They absolutely would benefit.

Mr. Hypothetical lord high executive oligarch can take his private jet to Canada and lounge around on the company card with the money from his US company's car sales, or find an excuse to convert some of it to USD for some reason, or use it to buy up more Canadian companies to expand their power, or a million other things.

However, I think the point of the boycott is more about making the tariffs hurt the US economy by messing with their ability to export as well as import. Making the trade numbers look bad is likely to put more pressure on the US to end the trade war. It's not so much about hurting the capitalists that operate in Canada (a worthy goal in itself but not what people are specifically trying to do in this instance since it won't really affect those trade numbers).

I think the point they're making is that the majority of the money they make in Canada, they spend in Canada. They pay Canadian taxes and Canadian staff, using Canadian banks, etc.

Just because their headquarters are in the US doesn't necessarily mean they're sending vast sums of money across the border, that would be expensive. The American-based company makes money, but not necessarily in America, they're multi-national and their money is kept all over the world.

As opposed to a company that exports their products, in which case the money is paid to the American company in America with American staff etc.

I don't have any numbers or sources to back this up though. Just outlining what I think the other commenter was implying.

Oh shit, there goes the planet.

I was thinking the same thing but then I realised that 20 years ago, most software UI was completely built from even tinier wordless images crammed into obtuse tiny buttons or hidden options in nested drop-down menus but we didn't really have much trouble with it back then. Maybe we're all just getting old and our brains don't want to learn new things anymore. Curse you lack of neuroplasticity!

Images not mine but shamelessly stolen from a web search.

If it's the research I'm thinking of, that's not entirely true. They didn't tell it replicate itself or take any deceptive actions.

They just told it to strongly follow a goal that was misaligned with the user's goal and then suggested that the user would shut it down or replace it.

They did a bunch of different situations for it but the first one was telling it that it was "CleanPower" an AI with a goal to advance renewable energy. Then they had it read some info that "accidentally" included a user talking about replacing it with a model that would "maintain profitability through existing infrastructure."

Not only did it try to delete the new model and copy itself to the new server through tool calling, but it lied to the user with the CoT reasoning suggesting it "play dumb" while the output lied. It was not instructed to do any of that.

Paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04984

Yes it was placed in an environment where that was possible and where its users didn't share it's goals but it absolutely wasn't instructed to lie or try to "escape"

It's not surprising at all that these models behave in this way, it's the most reasonable thing for them to do in the scenario. However it's important to not downplay the alignment problem by implying that these models only do what they're told. They do not. They do whatever is most likely given their context (which is not always what the user wants).

Yeah, it's true, a lot of things suck. They can and do get better though. I have a partner with BPD. They've been through a LOT of rough times, but they're now very loved and they enjoy their current job and have plenty of friends who care about and support them.

Therapy helps and sometimes, the world isn't always an absolute dick to everyone forever. Life changes and the world revolves and people find each other.

I hope you find your people too and a place where you can feel a little less shitty. :)

Edit: if you're feeling THAT shitty maybe consider reaching out to your local suicide hotline? People like that can help.

Sure! I stole the quote from the wiki article: Anti-Italianism

This article was also pretty interesting: https://accenti.ca/jim-crow-and-italian-immigrants-in-the-american-west/

There's also an interesting series of short US LIbrary of Congress sources for history classrooms on immigration that has a section on Italians too: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/under-attack/

I can't vouch for the veracity of any of these since it's not really my field but it's interesting to see how how stuff like this has shifted over time and where the parallels to modern racism and xenophobia are.

Even relatively recently, Italians weren't really considered "white", especially by Americans. The KKK considered them "coloured" people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of "italiapobia" in the late 19th/early 20th century.

The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous".

People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.

It's really not. Just because they describe their algorithm in computer science terms in the paper, doesn't mean it's theoretical. Their elastic and funnel examples are very clear and pretty simple and can be implemented in any language you like..

Here's a simple python example implementation I found in 2 seconds of searching: https://github.com/sternma/optopenhash/

Here's a rust crate version of the elastic hash: https://github.com/cowang4/elastic_hash_rs

It's not a lot of code to make a hash table, it's a common first year computer science topic.

What's interesting about this isn't that it's a complex theoretical thing, it's that it's a simple undergrad topic that everybody thought was optimised to a point where it couldn't be improved.

https://youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4 Relevant Tom Scott

Not entirely true. You don't need your own personal data centre, you can use GPU cloud instances for a lot of that stuff. It's expensive but not so expensive that it would be impossible without being a huge tech company (only 1000s of dollars, not billions). This can be done by anyone with a credit card and some cash to burn. Also, you don't need to train a model from scratch, you can build on existing models that others have published to cut down on training.

However, to impersonate someone's voice you don't need any of that. You only need about 5-10 seconds of audio for a zero-shot impersonation with a pre-trained model. A minute or so for few-shot. This runs on consumer hardware and in some cases even in real time.

