Some squatter who bought the rights to it for two twigs and a raspberry back when they were first selling off name rights 200,000 years ago

Plus, every dollar spent on Ukraine buys a lessened chance of other nuclear powers trying to invade their neighbors willy-nilly. If Russia is allowed to just invade whomever they want with minimal pushback from the world, that just emboldens more wannabe Putins to start wars of aggression or worse, build up nuclear arsenals.

This is so true for the housing crisis. Conservative NIMBYs will be like “deregulation good!” and “free market good!”, but then they religiously show up to any and all city hall meetings to rant and rave about how we need to use heavy-handed regulations to protect “historic” parking lots and the “neighborhood character”.

Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.

On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.

With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.

deleted by creator

I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

It’s so clear that the GOP is flailing. They’ve only won a single presidential popular vote since 1988. Old white people are dying and brown kids are reaching voting age. Young people at large are overwhelmingly fed up with the GOP. They are losing the demographics game big time, and I think they know it.

And I think the GOP base knows it deep down, too, and I think Obama was really emblematic of it. Suddenly, they had to wake up to a country that was rapidly shifting, a black man was president, gay people were getting rights and becoming broadly accepted in society, people were starting to talk about racism as an actual problem again, movies and advertising were getting more diversity, trans people were getting rights… And I think this deeply unsettled a significant chunk of the population who felt like their control over America was waning, hence the Tea Party, hence the MAGA movement.

This fascistic movement we’re seeing from the GOP isn’t logical at all. It’s losing them elections left and right, but if they don’t pursue this, they lose all their primaries, because this movement is about the Republican base lashing out over them losing demographically.

For real. I can’t name a group more gleefully sinful and un-Christ-like than the modern GOP.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.

Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.

I prefer rules-based utilitarianism, which is the idea that we should create a system of rules that achieves the most good when followed. If we created a system whereby we rounded up healthy people and forcibly harvested their organs “for the greater good”, well, society would collapse as everyone flees to the woods to preserve their own life and organs. No farmers, no scientists, no doctors, no infrastructure maintenance, just global famine. And that would be a far worse net outcome than the current system that lets some people die prematurely due to lack of available organs.

Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.

What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.

And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.

As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

In 2016, I said half-jokingly that I was moving to Canada if he won. Then he won and now here I am in Canada. Granted, I was a senior in high school when he won and I was already applying to a couple universities in Canada. But definitely was worth it. As many issues as Canada has (cough cough housing crisis), I at least trust it to not descend into fully-fledged fascism any time soon.

Yeah, this is a great example of why I make an effort to specify the government when criticizing countries. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? I call Putin and his government evil but never the Russian people at large. China’s genocide of the Uyghurs? I call Xi Jinping and the CCP evil but never the Chinese people at large. Israel’s apartheid state and ethno-religious cleansing? I call Netanyahu and his government evil but never the Israeli people at large (and certainly not Jews at large).

The allure of treating entire demographics or populaces as a monolith and blaming them for the crimes of their government is exactly why genocidal rhetoric is so dang pervasive, and I won’t abide by it.

(Yes, I will also criticize civilians who actively support these crimes, but I make sure to be clear in distinguishing between them and the rest of the civilian population.)

Ah, but that says not to kill people. It says nothing about killing rats! /s

Seriously, though, that’s exactly why we’re so capable of committing atrocities: we dehumanize each other until we consider it acceptable to kill. Portraying Jews as rats and subhuman is exactly how the Holocaust happened, and portraying Palestinians as subhuman is exactly how Israel is currently doing what they’re doing.

No problemo!

To do the link, you want to do the brackets first, then the parentheses. Like this [text](link):