So I'm trying to OCR 1000s of pages of old french dictionaries from the 1700s, has anything popped up that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and works pretty decently?
I use Gemini for that. Split the PDF into 50 page chunks, throw it into aistudio and ask it to convert it. A couple of 1000 pages can be done with the free tier.
I'm startled by people who say they love brutalism as an architecture. I'm able to enjoy the aesthetic, but _actually_ being for it as a viable way of housing human activity seems irresponsible. It's similar to saying "I love Beksinski paintings and wish people lived in them". What's even worse with brutalism is that the lack of form usually follows the lack of function: dark water streaks and humidity issues because gutters are for the weak, car-centric design, etc. People associate brutalism with urban decay because it's pretty much purpose built for that.
> dark water streaks and humidity issues because gutters are for the weak
One of the things that really drove it home was when around 20ish years ago I worked on a project to fit microwave links to provide broadband around Glasgow (ADSL2 was a ways off and only 8Mbps, and we could do 155Mbps with microwave).
Many of the Brutalist tower blocks had - at some considerable expense, in the 1990s or so - had been retrofitted with a steel-framed pitched roof over the existing flat roof. The space in between was lovely and dry, and we often fitted open network racks right there on the roof, where previously it would have been exposed to the elements.
Evidently no matter how hard you try, that squared-off flat roof aesthetic is just incompatible with West Coast Weather.
It's an odd thing, brutalism is almost universally hated by the general public but there's a seemingly endless stream of people who are willing to wax lyrical about why stained concrete blocks are actually the pinnacle of architecture.
It sometimes feels like a psy-op to read through all these gushingly positive comments, when you know how the average person feels about it.
I get that it's not actually something nefarious, but it really does suck that the people who like this garbage are so loud about it that it gets shoved down the rest of the public's throats.
I think the extremely public, visible, every-dat nature of architecture gives it certainly responsibilities that are different from other visual art forms.
The modern trend of trying to make art that's repulsive to people with "common", "uneducated" sensibilities is one thing when it's constrained to the inside of a museum, but it's awful when it takes up this much space in public.
> It sometimes feels like a psy-op to read through all these gushingly positive comments, when you know how the average person feels about it.
Yes, exactly!
A common theme among these weird ideological group-thinks is political undertones.
> "Today, criticism on brutalism and modernism is mostly voiced by those on the far-right side of the political spectrum, precisely because of the association between modernism and the post-war welfare state"
Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve.
Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.
Fascinating. Borges is not shy in mentioning his admirations, and what he was exposed to. I like that he leaves breadcrumbs, or whole loaves, pointing to what he likes. It's an interesting way to thread into literature.
I envy a bit those , who, like you, had such exposures. It's such a fascinating world, which I used to scoff at when I was younger. But it's a healthy envy. I feel happy for those who choose to developed such capacities, and it inspires me to try to develop them for myself.
All of quantum computing is reversible by nature (until you measure the state, of course). Yet, there'some research in the field focusing on irreversible ("non-unitary") quantum algorithms and it appears there is some advantage in throwing away, algorithmically speaking, the reversibility. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16596
It's interesting that classical and quantum computing researchers are each looking in the direction of the other field.
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