Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.

That’s a pretty reductive take, and doesn’t really account for how emissions are generated.

I don’t disagree that burning fossil fuels to generate electrical power doesn’t happen, nor that it’s not great for the environment (coal in particular is evil in that it contains radioactive particles that get concentrated in the waste ash — decommissioned coal plants are more radioactive than decommissioned nuclear plants).

However, your take misses these basic facts:

1. Power plants are giant buildings that can burn fuel at extremely high temperatures, and which can burn that fuel right at peak efficiency. They extract the maximum amount of energy from the fuel, and thus produce more energy per emission. You can’t do that in something the size of a passenger vehicle.
2. EVs are roughly 95% efficient. ICE vehicles are typically under 30% efficient (although HEVs can get up to 35% efficient). So for every kWh your fossil fuel power plant generates, EVs are going to be able to use it with very high efficiency. Coupled with #1 above you ultimately burn less fuel in your power plant to get the same amount of motive power than you would with an ICE vehicle.
3. While I’m not personally a “true believer” in the technology, a fossil fuel based power plant could theoretically implement carbon capture technology to reduce their pollution output. You can’t do this in an ICE vehicle.
4. And most importantly, when your power utility eventually phases out their fossil fuel based power plant, and ideally replaces it with green energy production, your EV gets that upgrade for free, whereas an ICE based vehicle will still need to burn fossil fuels.
5. Lastly — I can generate my own clean electricity at home. I can buy a pallet of solar panels that can generate 10kWh of power for around $5k. I can never make my own gasoline at home.

FWIW, I live in a jurisdiction where the electrical supply is 85 - 90% green already (primarily hydroelectric, with wind and solar) — so your concern doesn’t apply to me personally. However, even in jurisdictions that are burning 100% coal for their power, driving an EV is still overall better for the environment over driving an ICE vehicle.

One of the absolute best things I ever did for our household finances was to ditch virtually all of our gas-burning devices/vehicles. We’re down to one HEV (my wife’s car) as our only gas burner. My BEV replaced both our old ICE vehicle and our portable gas generator. Ensured our lawn mower and yard tools are all battery operated. That one HEV is the last gasoline albatross around our neck, and so we only use it for my wife’s commute.

We’re closer than ever, and I look forward to the day her car is paid off and we can replace it with another BEV, and get off the gasoline trampoline forever. If I never have to buy another litre of gasoline in my lifetime, it will still be too soon.

The problem with this analysis is that the “EV mandate” was never an “EV mandate”. It didn’t stipulate that only EVs could be sold after 2035 — it always also permitted other forms of Zero-Emissions Vehicles (and PHEVs with a minimum battery-only distance (80km IIRC?)) — including Hydrogen vehicles.

And Hyundai’s interest in hydrogen is just hedging its bets. They have one hydrogen model (the Nexxo), but multiple EV models. And if the number sold in Canada isn’t zero, it’s likely pretty close. They can be as interested as they want to be, but global sales are abysmal, hydrogen availability is low, the hydrogen is expensive, the hydrogen isn’t always green, and storage and transportation are significant challenges.

It doesn’t matter who is “interested” in hydrogen — it’s still not happening. But it was always allowed by the “EV mandate”, so it wouldn’t need to be cancelled for any MOUs.

Hydrogen isn’t going to happen. So stop holding your breath.

Beyond all of the other problems with hydrogen (production, transportation, storage, dispensing, etc.) the economic truth is that hydrogen vehicles are, at best, 60% efficient. And hydrogen production either relies on fossil fuel production (for “grey” hydrogen), or electrolysis (“green” hydrogen). Electrolysis itself is only about 66% efficient.

This efficiency matters in this comparison because when you put 100 units of energy to get 66 units of energy out, and then put that into a vehicle that can only transform that into around 40 units of motive power, you will always do better putting that energy into an EV which is 95% efficient (you put in 100 units of energy and get 95 units out). In terms of cars, you can charge more than twice as many cars with this input energy as you’d be able to with hydrogen. There is no world where that makes any sort of economic sense for anyone.

With hydrogen vehicles, you get a vehicle that needs a lot more energy to go less distance. It’s the worst of all worlds. And that’s just discussing the efficiency values — and not all the losses that occur during all the transfer stages. Hydrogen needs to be kept cryogenically cold (which also requires more energy to maintain) — in effect, there is no possible work in which hydrogen replaces a modern EV.

What the fuck is a guy living up in Nunavut supposed to do with an electric vehicle?

Nothing - which is why the existing mandate ALLOWS THE SALE OF PHEVs PAST 2035.

Your whole post just screams “tell me I didn’t read the mandate without telling me you didn’t read the mandate”.

But that’s true of virtually every dictator. You don’t get to be a dictator without a plethora of yes-men who are willing to implement the whims of the dictator without question. Dictators need True Believers to implement their plans, and oppress any opposition. That’s a basic facet of any dictatorship.

As someone who is a member of a National Sports Organization (NSO) here in Canada, I hope more follow Skate Canada’s lead.

