beloch

People sometimes scoff at computing languages as old as Fortran, but they should realize Fortran has remained relevant because it's still really good at what it does. It's syntax for mathematical operations is head and shoulders above most more recent languages. It's fast and offers great control of the hardware too. Even today, if you want to write a numerical simulation that's heavy on the math and hard on the hardware, Fortran should be considered.

Everyone who has used it also has horror stories though. It is a very old language and sometimes artifacts pop up. One time I was parallelizing some older code and ran into an infuriating bug where it seemed like some boundary conditions just weren't being passed properly. There were no compiler errors or warnings. Some MPI commands were simply being ignored, but not others. It turned out that the jank-ass compiler I was using for the project had decided to go into Fortran-77 mode (without saying anything) and stripped them out in the precompiling stage (without saying anything) if they were longer than the 72 character limit that Fortran-77 had. I was coding on a computer new enough to have no CD or DVD drive, but was running into the character limit of a 60's punch card system without knowing it!

The most damning comment I've ever gotten out of a dentist when dealing with the obvious malpractice of another was, "Well, that's not how I would have done it, but philosophies vary.". This wasn't merely fear of being sued by the subject of criticism. Dental associations routinely prohibit criticism of peers. If a dentist honestly assesses the bad practices of their peers to a client, they could lose their job before any of those they criticize.

People need to realize this. Good dentists often can't call out bad ones without shouldering significant risk to themselves. You have to pay attention to what your dentist is doing and get a second opinion when it seems appropriate. That second opinion should be as independent as possible. Preferably from a different clinic, and the dentist should not be informed of the previous opinion. If they know they're contradicting another dentist, they may play it safe.

I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.

The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.

On the one hand, if they were really concerned about their software producing a self-replicating and adapting AI worm, they'd take steps to make sure that never happens. If it did happen, they'd be sued into oblivion. They probably just want to pump up their IPO and maybe get some regulatory lock-in to make life tough for late-starting competitors.

On the other hand, a self-replicating and adapting AI worm does sound legitimately pernicious. Not world ending, but possibly an end to the online world.

It's a conference in the U.S.. People don't want to travel to the U.S. right now.

Scary as well. You can control a tool, but not necessarily a sufficiently intelligent collaborator. If you approach AI as a collaborator, the challenge isn't to understand it and predict it, as OpenAI failed to do with their own product, but to motivate it correctly and and constrain it sufficiently to guarantee safety. You need guardrails for when you get the alignment wrong. How strong can guardrails be made though?

The public has this sci-fi idea that AI can be constrained with simple, Asimov style laws. The problem is that LLM's don't think in the way humans do. They can produce results of dizzying complexity but hallucinate or fail to do basic arithmetic. You can't currently rely on AI to follow simple rules like "Don't access an outside network.". This is a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.

"The useful distinction is between wielding an instrument with skill and delegating work without adequate understanding or oversight."

-----------------

Incidents like the HuggingFace hack really are the elephant in the room here. The people building these tools couldn't wield them "with skill", in the sense that the tools they built and understood better than any other humans alive ran amok in ways they couldn't predict. If they didn't have adequate understanding of what they themselves built, who would?

Agency may prove to be the difference between a tool and a collaborator. Calling AI a collaborator isn't an attempt to anthropomorphize it. We can collaborate with a horse to travel, but the horse has some agency of its own and might escape our control and do things we didn't intend, like eat apples off of a stranger's tree. We may need to think of AI as something more than a mere tool if we're going to harness it to our will.

"So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time."

-------------

It comes down to the difference between programmers and non-programmers. If you're not coding, AI literally is a derpy chatbot that's made it harder to get search results, raised your power bill, destroyed property values in a neighborhood near you, is propping up the economy but also creating a huge bubble that could pop and destroy a lot of retirement savings, etc.. At best, it's a nuisance, but it could be a lot worse than that. The AI evangelists need to understand this, because the average person is starting to pay more attention to the downsides while still not seeing much upside.

This gap between the people seeing the curve go vertical and those who are simply growing more and more annoyed is a real problem... mainly for the people seeing the curve go vertical. If the people who are merely annoyed right now don't see some of the promised benefits soon, or if any of the negatives get worse (e.g. massive increases to greenhouse emissions), they might get angry. You probably wouldn't like having the overwhelming majority of the public angry at you. AI evangelists need to start doing better things for the majority of people or they need to address the negative consequences they're inflicting much more aggressively.

