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Nvidia GPUs in the post-apocalyptic radioactive barrens are going to be stupid pricey.

I'm not at all close to knowing their internals with books in particular but for most products Amazon has made a significant effort to remove themselves from direct product stocking wherever possible (instead preferring to warehouse other people's stock for efficient shipping). I would guess that they aren't particularly well positioned with publishers at this point... Also, most publishers probably loathe Amazon at this point for all the times Amazon has tried to fleece them w.r.t. Kindle.

They could revert to the pre-LLM craze where Alexa was actually able to answer prompts in a reasonable amount of time. Alexa is a glorified egg timer for nearly all users - it's super convenient to use a voice prompt to start/stop timers while cooking and being able to play music on voice demand is kinda alright. It genuinely doesn't need to answer hard questions.

Yeah, one of my main points of contact was a gmail address for a number of years. I've switched over to giving out an address on a domain I own but it's a huge pain migrating contacts over.

I hope the younger folks learn better the lesson to own your nameplate - even if you just end up forwarding message to gmail or what-not for consumption, keeping control of the nameplate gives you the flexibility to shift later on.

Ah, to clarify, Canada's upper house is basically a house of lords equivalent that we expect to be full of puffed up nobodies that get paid a too generous stipend to sit there and keep their mouths shut. Canada has one elected congress body (the one we all talk about) and then this vestigial senate which is generally expected to sit there and silently approve everything that passes through it.

It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.

Yeah, I think it'd be excellent if we could just disband our upper house and while it's worth pushing them to act on this bill I loathe the senate's continued existence and would rather be in a position where this emergency call happened prior to it passing the house.

Do you think that perhaps a sample of Canadians that emigrated to the US might not be representative of all Canadians?

Also, if you're in a tech sphere then there's even a notable bias of folks in SF that are happy to have left whatever other part of the US they used to reside in.

I think it's fair to say that a large portion of their valuation comes from their political ties lending an air of invincibility. If Palantir came under scrutiny it's guaranteed that neither JD Vance nor anyone else Thiel could mobilize would remain silent and let it happen.

It does not and it's quite confusing. You'll often see people use the term LPC or Liberal and avoid lower-case liberal due to the confusion of that word. In Canada the Liberal party is a fiscally centrist/corporate & socially liberal(ish) (aka it's similar to the traditional British definition of Liberal). The Conservatives are a large right wing reactionary block that seems to be perpetually in the minority but with a large loyal voting block while the actual opposition mostly comes from three parties that rotate in and out of relevance as a left-wing voice BQ (Bloq-quebecois), NDP (New Democratic Party - fading since the death of Jack Layton), and the Greens (Environmental sorta, but also weirdly anti-science sometimes). And that's on the national level - at the provincial level it gets even weirder with the BCLiberals (recently named BCUP) being socially and fiscally conservative and opposed by the BC NDP and other minor parties.

Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.

As a Canadian-America - nope, Canada is far better off than the US. I don't know if the US has a route out of the hole it's digging at this point.

Canada has problems - a state media that barks the party line isn't one of them. One political party would love you to believe that and it's aligned with the party south of the border that's trying to destroy media credibility across the board, but that's a political effort because transparency is an impediment to their agenda.

This isn't to say there aren't biases in media - there always is, everyone is biased in their own way - but the presence of that bias can be understood and having a robust pipeline for news is more important that trying to futilely eliminate all bias.

Yeah, I'm pretty certain the Americans don't want the solution the Germans got to correct that problem.

They will say that regardless of their intentions - that doesn't mean we should ignore that possibility but that isn't a great indicator.

That is a statement that may be true but we've spent a whole lot of time thinking about it and there's still significant disagreement at an academic level, though, with our better understanding of quantum mechanics it has been much more difficult to justify the point that we live in a fully deterministic universe, lately.

And if we reject determinism then definitionally there's arbitrary probability somewhere in the heart of our decision making (though probably in a very minor role compared to established biases).

Yeah, the human ones are because we're talking finding a human answer to a human question.

It's possible has been trained to match a human level of assessment (though imo it's still a ways off) but the AI response is never going to be more representative of true understanding than a human response when it comes to a human question expecting a human answer.

It's quite likely that a given AI will have a more representative response than a given human - but we haven't ever tried to pump so many resources into the training of a single human scholar.

