Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

If you’re referring to the NDP losing votes and the conservatives gaining them, I’m guessing that’s not very common. What would make more sense is for Liberals to move to Conservatives as NDP move to Liberals.

Poilievre knows people don’t want him. The only group that wants him are young MAGA types.

How do I know that he knows that? Because he has Harper out there campaigning for him to older conservative voters. He knows those folks would rather vote for Carney than him. That’s why he’s trying to trick them into thinking that he’s Harper’s buddy. It’s not gonna work.

The Conservatives are trying to pull together an impossible coalition of older centre-right Canadians and younger post-truth populists. I’m extremely doubtful that they’ll succeed. But they don’t have any other choice.

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

The way to train more docs is to build more medical schools, more hospitals. Gotta lay out the big money for that!

The other problem we have is the demographic bubble. The population is still aging. As the boomers approach their 80s the medical costs of caring for them will rise exponentially.

Yeah. I remember people talking about how in the 1950s you’d go for a drive in the country during the summer and your car’s windshield would be completely covered in bugs. It was like a rainstorm there were so many. Now you can drive through those same areas and not even get a single bug hitting your windshield.

I felt the same way when I first got online in the mid-90s. I thought it was gonna bring all people together. Seems pretty quaint at this point!

Things are obviously pretty bad right now but for me the jury’s still out. It could be really good a hundred years from now!

Shamelessly stolen from a Simpsons meme group I frequent.

I never use AI. Can’t stand it. Wish it would go away!

I also think it’s completely stupid and overhyped. I took a course in 4th year on building and training neural networks with PyTorch. I know how it all works at an intimate level. It’s not going to lead to a singularity any time soon (as so many people think).

I think there’s a lot of explanations for the decrease in value of the ads:

• ad market saturation
• user ad fatigue
• rampant ad blocking
• less engagement overall

I’ve heard YouTube video ads pay a lot less to the creator than they used to. A lot of creators are struggling and feel pressured to release a lot more videos and more consistently. But this can all be measured by view counts where the numbers drop off as engagement disappears.

One of the worst things a YouTube creator can do is completely change the type of videos they make. This often gets people to stop clicking videos and YouTube’s algorithm takes this as a sign to stop recommending that creator, causing their views to drop off a cliff.

I wonder if there’s a similar issue with the ads on game review sites today. I have seen some YouTube video reviews that include a sponsored segment for a game I’d never in a million years consider playing (which has no relevance to the video at hand). Maybe if people are reading reviews the ads aren’t relevant to the games they’re playing so they never bother with them?

Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.

Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!

Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.

What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.

The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.

Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.

Yeah. Sometimes I think people are so used to media (TV, movies, video games) and the distancing effect of being in a vehicle (looking out a window at people) that they’re actually capable of travelling to another country without actually believing that they are there in person.

Apart from stories like this, there are countless other stories of clueless travellers who walk around treating locals like NPCs, not really realizing how annoying and offensive they are. These big blowback stories are just the tip of the iceberg on that whole genre of stupidity.

It’s self-consciousness (less charitably called hack writing or selling out). These are game developers trying to chase market trends rather than following their hearts.

Some are honestly trying to make games that they themselves would love. But it does have a bit of the feel of “I love ice cream and I love dill pickles, so why not dill pickle ice cream?!”

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Thailand’s lèse majesté laws are very strict. The government treats insults to the monarchy as a harm to the entire country.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway?

Just don’t wear an American flag on anything and you’ll be fine!

Yes! And we need to build out our rail networks. It should be really cheap to move stuff across country by rail on manifest trains. Additionally, we should have a high speed rail network connecting all of our major cities so that we can travel anywhere without flying, without driving, and without crossing the border.

I’ve always admired the parliamentary tradition of having to drag a new speaker of the house to their chair. Reluctance to have and to use power is such an important, admirable quality.

That said, I do believe our Canadian system is much better than the US one in one particular respect: parliamentary accountability. The leader of the executive, the prime minister, cannot remain in power if they lose the confidence of their own party. We witnessed this most recently with the resignation of Justin Trudeau after he had lost the confidence of his party.

In the US, the president has a lot more power simply because he is insulated from his own party by the separation of powers within the system. Trump is fully engaged in his destructive tariff campaign despite any opposition within his party because of this. The Republican Party, as bad as they are, are never as bad (or as good) as any individual within their ranks. This moderating effect does not extend to the White House due to the aforementioned insulation effect.

I do want chicken. Just not chicken nuggets which are made from mechanically separated chicken aka pink slime. If I’m having fried chicken, it’s gotta be whole muscle meat.