For anyone in #yeg in need of any random household item (from cheese graters to some furniture): my girlfriend is moving into the city and there's some downsizing needed from both household collections, and I've accumulated a LOT of crap over the years. I would semi-guarantee against quality, but if you're going, say,

• "damn, I desperately need just, like, any spatula"
• "two generic ice-cube trays would be nice as we get to hot weather again finally"
• "you know what for some reason I want? a screw-mountable wire CD jewelcase holder"

etc etc, hit me up! I may be instantly able to say yea or nay, and if not I'll keep a list while we sort through everything over the coming week/months. This will inevitable include some major furniture pieces (and if you're in desperate need of a mattress and can't afford anything but would take a free one previously held by folks extremely paranoid about bedbugs, we have at least one, maybe even two...).

And we'll be doing enough running around the city we can drop any item off basically anywhere, though if you're near #Parkallen you can certainly come pick it up (or just swing by my front yard on 110th street and check through my free crap to-a-good-home items box for a subset of stuff I don't reckon I could donate to a formal place but would seem wasteful to outright trash).

Boosts welcome, especially from folks who have #Edmonton followers. We really need to get rid of things, but would rather they end up used rather than trashed, yaknow?

Oh geez, it's hitting a few hours later than forecasted by the HRDPS West or Continental modelling so there's hope we'll avoid it being this bad but

• HRDPS West predicted a big drop of over 10mm
• HRDPS Continental reckoned 35mm

#yegwx rainpocalypse continues

I honestly think that those data farms are intended for surveillance rather than LLM usage. There's no profit path for LLMs. The only company who has made a dollar from LLMs is nVidia.

But if you want to be the private contractor that provides the government with compute and capacity to track every person in North America, those data farms are table stakes.

What I can't work out is why they'd bother with that level of surveillance in a society already disinclined to rebellion.

@glyph Agreed. I think the way to solve this problem is to always have three main planks in mind when building systems:

1) Open source
2) Ability to Self-host
3) Interoperability/Data Portability

To my mind these are all as important as each other.

In attempting to distance himself from his own company’s executives and strategy documents, Nadella has revealed that he either does not know how to read or does not know what is happening with some of the company’s highest-profile products.

https://www.404media.co/satya-nadella-not-sure-who-said-microsoft-wanted-to-make-addictive-ai-is-looking-for-guy-who-did-this/

these modern SQL query builders are amazing! I tried a simple SELECT * FROM TABLE; and it failed, but there's a handy "fix this query with AI" button that went and read the docs for me and rewrote it into a different, equivalent form, which also didn't work

@DavidM_yeg Exactly. Because of magazine deadlines, I wrote this column before the news about the reshaping of AISH broke. It is galling to watch the UCP cry crocodile tears about the rights of the disabled while simultaneously reducing basic benefits for many severely disabled Albertans.