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Have a look at those requirements through the lens of homelessness.

Then also imagine it through the pov of a trans person who is unable to receive healthcare if they also classify transness as a mental illness.

Sorry, I'm not getting it.

Homelessness isn't a disease.  If I were homeless, I'd be more worried about the police picking me up, and dumping me outside the city so I could freeze to death.  Emergency room staff suggesting I might be better off dead wouldn't be high on my list of concerns.

If someone doesn't qualify for healthcare, then they don't qualify for MAID, either.  Being cut off from healthcare because of being trans would seem to be a different problem.

The point of MAID is that severely and untreatably ill persons should be allowed to end their lives with the assistance of medical personnel, without said medical personnel being charged with murder.  I think extending that to include mental illness is a bit doubtful, but if someone doesn't qualify as mentally competent, they're not eligible, regardless.

It's about direction of travel, you know? Ten years ago I thought things were going well here. I move somewhere that is engaging in eugenics and it turns out they decide to expand that over the next ten years and suddenly it includes me, well, gee, my face will be red.

This may just be a point of terminology, but euthanasia and eugenics aren't the same thing.  If you want to accuse Canada of eugenics, look into our history of forced sterilizations.  Euthanasia is supposed to be humanitarian; eugenics never is.

[cannot]

As it's currently structured, MAID doesn't seem to me to be particularly dangerous.  The patient can't be pressured into it, and must find their living conditions unbearable.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assistance-dying.html

Some snipped eligibility requirements:

• be at least 18 years old and mentally competent. This means being capable of making health care decisions for yourself.
• have a serious illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2023)
• be in an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed
• experience unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable
• make a voluntary request for MAID that is not the result of outside pressure or influence
• give informed consent to receive MAID

Requirements for independent witnesses to the request:

To be considered independent means that the witness cannot:

• benefit from your death
• be an owner or operator of a health care facility where you live or are receiving care
• be an unpaid caregiver

[...] or Canada where the MAID stuff seems like a pretty huge red flag.

Why, what have you been hearing?

Domestically, there were reports that a Veteran's Affairs caseworker was inappropriately recommending MAID to certain veterans (the employee was fired as a result).  And making MAID available for persons suffering from mental disorders is controversial, to say the least.  But, I'm not sure if that should be a basis for deciding to immigrate or not.

Setting that aside, Canada's medical system is heavily overloaded right now, which might be a reason not to move here, especially if you're in less than perfect health.  It's almost impossible to find a GP in many areas, and there were recently two cases of women in Nova Scotia dying while waiting for treatment in emergency rooms.

Some natural things of Order and Chaos for contemplation
[...]
circuit boards, order

Circuit boards are the very personification of chaos.

Thermal noise, phase noise, power supply switching noise, mechanical noise, interference, crosstalk, microreflections, microphonics, parasitic inductance, coupling, return loss, timing skew, clock jitter, radiated emissions, spurious signals, non-linearities, unclear requirements, cold solder joints, tombstones, pad cratering, bridging, delamination, and they want it all fixed last week.

So, word is they're now planning on sending tanks to Ukraine, and I says to myself, I says:  "Why not earlier?"  They've been doing the same kind of gradual ramping up in other ways, as well; HIMARS now, Patriots later.
And I can think of a few possible reasons:

1. Bureaucracy is slow.
2. They're worried that an an abrupt escalation will spook Pootin into going nuclear.
3. The object of the Powers that Be is not to break Russia quickly and abruptly with overwhelming force, but to bleed them out slowly, causing them much more damage in the long run.
4.  ...and on the opposite side of that coin, Ukrainians are the "good guys" right now, but maybe they don't want to assume that will continue indefinitely into the future.  Flooding Ukraine with modern weaponry has the risk of creating a new regional mini-superpower, and if we provide the weapons gradually enough, the accumulating damage to Ukraine's infrastructure will keep a lid on their future ambitions.

I tend to prefer the "Bureaucracy is slow" reason, because it's the simplest.

I am beginning to perceive a pattern, where people outside the STEM fields see AI as this revolutionary technology that is going to upend everything, while the people inside the STEM fields have an attitude more akin to "here's another tool for the toolbox; it will improve your productivity in some ways, and occasionally give you a terrible headache."

There was a similar dichotomy of attitudes when electronic microcomputers were becoming popular, but we didn't get a utopian paradise, nor did it take away everyone's jobs, or make us slaves to the machines.  Some jobs went away, some were created, some changed; but overall, we're still in perdition, just with some aspects running orders of magnitude faster.

I don't write academic papers, so automating that process does nothing for me.  However, I do occasionally read papers from electronic engineering academia, and in that context, my interest is whether or not the paper contains information I need to solve a problem.  The form of the paper affects its readability, but the underlying research is what determines its utility.

In its current incarnation, OpenAI is obviously and painfully incapable of producing academic papers of any value to me (see my travelling salesman example, above).  An AI that could synthesize existing papers together to produce novel conclusions might have use, but the results would have to have practical relevance.  There are an infinite number of true yet meaningless papers that it could construct, which means that someone who knew what they were doing would have to be presenting a problem space to perform the synthesis over, or sifting through the mud to find the gold nuggets.

An AI that could, on its own, determine what kinds of papers someone in industry would find useful, and then synthesize those (effectively, an autonomous research engine) would be verging into singularity territory, and that would be pretty cool.

Get ready for rocket scientists that drank their way through grad school getting jobs at NASA and SpaceX.

I thought all rocket scientists drank their way through grad school?

