lemmox

FB just put shovels in the ground on a datacenter in Alberta. Bringing a new nat gas plant online nearby but it's a little quicker to bring the DC on than the plant.

Many years ago my wife fell down the stairs and suffered, what turned out to be, a broken fragment of bone that poked into a nerve. It took quite awhile to diagnose it because <medicine is hard>. Along that journey to diagnosis she was almost bedridden, and in excruciating pain, most of the time with with physio, chiropractors, muscle treatments, nerve pain meds, etc, all failing to help her function. The opioids she was prescribed made it so she could function. She was high, "dreamy" (for lack of a better word), reported still feeling the pain, but could function. The day after the neurosurgeon performed her spine surgery she voluntarily stopped the opioids and finished her healing from the procedure with ibuprofen. She never looked back and described never feeling an urge to take the meds again. I wish I could say that this experience gave us some great insight into the complexity of opioids but it didn't. In her case they did their job until she didn't need them anymore and that was that. I don't read anything more into it then that.

From the article: In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

Yes, I recall this as well. It didn't pass the smell test to me - probably wineries making up a reason to justify switching to screw caps.

An interesting trick I found here was to ask ChatGPT to produce tables of concept definitions and include a metaphor for each concept to help understanding. It was quite good at coming up with metaphors and that actually felt kind of magical.

Interesting prompts! IME the quality of the answers the users give to the ChatGPT questions in these prompts will make or break the experience.

I played around with this use case in the spring when my teenage daughter was looking for extra test prep materials. At first the experience was interesting but there was an "AI uncanny valley" shaped problem: the material just didn't seem to fit. It felt wrong.

This uncanny valley was significantly reduced, even eliminated in some instances, by including the entirety of our school district's online material about the course; information about the core competencies (across communication, thinking, personal & societal), the big ideas, the curricular competency & content about the learning standards. Our district has a pretty good website with all of this information laid out for each course and grade level.

Including all of this information in the prompt context resulted in relevant and harmonious content when asking to generate course outlines, student study-prep handouts, and even sample study session pre-tests (although ChatGPT wasn't strong at reliably creating answer sheets for the pre-tests).

Context is key!

I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b).

"Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

Rust was used primarily because a couple of the founders of the company were Rust experts

It's remarkable how significantly the first few months of a project impact the first few years of a company. How quickly casual & spontaneous decisions, largely based on convenience and familiarity, ossify into legacy drag.

With nuance, I guess? Depends on the conversation.

I'd say that there's more agreement than disagreement. Here 70% of the overdoses are related to drugs cut with unpredictable levels of fentanyl. I'd say I've seen consensus on that being a "bad thing(tm)", and consensus that the criminals cutting street drugs with fentanyl are "bad guys(tm)".

I guess to your point about junkies making bad decisions, my peer group skews older, we've already said everything we can say about junkies making bad decisions 30+ years ago. It's true, but it makes for stale conversation and seems kind of orthogonal to, or at least adjacent to, the current fentanyl situation.

One example provided, which I've not fact-checked and might be limited to BC, was that disclosing addiction during a hospital visit opens up a file with child welfare services.

My wife actually asked this of some professionals working in this space yesterday at a local awareness event (she works in community services, unrelated to drug policy). The answer (paraphrased) was it doesn't directly stop the poisonings. It's in the spirit of harm reduction to open up more support channels. One example given was about going to the hospital and honesty with health professionals. Currently there's disincentives for an addict to disclose their addiction due to legal actions that get triggered upon disclosure. Removing those legal triggers could (would?) allow for more supervision without legal consequence to hopefully reduce the overall harm. It gave us something to chat about.

FWIW since I started referring to this as poisonings (instead of overdoses) I've found folks to be much more amenable to conversation. Nobody likes the idea of the wicked poisoning the vulnerable.

It depends! FWIW the spots I've used event patterns most often are high write loads that benefit either from fan-in micro-batching before hitting the data stores or polyglot systems where a client/system event need to fan-out to multiple systems and we want to insulate the producer from downstream latency/outages.

Oh wow, Pandas and sklearn were there - I was able to train a random forest classifier on the iris dataset. That's pretty slick!

It was! They were my urban farming buds. I took care of the PVC, they took care of the pooping, the basil took care of clearing the nitrites out of the water. It was all golden until that masked bandit struck. Now I live out of town - I'm quite sure the bears would eat the whole kit if I set it up again.

I set-up an aquaponic system on my front porch a few years ago. My wife was skeptical but I grew some of the finest basil around. Just used a tote filled with goldfish, some PVC piping, and a pump. Unfortunately one evening the raccoons figured out how to pop the lid off the tote - it was a massacre!

