a Bangladeshi household, the women will spend all the time in the kitchen cooking elaborate meals, while the men are socializing. This is rooted
23.
by rayiner 6d ago
Modern intersectionality isn’t the cultural relativism of 20th century liberalism. Intersectionality has a built in escape hatch for any aspect of foreign culture that conflicts with the foundational premises of post-religious children of
24.
by rayiner 6d ago
It’s the residual Puritanism. Foreign-facing federal agencies like the CIA were the last bastion of American WASPs. I grew up around these people because my dad worked for a contractor for USAID, which was at times a front for the State Dep
25.
by rayiner 6d ago
This is the kind of bizarre article you see in an era where people reflexively support anything having to do with the federal bureaucracy. Even the 1960s CIA that was overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other countries is now “li
26.
by rayiner 6d ago
Yes, the problem is the 99% of the other people and stuff that got added.
27.
by rayiner 6d ago
Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.
28.
by rayiner 6d ago
“HR America” in a nutshell.
29.
by rayiner 7d ago
It's incredibly how long an era of good decisions can allow a company to coast.
30.
by rayiner 8d ago
This methodology makes no sense lol. I thought PISA was the gold standard for international educational comparisons.

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