January 20, 2021

Joe,

Well, Joe, you made it. A lot of people said you wouldn’t. Frankly, I’m surprised, but here we are. You know, this job—it’s not easy. People don’t understand. They think they know, but they have no idea. Believe me, it’s the toughest job in the world. I did it better than anyone ever has, that I can tell you. People say it all the time. But now it’s your turn. Let’s see what you’ve got.

You’re going to learn quickly, Joe. The media? They’ll love you at first. They’re on your side now, we all know that, OK? They never treated me fairly. It was a witch hunt from day one. Fake news—nonstop. But here’s the thing: they’ll turn on you too. Trust me, they always do. And when they do, you’ve got to be ready. They’re not your friends, Joe. They never were.

Let’s talk about the swamp. You know it’s bad, I know it’s bad—everybody knows it’s bad. But it’s worse than you think. Much worse. They’ll smile to your face and stab you in the back. I cleaned a lot of it up—did an incredible job, by the way—but you’ve got to watch out. You’ve been here 47 years, but I don’t think you’ve seen what I’ve seen. Be strong, Joe. You’re going to need to be stronger than you’ve ever been.

America First, Joe. Always. I rebuilt this country. Best economy in history. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Record jobs, record stock market, and then—boom—the China virus hit. Total disaster. But we handled it amazingly. You’re inheriting something great, don’t mess it up. People love America First, Joe. You’d better not forget that. The radical left—they’ll try to pull you away from it. Don’t let them do it. They’ll ruin everything. Believe me, they’re bad news. Very bad news.

And here’s the thing: they’ll tell you to undo everything we did—big mistake. Huge. The military? I rebuilt it. Our trade deals? Best deals we’ve ever had. You don’t want to go back to the old way. It was a disaster before me. Total disaster. Keep what works, Joe, even if they tell you not to. They won’t admit it, but they know I was right. Everybody knows it.

Anyway, Joe, good luck. You’re gonna need it. We’ll see what happens, right? A lot of people are watching. And you never know, maybe I’ll be back in 2024. People are talking about it. A lot of people.

Donald J. Trump
45th President of the United States

P.S. Don’t let Kamala take over. I hear she’s already measuring the drapes. Sad!

Edit: forgot to mention that this is not the real letter. Obviously.

Did anybody bother to look at the numbers?

I checked the stats for the last 4 years here and it looks really strange. Statistics isn’t my thing… But it looks like it’s wise to be cautious and not to fully trust the numbers.

Around the beginning of last year there was a huge dip in the Windows market share that seemed to be correlating with a peek in “unknown”. Windows then catched up in a somewhat erratic way.

Mac OS also shows a weird behavior. Starts at 16%, up to 21% and the down to 14% between October and November…

It’s not likely that a huge number of people decided to buy a Mac and then trash it one month later. Same but opposite goes for the windows stats.

I think it looks like there is an uncertainty of more than the total market share Linux is shown to have…

Not saying that Linux isn’t increasing on desktop market share. Just saying that numbers seen to have quite a bit error margin and to be cautious if referring to these numbers.

If you’re getting excessive sweaty hands when wearing nitrile gloves, thyroid problems isn’t the most likely cause…

I recommend you shrink the windows partition on the internal drive and install Linux in the then empty space. The extra disk you have can be used as and extra disk or you can create mount points for /home and other directories.

Microsoft does not recognize other operating systems as “equals” (WSL is not Linux being week. It’s making Linux a puppet controlled by Windows) and therefore they design everything Windows as it was the only OS in the world. Therefore keeping Windows will often require some extra acrobatics from you.

Google has worked hard to break up Microsoft’s monopoly and Windows-Office lock in effect. The way Google designed Android and the eco system around it pushed out the model where you fully own your device. (“own” as in be in full control of what you bought).

Nowadays people are used to get things for the price of their personal data and/or spending half of the time using their device by watching ads.

As I see it, Microsoft has just adjusted their offering on the consumer market to what people are used to today.

This repository and its releases do not contain game assets. The original game is required to build or run this project.

Nintendo might try but there wouldn’t be much substance in such claim.

