Gaëtan Perrault

A [great one from Quora](https://qr.ae/pFvLt1 ).
Question:
> How long will it take America to recover after Trump is gone?
Answer (Franklin Veaux):
> About as long as it took Germany to recover after WWII: basically, two generations.
> But we will never, ever recover the power and influence we once had, just like Germany didn’t. That will never happen. That is gone and it will not come back.
> The next hundred years will be the age of China, not America.
I don't think America has really come to terms with this yet, but that's where we are. I think the age of China will be closer to 50 or 60 years because of demographics. But it's already their era, people are still catching up about how far behind they are.

2026-05-13 16:15:01 GMT

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If your stance is that an organization shouldn't exist as a for-profit entity and should be replaced by a co-op, then what can any CEO say. We could just copy and paste your comment every single press release.
Fortunately, we have a community-based competitor. Codeberg.
Unfortunately, you chose not to mention them. So you probably got an axe to grind with them too?
I firmly believe that the open source Community needs an open source Community platform for code management and build release. But I hold that belief while also holding the belief that GitLab is probably doing the right thing for their business.
We are both on Mastodon, we have a general agreement that we want a better world in terms of Technology. We don't get there by whining about the tech we are never going to use, doing things we don't like. We get there by building and funding and promoting the tech we want in the new world.

2026-05-13 03:06:25 GMT

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So if you are the CEO of GitLab, what do you do instead?

2026-05-12 22:09:47 GMT

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I'm not really sure about this. Like, I'm confident that some customers will dislike the change. But this also sounds like a change that's going to have pretty broad industry support.
Robots instead of humans are going to be the primary contributors of code. That seems like a reasonable reading of the future.
Do I think their layoffs are a little aggressive? Yeah. I do. They're talking about customers with 10x the spend, so they likely need the same size of workforce to support that spend. Even if that force is structured differently.
But these are details, I don't think that the entire thing is a terrible idea. You seem to think it is.
If you were CEO, what would you do instead?
You think this is s*** and bad things are going to happen. If you had the magic wand, what would it look like for good things to happen?

2026-05-05 22:55:20 GMT

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The challenge with anything housing related is that our government is operating on multiple levels. In fact, multiple governments are operating at multiple levels. All to meet really complex needs.
This SRO housing is like the last resort housing for people who may not be able to truly care for themselves. Or to care for the places they live in. You hear stories about these buildings getting trashed because the people living there have trashed every other place they've lived and may truly not be able to care for a place at all.
Politically, people want these places to be cheap. Bare minimum stuff available so that residents have less to wreck. So they get limited budgets. But stuff inevitably does get wrecked and we need to maintain these buildings. And the residents who live there need extra help and staff... But there's never enough budget for that too...
This is much less about "housing rights" and more about how we fund and provision aid. Today, that's complicated and uneven.

2026-04-27 01:35:21 GMT

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Oh, no doubt that regional salary cap adaptations would help the situation. I just don't think it addresses all of the lifestyle issues.
Even with similar tax adaptations on salary, I could see a lot of players justifying their decisions to play in San Jose or Tampa Bay over Calgary or Edmonton, even if their final take home pay was exactly the same. Just because those places are easier to live (weather) and because you're not a local celebrity.
All that stated, it would be a good first step.

2026-04-26 22:09:36 GMT

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connected note BTW, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a decade. Watched a bunch of Sharks games. Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau years.
The US was significantly better for multi-millionaires. Taxes at the top end are not significantly less in California, relative to BC. But you got access to the premium Healthcare, even after playing is done. And a whole network of services dedicated to your income bracket. Plus you can go places.
Like there are probably 10 restaurants in Winnipeg that the Jets players can actually visit. Even the third liners. But if you are a sharks player, you can go anywhere. Almost incognito. Heck, in the Bay Area, you're not even the richest person in the mall on any given day.
Playing for the Canadian team is really hard. Beyond just the public scrutiny of every play, you almost live a better life on the road than at home.

