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Cake day: March 28th, 2025

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  • Justin was the right leader at the time he was elected, but his ‘best before’ date had certainly come and gone. Politics really wears one down. American politics wears down a Canadian leader even more. But Justin did stand up to Trump and won in the last round of trade negotiations with America.

    Fell flat on his face in the Meng Wanzhou, affair, however. The Michaels were clearly targeted because of their American connections - one with the Democrats the other seriously tied to the Republicans. Lawful and legitimate targets for the Chinese, they fit perfectly into the requirements - influential Canadian citizens who were very close to American politicians and under the American State Department umbrella. Justin knew (or should have known) that, and he fell right into an American cesspit that there was absolutely no good way out of for Canada.

    Methinks also his Catholicism and the political fighting between the Pope and China at the time had something to do with the animosity, as well. Really, selecting as the Canadian ambassador to China, a devout Roman Catholic official who is a staunch supporter of and even leader in the Roman Catholic Church bid for domination of the world religious order, during this crucial time? Smells entirely of Justin putting his religion ahead of sound international diplomacy. China never got over that slight, and held it over Justin and Canada ever since. China hit Canada hard, economically, for that.

    The world has changed since he was first selected as PM, and the new era requires a different leadership style. A ‘just watch me’ decisiveness of his dad, but without the arrogance. Carney has that style. When he lead the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, he got things done while outmaneuvering the politicians. And he understands more than any other world leader today about how money and the economy work. A ‘social responsibility conscience’. we will have to wait and see, but that is what the Green party is for.





  • The Canadian film industry is so huge that a great majority of ‘Hollywood’ films have at least part of the movie shot in Canada. Night at the Museum (all of them) was a big one that very few people realize was shot in Canada. I Robot, also parts of it shot here. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Chronicles of Riddick (all of them) was shot in Canada. The list goes on and on and on. The reason why so few Canadians recognize Canadian cities and settings in the American movies is that the sets are aways ‘Americanized’ - American flags, American money, American license plates, American road signs, American brands, American store branding, American iconography. Even if you knew it was shot in Canada, you would hardly recognize it as Canadian. The sets are purposely designed to look American. Even when it is supposed to be a Canadian city in the movie.




  • And you forgot to mention, we are a lot SMARTER than the Americans.

    It s true, Americans have hugged the limelight for 70 years, always, ahem, Trumping the news. No matter how loud we shout, it is always the American voice that is heard in Europe. But really, the reason lies not just in America’s behavior, or even Canada’s, but in the complete disinterest of Europeans in even bothering to learn anything about Canada, the assumption in Europe being that we are just ‘not significant’ compared to the US. Even though we did a lot more to defend Europe in the two Great Wars than America did. We were the ones that developed the strategies for the new technological warfare (Vimy Ridge, for example), the Americans simply copied them. It’s just that the Americans took all the claim.


  • Daryl@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.caCanadian Video Game Developers
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    7 hours ago

    Vancouver and Alberta (for graphics) are world leader communities for game development. Unfortunately, most of the second and third stage development money is from America, so even if the game was designed and created in Canada, it is usually marketed in America. It’s all about who distributes the game, not who first develops it, that determines ‘country of origin’.



  • A computer science major in college, huh? That makes you more knowledgeable than I am? I TAUGHT computer science at the college level. I was doing neural networks in the 80’s. My first computer language was Fortran. I still have a chunk of core memory from those days - wires woven through magnetic cores. I KNOW why you are completely wrong - you just didn’t pay attention in class. You refused to learn. Students like that are very common, unfortunately. They always make life ‘interesting’ for teachers.

    Of course, the fact that you consider ‘intellectual discussion’ as swearing, using vulgar language, and insults says everything about you.

    You are EXACTLY a perfect example of ‘How can people really BELIEVE that crap?’ You live in a world of stupid, and nothing will change that.



  • Daryl@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTrump vs China
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    19 hours ago

    The Americans are panicking over China, they have no idea what to do and are just making knee-jerk responses pretending they are doing something and looking ‘tough’ in the eyes of Americans. Yet what exactly can they do to a country that has 3 trillion US dollars in ‘spare change’ of your currency and holds US$759 billion in your treasury bills?

