The claim that Canada banned firearms “that only appear in video games” is a popular internet talking point, but I couldn’t find evidence supporting it in the official Canadian firearms ban lists.
What actually happened:
1. The Government of Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of assault-style firearms since May 2020.
2. The 2020 Order in Council (OIC) banned approximately 1,500 firearms by name, expanded in 2024 and 2025. These are predominantly real-world firearms – AR-15 variants, AK-47 variants, the Ruger Mini-14, various shotguns, and many specialized rifles.
3. Critics have raised legitimate concerns about the ban’s logic – some firearms that were banned were “never designed for the battlefield, and never adopted by any military in the world, nor ever used in any battlefield” – but that’s different from being fictional.
4. Some rifles were banned “that probably came into Canada in insignificant numbers; indeed, there may be none of them in-country,” like obscure variants or rimfire lookalikes. Rare or uncommon isn’t the same as fictional.
Also it's worth noting that when the ban list was overreaching and included some common and venerable semi-auro WW2 rifles that were a bit too powerful or their fixed-size magazines/clips were a bit too large (eg M1 Garand), the Canadian government backed off on those.
#144117 on page 30 -- "AR15.com" "ARFCOM" listed as a 5.56mm semi-auto rifle.
That's a website. There is no such firearm, and arf15.com an American run organization does not hold a manufacturer FFL. Arfcom is a common short name for the message board.
> Another thing to try is to go to a diner alone. Same deal.
Oh yeah. This is one of the things I enjoy most when traveling for work (more often than not means traveling alone). I can go to dinner alone, watch people interact, feel the city, the people, the staff.
Discovering dinner alone to me was an interesting experience. And a lovely one at that.
I was also instantly struck by the intro of this piece of writing. It just doesn't make sense to me to state one's subjective interpretation as a universal fact, a universal law, as "the reason cafés exist". As if there is only one reason.
I really do not get the tendency to reduce everything down to one singular reason or cause. Is this a monotheistic religious thing? Is this a binary thing? I just can't wrap my head around this. But that might just be me - having originally studied literature and history (after graduating from high school with mainly stem subjects) I always felt I had one foot in each of those worlds - one in the "hard sciences" one more in the humanities. Never able to reduce myself to just one reason of being or one interest - and never able to attribute only one reason/meaning to a work of art.
So my long winded way of saying, that I just did not buy the premise.
I really like the article but in order to get the most of it, I had to mentally change the author's writing style. I think the article works much better if you reframe it from second person to first person and restate the general platitudes as observations of one particular place and experience.
This. Exactly this. Even relatively well working tools (from my experience and for my project types) like Agent OS are no guarantee, that Claude will not go on a tangent, use the "memory files" the framework tells it to use.
And I agree with your sentiment, that this is a "business field" that will get eaten by the next generations of base models getting better.
Imagine me standing next to the fence of the White House, calling the Meta Office. "I am calling from the White House", while technically true would be a lie, as my intent would be to make the other person believe something that isn't true, that I would be calling in some kind of official role.
So the statement does not necessarily be false to be a lie - if the intent is to deceive.
reply