Cuba would be in a much different and likely better position if the USA wasn't embargoing them and doing whatever they can to make sure the country never succeeds.

Local ordinances? Lack of subsidies? I live in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Everyone here has a heat pump. It's getting less and less common to see furnaces of any kind. But the government has been working hard to switch people over where they can, providing subsidies and showing how much lower your bills tend to be.

I greatly suspect Norway has also done something like that, considering the penetration of EVs there as well.

My heating/cooling bills are slightly higher in the winter than in the summer, but not meaningfully so, and we get temperatures down to -20C here occasionally. The heat pump is much slower at heating the house below -20C, but it's not too bad. (In actual fact, the reason why the bills are higher in the winter is because the cats still want to go out onto the catio and that means the door is often left propped open for long stretches of time. They want to do that in the summer as well, but the delta between room temperature and the outside temperature is smaller in the summer than in the winter.)

IN PRACTICE, the reality is that a normal heat pump will be better for your heating and cooling and your bills almost all of the time. If you live even further north than me, like in my old home town of Edmonton, you might invest in a failover heating system. But if you're buying from a reputable local installer, they'll set you up properly.

This is actually happening to the Canadian government in Ottawa. Very similar scenario. Not enough desks, rat infested buildings, complete chaos.

And the government is doing it because downtown business owners are having a hard time. It's madness.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...

Literally everything is worse under this system. For a government that pays lip-service to climate action, it's absolutely unwilling to do even small-scale things like let people work from home and not contribute to pollution and traffic.

As a Canadian, I actually don't see much difference.

A lot of Americans accept the book bans or INSTIGATE the book bans. They don't like diversity, they rail against DEI even when the policies in place are just to make sure that women and minorities get a fair shake. They LOOOOOVE bombing foreign countries, finding scapegoats, coming up with nonsense bathroom bans.

90% of what I see from American news--left OR right--is Americans kowtowing to authority while their quality of life goes down the toilet. They just try to decide which colour of authority they're going to submit to.

This tiktok ban was started under Trump 4 years ago, and weirdly, the Democrats pursued it for 4 years, and now Trump might stop it! When people complain both parties being the same, they're not that wrong. There are some outliers, but mostly it's the same love for the police state, for bombing Palestinians, for letting children get shot in school. Chinese people and Americans disagree on exactly what form of un-freedom they're willing to accept, but they're not that much different.

And in the case of China, there are plenty of more local politics that people ARE involved in, just like here in NA. Chinese people aren't voiceless, they just don't pretend that they actually have a say in Federal politics.

And, like, I'm not ignorant to how bad the Canadian system is about this stuff either. I vote in Federal elections and get no representation, and our electoral system guarantees that I basically never will.

Citation?

One of the FIRST posts I saw on there was a Chinese woman saying there were plenty of LGBTQ+ people on the app, so post all the thirst traps you want. The app is half amazing cooking videos and 25% muscle mommies.

I read a comment from one (Chinese) woman to an American creator that was like, "we find all the other feminists and tell them that we don't accept comments that denigrate women or focus on male sex acts, so we don't say "I'll F*** your Mom," we say, "I'll castrate your Dad!""

The problem the government has with the app is that people are learning that actually, as citizens, they have a lot more in common than they think. We all have similar struggles. We all want to be able to afford groceries and health care and find people to date that don't suck.

But without it, they're on the hook for billions in costs when climate change wrecks up the place.

Someone needs to pay for this, and oil and gas companies have KNOWN for years that climate change was happening and they didn't care. The predictions that exxon scientists made decades ago are remarkably accurate. Indeed, the science of climate change is, broadly speaking, very simple.

Companies that have lied to us for literal decades about how safe and clean their energy is, how nothing bad would ever happen, and now the executives will go off somewhere with all their money and hole up while the rest of us have to clean up literal wreckage from hurricanes and floods, cold snaps and heatwaves.

Global warming itself is regressive and impacts the poorest among us. Someone has to do something, and it sure as hell doesn't look like it's any of the federal governments in the world.

1. The repaid amount should never go over a certain reasonable threshold. Letting loans drag on for multiple times the original value is gross.

2. Governments should probably be paying for post secondary education anyway. Profits and education are a weird mix.

3. Not only should these people be forgiven their loans, they should be given back some money based on my first point.

I feel like these kinds of loans fundamentally misunderstand what is going on: these are people trying to get educated to make themselves and their communities better. Saddling them with huge loan debt is going to obviate at least some of the benefits of educating them; they have to pay their loans back rather than participate in the economy, at the very least.

ChatGPT is wrong just enough of the time that I can't trust anything it says.

If ChatGPT could return to me with a PRIMARY SOURCE of information--like a scan of a manual or something similar--then I might be willing to trust it, but otherwise, it's just relying on some stochastic mimicry and luck to return an answer that I can't have any confidence in.

BMI was a badly conceived tool, developed by a Belgian mathematician who specifically ignored other racial groups. Like, this is the start of a story that ends with, "garbage in, garbage out".

And given a BMI and no other information, you absolutely cannot tell anything about the person it describes. You end up needing supplemental information about the population you're studying otherwise it's meaningless. You certainly can't tell that someone like me with a BMI of 24-ish has a cholesterol problem or wonky blood sugar. You also can't tell how much time I spend exercising or that my resting heartrate is still in the low 50s.

And again, the boundaries are *arbitrary*. They moved the line for 'overweight' several years ago. You went to bed a normal weight, and woke up overweight.

It has all the markings of pseudoscience but we seem to trust it for some reason.