    The fact is, just like the financial meltdown a while back, China will just use this opportunity to buy up even MORE of American manufacturing, invest in building more US manufacturing plants (using American slave labor wage workers) and soon the US will be nothing more than a branch plant country for Chinese corporations, all profits returning back to China.


  • By some definitions of AI, a light switch IS AI. That is my point. AI is so broadly defined, and applied, that it is a useless term.

    Deep Blue, Alpha, matters not. These systems play chess, because they were set up to play chess by humans. They can not of their own volition suddenly decide to not play chess, but to play something else they were not designed for. The neural nets are trained on a specific task. They make decisions based on that training, and that task, and the task inputs. It is still basically algorithmic, where the algorithms have built-in modifiable parameters that can be real-time adjusted within their limits. It is a long way from mimicking neurons. It mimics what some human theorist THOUGHT neurons performed like. But it is still a programed algorithm that comes from a human mind, just that it is on a different technological platform than a binary computing device. It is an example of a machine being able to fine-tune a system output in real time based on feedback inputs.

    The intelligence has not evolved, the human capacity to create algorithms and devices to apply those algorithms in more novel and complex ways has evolved. It is human thinking that has evolved, not the ‘artificial intelligence’ per say.

    You are very, very wrong about the ‘no one knows how these neural networks work’. This statement is a perfect example of the hype behind AI. They are not hard to understand, and their functionality is not hard to grasp, as long as one can get around the bug-a-boo that they are not digital or Boolean devices. They do not follow truth tables or traditional truth table logic. But it is perfectly understood how they make decisions. We are, however, in the very rudimentary state when it comes to graphically or diagrammatically or schematically or even mathematically depicting how they work - the iconography, symbology, terminology has not yet developed comprehensively.

    The ‘nets’ have absolutely no idea what is ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. or ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’. Those are human concepts that have been anthropomorphically applied to inanimate devices. What it is in reality is some form of feedback circuit (human intervention or automated) that drives the system closer or further away from the desired state -‘desired’ as determined by the human operator. We did this many decades ago, even before digital computers, using analog potentiometers and electrical meters. Musicians do this all the time when they ‘fine tune’ their instruments. We have just gotten better and better at automating it and applying it to more complex situations. Some chess moves result in a better melody, others result in a more noisy sound. The instrument - the chess playing device - is simply fine tuned by repeated performances to produce the best sound, as we humans have determined ‘best sound’ to be.

    Living neurons, on the other hand, are still not completely understood, nor do we understand exactly how neurons make decisions. The best guess is that they use quantum effects, but that is only based on the fact that we are discovering more and more that life itself is based on quantum effects - photosynthesis for example, or the methods birds use for navigation across continents. But living neurons have nothing in common with these ‘neural nets’ except that a picture of one was used as some conceptual pattern or intellectual starting point that triggered some ideas in the mind of a very creative person. Like seeing a bird fly triggered the idea that maybe humans can fly. But neural networks have as much in common with living neurons as airplanes have in common with how birds fly.

    But in general, what we call AI is still nothing more than humans setting up machines to automate the application of the algorithms our human minds think of in the first place. Just a more complex, complicated, light switch - some device that allows us to automate the process of connecting the light to a power source, without having to connect the wires every time we want to use it.


  • I don’t need to ‘look up the history’. I was there from the beginning. ARPA and DARPA. Unix based. No WWW, no HTTP, no HTML. . No ‘MarkUp Language’ at all, because there were no web pages. No browsers. Everything text based TCP/IP. Pin-up ‘Pictures’ sent as very elaborate constructs made from different typed ASCII characters providing the different shades of grey, depending on the density of the characters. I still have one. tucked away somewhere in my file drawer, I think. Since it was mostly used by grad student tech nerds in the beginning, discipline was strictly enforced by ‘flaming’. It was only when the WWW became well established that corporations realize there was money to be made from it. Before that, it was indeed ‘free’. Well, the lines paid for by the Government and Universities.