2026-04-26 21:46:44 GMT

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oh goodness that Canucks and Boston series! The one guy who got drilled into the board head first with no penalty, let alone follow-up? And then the penalty calling game 7 was atrocious. Refs basically descended into not calling any penalty that wasn't a mandatory call.
And Boston's two giant defencemen basically treated that as a mandate to keep doing illegal stuff because the refs weren't going to call it.
I was disappointed for the Canucks fans, but particularly disappointed that the game just felt so bad.
I honestly felt the same way about the finals last year. I did not feel like hockey. Florida's defensive strategy was hack and slash and hold. You can interfere as much as you want, because they're only going to call mandatory penalties.
It's worse than just watching the Canadian team losing. It just kind of sours the whole experience. I mean, I have seen zero playoff games this year and that's why.

2026-04-03 05:50:11 GMT

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huh?
IndexedDB has always been a more advanced form of Local storage.
If you want SQLite in a DB, they have that.
https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/index.md

2026-03-25 17:26:15 GMT

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right, $25B looks right, that's not what your original post said... It said $2B, that's why I asked.

2026-03-25 16:43:25 GMT

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It's good to see officials start to acknowledge reality.
That stated, where did that 2 billion number come from?

2026-03-21 23:25:28 GMT

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back before we were public, the books were pretty transparent... that system ran on a small percentage of Roblox's infra.
We spent 100x the resources on the servers for hosting games. It was so cheap to operate, nobody noticed. I was the senior tech lead on the team, not once did anyone wave a bill in front of me or ask me to justify costs.
And all of this stuff is cheaper now because we have better GPUs for even less money.
You have a vision of cost, but I don't know where it comes from?

2026-03-21 23:09:07 GMT

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So you're operating under two technological assumptions. Number one, the AI technology works poorly. Number two, the AI technology is prohibitively expensive to develop and operate.
I used to work at Roblox, on the trust and safety team. We are basically an authoritarian regime on what you are allowed to say on the platform. Particularly for people under 13.
We used LLM technology for years before ChatGPT was available. It was not only affordable, it performed text interpretation and redaction that was literally impossible for humans to complete. It was able to escalate particularly dangerous text up to moderators for further review. It supported multiple languages. It interpreted weird utf-8 characters in multiple ways to prevent people bypassing the filter system with emoji or weird characters.
This thing did not work poorly, it worked very well. And it did so at an efficiency that was unmatchable by humans. And this was 2021.

2026-03-21 21:45:34 GMT

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It's clear that you and them have very different base level assumptions about the cost and value generation of these systems.
Sure, if I take your cost and values, then none of this makes any sense.
But they're clearly operating from different cost and values. So to them, this makes sense.
They're running the world's most advanced AI-powered surveillance system. Currently pointed at their own people. But they've been running that system for a very long time. Quite successfully, by authoritarian government metrics.
Before ChatGPT was launched, China already had years of experience using LLMs. Years of experience using automated image and facial recognition. At huge scale.
You're operating from the baseline assumption that this is some American grift being pushed by a couple of companies trying to make some money. They are not.
And the only way you're going to understand their perspective is to restart your interaction with this technology from scratch, wearing Chinese glasses instead.

2026-03-21 20:58:49 GMT

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> "Purging completely uncompromised party members...
Who cares? The purpose isn't to find or purge compromised members, the purpose of having an automated system is to replace the number of party members you actually need to keep the system running. The best way to minimize compromises is that you have less people in the system.
> Because it's stupidly unreliable...
I mean, have you met humans?
They lie. They cheat. They steal. They try to undermine your control and authority.
And they don't have built-in control and auditing systems like the robots do. And they're more expensive.
I'm still not understanding your arguments here.

2026-03-21 18:41:10 GMT

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they have the most advanced human surveillance technology in the world. And this is just the next phase of that technology. Putting this on people's phones and in their houses is like the ultimate in surveillance and control.
Venture capitalists love to talk about the single person billion dollar company. The Chinese Communist Party has 100 million members. If a technology like this can get rid of even a percentage of those, it allows you to tighten your grip as an Autocracy.
The companies building this technology today are all basically State assets. So they get direct access and control without any of the public fights like Anthropic.
So I'll flip this around, why do you think they shouldn't be doing this? What grift do you think they are being subjected to?

2026-03-10 07:48:12 GMT

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Her Etsy store is filled with so much cool stuff!

2026-03-03 08:31:04 GMT

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I have definitely heard several stories of people using the steam deck as their primary computer. Simply by hooking up a dock.
I also own a NexDock, which makes this seem even more reasonable. Keyboard + Touchpad + Screen + Battery.
This thing you're showing us doesn't have the Screen or the Battery.
So I guess the real question is what the price difference is between those two things? How much is this portable pad?