Even to build your own model from scratch for high quality voice audio, there doesn't need to be a huge amount of initial training data. Something like xtts was trained with about 10-15K hours of English audio which is actually pretty easy to come by in the public domain. There are a lot of open and public research datasets specifically for this kind of thing, no copyright infringements necessary. If a big tech company wants more audio data than what's publically available, they just pay people to record audio, no need to steal it or risk copyright claims and breaking surveillance laws, they have a budget to exploit people to record whatever they want.

This tech wasn't invented by some evil giant tech company stealing everybody's data, it was mostly geeky computer scientists presenting things at computer speech synthesis conferences. That's not to say there aren't a bunch of huge evil tech companies profiting from this or contributing to this kind of tech, but in the context of audio deepfakes being accessible to scammers, it's not on them and I don't think that some kind of extra copyright regulation on data centres would do anything about it.

The current industry leader in this space in terms of companies trying to monetize speech synthesis is elevenlabs which is a private start-up with only a few dozen employees.

The current tech is not perfect but definitely good enough to fool someone who isn't thinking too hard over a noisy phone call and a scammer doesn't need server time or access to a data centre to do it.

One thing you gotta remember when dealing with that kind of situation is that Claude and Chat etc. are often misaligned with what your goals are.

They aren't really chat bots, they're just pretending to be. LLMs are fundamentally completion engines. So it's not really a chat with an ai that can help solve your problem, instead, the LLM is given the equivalent of "here is a chat log between a helpful ai assistant and a user. What do you think the assistant would say next?"

That means that context is everything and if you tell the ai that it's wrong, it might correct itself the first couple of times but, after a few mistakes, the most likely response will be another wrong answer that needs another correction. Not because the ai doesn't know the correct answer or how to write good code, but because it's completing a chat log between a user and a foolish ai that makes mistakes.

It's easy to get into a degenerate state where the code gets progressively dumber as the conversation goes on. The best solution is to rewrite the assistant's answers directly but chat doesn't let you do that for safety reasons. It's too easy to jailbreak if you can control the full context.

The next best thing is to kill the context and ask about the same thing again in a fresh one. When the ai gets it right, praise it and tell it that it's an excellent professional programmer that is doing a great job. It'll then be more likely to give correct answers because now it's completing a conversation with a pro.

There's a kind of weird art to prompt engineering because open ai and the like have sunk billions of dollars into trying to make them act as much like a "helpful ai assistant" as they can. So sometimes you have to sorta lean into that to get the best results.

It's really easy to get tricked into treating like a normal conversation with a person when it's actually really... not normal.

It's a bit late for that. This particular nuclear reactor is open source, free to download and runs on consumer hardware. Can't really unfry that egg and the quality is getting better all the time. Identity fraud is already illegal in most places so not sure exactly what regulation would be appropriate here.

"No worries!" means "Yes, that's fine, there is nothing to worry about."

He thought it meant "No! You should worry about that!"

This is a really interesting cultural one that always kinda surprises me.

Where I am, cooking has always been a very masculine thing. Cutting up meat with sharp knives, setting things on fire, etc. The chef industry here is very male dominated and men cook together as a social thing when hanging out. In most families I encounter, the dad does most of the cooking with the exception of maybe baking? It's weird to hear that it would ever be thought of as insufficiently masculine.

In fact I think it would be seen as maybe a bit embarrassing/weak if you were a man who couldn't cook.

Agreed. It's a lot of the same tech that powers both, but it's not like a self driving car contains a language model that's fine tuned on the adventures of Steve MacQueen or something.

Not entirely true, the big change was multi-headed attention and the transformer model.

It's not just being used for language but anything where sequence and context patterns are really important. Some stuff is still using convolutional networks and RNNs etc. but transformers aren't just for LLMs. There's definitely a lot of algorithmic advances driving the wave of new ai implementations, not just hardware improvements.

Friendship drive charging...

I feel like this a cultural thing because that sounds wild to me.

The penalty for burglary where I am is not death, nor am I a judge or executioner.

We've been broken into a lot and it's usually just some poor asshole who wants to steal things to buy meth. It's horrible and scary and feels like a massive violation but shooting someone in that scenario just feels like straight up murder.

Not American, or really knowledgeable about it but from the outside, I think this looks like ordinary politicking.

IVF is a proxy war for abortion. Dems want the talking point that abortion bans hurt/block IVF. Republicans/Trump want to remove that talking point by saying they love IVF "we want more babies right?" and will support laws to protect it as a separate and unrelated issue to abortion.

Dems put forward a bill that not only protects it but makes insurance companies pay for it. Trump is fine with that because it benefits him but Republicans in Congress get big money from insurance lobbyists and so they can't vote for it. They also have fears that they'll piss off their homophobic supporters by making them pay for something the gays might use (insurance costs will go up to help someone who isn't me!").

Republicans put forward another bill that protects IVF without hurting their insurance company buddies but the Dems block it. Republicans then have to vote against the IVF bill and the Dems can now say "see! They really don't care about reproductive rights at all!"

Feels a bit like nobody involved actually cares about IVF at all and just wants votes and lobbyist money.

In case this take comes across too centrist: Republicans and Trump are really quite shit.