AlexandrB

> draw a very straight line to catastrophe

What's the straight line? I foresee catastrophe of the social media kind, where even more folks get brain worms from consuming AI information, but I don't foresee a physical catastrophe. How AI goes from "hallucinates all the time" to "self-improving superhuman thinker" to "being able to destroy the world" involves a bunch of logical leaps that are not exactly sound. At a bare minimum, how does a hostile AI secure the data centers it needs to operate from physical attacks like bombings? How does it defend undersea cables from being cut?

The real short term catastrophe is probably going to be economic and not in the sense of AI taking everyone's jobs, but rather in the sense of an economic crash due to AI overinvestment.

They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.

There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.

I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.

Giving Alberta a market where they can sell LNG might get them on board, but this would also require a bunch of new infrastructure (pipelines? ports?) that I suspect the Canadian government will not want built.

It would be lovely to get Europe off of Russian energy imports.

Absolutely true. I suppose I'm just seeing the ways that this could be abused by our political leaders.

It doesn't seem like anyone knows what it is yet since it's a new thing. But free movement of people for work is mentioned in almost every article about it.

Canada's net immigration (mostly from east Asia) was crazy high for a few years after COVID. Clearly enough people can afford the airfare.

He's not wrong. I have a suspicion this EU idea is a way to backdoor immigration increases - something the Trudeau government was very keen on but was scaled back by Carney. Largely because immigration has become a hot-button issue in Canada and was partly responsible for Polilievre's popularity last election. Joining a treaty where another governing body would set the criteria for immigration and Canada just has to accept it due to freedom of movement within the EU is one way to route around the whole thing politically and make it much harder to change in the future.

If this is the motivation, it's a grossly undemocratic move.

I don't get how folks who hyperventilate about Trump being a threat to democracy can look at stuff like this and cheer.

Dude, small business owners only have so much to spend on marketing. Before it was AI, it was stock images or Microsoft clip art. I don't care that my plumber has bad logo, it saving money on a logo keeps him from selling to PE and enshittifying his business.

What does suffering or pain even mean for a purely analytical entity like an LLM? We can feel pain because we have a body, pain receptors, and parts of our brain dedicated to converting their signals to a subjective experience. What can an LLM "feel"? The words pain, happiness, sadness, suffering are all abstractions of real experiences that can not yet be encoded in a way that an LLM can use as input. All the LLM has are the abstractions.

I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/opinion-sports-betting-morgan-camp...

It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.

> This is the same EU who once reduced the Canadian trade minister to (literal) tears

Wow. That's really pathetic. I'm ashamed as a Canadian. I don't want someone who can be reduced to tears by a negotiation negotiating on my behalf.

You clearly don't pay attention to Canadian politics. Canada basically let McKinsey run their immigration policy[1][2] for 10 years and has now appointed the former CEO of McKinsey[3] to a business development role in government. I wouldn't say that Canada is just a satellite office of McKinsey, but it's getting closer.

Canada is corrupt as hell, just no one cares so it doesn't make international news.

Edit:

Oh yeah, forgot about the SNC-Lavalin debacle, where the ruling government tried to make the legal problems of their corporate buddies go away[4] by sneaking a new "slap on the wrist" law into an annual budget bill and then pressuring the prosecutor to apply it.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mckinsey-immigration-consul...

[2] https://thewalrus.ca/shadow-government/

[3] https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/31/prime-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNC-Lavalin_affair

As a Canadian, this feels like hopping on board a sinking ship. EU and Canada have both severely underperformed for the last 10 years. I hope encouraging more trade can help.

Canada has a proven, safe reactor technology[1] and Uranium to spare. This is a good synergy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

Funny, as a Canadian I feel like Canada is a completely broken country and the US is sane by comparison. Grass is always greener, etc.

The upper end of a lot of these product categories is often populated with overpriced junk that's popular for conspicuous consumption reasons. Clothing is the prime example, but a lot of modern fine dining is also trash (who actually enjoys eating flavoured foam?). So there's actually three races: lowest price, highest quality, and highest brand value.

The ratings are hilariously gamed. Vendors will use coupons and discounts to get you to leave a positive review, while negative reviews are often reported off the site or the submitter is hounded by the vendor.

I do know that people use these ratings when making decisions, but the correlation to quality is fuzzy, at best. I can't imagine people will continue trusting these ratings forever.

Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.

Cost is a big factor, but so are modern building codes. Some classic architectural features are outright illegal to build in 2026. Others might be allowed, but there's almost no one left who knows how to do it (e.g. plaster walls or ceilings).

Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.

Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.

Edit:

Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.

I think the paradox of tolerance has been interpreted by many on the left in a way that flatters them and is convenient to their political ends. Forces that actually threaten democracy and tolerance are frequently ignored or swept under the rug, while the left's political opponents are demonized as not being tolerant enough to participate in democracy so they can be summarily dismissed.

IMHO this tactic is one of the drivers in the falling trust in institutions that we see across the western world. You can't simply dismiss your opposition as not tolerant enough as a way of winning a political argument.

We're all being misinformed by various interest groups. If you think you're immune and have some perfect understanding of reality, you're kidding yourself.

RSS was so good for this. No wonder Google had to kill it.

It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.

Canada just appointed their former CEO to a government role.

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/31/prime-...

The real LLM tell is tortured and inappropriate metaphors and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs[1]. What purpose is "quietly" serving in this headline?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA

This rings more and more true every day: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...

> Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.

I don't think this is the last time we will see this argument. Disney has a lot of value in brand equity to protect so it made sense for them to back away, but a "bad guy" company that's already regarded with distrust will probably go all in on this in the future.

3 years is probably too soon, but I would take the bet on "ever" any day of the week.

> most importantly: there's enough competition that people would just use other models that don't do this.

Show me a Smart TV without ads and some form of tracking. Some product categories are already completely enshittified despite plenty of competitors. People care about up front cost more than any other metric. So no, people will not switch to other models in numbers that matter. If your competitors can drive down up-front prices by selling ad placements or eliminating free checked luggage (airline industry) and you try to take the high road your reward will usually be irrelevance and bankruptcy[1].

Edit: [1] You could cite Apple as a counterexample, except they're busy stuffing ads into more and more of their software. Why? Because it's free money for them and 99.9% of users don't care enough to switch.