There was a bit of a controversy a few years ago when people realized that the head of the Linux Foundation was using Mac OS to give a presentation at a conference (especially ironic considering the presentation was about using Linux on the desktop). If the FreeBSD Foundation is similar to the Linux Foundation (which seems to be the case from looking at their site), it's mainly intended as a vehicle so large companies can fund aspects of the system they want developed rather than an ideologically driven organization like the FSF. From that perspective, an executive actually trying to run FreeBSD is a nice thing to see. It's been a running joke for years that when you look at a FreeBSD conference you'll see all the developers running it in a VM on their MacBooks, so if they're treating bare metal as more of a priority I think it's a positive development.
If only the Linux Foundation was primarily funding development of Linux, it's hard to describe what it is they are doing exactly, but it's a bit like a social club for Middle Managers and other insignificant people, building ecosystems^TM, connections and synergies^TM, and of course the Linux brand. Starting initiatives and such.
> With less-than-satisfactory OCR output, I resorted to a process I used many years ago when converting scans made of old Commodore ROM dumps printed on a Commodore 1515 dot-matrix printer. The process relies on the ASCII OCR output having the same repetitive errors. "B" and "8", "S" and "5" are good examples, as are "l" and "1", and "O" and "0". There are many other similar single-character errors and, when working with x86 code, there are similar errors with instructions like "MOV". This process naturally works better if the output file is monolithic rather than single-page OCR conversions because you can do substitutions across the entire converted printout and not 75 separate files.
> The next formatting hassle was the spacing. This required repetitive substitutions of a descending numbers of spaces to tabs (i.e., replace 8 spaces with a tab, 7, 6, etc.). Then if you want to return it to fixed spaces (which is likely how the original printer printed it -- spaces and not vertical tabs), you can. For pure re-creation work, spaces produce absolute column formatting while tabs can move around depending on the program displaying the file.
> Once you run thought the 15 or so common global substitutions and tab conversion, it's a lot easier to work with the file to fix formatting and perform other cleanup. This is then followed by a line-by-line comparison against the original printouts. Overall I'd say the conversion output quality with this method is very good.
Hmm, doesn't say anything about what OCR tools they used.
I've got a 4" stack of wide-carriage COBOL. I guess it's two revisions of the same system so I only need to scan the newer half. Its probably from a TI Omni 810.
On the other hand, I've got 100 pages of code printed in compressed font by someone wanting to make sure that 80+ char lines fit within margins. So a lot of words just don't come out at all. A frequent error is "A" becomes "H", "O" becomes "U" because the top dots aren't "attached".
And columns of line numbers starting with 0001, or hex? The most confounding thing is OCR that thinks 00 is a sideways 8, and that dominates the uniform block, so it tries to interpret the whole column as sideways text. In another situation, it interprets two stacked lines (each starting with 0) as one line starting with 8 and it just goes off the rails.
So I've been working with automatic skew correction, then clipping it into rows, in order to get each line of text isolated from the surrounding context. When I do that, I get better results, but it is not great either.
I'm considering going all-in on training a new recognizer on snippets. For that, I'll be constructing "The Set of All As" and so on.
Pretty interesting. I wonder if a whitelist against certain columns in the output could help, e.g. this column can only contain valid x86 instructions (e.g. MOV is allowed, M0V is not), this column can only contain hexadecimal (1 is allowed but never "l"), etc. Probably more work than it's worth given the final line-by-line comparison that happens anyway.
They will never release the code for anything that new because at that point, there's tons of licensed third-party code and the codebase is so large that going through everything to verify ownership would not be feasible. The code to NT 4 and XP have been leaked though.
I think the Vizio lawsuit will set a more narrow precedent than the SFC wants. The tentative ruling the judge in that case made in December (not binding, but represents the judge's current understanding of the case going into the trial) is that Vizio has a contractual obligation to provide the GPL source code for the TV the SFC bought because the TV has an offer to provide source code upon request buried in one of the menus. The tentative ruling doesn't cover what happens if a company doesn't offer to provide source code. In the future, a company that uses GPL code without a source code offer could argue that third-party GPL beneficiaries have no grounds to sue because there's no contract being violated, and this would take another lawsuit to resolve.
That was my impression, as well, but I recently met SFC people and they assured me that the judge is taking the third party beneficiary doctrine very seriously, it‘s not off the table. Funnily, because Vizio objected to the tentative ruling, it has little meaning now.
The trial in August will handle the TPB stuff, as well. It will be streamed, btw.
2nd link doesn't work.
That would be a neat tool, to find the original article and see how many levels of AI summary it has gone through, a game of AI telephone!