NSOs in Canada that receive any funding from the Federal Government (read: all of them) are required to follow the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport (UCCMS). Right now with Alberta’s laws in place, an NSO that is forced to discriminate against an athlete thanks to those laws could find themselves in violation of the UCCMS. The penalties for being in violation (beyond any Criminal Code violations) can be pretty severe — all the way up to being banned for life from participating in any sport anywhere in Canada.

As such, I suspect more NSOs are going to be looking at whether it’s worth the risk holding an event in Alberta. They don’t get a get-out-of-jail-free card from the UCCMS and its penalties just because an event is in Alberta. And most (all?) NSOs already have their own policies for trans athletes that are specific to their sport and the needs of their athletes^0. We don’t need governments making those rules when the NSOs can do so themselves in a manner more targeted to their individual sports.

As a Registered Coach in British Columbia, trans women and trans men are welcome in my tournaments competing under the gender class of their choosing, in alignment with basic human decency and my NSOs guidelines.

^0 — not all sports are made equal, and the impact of gender based development differs from sport to sport. In some circumstances^1 a trans woman might have an advantage in something like wrestling — but has virtually no advantage in something like shooting sports.
^1 — every trans person is different, just as every man (and every woman) is different. So I am somewhat pre-supposing the “worst-case” sort of scenario that right-wing nuts presume is always the case for the sake of argument.

I’m willing to bet you could convince a subset of those people that such an LLM is in fact the second coming of Christ. So not just some tool “approved” by God, but that the LLM is the God itself.

Then (to the “true believers” minds) whatever it says will be unquestionable. And then whomever is pulling the strings behind the scenes can commit whatever atrocities they desire.

I’m familiar with TempleOS — but it really doesn’t have any applicability here. It’s just something written by a guy with some mental illness who thought God was telling him what he wanted in an Operating System. But even for the faithful it’s just a tool — like how a temple itself may be an important holy place, but isn’t itself worshipped by the people who use it. Nobody considers a church to actually be their God.

That’s vastly different from an LLM that purports to be itself divine. We can setup an LLM that actually claims to be the second coming of Jesus, and there will be people will do whatever it tells them to because of belief. If you suck in enough people for enough years slowly enough to build up a cult following, and abuse them just enough to keep them in line, you’ll be able to tell them to do all sorts of truly atrocious things — and some subset will in fact go through with them.

And yes, people can do that already (see Jim Jones, David Koresh, or any other cult leader that convinced all their followers to kill themselves and their families) — but an LLM could have a vastly larger reach around the globe. We may not need for the LLM itself to become Skynet — one or two bad actors behind the scenes of a “divine” LLM might be enough to bring down humanity all by itself.

Mark my words — but we’re going to see a time (in our lifetimes) where a group of people is going to worship an AI as “divine”. And you won’t be able to convince them otherwise. An AI-centric cult is all but inevitable at this point. And it will be self-reinforcing.

TIL 20% of Americans live in a persistent vegetative state.

I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.

I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.

On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?

That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.

Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.

GitLab Enterprise somewhat recently added support for Amazon Q (based on claude) through an interface they call “GitLab Duo”. I needed to look up something in the GitLab docs, but thought I’d ask Duo/Q instead (the UI has this big button in the top left of every screen to bring up Duo to chat with Q):

(Paraphrasing…)

ME: How do I do X with Amazon Q in GitLab? Q: Open the Amazon Q menu in the GitLab UI and select the appropriate option.

ME: [:looks for the non-existant menu:] ME: Where in the UI do I find this menu?

Q: My last response was incorrect. There is no Amazon Q button in GitLab. In fact, there is no integration between GitLab and Amazon Q at all.

ME: [:facepalm:]

The IONIQ 5 handles are still mechanical, and aren’t any more likely to malfunction than any other mechanical door handle. While they’re recessed, they’re effectively like a see-saw, in that you push down on one end to pop out the handle on the other end (a purely mechanical operation — it’s just hinged in the middle with a small spring). When you pull on the handle, it’s still just a mechanical operation to unlock and open the door. Now there is a motor that can auto pull that handle in and out — but even if the car battery is dead as a door nail popping it out by pushing on one side and pulling out the other is quick, easy, and works 100% of the time as it’s purely mechanical.

So there is no hazard — or at least, not any more than any other mechanical door pull.

You can see a video of the process here. The video is more based on how to open the door when the keyfob battery is dead, but it also applies if the car itself is dead.

Trudeau was a fucking saint compared to Trump. You’d have to be severely brain damaged to think he did anywhere near the kind of damage Trump is doing down in the US.

Short answer — the internal “switch” is held in the on position by a magnet. Magnets become much less effective when they get hot, and while there is still water in the cooker the maximum temperature will be 100C. Once all the water boils off the temperature quickly rises — but the magnets stop being able to attract the switch when they hit around 102 - 103C or so and release the switch, turning the machine off.

So all has is a switch connected to a magnet next to the bottom of the pot. That’s it. Physics does the rest.

We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).

And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.

I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.