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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • The text is only fucked the the way that The Onion sticks are fucked: this is only labeled satire because of the tone of the article. The content is as true as “real” news.

    The actual “fucked” content is that the author was correct, and that the wealthy benefit from hunger and the threat of starvation to maintain access to abundant cheap labour.


  • Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

    I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.






  • Err… That’s definitively AI.

    AI is just any computer algorithm that does a task that would be aimed to require human intelligence.

    Identifying text in an image is a non-trivial task, so OCR is a type of AI algorithm.

    That said, I assume “AI phones” are probably not using the term AI in the general sense; presumably they just mean that it uses MM-LLMs somehow.


  • The cynic in me is wondering if this is just Google trying to get around the movement to stop children from being given addiction machines* before they’re ready for them. (*Smart phones with infinite-content-stream “social-media” apps)

    There’s a push to ban smart phones for students below age 16 at schools (and educating parents to try to get them to just give their children dumb phones until age 16 outside of school hours, too.)

    But maybe that’s just me being cynical. This movement only started gaining steam after The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was published earlier this year, afaik, and Google is hardly an agile company anymore…



  • If you look at the actual seat-by-seat projections, current polls give a near mathematical certainty of a CCP majority.

    Trudeau needs to take a page from Biden’s book and step down in time for there to be a leadership race. I don’t think it’s fair (he’s done fine as Prime Minister, imho) but he’s unelectable. A PP-led majority government could do a lot of damage.


  • They aren’t suggesting dropping the “British”, rather they are asking about changing the name to something more representative of the Indigenous Peoples of BC who have been keepers of the land since time immemorial.

    Not sure how that would work, though, as there are so many Nations and languages in the province.

    Like, “Powell River School District” is now “qathet School District”. They didn’t just drop “Powell” to call it “River”, lol.




  • lol, of course the NIMBYs in West Vancouver are the only municipality to outright reject it. What a joke.

    So glad to see this coming; we need to fill the missing middle in housing.

    That said, I am worried about infrastructure keeping up with rising population. Swimming lessons fill up within minutes of it opening, schools are at capacity, there are no doctors for most, hospital wait times are increasingly becoming a problem, etc.

    We need more investment in everything, not just housing!


  • I agree, except that the law, as written, is stupid.

    Charging for outbound links and for sharing the robots.txt summary provided by the news outlets themselves for use is ridiculous.

    Instead, they should have implemented a digital advertising tax. 20% of gross sales, maybe? Make exemptions for small groups (first $1M in #ad dashes is untaxed?) (Numbers to be determined by an actual trained economist and policy expert, not me.)

    That would hurt them directly on the revenue side where they make most of their income, and make local print/TV advertising more cost-effective (helping local media companies).

    And then use 100% of the tax to support journalist salaries as a tax rebate through the CRA, like CCB or the carbon rebate.

    What am I missing? This seems so obvious to me idk why this wasn’t the original plan.





  • Teacher:

    Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you’ve done a course once, you can coast forever.

    Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it’s not done very often.

    Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.

    Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are “old school” are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.