AlexandrB

> If the courts ruled against them, would you have taken that as evidence for the quality of the charter, and the legal system that stands behind it? Or is this a tails I win, heads you lose situation?

That's a fair point. Though the truckers are just an example.

I just don't think the charter offers guarantees anywhere as strong as the US constitution. For example, Canada's hate speech laws have taken a big chunk out of both the right to free speech and now the freedom of religion[1] set out in the charter.

[1] https://www.cccb.ca/media-release/proposed-restrictions-on-r...

Politically or economically? Because economically Canada is headed to the bottom of the G20.

https://www.bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-th...

> Are there lots of examples in Canada of basic charter rights being violated in such a manner?

Plenty, it's just usually against unpopular targets. The most notable recent one being the trucker protest[1]. And what were the consequences for those in charge for this charter violation? I believe the answer is "nothing".

So what we have in Canada is a charter that theoretically protects citizens, but in practice can be violated by the government with impunity.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-federal-cou...

I've given up on all streaming services because none of them offer a model where my money goes to the artists I listen to and not to Taylor Swift and other top-40 nonsense. Switching completely to Plex + PlexAmp + Bandcamp + iTunes purchased music (it's DRM free). It helps that I have ~300 CDs to kick start my library.

It's a trade-off. You get bigger scope and better production values at the cost of creative control. Often that also means that the gameplay gets diluted or dumbed down to make the game more marketable.

Oh absolutely, but fans should not expect good games to continue at that point.

Modern sports gambling ads amount to fraud because winners are prevented from winning more through wager restrictions. The whole industry can only exist because it cheats and lies.

I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".

It's definitely a balancing act. There are some great cinematic games (Last of Us), but it's also easy to put all the focus on the cinematic aspects and have a bunch of mediocre gameplay as filler in between. I don't understand why more games didn't go the Half Life 2 route and have the conversation/cinematic play out around you without taking control away completely.

I think the core issue is bad writing. All of that other stuff is only a problem because it's written with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. In many cases the writing reduces characters to their identity group instead of being believable humans with believable motivations.

I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small. Supergiant Games is a great example of this approach. Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time.

The US gaming industry has serious Hollywood envy. There's a constant push to make games "cinematic" and put big name actors in leading roles. This not only bloats budgets but results in barely-interactive monstrosities where gameplay is just a bridge between long, non-interactive cutscenes.

It's ironic because Hollywood is not doing too well at the moment.

This is a reach. Not because the Saudis don't want to influence the direction of games, but because Bioware has had such a run of embarrassing flops over the past decade that I'm surprised they stuck around this long. Peak Bioware was probably Mass Effect 2 and it's all been downhill from there.

This is such a common story across different conservation domains that I no longer trust the green movement. I think many of them are motivated by a sense of moral superiority rather than by actual concern for the environment.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

> In 1997, the National Wildlife Institute, in co-operation with the University of Turin, produced an action plan to eradicate the American grey squirrel from Italy, as this introduced species replaces the native red squirrel through competitive exclusion and damages trees through de-barking. The first step, a trial eradication of a small population of grey squirrels at Racconigi (Turin) to evaluate the efficiency of the removal techniques, started in May 1997. Preliminary results showed that eradication was feasible, but the project was opposed by radical animal rights groups which took the National Wildlife Institute to court in June 1997. This legal action caused a suspension of the project and led to a lengthy judicial enquiry that ended in July 2000 with the acquittal of the Institute. Nevertheless, the 3-year suspension of all actions led to a significant expansion of the grey squirrel's range and thus eradication is no longer considered practical.

Good for you. I'm sure that makes you feel really good about yourself.

I wonder though, do you think the animals care about your integrity or whether your message actually affects change?

Plastic straws are simply emblematic of the environmental movement as a whole. "Political capital" is not infinite, folks will only tolerate so much disruption to their lives. Going after plastic straws instead of something more consequential was a mistake.

Why did Alberta ban plastic straws then? There are approximately zero beaches here.

Exactly this. Living standards are closely correlated to energy use and no one is going to volunteer to live in poverty.

The environmental movement does itself no favours either by pursuing high social cost but low impact interventions like paper straws and ignoring (or outright vilifying) nuclear as a viable path forward.

Finally, there's a huge disconnect between the (supposed) low cost of renewables and what people experience on the ground. Countries like Germany are a good example of this. The constant refrain is that solar and wind are super cheap and are running more and more of the country, but those savings (if real) don't make it to the average rate payer. Something is clearly wrong here. Either the cost claims are incomplete and don't factor in something important or the auction mechanism used to set prices must be discarded. But the disparity between claiming massive cost benefits while having people pay more sours the public on the technology and destroys credibility.

Forget robots, what you're describing already happened in the trades. Modern construction techniques are all about lowering the skill required to build a house and standardizing the process so it can be done with minimal training. E.g. drywall and caulk replacing plaster and precise joinery.

You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.

It's a numbers game. As much time as Waymo had been on the road, it has not been long enough to hit a "drunk driver running red light" situation. It'll happen eventually.

Unless you have to replace the battery, then it's probably $20k just for that.

$6k maintenance per year? That's crazy high, where are you getting that number?

> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.

If this ships, it will deliver a fraction of what's promised here. My money is on the "flying" version being delayed repeatedly until it's quietly cancelled. Anyone remember the fast battery change stations[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj6LaYFall4

You're dreaming. Prepare for DMCA2, where it will be illegal to run an LLM on a compiled binary for the purposes of decompiling under penalty of jail time.

Surely, the user is doing all the hard work. The scale or whatever is just a tool to do so - like a ruler. Imagine if your measuring tape put the measurements you take behind a paywall.

The V in IOT stands for Value.

The E in IOT stands for Ethics.

Yeah, the lack of memory is a huge problem - makes it impossible to conversationally correct a mistake. Instead, you have to start the interaction from the top and hope that this time it works out.

That's also what drives me absolutely insane - I want a guide from Apple that gives me a regular syntax I can use to get predictable results with Siri. The fuzzy, natural language stuff in Siri is so bad that it's completely unpredictable what will work.

The #1 reason is while driving. It's also the only reason I have Siri enabled at all since you can't use CarPlay without enabling it.

Edit: There are other cases where hands are not free as well - like cooking - where it's useful to be able to start music or add a todo.

I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?