mvac's comments | WingNews

mvac | 9 months ago | on: East German cities offer free stays to fight depopulation

The town of Görlitz is truly charming. I visited after discovering that many scenes from my favorite movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, were filmed there (https://www.discovergoerlitz.com/grandbudapest/)

mvac | 9 months ago | on: Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model that transforms documents into structured markdown

Correct link for Docext: https://github.com/NanoNets/docext/blob/main/PDF2MD_README.m...

mvac | 9 months ago | on: Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model that transforms documents into structured markdown

How does it compare to Datalab/Marker https://github.com/datalab-to/marker ? We evaluated many PDF->MD converters and this one performed the best, though it is not perfect.

mvac | 9 months ago | on: Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway

In my experience Uber/Lyft/Bolt in their race to the bottom started tolerating cars in bad shape and drivers that don’t care about driving safely. Really hoping to see Waymo or any other robo-taxi in Europe soon.

mvac | 11 months ago | on: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

This exemption is only there for "reader apps"

" 3.1.3(a) “Reader” Apps: Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video). ... Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site ...

mvac | 1 year ago | on: The blissful Zen of a good side project

It reminded me a part of the "The Tar Pit" esssay from The Mythical Man-month:

> Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? > First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design.

...

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.

mvac | 1 year ago | on: Mistral OCR

Yes, i have. The problem with using just an LLM is that while it reads and understands text, but it cannot reproduce it accurately. Additionaly the textbooks I've mentioned have many diagrams and illustrations in them (e.g. books on anatomy or biochemistry). I don't really care about extracting text from them, I just need them extracted as images alongside the text, and no LLM does that.

mvac | 1 year ago | on: Mistral OCR

Great progress, but unfortunately, for our use case (converting medical textbooks from PDF to MD), the results are not as good as those by MinerU/PDF-Extract-Kit [1].

Also the collab link in the article is broken, found a functional one [2] in the docs.

[1] https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU [2] https://colab.research.google.com/github/mistralai/cookbook/...

mvac | 1 year ago | on: We're forking Flutter

Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.

mvac | 1 year ago | on: We're forking Flutter

Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death. I applaud the effort and hope they will be able to find a monetization model that works to support the development. There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed (Silverlight -> OpenSilver and various .NET-based cross-platform technologies) that serve their customers well. Unfortunately, none of them are in any way "mainstream" like Flutter is today.

mvac | 2 years ago | on: Cloudflare employee posts layoff call with HR and goes viral [video]

Don't you think it's also a problem of the corporate-kindergarten culture, where everyone and everything is considered great, even though, as a salesperson, they haven't closed any deals in the last four months?

mvac | 2 years ago | on: How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant works

Thiel was right (9y ago) with the west being leader in innovation in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms.

mvac | 2 years ago | on: Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird [video]

The full infographic presented in the talk: https://latentspaces.zhdk.ch/imb/

mvac | 2 years ago | on: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)

> ... quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person

So true, I've yet to see anything of quality produced by groupthink.

mvac | 3 years ago | on: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

The developer experience just sucks compared with regular project with build, hot reload, etc…

We have also tried this approach and I still think that it might be the future. But apart from using it on tiny projects and experiments, the DX is just subpar compared to any modern vite based “build-full” stack.

mvac | 3 years ago | on: Is the Living Computer Museum dead?

When I read about the museum closing, it made me quite sad. I was absolutely thrilled when I visited it 7 years ago. I didn’t have time to go through everything I wanted, thinking that next time I’ll make more time for it. Now I realize how even things like computer museums in IT cities backed by IT billionaires are ephemeral.

mvac | 3 years ago | on: Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership

Do you find UTM to be “good enough” or lacking certain features? Tbh I find it quite amusing that Windows license costs less (in the EU) than Parallels for year.

mvac | 3 years ago | on: Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership

I switched to Mac, but still sometimes need the full Visual Studio for work. VS for Mac is a joke and I don’t believe that even its developers use it.

mvac | 3 years ago | on: I'm starting a zero waste grocery delivery service in NYC. Anybody interested?

For some reason I always see zero waste stores to open with lot of fanfare and then close down after a few months. Even in hip areas, where demand for hipster cafes and vegan restarants seems to be infinite.

Not sure why, thought. Maybe zero waste store is one of those ideas that seem so nice, but don't work at all in reality?

mvac | 3 years ago | on: Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership

Technically you can use any Windows 11 licence key (or even Win 10) to activate Windows 11 Arm in Parallels. Have been using it since last december and so far it has been much better experience than with any Windows PC...