u/Distinct-Ebb-9763

Sort of a rant and vant.

So whenever we look at our Social Media feeds or even media, a narrative is forced that we you don't belong to the army, don't have ambitions to join the army or associated to it then you are not patriotic enough. A bloody civilian can't be a patriot.(a narrative that fulfillment of our national and social duties is bare minimum and whatever they do is a favor upon us).

Now before army supporters bash me, I myself belong to army family, I wasn't born normal and have stayed in CMH myself as my father was a flight caset then but left air force in few months as he received a decent offer from gulf, an uncle of mine is a shaheed during the Swat operations. And have closely analyzed things. The difference has always been that I was raised abroad and always question things and that's the same for my younger brother who rejected his selection in medical corps just because he does not like blind order following.

So yes there was a minor phase in my teenage years when we shifted to Pakistan. But as I started hearing inside incidents in army, be it any division, I lost my interest. And those from army families very well know that army ain't pure. There's bad everywhere.

But as I am now 20+ years old now, graduated, a decent job in AI domain, paying my taxes, being part of blood drives abd donation drives both as a donor and volunteer, volunteering in activities for betterment of low level government schools in twin cities, having hope in heart that I will reach certain heights where I start giving back to my country InshaAllah. Like always want Pakistan to prosper from Gilgit to Gwadar. Pushing myself to feel positive about this country despite everything wrong going on in this country, although I do feel pressurized about survival in this inflation (haven't taken a penny from parents in these last two years) but still I feel like Allah has blessed me a lot as compared to larger public of Pakistan. And when people do let me know about their worries how this inflation and stuff is hitting them or how this society is treating them. Even then I remain positive about Pakistan's future despite knowing how badly our government and military establishment is handling things.

Then my batch mates who also belong to army families and have been in this system from the very beginning or have joined the army recently (and yes they are sons of army officers) make us civilian batch mates that how high and mighty are they, without them Pakistan is nothing and all that self-centric mentality. And yes that is absolutely common in majority cases in armed forces. And then the media does it's stuff as well, if you see any patriotic reel and it's only and only associated with army.

And all this makes me think that do civilian efforts for this country do not matter at all? Was my father's decision to leave Air Force and go to Gulf a bad decision? Was it a wrong decision when my family had given me a chance to join Army Engineering Corps and I rejected it as I didn't find it a good idea.

I feel like if a civilian pays all his taxes, does philanthropy, is loyal to the nation and doing great stuff even then he would have a higher chance of getting labelled as a traitor instead of being hailed as a patriot just because the military almighties don't align with him or steals their spotlight, they will make the very public whom that civilian is good to go against him. And they have done this throughout history and to their own army officers as well who stood against their might.

Sort of a rant and vant.

So whenever we look at our Social Media feeds or even media, a narrative is forced that we you don't belong to the army, don't have ambitions to join the army or associated to it then you are not patriotic enough. A bloody civilian can't be a patriot.(a narrative that fulfillment of our national and social duties is bare minimum and whatever they do is a favor upon us).

Now before army supporters bash me, I myself belong to army family, I wasn't born normal and have stayed in CMH myself as my father was a flight caset then but left air force in few months as he received a decent offer from gulf, an uncle of mine is a shaheed during the Swat operations. And have closely analyzed things. The difference has always been that I was raised abroad and always question things and that's the same for my younger brother who rejected his selection in medical corps just because he does not like blind order following.

So yes there was a minor phase in my teenage years when we shifted to Pakistan. But as I started hearing inside incidents in army, be it any division, I lost my interest. And those from army families very well know that army ain't pure. There's bad everywhere.

But as I am now 20+ years old now, graduated, a decent job in AI domain, paying my taxes, being part of blood drives abd donation drives both as a donor and volunteer, volunteering in activities for betterment of low level government schools in twin cities, having hope in heart that I will reach certain heights where I start giving back to my country InshaAllah. Like always want Pakistan to prosper from Gilgit to Gwadar. Pushing myself to feel positive about this country despite everything wrong going on in this country, although I do feel pressurized about survival in this inflation (haven't taken a penny from parents in these last two years) but still I feel like Allah has blessed me a lot as compared to larger public of Pakistan. And when people do let me know about their worries how this inflation and stuff is hitting them or how this society is treating them. Even then I remain positive about Pakistan's future despite knowing how badly our government and military establishment is handling things.

Then my batch mates who also belong to army families and have been in this system from the very beginning or have joined the army recently (and yes they are sons of army officers) make us civilian batch mates that how high and mighty are they, without them Pakistan is nothing and all that self-centric mentality. And yes that is absolutely common in majority cases in armed forces. And then the media does it's stuff as well, if you see any patriotic reel and it's only and only associated with army.

And all this makes me think that do civilian efforts for this country do not matter at all? Was my father's decision to leave Air Force and go to Gulf a bad decision? Was it a wrong decision when my family had given me a chance to join Army Engineering Corps and I rejected it as I didn't find it a good idea.

