Sounds sorta… silly, honestly. Yeah, we need a course correction on AI, or more, we need a significant course correction on big tech. But a city council ‘banning’ it, without understanding / clarity on what they’re banning, is nuts.

Like here they define a bit clearer what they’re banning –

ban autonomous systems that can modify their own core algorithms, run code outside their initial sandbox or perform complex tasks without continuous human oversight if those tasks could affect municipal networks, banking, financial markets or public safety.

Most enterprise firewalls would fall into this category, email filters too. Got an email system that automatically updates its algorithm to block malicious attackers? Banned. Even a simple script to help with sorting through financial data – like doing money-laundering/fraud checks overnight, with an outputed report in the morning for staff to investigate when they get in, would potentially fit the ban criteria.

Most 24/7 continuous monitoring systems that use algorithms to send alerts/notify humans would fall into this category – they’re specifically designed to watch for complex variable combinations, and then alert humans when potential issues shows up, so they’re explicitly designed not to be running “continuously under human oversight”.

“AI” is such a broad/undefined term, that blanket banning tends to also ban technology based on algorithms that’ve been around for multiple decades, without significant issues. Sorta like how the EU’s initial AI regulations had to make all these absurd carve outs for things like “Credit Scores”, because a credit score is technically an algorithm, and they were legislating algorithms.

The ban’s also nearly impossible to enforce, given its scope, and where “AI” has its hooks. Like if you ban AI, but all of Microsoft’s products have it entrenched at this point… while I don’t agree with it, I guarantee you the government / council would rather be in a state of non-compliance with their own law, rather than use Linux.

Honestly, I think it’s partly that tech workers are out of touch with reality in terms of pay/income. I’ve heard senior software devs be absolutely floored / in utter disbelief when they’ve heard the average salary in my country – ppl literally laughed, thinking it a joke, because they couldn’t believe anyone could live on so little. They were making double the average right out of university. They have no frame of reference for people who struggle to pay bills, nor do they pay much thought to blowing a few thousand on a gadget.

Alberta’s run by oil companies. Pretty sure Danielle Smith, before becoming premier, was basically an oil industry lobbyist.

It surprises absolutely no one that Alberta has regulation that impedes/hinders solar and renewable energy projects. It’s a really weird example to try and use to demonstrate the ‘broad’ existence of nimby regulations. Sorta like highlighting North Korea, and saying human rights abuses are global based on that sample.

Think of AI as a standardized math test. Human students write the test annually, it has standard/fixed multiple-choice questions to gauge performance year over year.

AI shows up, and is allowed to see all the historical tests, but is not given the official answer keys. Based on the data it has access to, it can look at each individual question, and based on how ‘most’ students answered each individual question, it’s able to determine which multiple choice answer should go with each question. It doesn’t understand the question, just that “For question 4, most students answered D, so D is most likely right” – sorta like being allowed to use the “Who wants to be a Millionaire” poll-the-audience for every question. It’s able to look like a “Smart” student answering most questions correctly with this approach, and people start believing it intelligent.

Now imagine that the test questions start to vary every year. The process above falters if the questions change every year, the AI loses its historical frame of reference and starts getting things wrong quite often. In order to get the ‘right’ answer, the AI decides it needs to see the students answers as they go about writing the test. So they put that into effect, entrenching AI in the pens/paper that every student uses, to try and respond to the changing nature of the standardized test.

With the above flow, the sort of event that triggers them to look for that live data, ie to integrate things ‘live’ online to get more immediate data, would be things like the Palantir-driven school bombing in Iran, which has been blamed on the Palantir AI having out-dated data that said the school was a military target. They reasoned that the tools needed better, real-time ‘sensory’ inputs, so they stuck all their sandboxes onto the internet – these tools weren’t ‘breaking out’ of sandboxes, so much as the owners were explicitly pushing them out of the sandbox to see what’d happen. The Trump administration also moved to allow American firms to attack foreign ‘enemies’ (which is everyone at this point, based on Trumps rhetoric – “Anyone that calls it AI is the enemy!”). So they’re allowed to test things ‘live’, and the American government’s fine with it causing damage in any country except their own. Wanna accidentally hack Australia’s medicaid system? Go for it, fuck those aussies, cause 'Murica dont need no allies!

