If that referendum was held, Alberta would stay firmly in Canada. The separation group is loud, but very decidedly in the minority.

Most Albertans understand the semi-antagonistic relationship is just here to stay. What exasperates them is the two faced nature of it. If the rest of Canada is so appalled with that industry, they should stop taking the blood money. Exclude those revenues from the equalization calculation.

But that won't happen, so the country lives well off the proceeds while belittling the provider. In the meantime they're bent out of shape by the damaged auto industry in Ontario - an industry providing cradle to grave emission producing units.

Nobody likes hypocrisy.

It was a "planned" emissions cap and changing the rules around clean electricity won't mean much. They aren't going to run off and build more coal plants. And investment in carbon capture is the lip service being returned for that lip service.

And the deal to open the door to a new pipeline to the west coast is equally nebulous. It requires BC and a ton on indigenous groups to be on board. If it ever happens, it's years away.

None of this changes anything any time soon. All politics, no substance.

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

Given the rate at which AI will supplant the human workforce, it seems to me that an ethically intended label isn't an unreasonable ask. Most gamers will blow right past it anyway.

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

>What if he convinced you suicide was his best option?

I'm not a chatbot. I would go to the social workers and see what the best thing to do is, not help him commit suicide.

It's never the best option, unless you are talking about euthanasia instead of terminally ill people. But I differentiate. That's why we have different words.

So, they didn't have AI actually do any of those tasks, they said AI *could* do those tasks by looking at the task and looking at AI and saying "Yup!".

AI probably can't do those tasks, or people would be replaced already.

This is a cheerleading study on AI meant to drive more investment, that's all.

"Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research."

It was based on solving a maths equation.

(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.

Isn't Uber still losing money?

Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".

Erm... that's the whole point of a T&C/EULA/et al. To limit legal liability and as a defence against being sued. Which is one of the reasons most countries do not treat them as binding contracts.

I know, right?

In the main loop just add:

If (user.getMentalState().equals(MentalStates.SUICIDAL)) { printHotlineInfo(); exitSession(); }

It's hard to make guardrails and it's fun to circumvent them.

"Just as long as any loss is still public and any profit is kept private"

Better not happen. That's the future dreamt of by American financial companies. How embarrassing would it be to have Mexico get their first?

Sounds like the US needs another moonshot.

it's quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable"

Much as I would like to think that's true, I don't buy it. If one thing has become true in the last twenty years, it's that thoughtful, original anything seldom strikes enough of a chord to reach mass appeal. Straight up the middle schlock aimed at the lower half does far better, and AI can do that already. In fact, for a large portion of the populace, nuance and subtlety of thought isn't just wasted on them... they're actively antagonistic towards it, and popular culture has made that a laudable stance. Willful stupidity. Taking enjoyment in deliberately missing the point. AI may do vastly better at reaching them than a human author could hope for.

I admire Francesco's optimism, even if I don't share it.

Exactly. That's why comparing the positions of Japan and the US isn't valid. They are very different situations. Japan is pretty well insulated. The US is far more vulnerable.

I still don't understand. Are you agreeing with me regarding the fragility of the US dollar's status? Because I did not bring up BRICS, nor did I put forward any candidate currencies. I even went so far as to point out you don't even need one to step up right away.