2026-02-06 20:52:18 GMT

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ok, the whole review is a little odd in that it feels "thirst trappy". Like, she's lounging on a blanket in a mini-skirt and a crop top playing video games.
But yes, the whole videography definitely has a "movie" feel to it as well. The music, the soft backgrounds, the very specific lighting. The outdoor transition. I'm honestly not sure what to make of the whole thing.
The review/comparison itself is very middle of the road. Like I could have generated that script from a compilation of other reviews over the last several months. So it makes you wonder what else is going on here?

2026-02-06 20:38:10 GMT

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I think the x-rays would be cool, but they're also private personal medical information. So you can't exactly post them on the walls.
Hence the signed memorabilia instead.

2026-01-07 11:43:36 GMT

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There is so much weird stuff on this map.
Not only does it look like Ontario and Quebec got obliterated, but somebody did something very weird to Lake Superior, because that shape is not right.
If you scroll all the way over to the West Coast, the shapes are equally weird. The coastline is weird. It looks like parts of Washington state have disappeared? Or maybe we're just not getting that part of the map? Because there should be islands there. Vancouver Island stretches below the 49th parallel and it's not there.
This feels like "AI photoshopping".

2025-12-03 04:13:30 GMT

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Should people be vibe coding network buffer code for a video game? Do I want my database vibe coded? No.
Can you vibe code an app that reads your calendar and sends you an email suggesting a good time for lunch? Sure! That sounds fine.
But these are completely different contexts.
In fact, that latter example is wholly built on layers of the former examples. All of those people getting paid to build databases have zero connection to the Calendar / Email people. They have different roles, different responsibilities.
But we're throwing everyone's opinion and expectations in the same room, context free and suddenly we have no nuance.

2025-12-03 03:54:38 GMT

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I think we're moving into a larger stable state with respect to how software is planned and built and deployed. I like to think of this relative to how we deploy water resources or electricity. There are different levels of expertise at different levels of the stack.
You don't need to be a plumber to change your shower head or upgrade your sink faucet. But if you're going to move pipes, we want to be certified. And you're going to sign off in a house, we want you to be more certified. A whole building? Even more certified.
Want to design the water system for a whole neighborhood? You will need a professional engineering degree. Water system for a large city? We're going to need multiple engineers with PHDs.
The software world lacks both the certifications and this stratification of responsibilities. We're seeing a lot of people at different strata interacting, even though they lack any overlapping responsibilities. It causes a lot of friction and people talking past each other...

2025-11-12 19:34:28 GMT

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still have my original steam controllers. They actually got some use last week. Definitely excited about this steam cube! I have a slowly aging Windows gaming PC. I was already starting the research for the future Linux replacement.
Controllers and input devices are always a challenge here. Especially with some joysticks and other devices I own. But knowing that we've got a physical box will give the community a chance to start building libraries and resources around those devices.

2025-11-10 00:27:04 GMT

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look, I'm used to seeing people play football in snow, but definitely not in this particular way 😲

2025-11-05 02:41:33 GMT

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I think the shutdown actually needs to keep going until enough people realize that it really is the GOP. Like, they have control, this is all their budget.
It's kind of ghoulish to think this because I know that lots of people are suffering. But if we pass the GOP budget, we're still going to have lots of people suffering.
If lots of people are going to suffer because of government decisions, the least that we can ask of people is for them to acknowledge which government it is inflicting this suffering.

2025-10-21 01:55:35 GMT

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Was just talking to @npub1e9x…msz2 about some form of co-op owned Patreon replacement? It would still be subject to the whims of other members, but at least not corporate overlords.

2025-09-13 06:18:27 GMT

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Also curious?
I have seen ads for this, but I had no idea what it actually was. This looks really interesting for a night out, minus all of the things Crissy mentioned.

2025-09-09 16:41:21 GMT

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> Free plan users aren't customers
Kind of?<li>Customer: pays money for thing</li><li>User: uses thing, but doesn't pay money</li>
But I think you're diving right into the complex #enshittification logic of companies that take on free "users". And they all play fast and loose with the marketing use of those various words.
I wish they did as you said, set clear limits on what they could do with a free plan, or who they could accept on a free plan. Sadly, companies are just not that forward thinking. They often do a crummy job of servicing both the Customer and the Users.

