Pathetic that this ragebait has ended up on HN. I am Canadian. There is no sweeping authoritarianism here.
666 karma · joined May 19, 2018
You end up with billion dollar corporations gatekeeping this technology either way (who else has the capital to best train the models?). This isn’t about the little guy.
I find it astonishing that people continue to make this argument. A machine is owned by someone, a human is not. Why should the law treat machines the same way as a human? Sounds like some corporate flim-flam to me.
Battery life erodes over time but a new battery will fix it right up.
It depends what kind of development you're doing, of course. I am not sure what intensive computer usage means to you, but I would say I use it intensively! But I am not doing anything that requires a GPU nor am I re-compiling kernels every day. But for my humble needs I've found it's a cost-effective solution that holds up quite well.
Yup.
> And ... saying that publicly _and_ supporting the implementation tends to go very badly. (As it should imo, but that's a different story).
Good. (I don't support the implementation.)
> IF that is the summary conclusion to crypto (which I'm currently holding), then this is pretty close to "no practical value whatsoever", isn't it?
For ordinary people who don't need such services, yes.
I am not suggesting that this isn't ethically fraught -- of course it is. But one can imagine uses. I personally have known a couple people who fled Syria during the civil war, and bitcoin was a useful way to pull money out of the country, and much less dangerous than carrying a suitcase of cash.
What does "suck" even mean in this context? A composer might still "suck" if they compared themselves to Johann Sebastian Bach, but is that the most important question in the scheme of things?
The one thing we can all become experts at is being ourselves. Nobody in the world, in fact, can do it better. I think it's best to focus on that.
The anxiety you're describing, I think, is endemic in modern society, especially among the professional class. Whether or not we choose to adopt it is up to us.
1) This is pretty severe by Canadian standards (we don’t have the same kind of protest culture the US does), but more importantly,
2) If nobody was driving their trucks up to Parliament Hill (and if the demands the protestors were initially making weren’t as wild — although obviously there’s room to disagree, as we have here, regarding how serious they are), then I would agree. The mandates and COVID itself have definitely caused a lot of disruption and it’s our right to peacefully protest what the govt does. But the moment you bring commercial vehicles into the mix you are not, imo, a protestor anymore. Especially when you have prominent voices in the US egging it on, sending them money, etc. For what it’s worth I think the blockades on the border are at least as bad if not worse than what’s going on in Ottawa.
I confess to being not overly sympathetic to protest culture generally, but I believe a free society must tolerate protests. However, I think what’s happening now has moved somewhat beyond what we should tolerate.