I had thought about creating something like that for finding comments for articles. For a given article, display links to comments for HN, lobsters, reddit, etc. However, I feel I already waste too much time reading comments. I shouldn't make it easier and more tempting.
Man, maybe it's time for me to give the verge a subscription. There the only ones actually doing any journalism here and a bunch of AI blogs skimming off the top.
It's interesting how when you talk to people who are vocally in favor of capitalism, they always turn out to be in favor of an imaginary version of capitalism where everybody is a small business owner, rather than in favor of how the system works in practice and the outcomes that it necessarily creates.
It takes longer than ordering with a cashier, it keeps trying to upsell you, and it's always out of receipt paper because unsurprisingly the company that isn't willing to pay a person to take orders is also not willing to pay a person to maintain the kiosks.
Depends on what you're ordering and who the cashier is.
If your order is the happy path of no customizations of a combo with an experienced cashier, it can be done in seconds, for sure. "Medium #4 with a Diet Coke", pay, done.
But if you customize your burger or ordering a lot of items a la carte and you're dealing with a new cashier that has weak English skills, good fucking luck. You'll likely need to wait for them to figure out they need to call someone over to help, have to repeat your order, and you end up spending far more time.
> it keeps trying to upsell you
Yeah, I'll agree that's obnoxious, especially when it's trying to upsell you something that's already on your order. I ordered a combo. I don't need you to add another fry.
It's easily one of the most intuitive and straightforward kiosks out there today and you don't have to wait for one of the cashiers to notice you nor worry about them punching in your order incorrectly.
Glad someone else feels the same way! Knowing that I enter my order in correctly is the biggest win there for me as a picky eater. The cashier is just entering it into a computer anyways, so it makes sense for me to enter it in myself. I honestly wonder why more restaurants don’t do this. It’s not that hard to wrap a halfway decent UI around the system you already have.
If it's purely about the food, receiving it, consuming it, then sure, get the human out of the loop, interact with a machine. Ideally even the preparation is done by a machine. No human error or hair involved. Why even go there, let it be delivered to your home.
But these places are also about the experience of social connection. The bar keeper, the waiter, the chef. They are all involved in this experience and the actual food is "just" one component, one detail, albeit an important one. My favorite restaurants would be nothing without the people there.
It's similar with music. It's not just about the produced sound waves. The musician forms a social bond with the audience. Even when listening to a recording, my mind is re-living or at least imagining a live sitting, that connection with the musician. No machine generated music will ever be able to replace that.
I am more concerned with getting the right order and not with entering the right one. McDonalds will still get it wrong when you have a complex "change" of defaults even if it's entered correctly.
Other places optimize for this better by not having too many hand-overs between order and preparation.
Hmm. I’ve never really had those issues. It’s also much faster and easier than ordering with a human. I guess it does try to upsell you, but humans often do, too. And to me, it’s worth it to just click “No” in exchange for the added convenience (mostly in getting my order right).
I have had them run out of receipts, but it’s never mattered for me. If I’m dining in, the plastic number you carry to your table makes sure I get my food. And if I’m taking it to-go, they always find me anyways.
> It’s also much faster and easier than ordering with a human.
I'm not sure how that could be. I can walk up to the counter and say "Big Mac Large Fry Small Coke" faster than you can navigate the first screen of the kiosk, and a skilled counter worker can key that in and be done before I even get my credit card out.
The problem, I’m a picky eater. I never order something that simple. I always need it with “No X” or “Only Y”. Cashiers often struggle with that, even if they understand me well (which they don’t always). It’s easier for me to see everything an item comes with and make sure I’m entering my order correctly.
McDonalds' menu is not designed for folk like you. In my part of the world, we had traditional fast-food joints where the question would be inverse: out of the things you can see and add to your burger, pick a few. That is very efficient with a human prepping your burger.
Hm? McDonalds is one of the best for customization. Everything is removable and the software knows the calorie count of each ingredient so the total that shows up next to each item in the cart is accurate
The kiosk ordering at McDonalds is made to adjust the defaults which is slower than the mode I described: if automated, that would be a screen to choose the item, and then add things into it from a list — fewer screens, faster ordering.
Everybody would go through this workflow built for customization, and at McD they do not. This to me means they are not building for this usecase.
You have to wait in line behind several people to get to the point where you can talk to the cashier. Most McDonalds have several kiosks. There is usually little or no line. I can place my order grab a table.
> I can walk up to the counter and say "Big Mac Large Fry Small Coke"
In what culture is it normal to just state your order without greeting or saying “please”? You also didn’t include the time taken squinting at the menu and trying to figure out what you can even order.
The advantage of going with AWS is that when us-east-1 goes down, half the internet goes down so you don't have to defend why you had a service outage.
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