Iran
Trump, Netanyahu: for God's sake, get on with it.
Carney, Alberta and the 51st state
One of the major problems with the original NAFTA agreement was that it didn't go far enough - trade across the Canada/US border became easier for most high value products and services but political and regulatory action intended to protect local favorites, particularly in the populous Toronto-Montreal corridor, exacerbated both the reality and the emotional content of inter-provincial trade barriers inside Canada.
Had one major component of the original NAFTA idea: jointly determined continental policies on trade and migration, been implemented the worst of the abuses NAFTA, and later the USMCA version, led to would have been avoided. Specifically, the agreement as implemented:
- practically invited Chinese and other low cost manufacturing companies to use Canada as a transshipment point by-passing American tariff - exactly the exploit Carney's China deal promises to legitimize - and that drove the replacement of Canada's already weak industrial sector by one devoted to the assembly and relabeling of products made elsewhere.
- led directly to Canada becoming the refuge of choice for middle and upper class parents in places like Pakistan, China, and Nigeria seeking economic and political opportunity for their children. As a result our post secondary education facilities became dependent on foreign monies while major urban centers, particularly Toronto and Vancouver, saw a massive influx of people largely unschooled in Anglo-American (or, really Christian) ethical traditions like respect for law or the rights of others. What they did have was cash - and that, coupled with Canada's relatively weak criminal and regulatory controls (because based on the expectation of widespread decency embedded in the system's evolution to this point), attracted both independent and organized crime.
In consequence claims of widespread corruption in Canada's financial, regulatory, and political systems now seem highly credible; ordinary people working for their living cannot afford housing in cities like Toronto and Vancouver - where two room shacks in the boonies can cost over a million dollars - and people in the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where primary production remains prominent and most people still believe in work and family as routes to success, now see their neighbors in states like Montana and the Dakotas as people much like themselves and their own countrymen in places like Toronto and Montreal as profoundly alien.
So now we have people gathering signatures for a referendum on breaking Alberta out of Canada. I don't think it will pass; this time. Eventually, however, something like it will pass; probably before one passes in Quebec too, and that's too bad because Canada without Quebec would be much stronger and probably even capable of change, while Canada without Alberta just isn't possible.
(Two reasons: first British Columbia would be cut off from central Canada; and, second, Alberta money keeps Quebec and the Maritime provinces in Confederation. Without us, they're broke with no industrial base, an aging and/or incapable workforce, and huge natural resources they're both unable and unwilling to exploit.)
AI and coding
I have been working with perplexity.ai - in large part because my cell phone account provides access to the pro version for nothing.
It looks like, and to a large extent is, a fantastic search engine. Where it falls down in search is the tendency to cite sources that are no longer there: the web changes, but search results come from cached pages. This isn't much of a problem as long as you are willing to check its sources (which it provides links for) whenever you want either currency or certainty on anything not a simple matter of fact.
Perplexity can also be extremely helpful in looking up coding syntax, but there are three major gotchas affecting this:
- syntax in open source code tends to change as new ideas are brought in or old ideas removed - and hardly anyone offering code snippets or other advice in various forums or other services bothers to fully identify releases and/or environments. So if you ask perplexity something like: "what is the command to have ffmpeg remove every second frame from an mp4 clip" you get the right answer because ffmpeg doesn't change syntax much between either releases or host environments. Try something like "what is the colmap command to identify GPU use", however, and you'll get the wrong answer every time because colmap is evolving very quickly and perplexity.ai gives you what it finds on the web - it doesn't know anything on its own;
- it's a search engine with a human emulating front end - so you can't correct it. Tell it to use "FeatureExtraction.use_gpu 1" instead of "SifTExtraction.use_gpu 1" and it will acknowledge the change, but use SifT on the very next script snippet you're trying to get it to help you write; and,
- it is very good at consistency checking, but does not understand purpose. Ask it to help find an unmatched single quote in a bash script and it will find one in a line that's commented out - tell it the script has to distinguish left and right cameras for use with Colmap and it will give a clean looking script that gets nearly everything wrong - including incorporating mapper commands that have been discussed but not implemented.
Note that I have not tried grok - but perplexity sometimes offers answers from Claude instead, and it has not been any better on this.
Bottom line: it's a wonderful search engine, does a beautiful job of formatting responses (ask it " what is the average price of a 1972 Volvo 1800ES" and you couldn't do a better report without spending hours on it;) but that's about it - a threat to search monsters like google and anyone dependent on referrals from google search, but not a threat to competent coders.
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