CanadaPlus

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Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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A worried Washington prods Israel to define its military objectives - CBC (www.cbc.ca)

An interesting look at how America thinks about the conflict when cameras aren’t pointing at them. TL;DR they see themselves 20 years ago, and are trying to figure out how to convey all the lessons that experience taught them, including “branches” and “sequels”, which is jargon I haven’t heard mentioned before....

CanadaPlus,

Depending on what you want and who your mom is that might not be a bad idea, honestly.

Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed (www.bigtechnology.com)

The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...

CanadaPlus,

So what’s the consensus here? Does social media not include things where people use usernames, or do Reddit and maybe even Lemmy count?

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Nah, language has always been in flux. We’re not going to become babbling morons any time soon. I mean, we even have writing now so we can save up a definition to adopt or reject later; that’s fairly new in human history.

What is a bit different is that we have to talk about a lot of things that didn’t exist a generation ago, but that’s only a matter of quantity. Every branch of the Indo-European language family adopted it’s own term for iron when it arrived, for example, so I’m sure we’ll settle on some sort of consistent English terminology for different kinds of platforms. We’re just not there yet, as the replies I got show.

CanadaPlus,

Feature request to Microsoft: Roman-numeral-sensitive alphabetical ordering for files. /s

CanadaPlus,

Which coincidentally looks like the missionary position.

CanadaPlus,

So can someone explain what an AI factory is, from an engineering perspective? The fact there’s competition to build them suggests it’s not just a marketing term, but I can’t find a clear answer with a quick search.

Sask. asks court to penalize Anishinabe man over published jail videos experts say show torture (www.cbc.ca)

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe’s government is asking the provincial court to penalize an Anishinabe man for allegedly breaching court rules following the publication of information and video from inside a youth jail showing staff immobilizing him with a full body restraint device while he wept, hyperventilated and asked for...

CanadaPlus,

So what’s the physiology of this thing? It doesn’t look uncomfortable.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, I just watched it. How does it strain muscles? Like, I fully believe the dude was not having a good time (and Sask. is being a giant asshole asking for the case thrown out) but I don’t get it.

CanadaPlus,

So it rivals GPT-3, then, applying a correction for Chinese truth in advertising.

High chance they started with LLaMA and then built it out a bit.

CanadaPlus,

Exactly. China, to my understanding, has great simple or simple-ish manufacturing but doesn’t really have a robust high-tech sector yet, and is almost a joke when it comes to basic research.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Although the optics are still really bad. Maybe the CEO is dividing that by employee count in his head, but most people are just going to see a sum that would be enough to never work again.

CanadaPlus,

Interesting! Here’s a “chiefs” team that actually got a blessing from the affected people to call themselves that.

CanadaPlus,

I wonder how many people here actually looked at the article. They’re arguing that ability to do things not specifically trained on is a more natural benchmark of the transition from traditional algorithm to intelligence than human-level performance. Honestly, it’s an interesting point; aliens would not be using human-level performance as a benchmark so it must be subjective to us.

CanadaPlus,

You can’t actually teach it anything new, or to put it better it can’t actually derive conclusions by itself and improve in such way

That is true, at least after training. They don’t have any long-term memory. Short term you can teach them simple games, though.

Of course, this always goes into Chinese room territory. Is simply replicating intelligent behavior not enough to be equivalent to it? I like to remind people we’re just a chemical reaction ourselves, according to all our science.

CanadaPlus,

Once again, we wait on Turkey.

CanadaPlus,

You can already homeschool your kids, and teach them whatever garbage you want, and many people do.

CanadaPlus,

Well, what are you trying to say? We all know what the definition of parental rights would be in a vacuum, I think the point of contention here is what could possibly be missing in actual Canadian society.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Legally, no they don’t. I guess you’re right, that’s a right parents don’t have right now.

And if you think they should have a right to information that would lead to abuse, to the point of forcing it out of individual teachers, you clearly don’t care about those children very much.

CanadaPlus,

That’s amazing.

CanadaPlus,

I mean, a lot of Amish people probably meet that definition.

CanadaPlus,

Aww, what a nice idea.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Well that would by playing with fire on Russia’s part.

I do wonder if they might decide a short direct conflict with NATO is a more palatable way to leave Ukraine, as far as optics go.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah. I haven’t read the article, but that routinely happens so if it’s the right kind of damage we can’t be sure about deliberateness.

CanadaPlus,

Kamil Galeev has said it would be a much more politically manageable defeat, and that’s why they’ve tried to frame it as a fight against NATO itself so often. If I understand correctly, Russians tend to think of themselves as a mighty empire, but know that the West is mightier yet. If they lost to a non-mighty empire that would be a major embarrassment and heads would have to roll. If they lost to NATO that’s just to be expected.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Maybe, but the West also has a very vested interest in not dragging any confrontation out, and if whatever oligarch personally escapes punishment it’s still a way out for them.

I don’t expect them to nuke London, because that would definitely be curtains for them and possibly the whole world. Attacking unmanned offshore infrastructure and then denying responsibility, though? That might get them just enough of a thumping to prop up their narrative, without personally hurting too much.

