√𝛂𝛋𝛆

Something like, An image consisting of two men and three children, formally dressed, indoors, they appear to be at an event such as a wedding reception. There is a cake in the background and people dancing. There is a banner in the image that says "Congratulations Tom and Jerry".

Scripting and the command line is an option. It may seem a bit daunting at first but can be a lot faster. Doing AI training stuff I tried brute forcing for awhile but it is just too tedious. A model like a Qwen 3 can be instructed to act like a photo captioning model. It is quite good at optical text recognition in images too.

You can script it to caption the whole image or any number of elements like color, location, subjects, etc., while also limiting the length of text. Then modify the image metadata with the text. It is also possible to feed it a set of json keys and it will fill in the values for the dictionary.

If you go this route, then you start using tools like ripgrep and it becomes possible to find and manipulate many thousands of images quickly to find niche sets in the tens to hundreds in just a single scripted command. You can do stuff like grep -ril foo | xargs | sed ‘s/foo/bar/’ or something like that. Not at my comp right now to pull up the command flags, but that is how to search and edit to change all instances of words in a bunch of files. That one is technically incorrect but it makes far more intuitive sense than alternatives.

Something like Qwen requires enthusiast level hardware, or if you have to, a free google colab instance. If you search for captioning models there are much smaller ones like the ancient BLIP that are less accurate but fast and run on anything. Anyways, I know this reply is not exactly what you wanted, but it is an option, and one I thought was beyond me until I tried it. Hopefully it is useful digital neighbor.

Nah, it is a matter of weight. Roads are engineered specifically for the weight of these trucks. If these trucks are regulated stupidly, the cost of goods goes up very quickly, the cost of road infrastructure skyrockets, or both. Making cars obese to protect the dumbest humans is one thing, but the constraints are different here. A commercial driver’s license is supposed to be a real license with real qualifications. That is your only protection. In a society where driving is required, the regular license is a joke with superficial qualifications. It is just a tax on the populous.

Anyone here ever driven in a runaway trap system?

I was mildly scared of them when I was getting my commercial driver’s license ages ago. I was looking at potential jobs involving cranes or an excavator and lowboy. When a typical tractor trailer is fully loaded, you only have 3-4 full hard presses on the brakes before you lose them. Air brakes are inverted. The unpowered brakes state is fully engaged. The pneumatics are holding back the shoes; unlike typical cars that are pressing the friction material into a surface using hydraulics. When a truck fully engages the brakes, it lets all the air out. Then the reserve is used to refill the system to disengage. The engine’s compression is a primary component of the braking system. However, it is a manual transmission. Unlike manual cars, these do not have synchromesh (small clutches that spin up the secondary gear shaft to match the primary shaft speed). If you miss a shift, you only have around a 50-75 RPM window where shift will mesh at all. On top of that, the engine only revs 2k-3k RPM, so the transmission is usually an 8 speed with 2-3 splitters. That means there are 16-24 speeds total, and for any given speed, only one little shift window exists. I was scared of big downhills. When a truck is fully loaded, going down hill, and you’ve got to shift for engine braking, it can feel about like someone is fully depressing the accelerator in a regular car. That shift window passes super fast. One can rev match the engine to a small extent, but it is still easy to miss in an unfamiliar rig. You are more focused on staying in the lane when every visual indication you’re used to in cars is missing. Like you feel much larger than the lane and you only have around half a meter of extra margin split on both sides of the truck when driving minimum width lanes. So you miss the gear mesh, now you hard press the brakes to get the speed somewhere low where you are able to find a gear. Miss like that 3 times in a few minute span, and you’re likely to run out of air. That slams on the brakes, but that is not enough to stop a fully loaded truck on grades steeper than 5-6%. It is why the signs exist warning about the grade. You must use the engine AND brakes at these grades, managing the air levels in concert with the RPM and gear selected.

Anyone here ever fucked that up, or been in to a runaway ramp or engineered stopping surface?

Get into the business of subdividing homes into multi unit condominiums now. Corporations will buy up every one of them.

The cost of living is due to criminal extraction of wealth through worthless mismanaged banking. That criminally inflated cost is why western countries are not labor competitive. Banking in its present form is privateer piracy.

Depends on where you are and what you are worried about. Coming across a bear or mountain lion in a concealed close quarters area is what scares me. I have had that happen with a bear in a thicket. I was very lucky it ran when spooked because I only had a useless .22 on me. Later that day, a buddy let me shoot his .454. That is what I want for a side arm with a bear. I would have been lucky to draw and get one or two shots before it got to me. I want the biggest meanest slug of a bullet in that situation. For a rifle, I only really care about a solid bolt action. A small magazine is nice to know I have, but I am not taking bad shots. With a handgun, I want as many shots as I can hold reliably. I have no nostalgia for revolvers.

Machining is fun, but something like a gun takes a lot of skills and time invested.

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Nah. The plow improved society when everyone said the same thing.

The time can be invested in expanding and creating new things. Inbred societies that lost their industrial capacity only have the option to extract and reduce with gains and improvements. The capable use what they have to create more and new things. Puritan fuckwits believe they are in some kind of final state of technology. They aren’t even out of the stone age yet. The next era of major technologies is entirely biological. It is the key to sustainability. The USA forfeited that future for dogmatism and corruption in the medical field. All of the sciences require 5 sigma results except for medical. It is 3 sigma garbage. Things called breakthroughs in medical are insignificant irrelevant noise in physics, chemistry, and astronomy. One day biology will be fully understood and an engineering corpus. That is the day when true interstellar travel becomes possible. If we get to a complete understanding of biology before the next major planetary cataclysm, we will own the galaxy in 100k years. Planets are gravity prison cradles only suitable for the most primitive lifeforms.

The reason we are so backwards in the west is extremely simple, we are not meritocratic. Wealth is inherited. All of our present leaders have inherited wealth. Business acumen and intelligence are not hereditary. There is no path that bridges from the masses to the top classes of society to lead by merit. The lack of potential growth and mobility has crushed the culture into dystopian decline. There is no mechanism to stop this inherited wealth cancer. It is terminal.

The robotic industrial revolution is already won. Congratulations to the winners of the new age of progress and human evolution. If anyone tells you about the wonders of making nothing and a service economy, shoot them dead and don’t look back. They are criminal traitors.