I feel like if a civilian pays all his taxes, does philanthropy, is loyal to the nation and doing great stuff even then he would have a higher chance of getting labelled as a traitor instead of being hailed as a patriot just because the military almighties don't align with him or steals their spotlight, they will make the very public whom that civilian is good to go against him. And they have done this throughout history and to their own army officers as well who stood against their might.

Budget:

Up to $450 USD.

Location / Stores:

Pakistan. Can buy through Amazon, AliExpress, local importers, or international shipping services.

Use Case:

Mainly for work meetings and long office use, so microphone quality and comfort are very important. Also used for YouTube, Netflix, music streaming, and casual media consumption.

Devices:

Samsung phone (no headphone jack) and Windows laptop (has headphone jack).

Connectivity Preference:

Would prefer both Bluetooth and wired connectivity. Wired support is important as a backup for meetings and lower latency.

Preferred Sound Signature:

Looking for balanced sound with good clarity and vocals rather than overpowering bass. Comfort and microphone quality matter more than extreme audiophile tuning.

Past Gear Experience:

Using Sony WH-CH510 for around 4 years. Liked the battery life, but now looking for a major upgrade in sound quality, ANC, comfort, and microphone performance.

Options Considered:

Sony WH-1000XM6

Sennheiser Momentum 4

AKG K371-BT

Open to other recommendations as well.

So currently I have Sony WH-CH510 5 years ago, survived university life with it. And it still is doing well in terms of battery life audio as per it's calibre.

But as I am into my professional life where I have meetings with the team and clients, the quality is noticeable.

Can anyone recommend a Sony headphone that does a great work in audio and mic for the meeting purposes and a bit of entertainment stuff. I believe one that has wire capabilities as well would help in meetings.

I have a budget of getting XM6 version. Heard that CH1000XX is releasing and is expected to be priced at 600+ USD and that is a bit out of range for budget allotment for a headphone for me. So this should give you an idea about my budget.

Thanks!

So currently I have Sony WH-CH510 5 years ago, survived university life with it. And it still is doing well in terms of battery life audio as per it's calibre.

But as I am into my professional life where I have meetings with the team and clients, the quality is noticeable.

Can anyone recommend a Sony headphone that does a great job in audio and mic for the meeting purposes and a bit of entertainment stuff. I believe one that has wire capabilities as well would help in meetings.

I have a budget of getting XM6 version. Heard that CH1000XX is releasing and is expected to be priced at 600+ USD and that is a bit out of range for budget allotment for a headphone for me. So this should give you an idea about my budget.

Thanks!

So saw some headlines related to the deals done between US CEOs and government with China like NVIDIA letting China use their GPUs, NVIDIA Tesla Boeing etc looking forward to step into Chinese market or get hands on the raw material processing like semi conductor chip, rare earth minerals, etc.

These deals will surely impact the tech market especially AI by a lot and I do have a feeling that it will change the landscape of global economy as well.

Obviously they will have talks on Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, etc as well which also impacr the global economies.

And China will try to have the upper hand or perks in all deals.

The visit and talks are going on and we may see more updates.

Is it just me with this feeling.

And lastly a naive and lame question from a total beginner in investments, can this be an opportunity for Pakistanis in all this?

I'm building a product that runs entirely inside Docker containers, including trained AI models and proprietary backend logic. The target customers are labs that run air gapped (no internet) and have full root access to the host machine where the containers will be deployed.

The customer (legitimate buyer) wants to use the software, but my client is terrified that the lab's IT admins will reverse engineer the containers and steal the IP, especially the models and business logic.

I've explained that if someone has root on the host, they can docker exec, dump memory, copy files from overlay layers, etc. True isolation is impossible. But the client wants to make it "very hard to steal", essentially a strong speed bump.

Some ideas we've considered:

- Wrapping containers with a master key (only client knows it).

- Self destruct on 3 failed key attempts, deleting container images but preserving customer data.

- Compiling Python backend to native binaries and obfuscating model files.

The twist: the machines are air gapped, so no phone home licensing or cloud attestation.

What practical techniques have you seen work to raise the bar against root level extraction in on premises Docker deployments? I know perfect security is impossible here. I just need to make extraction expensive and annoying enough to deter all but the most determined attackers.

Thanks.

Hi everyone it's my first year in the industry. So recently I am working on a project that is based on information extraction from complex layout forms and there are portions in it that are rotated at 90 degree anticlockwise as well.

At base, I have implemented a VLM. Works great but tends to hallucinate and makes it less reliable. But if coupled with detection models, accuracy goes beyond 90%.

At first only 3 detection models were being used for some region cropping and rotating that region, etc and semantic signs detection for better interpretation.

Now there are some more edge cases that have been described by owner and honestly the VLM is not able to interpret it. So I can foresee that all those edge cases can be covered by training 3 more models.

So the production pipeline will have a VLM, 6 small sized fine-tune object detection in ONNX format running on CPU plus a lightweight OCR. And a bit of OpenCV.

No constraints on resources at all neither in speed as some processes run in parallel.

This could have been resolved by one single model like GPT or Gemini. But the owner wants everything to be processed locally. Neither does the owner have computer resources or data to finetune the VLM.

So the way I am having things done is that normal in production? Or is it too much or overengineered?