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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • There are always things people have in common. More-so today with the accessibility to media provided by the internet. That said being a friend to someone isn’t about checking a bingo card of similar interests. It’s about listening to their experiences and being interested.

    What do people watch on tv, what are they listening to, where have they vacationed recently, did you hear about xyz happening in the news.
    Kids. People with kids talk about their kids.

    Some of that might overlap with your experiences, some of it won’t, it doesn’t need to. You just need to shoot the shit, hear what they’ve been up to, say what you’ve been up to, and enjoy doing it. Maybe do an activity of somekind while your at it, maybe just eat dinner.

    The age range is just when people get busy with life and have less free time to actually do things. So they have less to talk about. Work becomes their lives. That changes eventually, wait another five year period. You get settled in your career and your focus shifts more towards what’s going on in your actual life.

    You should look up ‘speech communities’. It’s a linguistic anthropology thing. Essentially boils down to ‘people talk differently and about different things depending who they’re talking to and where’. In your case you want a group of work friends to talk about work topics with, separate from your group of childhood friends, who you can talk about non-work topics with.



  • If only we had strong provincial governments that were actually working together with the federal government, we could actually see some positive change. They could easily put a cap on gas prices, which ultimately would be tax dollars paying the difference in flux, but they would actually have a vested interest in scrutinizing the changes closely. Gas companies would actually have someone they needed to justify an increase to that has the power to refuse. It’s not hard to bamboozle 40 million people with a 2 cent/litre increase every other week, we all have to drive to work. It is hard to bamboozle the tax man.

    That said, it would also be easier if they colluded for them to drive up profits and hide the fleecing in our taxes. I guess it would depend on who was in power.

    Also Suncor got hacked. Not seeing it much in the news outside of a couple articles. So we can expect gas prices to be effected by that, fun timing with legislation that will supposedly have an effect on prices. How much will be column A and how much column B, I wouldn’t put it past what passes for journalism here to push it all onto the legislation.



  • I think there’s a problem with people wanting a fully developed brand new technology right out the gate. The cell phones of today didn’t happen overnight, it started with a technology that had limitations and people innovated.

    AI is a technology that has limitations, people will innovate it. Hopefully.

    I think my favorite potential use case for AI is academics. There are countless numbers of journal articles that get published by students, grad students and professors, and the vast majority of those articles don’t make an impact. Very few people read them, and they get forgotten. Vast amounts of data, hypotheses and results that might be relevant to someone trying to do something good, important or novel but they will never be discovered by them. AI can help with this.

    Of course there’s going to be problems that come up. Change isn’t good for everyone involved, but we have to hope that there is a net good at the end. I’m sure whoever was invested in the telegram was pretty choked when the phone showed up, and whoever was invested in the carrier pigeon was upset when the telegram showed up. People will adapt, and society will benefit. To think otherwise is the cynical take on the same subject. The glass is both half full and half empty. You get to choose your perspective on it.


  • Yup, not enough med-school slots, not enough doctors to teach more med-school classes, not enough hospitals to employ more staff back when staffing them wasn’t the problem. These issues have been decades in the making and there’s now no easy fix. If provinces had kept pace with medical infrastructure this wouldn’t be an issue today.

    Eventually we’re going to end up paying the bill to get caught up, at a premium, with interest, at inflated prices, with money that doesn’t exist because instead of saving anything they gave it all away in tax cuts and subsidies. They’ll blame it all on Chretien probably.






  • Scholarly articles have ‘impact’ measurements. ie. The impact they have on that field. My understanding is that it’s a combination of # of times it’s been cited, # of times its been downloaded/read with a heavier weighting towards citation. You can filter articles by ‘impact’ in many library databases.
    A theory that is not well accepted will be cited less, even if it’s being cited to be debunked the citations still count as impact, however an article with a greater impact will be cited significantly more which suggests the theory is more compelling.

    As far as my understanding goes.