At least the department was open. There are some hospitals in Ontario that have to close theirs a couple of times a month because they can’t scrounge up even one doctor to cover a shift.

Is it terrible that I’d like to see an LLM trained exclusively on translated shoujo manga trying to give teen boys advice about this?

Yes, there are parts of Canada that remote that still have roads. I grew up in one of them. Let’s posit an urgent but not-likely-to-be-fatal medical emergency, like the torn and detached retina I had a few years ago. That required an urgent trip to a major city in particularly foul winter weather. Nearest major city to where I grew up was 800+km, and there are other towns further out than that one. Add to that battery loss in the cold, plus loss of battery capacity over time if you’ve had the car for a while, plus the vehicle having maybe already been driven that day without time to recharge completely . . . I can think of places up in that neck of the woods where I would be seriously worried that 1000km of rated range wouldn’t be enough, although it would be more than sufficient for where I’m now living.

So I’m talking about shit that, in my experience, actually happens to actual people. The segment of the population involved is, admittedly, not all that large, but it’s of nonzero size—probably on the order of a few million, worldwide, spread through a number of countries that have large areas of empty nothing.

1000km range is fucking stupid. No one should be driving that far at once

I take it you’ve never had an emergency while living in a remote area. Especially not one with cold winters that will tank your EV’s range.

That’s caused (at least in part) by assigning timezones according to politics rather than longitude. Some places have gotten really skewed.

Anyway, most of us just want the government to pick one thing and stick with it. We don’t care whether they pick DST, ST, or create a new half-hour timezone to split the difference so long as the changing back and forth stops.

Trump Is Spoiling for a Fight over Canadian Potash

Let’s be honest here: he’ll take any excuse, and if he can’t find one, he’ll manufacture it.

And really, Belarus doesn’t produce enough potash to cover that 12 million tons even if they sent their entire production to the US.

If most people don’t want it enough to opt in, then it belongs in an extension, not the base browser. Then it’s still there for the ones who actually do want it, but won’t bother anyone else.

Pretty much, or any other fork that didn’t add this garbage in the first place.

Only in the US. Other countries will be able to push the prices down.

If I recall correctly, last year’s cacao crop failed pretty hard too, although I don’t remember whether or not the reason was related to climate change.

Does it do anything that isn’t in response to a human’s prompting? No? Then it can’t be conscious. Consciousness requires having a sense of self, which implies having needs and desires that one acts to fulfill without needing prompting. Even a bacterium is more conscious than these things.

Is anyone actually surprised by this? It’s one of those things that any semi-competent programmer could have told you would be the case. The study just formalizes it and adds specifics.

Thing is, that means you don’t really own the hardware that you buy, because a corporation is dictating what you can do with it even though it doesn’t belong to them. Most of us consider that unacceptable.

Pretty noticeable that Gentoo Linux doesn’t offer an option to compile OnlyOffice locally—it’s only available as a -bin package, which means that it’s precompiled by upstream. That tells me that either the available source is too incomplete to actually compile the software from, or it has some really strange licensing. Either way, it can’t be open-source software in the accepted sense.

The chain of trust starts with the owner of the hardware, not some random corporation that happens to make an OS. The owner can, if they wish, outsource the root of the chain of trust to a corporation, but that should be an active decision on their part, not something that happens just because the hardware was shipped with some random OS preloaded.

Don’t spread your legs for the cash.

Sex work is at least honest commerce. Don’t denigrate it by comparing it to the US’s political circus.

. . . And then the market will be flooded with RAM that companies preordered and can’t pay for, because the AI bubble burst before it could be manufactured.

Hey, I can dream, right? And seriously, I would be quite happy if this causes an increase in dumb appliances, devices, and cars in the meanwhile.

Artisan basketweaving likely has a sunnier future than, say, auto manufacturing, under current circumstances.

Always the same excuse—when will someone in a position to do something finally call them on this?

Actually, I’d interpret it as him losing his job in 18 months regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, since management is a white-collar job.