Unable to understand and/or admit that both sides can be bad. It’s ok to admit the “your team” did some nasty shit and it doesn’t in any way cancel out what the other “team” did.

Also, Winning an argument doesn’t in any way make you a winner. Actually, an argument that someone “won” often doesn’t lead to a change for the better or even make anyone convinced that your arguments were valid.

What’s is the main topic of your blog?

How good is good do you say?

We got a pretty good results with CER at 4% and WER at 15%!

This was on a limited dataset used to test and train which most likely means that if you introduced an even larger dataset with greater variations in handwriting style for testing the numbers might be even worse.

Very simplified: A risk of a character wrong every 20th character and a word wrong every 7th word. The SER was around 20%.

There’s an reason why no one has released a good model for western letters yet and why companies pay up to 1€ for capturing data from 10 handwritten pages.

It will come but OCR isn’t as sexy as developing text2image solutions.

You really don’t understand how Blu-ray works, do you?

Regarding Blu-ray as a medium for movies: Sony isn’t able do that kind of damage.

Blu-ray Association would go bananas:

Why are you worried about Sony owning the blu-ray format?

To train an AI to recognize handwriting you need a huge dataset of handwriting examples. That is millions of samples of handwritten text + information about what the written text says in every example).

This is why the best engines only exists as a service in the cloud. The OCR engines you can install lovely that are acceptable, but far from perfect, are commercial. Parascript FormXtra is one of the better commercial ones.

The only OCR Engine that’s free and really good is Tesseract OCR but it doesn’t handle handwritten text.

They are on to you…

You seeing me as aggressive just because I’m right about Firefox being a web browser is nothing I can do anything about and something you have to work with.

Me and Mozilla will keep trucking and call Mozilla Firefox a Web Browser… Or as Wikipedia says:

Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

And you keep calling Firefox your banana or whatever. It’s ok. I promise to continue to not being aggressive about it.

Banana or not, a document viewer / editor that handle a subset of two standards is not a very versatile document viewer / editor.

So back to my original point: Since Mozilla doesn’t have a very stable business model it seems dangerous to focus on other things than making their web browser the best at browsing the web.

Ps. It took us over 20 years to get rid of the cluster f***s Internet Explorer and Flash was and it seems we should have learned the lesson by now. Going down the same route as before, starting to support standards that rely on patents owned by a third party (Adobe in this case) is definitively not a death sentence in any way, but history has shown us that it’s a slippery slope that has many different paths and endings.

You obviously know very little about PDF since you’re trying to put it on the same level as HTML.

The PDF files that we see in our daily life today is not even halfway as open as HTML is and dealing with them is not as easy as you think.

Furthermore, you’re free to call Firefox a “document viewer”.

I personally prefer a state of the art web browser and a state of the art PDF viewer more than one document viewer that only handles subsets of 2 document types.

That was 20 years ago. Numerous PDF readers has surfaced since then.

PDF is not like HTML.PDF is a messy standard where you need Adobe products to support all the shit that a PDF could contain. There is no open source product that for example fully support PDF forms and therefore Mozilla won’t either.

All in saying is that Firefox is a web browser and not a document viewer. Since Mozilla would go bankrupt in two hours if Google stopped showing them with a shitload of money, Mozilla would be wise to focus on the core.

So if Google were to stop paying Mozilla for us to be able to use Firefox for free, we’re all running Chrome.

Let’s hope that if they support the shit show XFA is, they manage to support it fully.

The only one that seem to support it fully today is Adobe and I still haven’t been able to find any open source product that was able to close forms in PDFs.

I just wish Mozilla got back to focus on making the best browser.

PDF stuff is cool but not why I use a web browser.

Don’t give up. It might sound like a cliché: This not something that is won overnight.

It’s either that or revolution…

Everything starts with you engaging in local politics.

You get the politicians your deserve.

If you don’t engage in the local part of the political party that is closest to your views, then someone else will. That “someone else” might not have the same good intentions like you do.

The politicians elected in the lower parts of the political pyramid are the ones that will eventually rise to the next level.

So the corrupt ones in the top could have had a much harder journey if people stop focusing on the top and change focus to their own surroundings.