My buddy just used a shitload of quarter down to regrade the edges of his foundation. I have done zero of my own research but trust his judgment implicitly. We also have mostly clay around here but our home is built on pilings so I’m not worried about the wet/dry cycle. We have some very minor shifting with the seasons but nothing structurally significant.

It’s worth noting that a large amount of falling funding is a direct result of fewer students coming from other countries and paying higher tuitions. Fewer study permits = less money rolling in from foreign students.

I’m told the sun is shining. Maybe make some hay?

ITT: a bunch of people who didn’t read anything other than “AI” and got mad.

He thinks Rust is one of the few realistic ways to slash the class of bugs that come from C’s traditional error-handling and resource-management pitfalls.

Idk why everyone’s upset about this. It’s not wrong. The headline sucks, but the statement “Rust makes it harder to introduce bugs that an LLM will later find” seems pretty objectively true.

Not really sure what to say here. The world’s largest economy and former closest trade partner has declared a trade war against us. Idk why anyone is surprised we’re not exactly growing economically right now.

15% and its not a tax, it’s a Canadian content mandate like for cable and radio programming. 15% of their content (by cost to them) must be Canadian per CRTC.

Its not a tax.

Canada got control of its foreign policy in 1931. This statement is untrue for WW2.

The US grows a LOT of corn across most of the nation. HVDC links can transport a lot of power very efficiently over long distances. These systems are in use for this exact purpose in China, Canada, and Sweden where generation is far from the consumption site. It wouldn’t work across continents, but going from the Midwest to California or something wouldn’t be a problem.

Agrisolar exists. If the US converted just a few % of the acreage legally mandated for growing corn for ethanol to solar, the energy crisis essentially solves itself.

They already have started these layoffs. My cousin got hit yesterday.

Yes. Canadian Federal politics are largely dominated by “haves” vs. “have nots”. Alberta has historically been a “have” province with a decent amount of money flowing in from oil and gas industries. They resent having to pay federal taxes to “have nots” like their agricultural neighbors with larger First Nations populations. The narrative goes that Alberta (and western Canada) is paying taxes to Ottawa and Ottawa is “too far east” to understand/care about Alberta.

It’s all BS, they have equal ability to elect MPs, but because oil and gas is on the way out they throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way.

Spinning media is slower than solid state NAND storage

IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU CONTINUE TO SUPPORT INDUSTRIES THAT ARE 70% DEPENDENT ON US POLICY FOR YOUR MANUFACTURING SECTOR

Horseshoe theory strikes again

Generalizable or not, the issue is that as statistical machines LLMs are really only capable of producing likely output. To some degree this firmly limits the output to being unremarkable.

No one can help tell you that, unfortunately. The hype squad will insist we’re at the inflection point of exponential growth and point to Anthropic using Claude to come up with novel optimizations for training Claude. The haters will insist that a statistical word model will never be useful because it’ll never be accurate, and they’ll never find a way to make inference cheap enough to be viable.

Turns out if your job is selling 95% correct words (generic business people, mediocre writers, etc), then a word guessing machine that does a 95% good enough job may be sufficient to have value. But if your proposition is in being actually good at something, then you’ll continue to outcompete the machines. It’ll never be able to displace classics, but I can’t imagine a world where it doesn’t displace human-slop erotica, murder mystery, etc. where the quality was less important than volume.

As to whether it’ll plateau, I’m not sure. It’ll obviously never be anything other than a word guessing machine, but it turns out there’s a lot of interactions with the world that can be described with words. About 3-6 months ago people generally noticed a big change in how well things like Claude code worked, and it had nothing to do with model improvements. Maybe the same model + new secret sauce can yield yet another improvement.

Anthropic and OpenAI will never recoup their burned CapEx but that doesn’t strictly mean that inference will never be cheap enough to be viable. If the big model shops explode from bad economics, it’ll still leave behind open source models that could be “good enough” that could run on your local machine. Is that going to be sufficiently “good enough” for the 95% correct use cases? I dunno. No one knows.

So… I dunno. For you, all this means is we’re gonna have a big economic reckoning at some point and if you’re good but not great at your job, your job involves selling words, and your job doesn’t require 100% precision, I’d reckon there’s a chance LLMs stick in your world, to some degree.

And before I get banned for this take, please note I’m not justifying the massive ecological and economic damage the process has and will do on the way to whatever end it reaches. Reactivating coal plants for power to feed an economic bubble that also itself destroys the environment is almost certainly too high a price to pay to replace human slop with AI slop.

I really dislike that framing that a lot of people are pushing, which is (imo) very disingenuous. The framing is that we’re “trading” one big trade partner for another, and I’ve seen it everywhere from lefty Lemmy users to Pierre voters.

You’re 100% correct that we’re simply adding another trade partner and diversifying our options as we’ve done with many middle powers over the recent months. The goal is that no single trade partner should be 70% of our exports like the US has been historically and it irks me when I see people argue that we’re just changing our the US for China as though we’re only allowed one trade partner at a time.

Ontario is the province that just bought the premier a private jet, which presumably is the point of this article.

I’d prefer a very slim minority but I’m about to repeat email my MP about forcing voting reform through now that they’re in majority territory. Perhaps they’ll Trudeau it, perhaps not.

Worse, they proactively passed legislation authorizing the invasion of The Hague in case a US official was ever brought there for war crimes. Thank dubya and the 2002 congress.