I’m sure people in DC are thinking about all these same things. They’ve spelled out the retaliation for using nukes in Ukraine in almost accounting-like terms, apparently, and maybe they’ve done something similar for lesser attacks on NATO. I wonder if at this point they’re still hoping Russia stays intact for proliferation reasons, or if they’re just done with them.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Isreali citizens = also victims, although much less abused and arguably somewhat complicit if they immigrated.

CanadaPlus,

Go Spain.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

If you’re just born in Tel Aviv or Gaza City, I don’t think you should be blamed for these military things. Maybe you support Hamas or Otzma Yehudit, but you’re kind of a product of your environment, and if tangential support is all you do you’re still a bystander. Maybe not a great example of humanity, but a bystander none the less.

I would have to be pretty truly desperate to consider aliyah myself, even before there was a war. I guess I could do it, and then support forces in Israel for peace, but I’m not sure if I’d make any difference, and they’re going to be reluctant to let in my never-practiced ass even without me being openly hostile to the whole project.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Plus Israel’s dickery gets blind support from America. I’d guess if the Americans demanded actual concessions from Israel this would no longer be a problem, they’d have two states already. As it is, they have every economic and political incentive to just squeeze the Palestinians harder.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

And Tor Browser is Firefox based, so this is still a two player game. Unless you like navigating a GDPR banner on Lynx.

CanadaPlus,

This could actually be a render, WTF is that surface they’re on. They look like the way sheet metal comes from a foundry, though, in which case they’d be person sized.

CanadaPlus,

I’m guessing be so persistent with getting banned and then making new accounts without using a VPN that they have to.

CanadaPlus,

It will take a lot of effort, but yeah, I guess you could be a hacktivist that way. A smarter approach would be to leave little Arduino proxies or something in public Wifi locations, so you could do it all remotely. And then, going to the logical conclusion you arrive back at DDoS from other people’s hacked computers, which is a time honoured cybercrime strategy.

It would take a lot of time and it’s still not going to sink Reddit if it’s just you, though. Honestly looking at Twitter you have to do ridiculous shit to a big monopoly-ish network service to make people leave it. Like, more than Elon already did.

CanadaPlus,

“The refresh button is hacking”

CanadaPlus,

Ah, yes that would soften it. I should read the actual letter in question, rather than just going by the reported excerpts.

CanadaPlus,

Canada’s pretty close to America, so I’ll answer. My family uses WhatsApp. Better than unencrypted, at least.

You’re not going to get a very representative sample here. Signal is great but a lot of North Americans haven’t even heard of it.

CanadaPlus,

This is probably funny since OP said southern Europe. If it was eastern that would be very old I’m sure.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Thank you, and fuck you too.

Like, you’re not wrong, but in case it wasn’t intended telling someone their country isn’t real is generally considered an insult.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

No, it was a lighthearted joke.

Ah good. Keep shootin’!

No it’s really typical banter, it’s just with Americans you can’t be sure how aware they are. Same with Chinese if you can talk to them, apparently; it must be a byproduct of being a giant self-contained hyperpower.

Sorry you got downvoted.

CanadaPlus,

Hey, and you’ve already succeeded in separating from Canada!

CanadaPlus,

I’m pretty curious to know what got a bunch of prairie farmers on WhatsApp, but I suspect it leads back to India fairly quickly. Unfortunately, French-speaking Indians are a rare breed.

Are there any green alternatives to asphalt in development?

Asphalt used on road surfaces are byproducts from fossil fuel. With the ultimate goal of eliminating the use of fossil fuel to combat climate change, are there any good alternatives for road surfaces? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a viable replacement of asphalt in the works, or even a plan to replace it in any...

CanadaPlus,

That’s true, but AFAIK asphalt roads don’t tend to produce a fine dust (rather, the tires and mufflers do), so there should be some kind of plastic resin that would wear a similar way.

CanadaPlus,

Hmm. Usually when I see roads break, it’s more of a disintegration into chunks situation. I really though I watched a video where they vacuumed up dust from alongside a road.

If microplastics are going to be made, that is kind of an issue. Maybe it’s still worth it, or maybe we have to pick an alternative. I guess worst case we could just go to all gravel roads, and it would be slow but you would get there.

CanadaPlus,

Aren’t bike paths usually asphalt too? They definitely are where I live.

Rail would work I guess, and mass transit is better than personal cars for any number of reasons, but we’d have to put in a lot of rail and abandon all the significant road infrastructure built up. I’ve mostly stanned buses in the past for that reason.

CanadaPlus,

They are, and we still have some in circulation, but these ones are designed for it. They have rounded corners that won’t wear or hide dirt, and they’re made out of pretty thick, rubbery plastic sheets.

Scholar: "Murderous Putin is sure of his own impunity. He could not be more wrong." (www.theguardian.com)

Putin razed Chechen cities to the ground in 2000; casually invaded Georgia in 2008; protected Bashar al-Assad’s regime from accountability after his use of chemical weapons against its own people from 2013; annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. Each of these actions might seem localised, but the larger...

CanadaPlus,

Here’s hoping.

Yeah, he has some pretty huge challenges, not least being that there was already one coup and he had to negotiate his way out of it.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, two months later, after running around Russia doing who-knows-what. Not very impressive if your goal is to seem invincible.

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