There are a lot of people in New York. I’d like to imagine those downvotes coming from some of them resenting an outsider pointing out that their beloved city is only slightly less fucked up by automobiles than every other city in America.

I’ve been to NYC. Once they’ve dealt with the much larger problem they have with cars, maybe it will then make sense to “crack down on e-bikes.”

I guess when you’ve preemptively announced that you’re not going to retaliate against the illegal tariffs in any way that would get their attention, such as putting export duties on petroleum products, you end up with little choice other than to give them whatever they want.

He wasn’t exactly sphynx-like in the speech I was thinking of. He spoke with eloquence, but directly and plainly. It did indeed seem clear that he sincerely believes that the existing banking system — which he had a hand in running for so long — operates in service of the public good.

When it was announced that Mr. Carney would run for office, the first thing I did to find out about him was to watch a video of one of his recent speeches to a big business audience. There is no way he would think of MMT as acceptable. He’s a huge fan of the way things are, so we will keep spending a significant percentage of the government budget directly on satisfying the greed of the rentiers.

Of those, defence needs mentioning as it is the biggest by a large margin.

You mean we could afford it now, or we could afford it if some form of MMT were adopted? I think readers might benefit from it being noted that there is a difference.

Throwing money at established for-profit real estate developers: Not the best thing they could be doing, but maybe it’s better than nothing?

Apparently the new units will have access to an indoor bicycle parking area, so that’s nice.

As was said elsewhere on the Internet:

Don’t get me wrong, I welcome this policy, I just wish the “one line zinger” was a little more detailed, because if you come away from the article without reading on (or, more realistically, if secondary sources pick up this quote without the surrounding context), one could easily get a wrong idea.

What are those, ghost penguins?

Your critique of Modern Monetary Theory does not suggest that your study of the concept has been comprehensive enough to include glancing at the Wikipedia page about it.

The policy summarizes itself this way: It’s fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

Saying that “it’s fine” seems a little overly broad, because sometimes it isn’t, but I suppose that by “fine” they simply mean that it’s not forbidden by the policy. A more complete summary would also mention that where it is allowed, disclosure of LLM use is required.

Personally, on the few occasions where I’ve resorted to querying an LLM it’s been very much the same kind of experience that using Stack Overflow used to be. It’s a quick way to see one way that other people have done some thing, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it being the right way.

I see no reason why advocates of MMT wouldn’t have the same kind of reaction I do to the spending on oil pipelines, the military, the capital gains tax cut, the new ministry for AI, the new ministry for online censorship, the carbon capture idiocy — you’re spending how much on what!?

People were complaining about .ml long before I thought it was justified, but I looked again recently and yeah, maybe. This instance doesn’t federate with it so I don’t see it often. Based on my quick impressions the other day it’s gotten worse. Not that it’s an “echo chamber” and I don’t mind hanging out with communists, but there’s too much low-quality noise.

Personally I wouldn’t block the whole server if it were up to me. There are still good people there. Just be quick to block the people and posts you really object to.

Protecting children from accidentally seeing anything slightly sexy is naturally the top priority. That’s what is harmful to minors. We better all stick to legally safe things like racism-based disinformation.

… but yeah, the designers of mastodon deliberately chose to avoid posts any longer than very short.

Alternatively, make the picture more and more blurry and have people try to recreate the text.

Weird that Myspace is still “owned” by someone when it’s spent so long not being a thing that exists.

For most of us, thinking random thoughts about it while in the shower is probably not the most effective way to gain an understanding of the mathematical details of quantum mechanics.

See also: Why businesses lie about AI

a situation in which everyone – “boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants” – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies.

The link is presumably meant to be to this: https://blundervalley.ca/blog/what-flipped-hamiltons-vote/

[some random tech bro] suggested that based on its size, the data centre proposal before the city was unlikely to be an AI data centre, claiming it wouldn’t be economically viable. A quick search of Ontario’s corporate registries determined the owner of the land also runs an AI software company.

AI software companies are not going to hesitate to do a thing just because it’s not economically viable.

Normally I get around it by using Tor browser which works 95% of the time since it’s a totally normal-looking web browser — but here they’ve got the settings turned up so high that not even that works. It’s unusual enough that it probably wasn’t an accident, so telling them about it probably won’t help.