2025-08-10 20:12:16 GMT

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sounds great, let me know where I can sign up 🙋‍♂️

2025-08-03 05:38:16 GMT

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The reason we have reduced childhood and maternal mortality is because we have improved systems for healthcare and food distribution and delivery. Those systems exist because of other underlying systems like roads and fuel delivery and medical boards and universities.
When I say the polycrisis is an "obligations crisis", I am talking about our obligations to maintain those systems.
You say: "it isn't difficult to live well"
But in my mind, modern medicine is a requirement for living well. AND modern medicine *is* difficult, it *is* complicated.
Is there some part of that you disagree with? Do you not want modern medicine, or do you just think it's really simple?

2025-08-03 04:59:40 GMT

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Cy: "we did fine for hundreds of thousands of years"
Me: *looks up child mortality statistics for most of those years*
Given what we have today, I would not say that we were "fine" a thousand years ago. Is there a reason you think the child mortality from say, 1789, was a good thing? Or are you just trolling because you don't have a more useful contribution here?

2025-08-02 00:17:06 GMT

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We can blame billionaires for attempting to hack the human psyche. And I think there's some truth in the harm of the system of lies we're fed.
But take 100 median humans, and who all meant well, and ask them to reorganize to solve the polycrisis. Give them a magic wand and ask them for solutions. Then ask them if they would actually implement those solutions.
I strongly suspect most of them would drop out of the process simply by virtue of the overwhelming complexity. And even those that remain would struggle to agree on both the trade-offs they were willing to make and the ones they were willing to impose.
The system of lies we are fed are definitely bad. But the system of truths we need to hear are probably more overwhelming. //

2025-08-02 00:11:53 GMT

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I have started referring to the polycrisis as an "obligations crisis" among my friend group. Underpinning all of this crises is the simple fact that we have more obligations than we can actually service. The environment, the healthcare system, the housing system, our parents retirement accounts, our governance structures, etc.
The only true solution here requires a series of complex negotiations and some new Grand bargains around which obligations we are going to meet. And how we're going to meet them. This is a lot of change and it is serious change and it is heaped upon an overworked populace who struggle to meet their voting obligations every 2 to 4 years.
And I understand why people give up. They don't have the energy or the mental capacity left at the end of the week to actually deal with these big decisions. Nor do they want to adjust their life decisions to accommodate new deals...

2025-07-25 23:35:57 GMT

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dating all of the way back to the LAMP, MySQL was just the default.
Back in the aughts, PHP actually shipped with a MySQL driver. PgSQL needed extra drivers, but MySQL examples worked with no extra effort. And that was how people built web apps.
We hosting providers all supported MySQL because you needed it for WordPress. So this was easy for them to use.
When Ruby of Rails really took off in the 2009 / 2010 time period, it also used MySQL by default. For a lot of the same reasons. You could get MySQL hosting everywhere for peanuts. PgSQL was supported, but it was always an extra step.
But Rails was really a big moment here. It was writing all of your SQL, managing all of your connections. If PG had a feature that was better, Rails wouldn't include it because they also supported MySQL.
PG was for people who really cared about the DB, which wasn't most people.
At least that's my experience.

2025-07-23 04:58:25 GMT

I feel like the very existence of titles like this undermine the real value of home ownership.
> "Bought a condo in 2020? If it's in Toronto, it likely underperformed your savings account"
So what, it's a place to live, not an investment account. You don't have to sell it for a profit, you just have to live there.
In a world with sufficient housing, homes would mostly sell for the same inflation-adjusted amount. Comparing that to a saving account just seems silly.
But here's another dude doing exactly that.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bought-a-condo-in-2020-if-its-in-toronto-it-likely-underperformed-your-savings-account-165907280.html

2025-06-26 00:38:20 GMT

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went through a similar thing. It kind of sucks.
But it also reveals a real key security issue underlying all of these things. They don't want to (or can't) be responsible for verifying that users are actually humans, so they defer to the phone number as a form of ID. Basically leveraging the fact that phone numbers are more tightly controlled and other forms of digital ID.
I caved, and got phone numbers for both of the kids. Even though they were under 12.

