In terms of pushing a bit more each time... yeah, they probably will not call an emergency, but ICE and troops hanging around poling stations and selectively harassing people? That is plausible.. as is siezing ballots and subjecting them to mr pillow style recounts.

Every time they push just a bit more to see what they can get away with. Conservatives and libertarians have been wanting to do away with that pesky democracy and its anti-god communist implications since the evangelical takeover in the reagan years. So yeah... people have been warning for decades, but we keep getting closer.

Jobs was a completely non-technical stuffed shirt. The only things he brought to the table were his narcissistic self confidence and a sleazy ability to sell other people's work.

And make no mistake, those are valuable skills, if your goal is to get rich rather than to build the best toys. Even under the most charitable possible interpretations, however, it's still a fundamentally parasitic relationship. The "doers" tend to suck at selling ourselves, while the weasels are good at rooting through our scraps and claiming whatever shiny garbage they find as their own.

Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax

Unless we also roll out ubiquitous surveillance through a Vingean "Secure Hardware Environment"-like scenario where people aren't fully in charge of their own computers, I don't see how anyone could possibly detect whether or not I'm running any LLMs. Much like private DMCA violations (e.g. playing a CSS-protected DVD that you purchased, without getting authorization from the copyright owner first), it wouldn't have to interact with the world outside my house in any way, so it would be completely undetectable.

How would you tax that? I don't see this as reasonably possible without some pretty extreme measures.

Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.

3iob - its metal. it just won't be on mainstream radio, and metal is niche enough I'm not sure canada has dedicated metal fm radio stations?! They don't around here. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone listened to a lot of metal on spotify in canada that 3iob would be suggested in their discovery queues or whatever; thanks to cancon promotion.

French is an optional language credit to graduate in much of english speaking canada already, and many english language universities i've looked at don't require it.

As for your daughters reading assignments. Those artists aren't simply because "cancon + woke ideology" - oh a first nations person wrote it? Who cares what's in it. Its on the list! That's not quite it. (Although I'm sure you can find exceptions, people are people, and im sure someones on the reading list because they "know" somebody or some other nepotism/wokeism/or even plain old corruption.)

But in principle they are also chosen on the basis of the stories they actually tell. The school system explicitly wants to highlight and expose students to a variety of canadian perspectives and canadian experiences in canadian settings. That's an explicit goal. They want students to read about an immigrant from the middle east moving to thunderbay and navigating making friends and integrating in canada while maintaining their own cultural heritage, they want students to read about an inuit growing up in nunavut, or a small town in rural quebec overcoming lifes little challenges and celebrating its little victories. Even if they aren't subjectively "the best books", these are the types of stories and perspectives and ideas that they want students to be exposed to and to spend time thinking about. Then they include some of the more "important" works, like Animal Farm, the Hobbit, Romeo and Juliette, etc. Its a deliberate part of the breadth of the education.

To layer on top of that, of course its also a good use of public money to buy local, and circulate the money in the local economy; and for learning reading and comprehension, and thinking and writing about structure, plot, themes, allegory, etc, its all fine, and having as much "canadian subject matter" underneath it as possible, just makes sense.

I think you are perhaps a bit too cynical here.

Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

Guess how many people speak welsh in Wales, or Finnish in Finland? 10 million is a LOT of people. And lets be honest here, its still french. Sure its a dialect, but if you know Canadian french and put in a bit of effort, its not exactly hard to pick up Metropolitan french, belgian french, swiss french, etc, etc, etc.

French class is basically a 'a bit of exposure to even the idea of an another language (in this case french), a bit of canadian history (esp french canadian), oh... and its a bit of an art and drama class too'. For fucks sake its 30 minutes a few times a week in grade school.

Nobody is expecting you to learn conversant or fluent french from gradeschool french class.

If they dedicated the the time to arabic or hindi or mandarin, it would be just as ineffective at producing speakers of those languages. Meanwhile, french has some canadian significance in terms of heritage and culture, and its an official language... so what are you really on about here??

Heavy metal isn't mainstream. What part is confusing you?

It is exactly that. Its abused by many actors, and imperfect, and there's plenty of canadian crap as a result. There's also quite a bit of good stuff, and plenty of it is even made by white men (a tragically marginalized group, according to you apparently.)

Being worth consuming doesn't mean you'll hear about it. Wasn't that your very own argument about 3 inches of blood??

Lots of canadian content worth consuming wouldn't gain traction without the promotion. Your right, a lot of it isn't worth much, but frankly, a lot of is. So lets hear about it. What's the real problem here? You can't find enough quality american content to consume because canadian content is crowding it out of the marketplace? For realsies?

Meanwhile, take a look at all that top tier quality we're missing out on thanks to all that canadian content rules. American TV is full of promotion for low rent garbage reality TV, cake baking contests, hoarders, absurdist dating contests, and so on. American netflix is full of cheap comedy specials and low budget subtitled filler from their foreign studios, American spotify is full of AI slop music.

So yeah... if some of that is getting pushed below the surface some canadian crap is getting promoted instead. So be it.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".

Is 98 greater than 56? Yes? Okay then. It's still going up. So much vitriol from someone posting nothing but bare assertion - Cite please, beyond your fee-fees?

Let me 'splain it to you in simple language. The number of qubits doesn't need to scale exponentially on the short term for quantum computing to pose a very real threat; it only needs to hit the mid hundreds. As I mentioned, Grover's algorithm is O(n) - Meaning once we hit 256 qubits (plus some change for overhead), SHA256 is substantially weakened. Is that a full crack of AES, which you'll kindly notice I didn't previously claim, Mr. Goalposts? No. No it isn't - But it's arguably worse - SHA is almost ubiquitous and affects far more than encryption itself. You don't need to crack a tank's armor if you can convince its driver to piss in the fuel tank.

I also happen to think - and to be clear, what follows is my opinion, not psychic knowledge about the future - you're completely wrong on the bigger picture; and once QC hits its stride Gordon Moore will again be relevant. But critically, that's not necessary for it to cause some serious damage in the near future.

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.

That's as simple as it gets. I'm no fan of the orange turd, but it's virtually impossible for him to be wrong on every issue.

It's funny to think that not long ago just getting a bipedal robot to even walk was difficult. WABOT-1 took it's first steps in 1973 and looked like it was made from and Erector set and needed wires to connect it to it's power and control systems. It walked about as well as an old windup kids toy on a flat surface.

The Honda P2 was the first self contained robot that could walk and was introduced in 1996. It walked about as well as a 1950's sci-fi movie showing walking robots.

Honda ASIMO in 2000 was a bit more natural, but still fairly clunky at walking. I believe it could "run" at around 6mph.

The number of advancements in computing, material sciences, etc to get to the point where a bipedal robot can run faster than a person is astounding. In another ten or twenty years we may be looking at general purpose robots who can not only outrun the fastest human but also cook dinner. Hopefully it will be more Big Hero 6 and not Chopping Mall.

Nvidia's Jetson Orin isn't subject to export controls. It's basically like Nvidia's version of the Raspberry Pi with a few tensor cores bolted on so they can call it "AI".

You'll find a considerable number of elder geeks spent years gainfully employed working on 4 bit MCUs.

The key details here are the number of qubits steadily improving, and that throwaway comment about needing millions of qubits should be disregarded as utter nonsense. Sure, it's gonna be a while before "gcc -march=quantum" is an option, but Grover's algorithm has a space complexity of O(n); Shor's is O((log n)^2). Hand-turned implementations of those will be gutting virtually all of modern cryptography long before the script kiddies start trying to fork-bomb the entire universe.