Kind of splitting hairs, but a company that can let go of “scores” of employees and still exist is not a small business.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/

As a software developer, it perfectly summarizes my position.

Yoga is correct - the average riding is 100-120k people. The smallest riding in BC currently is 89k, so unless they were going to give BC more ridings it makes sense.

The only ridings which are significantly below that mark are:

• Labrador, it’s an entire island
• The territories, with 1 riding each

Labrador is perhaps debatable because Newfoundland has other ridings it could join, but I think the case for having a riding cross a strait is much weaker than splitting a city in a remote area. This is not unique to Prince George, and sharing a riding with people 600km away is just reality when you’re talking about remote, sparsely populated areas.

Yes, you’re anthropomorphizing far too much. An LLM can’t understand, or recall (in the common sense of the word, i.e. have a memory), and is not aware.

Those are all things that intelligent, thinking things do. LLMs are none of that. They are a giant black box of math that predicts text. It doesn’t even understand what a word is, orthe meaning of anything it vomits out. All it knows is what is the statistically most likely text to come next, with a little randomization to add “creativity”.

Think about it for another minute. Nobody pays $800/mo in Union dues, and we haven’t talked about other benefits like PTO, health, and working conditions.

Trump has been fabricating victim stories since the start of this whole saga - trade deficit, fentanyl are both not actually problems big enough to warrant his actions, but were provided as the reasons.

If the US wasn’t Canada’s friend, then the US had no friends. We’ve been each others’ closest allies for a century, if that doesn’t count, what does?

I’m quite sure the actual transaction is between private American utility companies and their counterparts across the border. There likely is a contract in place between the two companies which agrees on pricing, which would either spell out how rates are calculated, require a guaranteed warning period before rate increases, or disallow rate changes until the contract expires and is renewed.

However, Ford isn’t talking about a rate change between the companies. Even though it’s not a physical good, it’s cross-border trade which means it happens at the pleasure of the governments on both sides. Ford is talking about applying a tax to the electricity, which I assume his government has the power to do. Contracts between private entities cannot stop the government from levying a tax if it chooses.

For reference, most of Saskatchewan has been below -30 for all of February. Hit -40 on Tuesday. Finally warmed up yesterday. That’s a little colder for longer than we usually get, but not by very much. Large parts of Alberta are similar.

The central provinces have pretty extreme temperature swings between winter and summer. BC, southern Ontario and QC, and the maritimes are less extreme.

You’re completely right, if the goal is good customer support and decent working conditions for the operators.

It’s not. The goal is like 1rre said - make people get fed up and stop trying to get their stuff fixed, just buy a new one. Oh, and they could fire half the operators too, since less people would be willing to wade through the pile of shit to talk to them.

Money and profit, screw the rest.

And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.

I didn’t test other values but they’re probably OK.

Excellent work, thanks for the laugh.

I would actually argue that a large part of Canada’s issues in this regard is leakage from our southern border. Not all of it, of course. But a large part. Media is dominated by US perspectives, including all your garbage.

Yes, this is the crux of the matter.

If you give a person a choice between starving or screwing over the rest of society, they will choose the food nearly every time. Change the first part to “starve their children” and it basically becomes an absolute.

Yeah, people rating their insurance as “excellent” obviously comes with the implied “compared to other US healthcare insurance options,” if you read the rest of it or spend even 5 seconds thinking about it.

This article and discussion is specifically about massively upscaling LLMs. Go follow the links and read OpenAI’s CEO literally proposing data centers which require multiple, dedicated grid-scale nuclear reactors.

I’m not sure what your definition of optimization and efficiency is, but that sure as heck does not fit mine.

Don’t look for statistical precision in analogies. That’s why it’s called an analogy, not a calculation.

No, this is the equivalent of writing off calculators if they required as much power as a city block. There are some applications for LLMs, but if they cost this much power, they’re doing far more harm than good.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/

I’ll take a stab at it.

“Researchers spend $X to see whether poison leaking into the ground gets into our water.”