‘Excessive snow loading’ caused partial collapse of downtown Ottawa parking garage: investigation ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article…

Remember when Mike Harris sold off Highway 407 for about a three billion and we all got a $200 cheque? That highway is now worth over 30 billion. Another boneheaded move by a Conservative leader. We need to protect our assets.

"We have essentially doubled back to the computer architecture of the 1960s through the 1980s, a period dominated by the mainframe and the so-called 'dumb terminal'. In a bizarrely ironic twist, generative AI has reverted us back to a computing system from 50 years ago." pcmag.com/opinions/welco…

“I only like two oceans: the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. I’m not going to put Trump or America on any other ocean but these two.“

Yet another friendly reminder that the sitting President of the United States is insane.

Full details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the core engine of *all* PHP versions will be released tomorrow, October 21st. If your organization has internet facing PHP applications then you need to be ready to patch the minute the update is released or *strongly* consider taking the application offline until you can:

php.net/index.php#2026…

fun fact, plan 9 defaults to a proportional font for everything (9front switched to monospace bc vga rocks), i used to program C with a proportional font. it's honestly fine.

Do you believe that Alberta should remain a province in Canada? Tomorrow is your last chance to mark an X next to option 1 on your referendum ballot. Like it or not, history is being written tomorrow. Don't let others write it without your vote being cast. Make time to vote!

The Canadian flag will fly at half-mast on federal buildings across Canada.

All Canadians stand with the service members at CFB Wainwright, their families, and their community.

Shout out Canadian English

Poor people are often living paycheck to paycheck and have little savings. Putting together first/last/deposit and moving costs is very difficult.

People who have never been poor rarely understand what it's like, just as the poor don't really understand the wealthy.

Pythagorean theorem, written on the unit circle: sin²θ + cos²θ = 1.

“Voting to leave — even just voting in favour of maybe voting later to leave — is not sending a message to Ottawa.

“It’s sending a message to Washington.

“The message is this: Canada is weak, regionally divided, and can be turned on itself for America’s benefit. Ultimately, that message hurts all of us, including Albertans.”

From @jengerson:

readtheline.ca/p/jen-gerson-o…

The term “neural network” has been used so casually and so often that it’s worth clarifying what it actually means.

The original, true meaning is biological. A neural network is a population of interconnected neurons inside the nervous system of a living organism.

An artificial neural network is software that processes numbers through connected layers. During training, it adjusts those connections so it gets better at turning an input into the expected output.

Calling those units “neurons” doesn’t make them biological neurons and it’s borderline disingenuous. They don’t fire like nerve cells, they don’t have a nervous system, they don’t feel anything, they don’t have a soul, they don’t experience anything, they don’t understand what they’re processing in the human sense, and they don’t form thoughts in the human sense.

The term came from computer scientists trying to copy a very simple idea from how brain cells work. The name stuck, even though AI doesn’t work like a human brain.

That language is creating the wrong mental model because when people hear “neural network”, “learning”, “memory”, “reasoning” and “attention”, they imagine something operating like a mind. Those words describe mathematical operations and software behaviour.

“Learning” usually means adjusting parameters. “Memory” usually means stored information or retained context. “Attention” is a mechanism for weighting relationships between pieces of data. “Reasoning” describes a pattern of outputs that can resemble human reasoning.

Those terms don’t mean software is doing the biological equivalent.

AI can produce extraordinary results without having a brain, consciousness, feelings, intent, or human understanding. That doesn’t diminish the technology. In some areas, AI can analyse, classify, predict, generate and solve problems at a scale and speed that a human could never match.

Autonomous AI doesn’t change any of this either. Autonomous systems can make decisions, choose between actions, use tools and continue operating without a person approving every step. They can do that because people designed it, defined its objectives, gave it permissions, connected it to tools and allowed it to make those decisions.

Autonomy isn’t the same as independent agency.

