I am not cosigning the particular points made against Rust, because I don’t have context, but the particular language is not irrelevant, because the post is calling out social and cultural practices, and Programming languages are largely social and cultural institutions. Part of Rust’s success is due to how intentional the initial core users and developers where about this dimension of the PL.

I’m not an expert in AI systems, but here is my current thinkging:

Insofar as ‘GenAI’ is defined as

AI systems that can generate new content, including text, images, audio, and video, in response to prompts or inputs

I think this is genuinely bad tech. In my analysis, there are no good use cases for automating this kind of creative activity in the way that the current technology works. I do not mean that all machine assisted generation of content is bad, but just the current tech we are calling GenAI, which is of the nature of “stochastic parrots”.

I do not think every application of ML is trash. E.g., AI systems like AlphaFold are clearly valuable and important, and in general the application of deep learning to solve particular problems in limited domains is valuable

Also, if we first have a genuinely sapient AI, then it’s creation would be of a different kind, and I think it would not be inherently degenerative. But that is not the technology under discussion. Applications of symbolic AI to assist in exploring problem spaces, or ML to solve classification problems also seems genuinely useful.

But, indeed, all the current tech that falls under GenAI is genuinely bad, IMO.

Those are not valuable use cases. “Devouring text” and generating images is not something that benefits from automation. Nor is summarization of text. These do not add value to human life and they don’t improve productivity. They are a complete red herring.

GenAI is a bad tool that does bad things in bad ways.

“Persecution” — lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-Columbian_inventions_and_innovations_of_Indigenous_Americans?wprov=sfti1

That looks very much like a false dichotomy to me. You left out:

• advertising (which does not require selling data, this is just an invasive additive)
• donation and volunteer based (Wikipedia does this quite successfully)
• funded from tax income (as are online government services, crown corporations etc.)
• companies that sell something thru the internet l, and website is an advertising or pm selling platform. This accounts for most sites, tbh, from brands to retailers, to marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and Craigslist.

These are just off the top of my head. But the point being is that your major premise of obviously false.

Most companies that are harvesting our data are also requiring or pushing for subscriptions now, so the dichotomy is also false in that respect.

Finally, it is clear that millions of people are quite happy to pay reasonable fees for valuable services, which is why so many fee based companies are doing fine.

Afaiu,

• a real “Free market” is a myth.
• A fully gov. Controlled market is not a free market by definition.
• The problem with the Canadian housing market is not government regulation, it is excessive marketization (and not enough of the right kinds of regulation).

This is a case of “don’t let the bad make bad stuff worse”.

Removing taxes on tips is a stupid, pandering policy that, at best is just a distraction, and at worse a government subsidy to the restaurant industry.

If we want more progressive taxation that benefits low income earners, we can just do that. Why should a barista make tax-free income but not a janitor? I’m fine with reducing taxes for lower income earners and increasing it for higher income earners. But why should it have anything to do with tips?

• https://nyccli.org/
• https://prattcenter.net/our_work/gaining_ground

Building Community-Led, Affordable Broadband in New York City

Tell that to the hundreds of researchers who have their entire research programs and funding prospects thrown into the air, and/or outright cancelled.

Fucking bizarre take to lob at someone fleeing a country rapidly falling to fascism and ethnic cleansing.

These are places I would consider if I were able to go back to school:

• https://www.eng.mcmaster.ca/ece/degree-options/electrical-and-computer-engineering-phd/
• https://grad.uwo.ca/admissions/programs/program.cfm?p=41
• https://uwaterloo.ca/electrical-computer-engineering/doctor-philosophy-phd
• https://www.mcgill.ca/gradapplicants/program/electrical-engineering-phd
• https://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/programs/electrical-and-computer-engineering/

This fact has me considering dropping bell more than the outage itself.

It is totally indefensible for a telecom company to rely on X, steaming pile of inaccessible garbage that it is, for critical communications.

Yep, this basically is a government subsidy to the service industry, which then removes funds from essential government programs, like health and education.

Another step towards an illibertarian hellscape. :(

These kinds of prescriptive gimmicks are very exasperating, imo.

Of course I am aware of the “notwithstanding clause”, but this is not relevant for the strict majoritarian view you were espousing, is it? Moreover, “it allows Parliament or provincial legislatures to temporarily override sections 2 and 7–15 of the Charter” and the parts of the Charter subject to override are limited: “rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable”.

To my mind, this is clearly all further evidence of the fact that our government is organized via an intricate (and ever-evolving) system with various overrides and corrective measures and balanced powers, and that it is in no way simply reducible to strict, %50+, majoritarian rule.

I am not a constitutional lawyer (or any sort of lawyer), but my understanding (and what I meant to say) was that unconstitutional laws are subject to legal correction, so sure , we may vote in whatever we want, but that doesn’t meant the law will stand or take effect.

See e.g., http://www.revparl.ca/english/issue.asp

The reason we in Canada nowadays use the term referendum to mean mainly the non-binding  type is because at the beginning of the century the western provinces experimented with the binding referendum. But it was abandoned because the Manitoba law on the subject was declared unconstitutional in 1919, mainly on the ground that it usurped the power of the lieutenant-governor, as a representative of the crown, to veto legislation. It also interfered with the powers of the federal government, which appoints the lieutenant-governors and has the power to instruct them