But in practical terms, AI isn't going to provide a vector for students to cheat their way to a degree, because practically everyone in the domain will know what the tools are capable of.
There will be periods of transition, to be sure, but the assignments will just change form.  Instead of "perform research X, and write a paper on it", it becomes "use RocketAI to model research X, and generate a paper from your results using PaperWriter-2.1".

"She [Grimes] told me repeatedly that Musk has this theory of her that she's not real," Gordon told the BBC (via Cosmopolitan). "That she's a simulation who was created by him and exists in his cerebral cortex as sort of the perfect companion to him. Which sounds a little crazy and maybe even a little creepy, except, she agrees with it. She said she does feel like this simulation which was perfectly created for him."

He added, "Her interests are all the same as his and her music is very technologically oriented," explaining that they "both made a similar nerdy joke about a scary AI theory of the future."

At first glance, this is creepy as fuck, especially if she agrees with it.

But, on second thought, it's very easily tested.  If she exists only in his imagination, it would be physically impossible for her to kill him.

Which is why I would never hint at any such brain-damaged idea to my "perfect woman" (should I ever meet such a creature).  Because if she was my ideal woman, and we both believed she existed only in my head, she would definitely try to kill me, FOR SCIENCE.  (My perfect woman would be intelligent, very curious, and rather bloody-minded.)

I get very tired of people who think they're "nerdy", but lack the imagination to consider even the first-order implications of their navel-gazing.

The quote was taken out of context by the British press, as part of their ongoing crusade against Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

C'mon now, you don't really believe the Times, Sun, Mail and Telegraph give a single fuck about Muslim lives and wouldn't be cheering on this distorted account in any other circumstance, do you?

Dear god.  In context, the meaning is almost exactly the opposite of how it was presented.  I already knew to ignore the likes of the Daily Mail, but I thought Reuters was reputable.  I have been played.

I originally heard about this on Canadian television, but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they dumbly parroted what they were fed... like I did.

You can't stick your manager in front of OpenAI's Codex and have him produce anything much more complicated than Hello, World. Coders aren't out of a job. The AI Art Thing this ain't.

I asked that OpenAI thingy three questions.

The first was a toy problem, but in a difficult and somewhat obscure language.  It gave me a pretty good answer; I was quite surprised.  (I wanted a gray coder written in VHDL).

The second was a highly mathematical problem in a mature and well-understood problem space, in a common language.  It thought to itself for a while, and then failed with an internal error.  (I wanted a Reed-Solomon decoder written in C).

For my third question, I asked it to provide an algorithm for a very well-known problem, which is generally thought to be unsolvable (the experts in the field believe it can't be done, but haven't yet managed to prove it).  The provided answer was utter nonsense, that would have earned a failing mark in any second-year computer science class.  (I wanted an algorithm to solve the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time).

So, no, I don't think that anyone's job is in danger quite yet.

I'm more surprised that people are surprised to be honest.

This is what armies have done for hundreds of years - step one is to dehumanise the enemy. You can't kill 'em if you think they are people. Not as easily anyway.

The Taliban do exactly the same thing just the targets are different.

Don't get me wrong, it's awful and we probably shouldn't be doing it. But the pearl-clutching from military personnel is particularly funny to me. Sorry your boy said the quiet bit out loud I guess? Guy's still my enemy but it's good to see people confronted with what military service - especially in a time of war - actually means.

Demuhanizing the enemy in the heat of battle is hardly unheard of.  But afterward, a human being should feel some regret for their actions, even if they would do the same thing all over again if the situation was repeated.

What a person says and thinks afterwards informs you of their character.  His character is less "I killed people, and I regret it, but it was necessary under the circumstances", and more "I killed people, but it was just a game to me."

Maybe that quote reads differently in context, I don't know.

[I didn't think of those 25 as people]

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/highlights-prince-harrys-biography-spare-2023-01-05/

Harry says he killed 25 people when serving as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He says he participated in six missions, all of which involved deaths, but says he saw them as justifiable as Taliban insurgents wanted to kill his comrades.

"It wasn't a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it leave me ashamed. When I found myself plunged in the heat and confusion of combat I didn't think of those 25 as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bad people eliminated before they could kill Good people."

A royal person, thinking of the people he killed as pieces in a game?  Bravo, sir, bravo.  When he made a widely-publicized documentary about his love-life, in which he complained about media attention, I just thought he was a hypocrite.  Now, I see him as a cancerous, diseased emblem of those same privileged, aristocratic, colonial attitudes that, if combined with real power, trigger revolutions.

Despite their claims to the contrary, the royals appear to have failed entirely to adapt to the modern world.  They're just as awful as ever they were.

Edit:  Also, I'm now entirely disinclined to believe that the Nazi costume was an innocent mistake.

I have the antiviral.  Dramatic difference.

I mean, everything tastes like shit now, and I have no sense of balance, but that beats what was happening.

Never lost my senses. Just felt like my bones were trying to leave my body at all times.

I never got tested, but I strongly suspect I had the C a couple months ago.

I had the horrible bone pain, a rather unpleasant cough, and woke up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat.  I also had some oddly specific loss of taste; for a couple days, anything with vinegar in it (kombucha, pickles, mustard) tasted really weird.

All of this was after four shots worth of Pfizer.

Holy fuck where am I?

You are Here.

Sweet Eris' holy tatas WHEN am I??????

The wheel of history has turned, and it is once again The Interesting Times.

The other day, while the temperature was around -30 C, a water line around here broke.  The water in the neigbourhood was out for about a day while a city crew dug a hole in a neighbour's lawn.
(That's "lawn" in the seasonally agnostic sense; it was really just a patch of snow covering frozen ground, which ostensibly contained grass roots until the backhoe shredded it.)

The lack of running water, however brief, was a reminder that plumbing is one of the foundations of modern civilization.