There is an old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". This is just yet another facet of CYA where we know it's of limited utility and the cracking will happen either way but if you specifically argued against Denuvo before the cracking happens it's your ass on the line for it.

I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.

Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.

Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.

Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.

They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.

I'm not certain how early you saw the internet - but a lot of people threw up websites hosted on consumer quality computers sitting in the corner of their room. Don't underestimate people.

Not at all, a few people pay to make it available as a service to others because they want it to exist. It's like this website - there are no (traditional) ads and most of us have paid nothing to use it. A small expenditure creates a good community for technical discussion that the hosts value existing and for being able to occasionally promote their ventures on.

Oh darn, maybe we should just ban the entire online advertising industry. Gosh, what value we'd lose if we couldn't have our personalized attention destroying glitter boxes.

My opinion on web infra patronage has shifted over time, I used to generally accept that for small websites to exist advertising was a necessary evil since they were too niche to have a real revenue source. Then I ran one and I realized that there's far more labor costs involved in maintaining a site than infra costs and that for niche hobbies and communities ten bucks can just find its way into a central pot every month to keep the lights on by those with a bit more to spare.

I am now of the opinion that web communities can survive in the same way arts and other liberal pursuits have always survived. People with a bit more to spare put more into the pot to create the community they want to exist in and "freeloaders" is an alien concept to the genuinely interested since that money is being spent to create a place where meeting can take place without a financial requirement.

Before the tariff spree and general unpredictability the US could likely have muscled most of the rest of the world into following suit - now, not so much.

The goal is personal wealth - and scaring nations to the point of diverting even more wealth towards your coffers because of a perceived existential risk.

Wealth accumulation via scare tactics is a classic move of defense contractors and AI firms are quite capable of running the same playbook.

I consider "Create a throwaway" to be in line with the guideline posted above. It does violate it literally but not in spirit - the guideline is not to use an API key with the ability to draw unlimited or a very large amount of funds.

> It’s 20% more effort than writing Python or Typescript

I'd disagree with this point, there is more typing involved with a first draft of code than Python or Typescript, that's certainly true, but if we bring all the tools (e.g. docblock comments for "type declaration") that are habitual to make up for the shortcomings in most developer's minds then that gap shrinks and, imo, ends up swapping. It's cheaper to have automatically enforced and consistently maintained checks than moving that information out of band and the resulting code in a strictly typed and memory enforced language ends up removing a significant cognitive overhead when reading and maintaining the code.

I have a strong aversion to boilerplate code so it's important to try and allow terse expressions when possible - but unstated assumptions are worse than overstated assumptions.

Ah, so this article invalidates all of the safety guarantees of rust? Since one hole was found the entire boat is shot and should be left at the bottom of the harbor?

C++ has a terrible reputation which is well associated with, say C++98, if you have a good linter you can bop people on the head for using news anywhere outside a few limited locations where you consider it warranted. All working environments have language features or even programming paradigms that are considered detrimental to code ecosystem health and fighting against these is an organizational lift when working in any programming language. Full type security doesn't mean someone can't create an overly generic object and just start breaking code contracts across the code base. C++ has an awful lot of footguns and more warts than most but it can be made to be sane for development and the new language features really bring it on par with other modern languages.

I have worked in C++ (primarily within the Qt framework which pushed hard into const refs instead of pointers) and it's fine. I've also worked in PHP which can also be fine. Rust isn't something I've worked at scale in but it certainly is very attractive if I ever jump to an org working in it - but even in Rust you'll want to restrict style divergence and bad patterns with linting.

Most libraries could secure specific books if you needed them and they weren't stocked at that specific location. It was very dependent on the library but your local librarian would know the process for your specific location.

It's dependent on the minerals being prospected for and the mining techniques as well as general awareness and regulations that were in place during operation. Yellowknife has a huge ecological issue due to Arsenic being actively used in Giant Mine[1] but that was introduced to ease mining (mercury is also commonly used for gold extraction and purification, though occasionally offsite). So it really depends on the mine. Mines are never good for the environment but how toxic they are will vary.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

It's like the Facebook -> Meta rebrand, Facebook was a dirty word at the time while Meta wasn't (gosh that didn't last long though) so it was an attempt to try and get rid of the accumulated negativity and hope that searches for the topic of Meta only returned bland and positive results instead of dredging up the many ongoing court cases.