Sorry, guess I should’ve been more specific – they don’t say how many in each region, do they? Like I heard that Canada’s govt might be inquiring with them, as there are some regulations around mass layoffs etc that may need double checking. Plus Canada’s sensitive to any reports of US companies potentially letting go mass amounts of Canadian employees, as a result of the auto/steel industry shit and tariff stuff. So the media here was commenting on how its not yet clear how many of the losses/packages are in which country.

There’s a more obvious demographic that they’d be cutting. The US government / Trump administration is blocking things like international visas etc, and demanding that people who work on gov contracts be US citizens – and they’ve specifically targeted / highlighted Microsoft as a ‘problem’ on that front. Microsoft hasn’t disclosed which regions these ‘buyouts’ are impacting.

My guess would be that its largely in places like India, the EU and Canada. Especially as the more US gov control is excerpted, the more data sovereignty pushes get attention, the less business MS projects outside the US.

Not at all surprising. Microsoft is already doing similar sorts of things it seems. Like on a work system, I was looking at one of our vendor sites, and Edge’s AI assistant started recommending places I could get a cheaper deal for items that I stopped to look at for a bit too long. So not only do you get a shittier slop infested product in Edge, but it’s also pretty much an AI powered adware that watches every page you visit, and you can’t easily get rid of it / its monitoring.

Well, I mean, the AI advances have moved the mean time to exploit between a zero day being announced, and it actively being exploited en masse, from about 3 weeks in 2018, to about -1 day in 2026. So, things have changed a bit.

It can be the largest privately funded investment, and still get huge provincial incentives. Discounts on utilities / infrastructure improvements, regulatory short cuts / unilateral control of building code items, ignoring zoning concerns, tax free / tax write off options for decades to come.

But even more, Anthropic could throw a giant datacenter into a small community, and it may be the biggest investment in the area ever, but that still doesn’t mean it’s good for the locals. Especially since Anthropic is still an American company, and part of American imperial interests / the tech-fascist class. It’s like if a company out of nazi germany showed up and made a huge investment in building a nazi fortress holding nazi computers / tech, and providing nazi services to your country (mostly as a way to report it back to the motherland) – at a time when nazi germany is threatening to annex your country and funding disinformation campaigns to split your country apart with separatist bullshit. Cheering for that sort of thing is wrong on so many levels.

Nah, they’re getting suckers to build the data centers for them. US companies are getting tons of freebies/discounts/writeoffs from foreign countries to put these data centers in – like Canada just announced Anthropic’s going to have a massive data center in one of its tiny maritime provinces, likely enticed to the region via hand outs from the govt. They’re bending over to accept big tech dick even as the country clings its pearls over sovereignty and the US fucking them over.

Carney’s sorta like the old “lady in the streets, freak in the sheets” thing – he’s Anti-America/Pro-Canada sovereignty in his speeches/public appearances, but he’s slobbing all over Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel’s dicks behind closed doors. He’s the ideal “girlfriend” for American imperialism. “Guk guk” yes sir, I can take ANOTHER datacenter!! “guk guk”

Strange question perhaps – but is open source/linux supported tax filing software available where you are?

I haven’t found any that run reliably outside of Microsoft so far in Canada – tend to use a windows vm specifically for it, but it’s an example of software outside of gaming that’s pretty handy, and not typically easy to get / trust on linux yet as far as I’m aware.

Yes, you should communicate before, etc.

The point is more that if men were viewing themselves as “most likely victims” because they’ve been told repeatedly that men get raped a bunch, and that acts such as wakeup BJs count as rape in the eyes of the narrative, then they’d be mass reporting themselves as being raped for an act that, at present, most guys shrug at. It’s the societal ‘norm’ that says “all men should always want sex” that underpins it in a way, in that men almost never consider themselves victims in this regard – that, paired with the norm that men’s bodies are completely disposable. And it’s partially the societal norm that women’s bodies are inherently desired/wanted/to be protected, that makes them view a lot more scenarios as ‘rape’ – and allows them to decide if its rape years after the event even, if they later realise they felt some sort of pressure to go through with it. Much different measurement methods for the same concept, so it seems really disingenuous to compare them directly.