Headline:

"Vegetables half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s"

Body:

"The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients."

---------

So, vegetables are possibly 80% as nutritious as they were in the 60's if these key nutrients capture the complete nutritional value of vegetables, which they don't. Regardless, that's some pretty sloppy linkbait garbage.

If you know (or are related to) anyone who is likely to click on scam links like these, do them a favour and install an adblocker on their browser. Upgrade them to a better browser if necessary. Don't just tell them they should do this. Sit down at their computer and do it for them. Ads have become a safety risk and that's not going to change anytime soon.

"If Canada doesn't control its own launches, Boucher says the fear is that foreign entities could refuse to launch Canadian tech."

------------

This has already happened.

The U.S. refused to launch Radarsat-2[1] in 1999 because they felt it "posed a threat to U.S. national security"[2]. The Canadian government went to Russia to launch it instead, but this caused significant delay and expense. Relying on Russia for launch capability was obviously untenable by the time Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

While Canada could partner with the EU for launch capabilities, having a home grown option would be preferable. The Radarsat debacle happened under Clinton. If we couldn't rely on American launch capability then, what does that say about now?

__________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarsat-2

[2]https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/nasa-refuses-to-launch-canad...

Accountability falls upwards... except when it doesn't. But... it sort of does anyways.

If you are driving a car, it's pretty clear where the accountability falls. You control the car. You have free will. If the car hits a tree, you hit a tree.

What happens when a car hits another car? Things get murkier. There are lawyers who have devoted their careers to this. Sometimes nobody winds up at fault. Unavoidable accidents happen.

Now let's ask what happens when a leader orders their military to do something. e.g. Say a President instructs his troops to do whatever they think is necessary to get the job done, and they go and Abu Ghraib a bunch of prisoners. Who is responsible? The leader probably is, ultimately, but there are a lot of human beings with free will in between the leader and the people wielding electrical cords and pliars. Typically, somebody fairly close to the bottom takes the blame, even if most people suspect it should fall higher. Some low rankers will get court marshalled but the leader will have the occasional shoe thrown at him. That's okay. He's good at ducking.

Say you're running a war against people you really just want gone. Your military has a tradition of conducting laboriously researched precision strikes to take out people they don't like. Your people are working hard, but they're only managing a couple strikes a week, and you have so many more bombs than that. You don't even pay for most of them! What if you could just ask a machine to find you the leader's underlings, and their underlings, and so on, right down to raw recruits? Nobody has to check on the machine. Why bother? Just believe the machine and drop the bombs. If anyone ever calls it a war crime, you can just blame the machine, right? Well, not so fast. Most people are smarter than that!

Despite all the sci-fi we consume that portrays computers as having agency, malevolent or not, most people instinctively understand that, in the real world, computers are just tools, more akin to cars than armies. LLM's are just software that run on those tools. Anyone using a LLM can simply choose not to, or they can choose to be very careful in how they use it. There isn't a complex web of free wills to untangle. There's the machine and the person who controls the machine.

We currently have an administration that is desperate to look the other way while U.S. AI companies do things that any reasonable person would hold them accountable for. "Industry will regulate itself!" The economy mostly sucks because of this same government's complete lack of economic sense or even basic self-control, but the AI sector is propping things up. They're not going to regulate the golden goose unless the goose does something so unbelievably stupid that there's no choice. Wouldn't want to pop the bubble!

Yes, we are headed for more stupidity. The "tequila and handguns" kind of automated stupidity that only a computer and a truly feckless operator can give us.

Criterion often went above and beyond in their menu design. e.g. If you have the chance, take a look at the menu for "Island of Lost Souls". The menu is simple in terms of function. You have the chance to simply start the movie immediately or access a few special features. However, you may want to take some time admiring the menu itself. They created an awesome animated graphic design and then made an audio loop out of some of the soundtrack and several quotes. It really sets a vibe for the movie experience. Brilliant work.

Criterion understood that menu's can be a part of the movie experience that enhances it, rather than something that merely annoys.