Again, lots of people are probably unhealthy and carry too much fat on their bodies. But there are lots of people that are my size and have health problems, and lots of people that fat according to the BMI, but have great health markers, exercise lots, and will live a longer life, on average, than people that don't fit into the 'overweight' category.

Even if the BMI were a number that could tell you whether or not a person is fat, it still couldn't tell you if they're healthy. It's all trash, and making health policy or health decisions based on a badly calculated value benefits nobody except the fitness/health influencer industry (which is bigger than the pharmaceutical industry).

I have worked with designers who are current or ex-programmers, and I've worked with deeply un-technical designers. Both have their place. And the technical ones can write their own code, but that often causes its own trouble, since they're far more concerned with their feature in isolation than the systems they need to integrate with, or things like performance.

And the non-technical designers should not be given access to anything that generates code. Not only do I feel like that's not their job, it will probably lead to worse results and more bugs. They don't have a good sense if the code they've asked for does what they say by looking at in. We'd still have to have a programmer babysit the whole process, except now that we've done away with the junior programmers and their pipeline to learn the engine, we need more senior programmers to do this work that is much, much less interesting.

There may come a day where this is all much smoother, and more work can be done by a designer and an LLM than a designer and a programmer, but that isn't any time soon, IMO. It would be much more effective to teach designers to write code than prompts for an LLM to hallucinate systems.

I actually think the BEST use for LLMs in our industry isn't taking the place of junior programmers, it's augmenting automated tools that check for bad programming patterns and memory errors, or suggesting optimizations. An LLM doing code reviews is better than an LLM writing code by far. In my experience, most programmers (including myself) don't have the right kind of attention span or time to do a good code review; they're mostly sanity checks for extremely obvious omissions.

In all likelihood, they're talking about the BMI definition of "overweight", which is famously bad, since it can't distinguish between a bodybuilder and a person who is actually fat.

Moreover, the definition for "overweight" has changed over the years, arbitrarily. The set point for "overweight" is defined by people, with no particularly objective measurement of what that means. Turns out for some definitions of the term "overweight", all cause mortality is LOWER than people that are not overweight.

But if that's the case--that you're less likely to die--how does that count as "over" weight? Oh, because it's not the absolutely most aesthetically attractive weight.

And none of this shit tells you whether or not you're healthy anyway. I'm a cyclist and a swimmer, and I'm STILL on statins to control my cholesterol, and my blood sugar apparently swings wildly enough that my A1C most recently showed me as pre-diabetic. I have a good diet and I exercise a minimum of 7-10 hours per week, including lifting weights and all that other cardio. Meanwhile, I know people that don't have these issues that don't eat as well or exercise as much as me. They're HEALTHY.

I'm not saying people don't overeat, but it's extremely unclear to me that this headline is meaningful in any way that relates to health or well being.

There are plenty of lawyers that do really good hard work as public defenders, as labour lawyers, as environmental lawyers. I know more nice people that are lawyers than nice business owners, honestly.

It's just that the family lawyers and public defenders work long thankless hours for surprisingly low pay. It is as it ever was: you can make a lot more money being an unscrupulous dickbag than having any moral compass. It's just that if you have no moral compass and a law degree, it's EASY to get rich. No moral compass and, like, a carpenter? Not as much room for wrongdoing.

Anyway, yes, I'm sticking up for 'lawyer' as a profession here. They're an essential part of any legal system.

So as a games industry Senior Programmer, I can't imagine doing this.

Like, even a junior programmer is expected to have an opinion on the design of the feature they're working on. We have designers, but one of your jobs as a programmer is to give your opinion on whether or not something is fun. Whether it's even POSSIBLE to do within the constraints of the system.

Also, it would be a LOT more work for me to coerce code out of an LLM and then integrate it than tell a junior programmer, "Hey, our designer needs some internal data exposed to the blueprint system, can you get them what they need?" And it honestly doesn't take long to take an enthusiastic junior programmer to a level where you can start tossing REAL tasks at them.

Honestly, all this LLM BS sounds like a way to GIVE me more work, not lessen my load. I can talk to a junior programmer twice a week for half an hour, do some code reviews, and be on call for any of their code questions and that's STILL less work than conjuring some weirdo incantation to an LLM that doesn't know what 'fun' is and then trying to integrate that bug-free into our engine.

Gimme enthusiastic, friendly programmers all day long. I'll teach them how to code myself if I have to, but having someone that plays games, is excited to make games, and can connect with a designer--that's stuff I can't teach.

Don't get me wrong, it's not always a kind industry. Lots of layoffs, lots of shitty managers trying to make you work overtime for free. Lots of bad directors and designers that don't know what fun is themselves and are only concerned with how many microtransactions per hour they can squeeze out of people. But there are still plenty of good studios out there doing great work and entertaining people for a reasonable price. It can be a great gig.

I've seen a few people about it, yeah. My family has a history of heart disease, I think I'm just better about going to the doctor than they were. My grandfather had a few bypass surgeries; I'd like to avoid that if I could. (In fairness, that was also the era of smokers, so I'm not discounting that as a factor.)

But it's also worth noting that statins are cheap, even if they're not covered by insurance (at least in Canada), they have almost no side effects for most people (there's good evidence that any muscle cramping was a nocebo effect; I certainly haven't experienced any more cramping than usual), and they're effective. So why not just take them?

Also: thanks on the encouragement. I'm at 305 for 6 and I'm at the stage where I can add about 5lbs a week. A huge part of the struggle is just building enough GRIP strength to lift a bar that heavy.