What do you mean? I’m sure the minister of artificial intelligence will do a fine job, working closely with the minister of cryptocurrency and the minister of cloud experiences to engage transformative leverage in a way that will enhance governance innovation.

In some places it was already corrupt in the 1990s, and just steadily got worse since then.

In Ottawa it’s in August but wanting to be different than the USA in every possible way isn’t a great reason for wanting to go through the hassle of trying to change it.

Sometimes it seems to me that just maybe it could be possible that the same two or three companies controlling the entire supply of a crucial component for decades at a time is not really enough to enable the magic hand of capitalism to provide a healthy competitive market.

The outlets of the French river on Georgian Bay are full of wonderful places to visit if you ever get the chance. Try splashing around in the water there and imagine a giant port with ocean-going freighters.

The linked article provides no support for the insane idea of “revisiting” this interesting but now-obsolete plan. It mentions that the St. Lawrence Seaway was built instead.

if patents are meant to protect new inventions, how come Nintendo is asserting patents for which it applied months after Palworld launched?

The answer, it turns out, is ridiculous legal bullshit that makes no sense. Just like most of patent law.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

If you’re suspecting the youtube comments of being manipulated in ways that are contrary to the interests of Canada, you’re not nearly paranoid enough. You should be suspecting the youtube video recommendations algorithm.

It’s perfectly simple really. They’ll add a small AI module designed to detect Chinese language being spoken, levels of air pollution, and the scent of Chinese food, which will detonate an appropriately-sized self-destruct charge when a certain threshold is reached.

Nvidia products are just the start. Cars, sneakers, Coca-Cola — eventually every consumer product made in the USA will come with one. They’re just working out how to stop them accidentally detonating in certain parts of San Francisco and New York.

In the 2000s, an ideological battle played out across the fictional cosmos of EVE Online.

I was playing EVE around that time and it’s a little strange to see Goonswarm valorized like that. It’s the only MMO I ever tried where I really got into the social scene within the game. For a time I was loosely affiliated with a small independent corp which was loosely affiliated with a sort of informal federation of others. We all had the ability to make a living independently but we all usually had more fun when we cooperated and so we often did. I never really stopped to think about the politics of it but I guess it was pretty close to proper anarchism, in a way. The giant alliances that battled each other for total dominance were a but distant menace that we would occasionally snipe at or steal from.

Anyway, good book review. More interesting than I would’ve guessed when I clicked on the link.

Take heed, government of Canada: It may be difficult to imagine but you need to find real courage and leadership here. Bear in mind that if you fail as all your predecessors who faced or avoided this problem have failed, David Suzuki will be disappointed.

One thing that can be said for Carney is that over the course of his long career as a banker he must have had considerable experience dealing with people like Trump. By which of course I mean people who are rich and powerful, very great and successful.

I think that most people would indeed “automatically pass out and sleep” long before 11 days went past, unless they used some strong drugs or stimuli designed to keep them awake. Source: I tried to see how long I could go without sleeping, no tricks just sheer force of will, when I was young and healthy. Slightly more than 90 hours.

I wonder if there’s a browser extension that would block every page containing “Trump” from loading, and redirect to a random picture of a cute animal.

Being so cruelly deprived of oil pipelines, maybe they can claim refugee status in the USA.

It’s striking how many of the things they’ve changed seem to be slightly for the worse:

• the lockpicking and persuasion minigames are a little less fun
• the level-up choices are dumbed down
• the speed at which you gain levels is even faster
• the local map is weirdly hard to find for some reason
• the HUD looks worse
• there is much telemetry
• there are framerate problems

Then there are the things I’d have expected them to improve that are unchanged:

• they didn’t give us better difficulty settings
• there’s no walking slowly with the controller
• level scaling has most (but not all) of the same problems it did
• the day/night cycle still flies past at hyperspeed
• horses still report your crimes to the telepathic guards (okay I guess they had to keep that)

Of course there are mods to fix most of those problems. Oblivion is a great game, and it’s good to see a lot of new people playing it for the first time.

I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”

CONTENT WARNING: A vertically-oriented video in a player with no volume control on Instagram involving Jordan Peterson.

This being c/politics I feel justified in pointing out that growing extremism among politicians probably has much more of an effect than extremism “online.”

I have no idea about how people in the UK should react and I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding of it is that if no one involved in running your site is British, it’s not hosted in the UK, and you don’t have any kind of business relationships with people in the UK, you absolutely should not worry about it or take any action at all beyond making sure you don’t sign any deals or offer any products for sale in that country.

They cannot legally or practically do anything to you beyond perhaps blocking access to your site somehow I suppose, and in the extremely unlikely event that they tried something crazy you’d be an international cause celebre with plenty of legal support available. Doing their dirty work for them by trying to block British IP addresses seems inadvisable.