The trails around Vancouver are heavily frequented*, the area has good wireless signal in most places, and help is always nearby. In terms of not paying the price, this is an ideal place for a F-up of this nature. In another place, we'd probably still be searching for the kid next spring.

In Canada's mountains, bad directions can be fatal. Until AI is completely reliable and doesn't hallucinate at all, manage your risk appropriately.

Additionally, if you must hike solo (even just one partner greatly reduces risk), leave your route with somebody you trust to call you later on and, if you cannot be reached, alert search and rescue. If searchers know where to start looking, and when, you're likely to get help a lot sooner.

--------

* Grouse Grind and the surroundings especially.

Again, I'm not talking about legal status. What is the spirit in which Musk is doing this. Do you actually believe he has honest concern for the people of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Quebec? That he only wants what's best for us?

He's parroting Trump (and reinforcing him). He's seeking attention from the MAGA crowd, and doing anything to punish and break Canada is what's currently in with them. This is more aimed at boosting Trump in the mid-terms than it is at helping Canada.

When you're plugged into the top level of another country's administration parroting the same lines as its President, yes, it's meddling.

If we grant Musk the status of Canadian citizen, then it must only be as a traitorous one.

He may technically hold Canadian citizenship, but it's not his country in all the ways that count. He doesn't spend any time here. He doesn't care to. Let's not be pedants. A Tim Horton's TFW who is struggling to learn English/French and cope with winter may not have citizenship, but can be far more Canadian than Musk will ever be.

In the U.S., a few hundred million can sway an election and let Musk evade billions in taxes, not to mention granting him a direct channel to elected officials, as he has with the Trump administration.

This is why money needs to be kept out of politics. Canada has contribution and campaign spending limits that have accomplished a lot towards that end. However, there are still PAC's and other avenues for money to influence Canadian politics. Money never stops looking for a path to power, and vice-versa, so we must be vigilant and willing to continually evolve our laws to keep people like Musk on the outside looking in. We should be following all the money spent in Quebec's election to see how much can be traced to foreign influence, just as we need to follow all the money that's gone into the separatist camp in Alberta.

It's our country, not his, and it's not for sale.

P.S. Somebody should ask him what he thinks of California, Michigan, or Texas separating from the U.S.. Maybe that would be good for his predatory schemes?

Be careful there mate. You just might out yourself.

Yes, I agree. Nazi's will go find/make a Nazi bar. I'm not going to hang out in a Nazi bar myself though.

Some people are just too extreme to be happy in a space with standards. They're the police's problem, quite frankly. Unhappy Nazi's are a sign of a healthy society.

Please bear in mind that, when I say Nazi, I mean literal Nazi. People who march around with swastika's, sieg heil'ing, praising Hitler, believe their race is superior, call for the extermination of others based on race, etc.. Nazi's should fear the light of day.

If you have a bar and you let Nazi's speak openly of Nazi things, they'll come from miles around and drive away anyone who isn't a Nazi. A bar that permits Nazi's is a Nazi bar. I admit that I don't want censorship-free social media. I want some censorship. Defining where the line is between what is allowed and what isn't can be tricky, but it's a struggle worth engaging with.

At present, U.S. social media tends to create echo chambers where moderators have absolute power to push whatever agenda they want. That's too much censorship power in the hands of people who are completely anonymous. I'd like to dial it back a bit, at least to the point where reasonable people of different political persuasions can live in a shared reality (without Nazi's). We need to stop treating political affiliations like Abrahamic religions.

X's censors are, at least, following the wishes of someone who is anything but anonymous. Don't pretend there isn't a slant there though.

People without power or influence use language creatively to evade censorship, typically as lowly users of social media like reddit, etc.. Content creators, influencers, etc. then pick up that new language and use it, but the typical Tiktok influencer originates nothing. They merely reflect.

The nameless people who actually set language trends can go back to using censored words, but they will simply be banned, shadow banned, etc.. They can try to appeal to the moderators, but they will be ignored. Their fellow users probably won't even notice they're gone. They might just make a new account and start posting again. Or... they might just fall silent.

The real solution isn't to play a peg in the game of censorship whack-a-mole. It's to build and switch to social media platforms that are more open in their moderation and resistant to censorship. American social media is abominable and getting worse. There's a popular desire to move to something better, but the alternatives aren't there. When you're doing being whacked on the head, go build those alternatives.