I came for the memory footprint but I stayed with Rust for this. Rust became my daily-driver for hobby projects because refactoring and tinkering with old projects is a breeze. For me, Rust projects don't seem to require much cognitive burden to load into my human memory. I do not claim that this quality is unique to Rust however it is very much present in Rust.

We hit 46 in some parts of Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver. It was brutal - when I hosed the kids off in the back yard some birds parked themselves in the mist and just sat there with open beaks. It's cooled back down now.

I wonder if this means that existing customers/products had to stop using the service? If so this might be the first time I recall seeing a cloud vendor flex like this.

CTOs of city and law enforcement orgs are probably seriously questioning the vulnerability of relying on cloud SaaS.

Name servers refused query (lame delegation?) [205.251.197.124, 205.251.194.41, 2600:9000:5301:dd00::1, 2600:9000:5302:2900::1, 2600:9000:5305:7c00::1, 205.251.193.221, 2600:9000:5307:5900::1, 205.251.199.89].

This is my experience. One part luck, one part upbringing, one part privilege. Both my kids are thoughtful, even tempered, curious, and tenacious. Often they are called "mature" for their ages (8/11). Such is not a description that fits most of the children in their peer group at school. FWIW most would probably call me a strict parent. Not in a punitive sense, but we do keep our standards high and do not normalise behaviours that we don't like.

Honestly the school board's efforts have been phenomenally bad. We're in BC, Canada, which appears to have said "hey teachers, here's your Zoom license! Get on that e-learning thing - kthxbye!" In aggregate it's a bum deal for the teachers, students, and parents. Hopefully it works for some but it doesn't for anybody that I know.

However... I took control of the curriculum. I'm not a teacher so I didn't presume I knew best: I based it on the Khan School Closure Schedule [1]. We sprinkle in a few arts & crafts projects with their mom, some nature walks in the afternoon, some Khan math and language arts in the morning, and an hour or so of coding after lunch. They have a few extra chores around the house - nothing too onerous. We've increased their music practice sessions.

I've been working from home for several years so I did not have much adjustment to my working situation. It took a bit to find our education groove but, by and large, I'm happy with it now that we've deprioritised the haphazard din coming from the teachers.

My wife's impression is that both kids are performing at a higher level than they were in meatspace school. The kids and I agree.

I could probably sustain this indefinitely as my kids are kind of self-directing their way through the assignments. I'm keen for the new normal to kick in but, from my POV, this has unexpectedly turned into one of those "golden years" moments for me. We're making some memories and the kids are fine. Lemons and lemonade, I guess.

[1] https://keeplearning.khanacademy.org/daily-schedule

FWIW I found reading about the process of making respirators quite fascinating. It opened up a whole world of reading about nanofibers and the melt blown process that I'd not previously stumbled upon. Turns out good masks aren't just any old fabric - producing unwoven sub-micron nanofiber fabric is quite involved and that fabric is in short supply.

Key factual allegations are described[1] with the summary:

"The COVID-19 outbreak has caused hardship in Missouri and across the globe—death, isolation from sick and dying loved ones, massive unemployment, economic dislocation, uncertainty, and trillions of dollars of economic losses. China should be held legally responsible"

[1] https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/2019/k...

Italy also appears to have suffered from tragic public health errors. Apparently they moved covid-19 infected patients around. First to other hospitals that had not yet had outbreaks and then into empty beds at long-term care facilities.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/covid-19/italy-covid-19-outbreak-les...

Only time will tell if these differences are meaningful. FWIW I'm in BC and have found little fault with the provincial health agency's response and, for the most part, have been impressed with the level of compliance from the public. Is it enough? Time will tell, but so far the numbers could be a lot worse.

Jon has been working on a reasonably large Rust project called Noria[1], "a new streaming data-flow system designed to act as a fast storage backend for read-heavy web applications".

I found his Rust live coding sessions on YouTube[2] to be an enjoyable introduction to Rust.

[1] https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_iD0xppBwwsrM9DegC5cQQ

Dropping a drive-by upvote for the Fish[1] reference. I started using it last year and really like it.

[1] https://fishshell.com/

I'm always amazed by how tricky DNS failures can be.

I have no direct knowledge about Zendesk's use case however currency conversion is table stakes for any company doing international business. Purchase orders and employee travel expense reports being top of the list.

The article claims 15M in Ontario and BC. That's about 3 out of 4 residents of those provinces. I guess there's a lot of old records in there. The scope is so large that pretty much every adult can now be intimidated by threats of releasing medical test results.