An autonomous system can act without a person pressing a button for every action, but it still operates because its creators gave it the capability and authority to do so. It doesn’t suddenly acquire feelings, motives or moral responsibility because the software can choose between available actions.

The terminology makes the technology sound more human than the underlying mechanics justify.

This is important because people are starting to assign responsibility to AI systems instead of tech founders. A “neural network” didn’t decide to compromise a computer network. Software produced an output or took an action because people designed it, trained it, configured it, gave it capabilities, connected it to systems and deployed it.

AI deserves appreciation for what it can actually do but it doesn’t need a fictional human identity to make it impressive.

The word “neural” shouldn’t make us forget that.

The old relationship with the US and Canada is over. Today's revelations only cement what most Canadians already knew.

The midterms or a new government won't fix anything.

It will take decades for Canadians to trust the US again.

So, the separatists are literally trying to trade away Alberta's oil -- Alberta's inheritance - in order to secure American support for independence. theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…

As an Alberta MP you should probably know we are the only G7 country without a strategic oil reserve because we are the only G7 nation that is a net exporter of crude.

National strategic reserves are maintained to meet an obligation to the IEA to hold 90 days of net imports on hand. That obligation for Canada is zero barrels. There is ~95 million barrels of private storage in Canada.

Strategic reserves protect importers from supply disruption, not cost. Product released from reserves still generally enters the market at the global price. To truly get the price down, we need to resolve global challenges with supply and refining capacity.

We’re keeping prices down in Canada by pausing the excise tax on gas, giving a groceries and essentials benefit to those who need it most, and working with provinces and companies to increase global supply, alleviating upward pressure.

now that programming is easier than ever can we leave Electron and go back to native desktop apps?

Stephen Harper on Alberta independence:

"I spent a good part of my early political career involved in the debate over Quebec independence. That was driven by a large minority of the population who genuinely want a separate country, regardless of the cost. I do not believe the downsides of that experience are fully understood in Alberta.

"Over two generations of Quebec politics were spent debating the goal of the separatists. Families were divided, and friends were lost. The more serious the challenge became, the worse the economic impact became. In the process, Montreal’s two-centuries’ long position as the commercial centre of Canada was permanently lost to Toronto."

I’ve really been enjoying this comprehensive, real-world working out of a version of market socialism, out today from @JacobinBen, @sunraysunray and @mikejbeggs, much more than I thought I would, given my status as a stick-in-the-mud defender of economic planning.

Demolishes ocialist shibboleths alike; makes a range of truly novel arguments; and it’s hyper-pragmatic, connected to the world and humanity as they actually are, and refuses to wave away real feasibility (and even desirability) challenges to visions of the egalitarian democratic society, unlike too many left texts today. “The technique of a socialist economy ha[s] been badly neglected. Instead, only one of pure criticism of the capitalist economy [is] offered,” the authors quote philosopher and economist Otto Neurath as saying of Left thought in the early 20th Century. It could be said just as accurately of our own time.

There’s still lots to disagree with, of course, and Michal Rozworski and I aim to have a piece out laying out some friendly disagreements. Not least over how the economic calculation problem is not solely a critique of totally marketless *economy-wide* planning, but also of planning *tout court*. The authors sometimes recognize this and sometimes don’t. I also think the book could be stronger with respect to resolution of environmental problems (it sounds too similar to what social-democratic regulation already offers; in which case, why does the environment need socialism?) and to exploring what environmental problems actually are (incentive and coordination problems).

But beyond my quibbles, it’s really very rigorous but also a breezy, often funny read. I hope that it kicks off a new era on the Left of unapologetic, equally pragmatic draftings of competing recipes for “cook-shops of the future”. And if we were ever to achieve a society like what is sketched out here, I would consider the Left’s job largely (thought not completely) done.

ppl complain about french spelling but unlike english it's actually like 95% regular like "eaux" being pronounced "o" is kinda stupid but also its basically always pronounced that unlike english where any given letter can be pronounced at least 3 ways with no rules whatsoever