2025-06-05 22:47:36 GMT

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this is great fun.
I love that you are using the TKD gloves for Karate training. Don't get me wrong, I think the TKD gloves are better, especially for the bag. But they're specifically for a sport where 99% of the points are scored with your feet 😁

2025-05-30 07:02:59 GMT

"Why are so many companies on the AI hype train?"
Just got out of a big Tech conference in Vancouver and the "AI on everything theme" was pretty evident. But it was light on what people were doing. Is this all just companies trying to look cool?
I've come to think it's deeper than that. If these companies were not all in on AI, what else would they be doing with that R&D time? With that marketing budget?
Some new incremental change rolled out by their understaffed eng team? ... /1

2025-05-16 14:58:29 GMT

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, this is so weird... Like it makes primal sense (hungry, have knife, see meat). But it's just so unexpected.
@npub1nxf…5pq2 my partner and I are in Nanaimo and I swear that "Nanaimo man" is the Canadian equivalent of "Florida man". We get so many weird headlines.
Though this one might be the recent winner.

2025-05-15 07:05:41 GMT

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I think it really depends on context. But a lot of economists seem to think it's the same thing when they speak.

2025-04-25 22:54:35 GMT

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fortunately we do have a currency that is completely backed by electricity... Sadly, that currency is Bitcoin.
The USD is also really buoyed by the fact that it is the trading currency of choice for hydrocarbons.
So it's kind of happening, but not in the best way either 😕

2025-03-28 05:44:03 GMT

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I don't think we make it out of the 2020s without some form of 1929 crash.
A Pandemic, a gilded age with high stock prices, a Smoot-Hawley style president, rise of fascist governments... It's not the same song, but man does the tune sound familiar.
And a president willing to ride this through pain. Willing to tank the US dollar and stock market to make these tariffs work. An ailing superpower.
I don't see away this ends smoothly.

2025-02-07 16:25:17 GMT

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I'm a Patreon backer of this writer. The book is definitely semi-autobiographical, they were processing a lot during this period.
As a fellow Canadian kid, one of the things I appreciated in this book was all of the background mall details. I definitely felt time warped.

2025-01-16 00:47:25 GMT

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I'm dictating this answer into my phone. I definitely use the dictation on my phone as a primary input method.
It works okay. But I don't like doing anything that requires structure this way. You can't do bullet points or easily manage things like carriage returns. You definitely cannot italicize or bold face text that you are writing.
I have no idea how you could compose dialogue this way. At least not without going back to edit it later.
Drafting, not finishing.

2024-12-18 16:54:11 GMT

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are you running this through the drywall, or via cable runs along the outside of the wall?
That latter method always seems to need even more cable.
Also cat6? cat6a? Conduits?
Inquiring minds want to know 😀

2024-12-01 18:00:30 GMT

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We have the same plan for today. We've added a Holiday Log on the TV... the TV that hangs over top of the actual fireplace :)

2024-11-17 08:44:32 GMT

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for complex reasons, my wife and I own a gas cooktop and an induction and a backyard gas grill...
We've had many discussions on the pros and cons, but don't have an absolute winner. They each have their quirks, they all have different trade-offs with different cooking tools.
My biggest takeaway is that it's important to get the right tools for the cooktop you are using. And it's important to adjust cooking styles appropriately.

2024-10-21 02:40:08 GMT

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The human in the picture is using a mop to clean a floor. The robots on the back wall are mobile mop robots that clean floors.
You are nominally correct that the human has different jobs than the robot.
But in the case of this particular photo, the human is in fact doing the job that the robot was created to do. Your example is completely misplaced. This is more like a human outside of an automated car wash scrubbing the exterior of their own car.

2024-10-18 00:17:29 GMT

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dog photos you say? Here's Copper fresh from the groomers. Almost a smile on his face.
https://cdn.mastdn.ca/media_attachments/files/113/325/545/605/328/155/original/9ba54090da445715.jpg

2024-10-12 20:28:46 GMT

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I feel like these are the questions every breathless journalist should be asking of these AI companies. Not silly things like "can it write derivative garbage". But useful things, like having it help us see, or helping us visualize important data.

2024-08-04 08:08:59 GMT

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"Requires no special equipment; just time & effort."
But these are the two most precious resources on a build or a renovation. And this is what's really at odds here. Asking people to spend expensive time to save inexpensive materials is always going to be a tough sell.
We need to make construction greener. But if we can't put young people into new housing (see all of Canada), then every initiative that makes housing more expensive is kind of getting in the way.