Listen, I’m not going to tell them to get bent for doing the only sane thing they’ve ever done, but I’m not throwing them a welcome-to-the-family party either. The lesser evil is still evil and I will continue to avoid so much as letting my shadow darken their doorway.
Please, tell me more about what my values are. While you’re busy making generalizations about other people, pay more attention to the conservatives undermining your own province, because we aren’t the only province getting targeted, we were just the low hanging fruit.
I said 25 years ago it doubled in 10 years. We’re not talking about the same time period.
It’s pretty close to 50/50 population wise. A little over half are right wing mostly in the sticks. A little under half are left-ish, mostly in the cities. But yes, basically anyone who couldn’t hold down a job anywhere else was told to grab a shovel and head to Alberta to dig for oil. And they came, by the millions. They bought up the cheap houses in all the little whistle-stop towns and then headed off to work the rigs. We leaned a bit right before they came, but not this far right. Even most of the farmers find them extreme.
The American oil barons promoted American style culture and a disdain for Albertan history and cultures. Most of the rig pigs and truckers didn’t know any better, they weren’t from around here. Now 25-30% of the province doesn’t even identify as Canadian.
Don’t misread me, it was never a haven for critical thinkers, but we had one of the finest public education systems in North America for nearly 30 years once. You wouldn’t know it now. Our public health system was a miracle for how low our population density was. It’s still not as bad as some of the truly dystopian parts of the US, but it’s certainly a struggle compared to some provinces. The racism and xenophobia always existed, but it was never this widespread, and it certainly wasn’t this open. All our independent news orgs are now wholly owned by American hedge funds.
There’s some bright spots though. The arts are still widely celebrated here. Calgary and Edmonton have more stage theatres than you’d find in many cities twice their size, and music festivals are everywhere. Arguably we have more diverse food culture here than most places in North America too. The urban centres are actually pretty cosmopolitan and friendly. If you stick to the urban metro-areas and the national and provincial parks, it’s still beautiful.
And the political situation isn’t as hopeless as some people make it out to be. We’re outnumbered, but just barely.
Read it again. Your recency bias is showing. They flooded out west long before there were any ad campaigns.
Well, I mean if you stick to the coast it’s fine. You get into the interior it may as well be Alberta.
Please, no. Please? This is how we got into this mess in the first place. We were slightly more conservative than the Canadian average 25 years ago and then all the rest of the country dumped their social rejects on us. Our population doubled in like 10 years and now we have Danielle Smith running the province. Please, I’m begging you, stop sending every failed Ontario washout to Alberta.
This guy gets it. There’s legitimately people who couldn’t get the food, don’t have the facilities to prepare it in their shoebox apartment, don’t have the skills to prepare it, have next to nothing for food storage capacity, and/or are on too much of a time crunch to actually prep their own food.
Does that describe everyone? No. Do they exist? Absolutely, and sadly more common than people realize. I’m extremely blessed to have a comfortable suburban house and all the access in the world to the resources I need, but I came up in less favourable circumstances and have old acquaintances who are still there. A grocery store was hard enough to get to it may as well have been on the moon for all the time and transportation I had to get there, my access to tools and appliances to cook were effectively non-existent and the fridge and freezer I had access to couldn’t hold a full week of food to begin with. Living on convenience store taquitos and fast food wasn’t a choice, it was that or starve, and you ate what was open when you had time.
No, they were well employed for their age and skill, living on their own and even in a relationship. Then they started to self-sabotage. A lot. The AI amplified every negative impulse to the point he fell into complete social breakdown. Instead of developing healthy behaviour patterns and getting negative feedback on harmful, anti-social ones, the AI “supported” him unconditionally, and he started to trust it more than he did the people around him. Really kind of tragic because exposure to it destroyed an otherwise promising young man.
Anyone with any sense and other options stopped eating there a long time ago. I feel bad for those who literally live where there’s no other viable option, mostly because it will rapidly make the last possible option non-viable.
I have zero sympathy for those with good alternatives that don’t walk away. The company ran its course. Let it burn.
Because the modern world runs on psychological manipulation. Has since the end of WWII. The economy as we know it is built on leveraging, manipulating, and exploiting our cognitive biases and psychological vulnerabilities. Today we give it gentle sounding names like “Marketing” and “Public Relations” and “Brand Identity Management”, but what it is, is the psychological warfare techniques developed during WWII, evolved during the cold war and weaponized against civilian populations to extract profit. This is just the latest evolution of a set of practices that goes back 75 years or more, which underpins every part of society as we know it in the modern world.
I believe it. I’ve watched people end up homeless, friendless and unemployed from their AI habit. Granted, they weren’t in a good spot to begin with, but AI took them from keeping their heads above water to living on the street and screaming obscenities at strangers. AI Psychosis is wild.
She was warned. Turns out if you lay down with face eating leopards, you really do get your face eaten.
Depends on the state. Some states require everyone involved to know they’re being recorded, some only require single participant consent.
Seems like a lot more work than just remembering to make a list before you leave home.
I didn’t say it was a good solution. Especially when you make the whole fundamental function of the fridge dependent on the network.
You know those influencers who get like a few million views from building silly Rube Goldberg Machines?.. That’s the only thing I can think of to justify the toaster, and then it’s literally just taking the place of an RC actuator.
As for the fridge, the only thing I can think of is you’re one of those people who constantly forgets what they went shopping for, and need to video stream the interior of the fridge to check if you’re out of something.
Right? Just because a networked version exists, doesn’t make it a good idea.
You might not, but it would be really nice if some others would. If we repeat it often enough, some of them might actually learn something for a change.
Yeah, chips are more of a perishable good than any kind of durable infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the models themselves have no durable value because information is never truly scarce, regardless of how they try to make us pretend it is or poison the well with lies. There’s no magic solution to making LLMs actual AGI or even effective tools outside of their narrow scope. Not only that, the way they’re using it is extremely reckless, deeply inefficient, and supremely cost intensive, on a level that makes the Manhattan Project look wholesome. There isn’t going to be a “last man standing” to win, it’s just going to go up like flash powder and take everyone in the dogpile with it.