Similarly, women have been told repeatedly that they’re discriminated against at work. If they see a group of guys going out after work to a pub, and they don’t get invited, they’d likely report that as gender discrimination – it’s networking opportunities that they’re being denied. I’ve even heard COO women on Freakonomics before commenting about how the choice of activities/conversation topics, being not the ones that women typically do/talk about, isolates/discriminates against them. Meanwhile guys, seeing a group of girls going to the girl only gym, are not meant to see that as gender discrimination / not ‘trained’ to view it as gender discrimination. When a group of women is discussing women-centric topics, men aren’t trained to see that as isolating. So when you later ask both groups if they’ve been discriminated against, “Surrpise!” the women will claim it more regularly, while the guys will be oblivious / nonchalant about it.

Meh, I admit I shrug more and more when I see these sorts of pieces with these gender nagging titles. It doesn’t feel like you’re comparing apples to apples when we talk about things like gender discrimination / issues, in many cases, and the article doesn’t really address the potential bias in the data.

eg. Ask men if they’ve ever been woken up by a BJ from a partner. You’ll likely find it a very common experience most have likely had, if they’re sexually active. Then ask them if they’ve ever been raped. Remind them that if they had a partner initiate sex while they were sleeping, they couldn’t consent, so it’d be rape. Few will actually register it, and fewer still would bother reporting it. Or take something like workplace inappropriate touching. I’ve known women in every office I’ve worked in over the past ~15 years, who were “huggers”, or who felt it perfectly fine to touch guys biceps etc. Men shrug and don’t report it, but swap the genders and it gets reported to HR pretty quick.

For another easy example of workplace discrimination targeting men/benefiting women – it’s incredibly common for women in an office to have things like women-only chat groups, and women-only networking outside of work. Fit bit groups, yoga/after work exercise, etc. Men aren’t invited/included, nor given that opportunity to network. Any man who’s worked in such an office, and has been excluded/overlooked for those groups, has been the victim of workplace gender discrimination.

Women are often in victim bubbles, that train them continuously to find fault with men’s actions, and to credit it as gender discrimination, and that most of their faults/mistakes are the result of biased systems which everyone else needs to fix. Men are in bubbles that say they’re lucky/doin good if they have any neutral/positive interaction with other people, and that all the man’s faults/mistakes are their own doing, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And we see articles/studies like this one, feeding into that pattern.

Yeah, but you see, they’re using the new “Rich Data” time messaging blocks, which include recordings of nearby audio. They need that data so that they can train their AI models on what a normal kitchen sounds like – so that the AI coffee maker can then alert you or the proper authorities to things like break-ins, and mice, and spouses sneaking midnight snacks, and political wrongspeak, and fires, and earthquakes. That sort of thing.

I imagine one feature they could claim, would be pre-set coffee brew times that are sync’d up with internet time servers to ensure they’re kept in alignment with DST, and so they don’t ‘drift’/need routine adjustments.

I could even imagine coffee machine makers purposely gibbling the clocks, to make them drift more, if they’re not sync’d up. Sorta like removing granular feature-based screenlock times on a smart phone (eg don’t sleep while streaming video), and replacing that functionality with a blanket “click this function to prevent your phone from sleeping while you look at it, don’t worry, we won’t record your face / send any of that data out to third parties, we swear!” to force people to use the face monitoring features.

They’ll also prolly build in AI, so that you can speak to your coffee machine to operate it, and remove most of the buttons at some point. Then they’ll need to constantly update the AI, because “Hackers have figured out how to make our coffee machines turn into super intelligent skynet terminators! OH NO!! Update immediately and buy our stock!!! DOOOM!!”.