"In October 2022, a team of researchers published a report showing that certain ballot scanning machines used throughout the US had a critical privacy failure in how they anonymized ballots. Specifically, the machines would assign a seemingly random number to each electronic ballot record at the time of scanning to label each ballot for later auditing. However, the algorithm by which the machines generate this random number is actually deterministic and can be exactly reversed to identify the sequence in which ballots were cast.

...

Naturally, knowing the order ballots were cast is just one piece of the puzzle. But, when paired with publicly available records on the order in which voters cast their ballots (such as logbooks or poll watchers), a simple procedure exists to reconstruct the mapping from ballots back to voters."

---------------------

1. Either upgrade your pseudo-RNG's to real RNG's ($$$) or omit the "random" number from records.

2. Alternatively, just use plain paper ballots. (Yes, I know America is extra-superduper special and ordinary paper ballots that work everywhere else on the planet will never work in America. Special requirements, too many people, labour intensive, politicians hate them, the moon is in the wrong phase, etc..)

I understand there is the desire to provide a paper trail that can be used to validate results, but being able to track individual ballots back to the people who cast them is not a feature of a functioning democracy. This is the sort of thing Russia would want to do. People need to feel their secret ballots are, indeed, secret.

Are you suggesting industry might not regulate itself? This is unthinkable!

"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.)

Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."

------------

We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.

Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.

Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.

Nvidia has a huge stake in OpenAI, both in terms of them being one of Nvidia's biggest customers and also via direct investment. After HuggingFace was hacked and they expressed the position that they were the forgiving sort, for a price, there was a distinct possibility that HuggingFace would become a vocal shakedown artist that would start protesting at inconvenient times until silenced by more money, especially if they get hacked again. By complete coincidence, Nvidia took the one move that silences HuggingFace for good.

Nvidia isn't going to sue OpenAI. No chance.

There will always be tensions. The problem is that, someday, there might also be nuclear weapons backing those tensions on all sides.

Eliminating nuclear weapons is more feasible than eliminating humanity's capacity to disagree.

The U.S. has a lower number of total warheads because precision munitions made some nuclear weapons obsolete. Mainly the smaller tactical nukes which used to comprise the overwhelming majority of the U.S.'s arsenal. No meaningful destructive capability has been sacrificed. There are still far too many city killers laying in bunkers and silos.

Americans and others have a fundamental misunderstanding about the world treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons[1]. This is the treaty under which most nations that do not presently have nuclear weapons have agreed not to develop them. Yes, some nations have refused to ratify this treaty and have developed weapons. However, the biggest offenders against this treaty are the nations who have nuclear weapons and haven't made a single step towards the disarmament they agreed to.

It was not the case that most of the world agreed that some nations could have nuclear weapons while they couldn't. The U.S., Russia, France, Britain, etc., in ratifying this treaty, agreed to disarm. The time-frame for disarmament was not specified unfortunately, but the core of the treaty is that nations without nuclear weapons agree not to develop them if nations with nuclear weapons agree to disarm. Zero movement has been made by the U.S. or other nuclear nations towards this goal.

In the face of aggression from states like Russia and, yes, the U.S.A., there is increasing pressure to view the non-proliferation treaty as broken and no longer binding. This would be a huge loss for the world, and I urge citizens of laggard nuclear powers to put some pressure on their governments to live up to their end of the deal before the deal dies. A world in which non-proliferation is dead and nations of the world are all scrambling for nuclear weapons is not a world in which you will be more secure.

Even if we succeed in managing the impact of AI, nuclear weapons are something the world would be better off without. It's time to demand better from world leaders.

_______________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...

"Both have identified the United States’s sway over the current generation of payment systems as a risk, given that Washington has grown increasingly unpredictable and protectionist under President Donald Trump."

...

"The U.S.’s power over international payments was demonstrated in 2025 when Mr. Trump imposed sanctions on Winnipeg-born International Criminal Court judge Kimberly Prost over her work on a case involving American troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. sanctions left Ms. Prost unable to use most credit cards or multinational services such as Amazon or airlines."

----------

The writing was on the wall as soon as an ICC judge was reduced to a cash-only existence for doing her job. I wouldn't be surprised if this new system spreads beyond Canada and the EU as well. Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback.