Yep. I don't know if anyone is interested in anecdotes, but looking from Europe, I will do my best to avoid any kind of US dependency until US has a) overhauled the legal system starting from the Supreme Court and b) gotten rid of the de facto two-party system. (No, one-party system does not count.)
The two-party system is fine. We have to be honest about the fact that parliamentary systems can give massive power to a tiny fraction of the population when that small party becomes the deciding vote.
The problems with the USA political system are: electoral college, senate being 2 votes per state, and the supreme court being 7 people for life. But nothing can be done about the last two now. Especially now that the Supreme Court made a decision limiting how amendments can be ratified.
The efficacy of US democracy has eroded over time, and it's clear we're going to need reforms to preserve democratic governance for future generations.
Every branch of the federal government has experienced a decline in democratic accountability.
The House is so gerrymandered that only 10% of seats are remotely competitive each year, and it hasn't kept up with population growth.
The Senate is permanently gerrymandered, with state population differences that are far more disproportionate than what was originally designed for and intended when the Constitution was written.
This combined with hyper-partisanship prevents the US from accepting new states like Washington DC (population 700,000+) and Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million), depriving millions of US citizens from Congressional representation (no, non-voting representatives don't count).
The Supreme Court has become hyperpartisan, and appointments are a high stake circus that rely on arbitrary retirements and deaths. They need to be elected at this point to preserve democratic legitimacy.
As for the Presidency... the Electoral College has resulted in the election of the loser of a popular vote twice in 25 years.
I don't know how reform will happen, or if we'll ever see it in my lifetime but we desperately need it. The US government needs to be accountable to the people again.
Democracy is precious, and it's so tragic to see how much it's declined.
Is it? Many western countries are having more or less prominent populist right wing movements, and the two countries I can think of where that movement has gotten its hand in power on really significant issues during the last decade or so are UK and US. Both strongly two party systems at the time of the "interesting" developments. And I do not think a two party system is typical, I am sure there are some countries happily trodding along with their two political parties, but they are not the rule.
> We have to be honest about the fact that parliamentary systems can give massive power to a tiny fraction of the population when that small party becomes the deciding vote.
The American two-party system gave massive power to a tiny fraction of the population, which the large Republican party then retconned into most of their members as their party platform. Now they're a large fraction of the population. I'd choose the approach where the small faction remains its own small faction, even if they occasionally get to pull the levers of power.
Is that the extent of your requirements (for now, at least) ?
As an American I keep trying to surmise what we're going to need to do to start repairing the damage from this massive self-own. It's kind of hard because we don't know where the bottom will be, but we at least need to start having these discussions on what constructive approaches might even look like - we can't have our milquetoast opposition party phoning it in yet again with entitlement as the less-bad option.
External context is key - one of the main goals of this hybrid warfare attack on the western world has been to disrupt our relationships with our allies, and also because other countries have developed Democracies that function way better than ours. So please know that at least some of us are listening.
> Is that the extent of your requirements (for now, at least) ?
Well, if you ask my other wishes, once Europe has gotten its act straight and decides to tax/tariff/regulate/whatever (american) big tech to hell and back, I kind of would expect that any decent person on that side of the pond would just humbly nod their head and note that, yes, we/they deserved it.
I think domestically we need some analog of the EU's GDPR, as table stakes for preventing the surveillance industry ("big tech") from amassing so much power over the People that they're inclined to try for another coup.
We also need some kind of antitrust enforcement against the forced bundling of products from the distinct categories of hardware devices, network services, and client software.
Those should leave us with a similar environment to the EU. Beyond that, sure tax away, whatever. If we've done our job right domestically, these services should be a lot easier to value in terms of subscription fees rather than nebulous values siphoned away from surveillance subjects.
Interesting. Could you give an example? The only example I could think of is when one is making a big ball of something and needs to cover the surface with another ingredient or preparation then it would scale as ^2/3.
In general seasoning (or saucing) anything solid is more about exposed surface area than mass, and this depends on things like cut sizes, evaporation shrinking, and god knows what other factors. It doesn't scale with simple math, because there are all sorts of other factors involved that complicate this (surface texture just being one).
It is also all moot because ingredients (especially spices) have massive variance in potency, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, etc., so recipes are only ever a guideline. I.e. if you double a spice that is twice / half as potent as expected, you can get an unpalatable / bland dish, and IMO factors between 0.25 to 4.00 are extremely common for plenty of ingredients. So you always just need to taste and adjust accordingly. This is also ignoring that certain ingredients can vary in multiple dimensions (e.g. a lemon that is a lot sweeter than expected but less sour, and so simple scaling of the lemon alone can't get you want want: you need to reach for white sugar and/or citric acid to get your desired pH and sweetness).
It is also a fantasy that all flavour concentrations are perceived linearly anyway (and this is especially the case for acidity / sour / pH generally, but also spiciness in e.g. ginger, pepper, capsaicin).
> I just found myself in someone else’s kitchen and they didn’t have a slide rule.
What? No way that happened! In all seriousness though I almost never find myself in the need to multiply anything in the recipe by the amount different than some multiple of 0.5 and these are pretty easy to do in my head.
Not a bad idea, though 'too recent' I think would be the only benchmark - for now, until they get faster at training. OpenAI has thrown away most of their safety team so that shouldn't be a reason anymore to delay model releases "for safety checks".
What would be too obscure or useless, when every new model boasts increasing parameter count (as if having more parameters would make the models better after a certain threshold)?
It is easy to make the mistake of believing CEOs are automatable based on their public speaking: interviews, earning calls, conference talks. With a rare exception (cough Musk) CEOs communicate in a very sterilized PR-speak, coached and vetted by PR, media relations, and legal counsels, and usually stick to facts or not very controversial opinions. That part of the job is pretty replaceable with a well-trained LLM.
The real job is done behind the curtain. Picking up key people based on their reputation, knowledge, agency, and loyalty. Firing and laying off people. Organizational design. Cutting the losses. Making morally ambiguous decisions. Decisions based on conversations that are unlikely to ever be put into bytes.
Yeah, that's because business leadership is largely a cult. The way you prove your loyalty to the cult is by overseeing larger and larger layoffs ordered by those above you until you're the one putting people on the street.
I run Immich for more than two years and there was an upgrade to 1.33 I think around spring 2024 that required special instructions on editing docker compose file because they changed the vector database. I think there was also a database migration same year when - if you did not update the version regularly - would need to run two step upgrade. They provided plenty of documentation always. A while ago sync was quite wonky but they improved that a lot lately.
The link states most of the outbreaks are linked to a gathering in New Brunswick, and then Southern Ontario, before eventually making its way to Alberta.
Thank you for doing your part in collective immunity and for additional context! Also I see you are from Fort Mac - I know you have been through tough times and I hope all is well with you and the family. Alberta is responsible for a disproportionate amount of measles cases, but I would not put it on anyone else other than unvaccinated people, in Alberta or elsewhere.
the gathering location means nothing; AB has two very large cities with lots of international ties. eventually it was going to hit AB, in the same way that someone with measles was going to arrive in Toronto or Vancouver.
the measles kept happening, constantly, again and again because AB is full of anti-vax communities.
the mennonites got hit hard, but they're not located in huge numbers around the province. dumb-ass anti-vaxers sure are all over the province tho.
This is a lot. If you are in a company large enough, you surely know at least 20 people and one of them is gone. The earlier floated figure was even larger: 30K
I suppose it’s what you are used to. A company that I worked with had under 100 staff, very profitable but had a staff turnover of about 10% per year.
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
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