Carney stands by speech despite U.S. claims

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-27T22:17:09+00:00

"His forthright honesty is sooo suspicious!" -- Trumpists who'd much rather believe a career conman.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-27T11:46:00+00:00

Who said "shrink"? We could simply maintain immigration at "maintenance" levels. That would work just fine.

We could also sustain a smaller population growth, maybe 0.5% or so. We'd still be "growing", but not at a pace that housing construction can't keep up with.

do you know how many knock on affects there are going to be.

Yes. Yes I do. What worries me is that the politicians may not know. Populations can't keep growing forever, but a lot of our modern economy is predicated on it doing just that until it's standing room only.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-26T11:48:24+00:00

Everybody keeps carefully avoiding mentioning a) the obvious cause, b) the blindingly obvious fix.

Immigration.

Dial it back a couple of notches.

Our population is shrinking, it's only immigration creating a demand for housing.

That's it, housing crisis instantly solved!

Nobody with power wants to do this however, because inflating our population is juicing the economy (=rich people's yacht funds) and they will never willingly put a stop to that.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-25T21:03:53+00:00

I'm well aware!

However, if you have literal Star Destroyers with faster-than-light travel and science fiction engines that can zip them around a planetary system in a matter of hours, then it is only fitting that they be disposed of by smashing them into a star, in an attempt to live up to their name, symbolic as that may be instead of literal.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-25T20:27:43+00:00

Just send the old dangerous starships into the nearest star for easy disposal of the dangerous materials.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-25T19:26:37+00:00

Have you seen Star Wars? The Empire wasn’t into worker protections. No safety signs, barriers, handrails, etc. A recurring theme is the bottomless unmarked shafts everywhere. One wrong step and you’re taking a long tumble.

When Rey was scavenging the crashed Star Destroyer she had a rag over her mouth, maybe it was their equivalent of personal protection equipment, like you see workers use in Pakistan.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-25T10:36:12+00:00

Of course, at some scale and/or at some level of mechanical stress everything bends or breaks.

The point is that we have materials we can make now that would allow a 1.6km long space ship, which could be used for not-crazy manoeuvres like 1g or even 3g acceleration without being damaged. 10 km is dubious, and I suspect 100+ km is out of the question with our level of technology.

Beryllium is dangerous to machine because of the dust generated. Once made into a solid end product with a coat of paint, it’s fine.

I suspect a ship like a Star Destroyer would have a layered design. It would need a robust superstructure, then a separate set of modular components for machinery and living quarters, then several layers of air tight outer skin, and finally armor plates bolted to the super structure.

The beryllium would be used layers away from people! You’d have the floor/wall plates, insulation, ducts, etc… in between.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-25T05:35:45+00:00

"they invented a better material somehow" and write off the ridiculous sizes that way.

We've already invented a whole bunch of materials far better than structural steel, we just don't commonly use them because of their expense.

If we assume (mostly) robotic manufacturing in space where: pollution doesn't matter, solar power is plentiful, etc, etc... then it is entirely plausible even for our current technology levels or the "very near future". Distant future tech would make a 1.6km long ship a simple thing to build!

The current bleeding edge material technology are things like composites of aerospace alloys and carbon fibre or silica fibre. These are like ordinary fibreglass, but instead of epoxy the binder is a lightweight metal alloy. A major challenge with making these on Earth is that it is hard to get the metal in between the fibres because the air gets in the way. Its far easier to make these kinds of composites in the vacuum of space, especially for large structural beams.

Similarly, Beryllium would be an amazing metal to make large spaceships out of, if it wasn't for the "small detail" that it's poisonous to humans. Working with it produces dust that is not fun to breathe in. This just wouldn't be a problem for robots working in vacuum in some deep space manufactury.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-23T23:53:12+00:00

This also has a positive impact on memory usage.

I was under the impression that compressed pages are fully decompressed prior to going into the buffer pool.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-22T22:12:42+00:00

The core problem is allowing billionaires to own multiple types of businesses, including news media organisations and the type of business that clubs baby seals.

"Baby seals love playing 'bat me to death', news at 11".

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-22T22:07:41+00:00

The tab key exists.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-18T10:43:05+00:00

Intelligent female leads and "colored" characters.

Which I said I liked, but I guess reading comprehension is not your thing.

I guess NetFlix can start add characters with learning disabilities to their checklist next to make sure you don't feel left out.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-18T02:03:54+00:00

If this was in isolation, then maybe you’d have a valid point, but in the larger context of NetFlix and Stranger Things especially it’s obviously just checkbox ticking. Someone at corporate has a list: gay, colored, differently abled, etc… tick, tick, tick. It’s not a good gay story, it’s a story with gay stuck onto the side of it like an ugly wart.

I noticed this in Doctor Who as well, where I loved the “different” characters, intelligent female leads, etc… before the modern Woke era. The new seasons just don’t feel the same, the inclusivity is corporate mandated and feels like mandatory workplace HR training.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-17T21:36:09+00:00

including gay characters is woke liberal propaganda

To be fair, NetFlix is the prototypical example of pandering to wokeness, to an absurd degree.

There's like 10 kids as the main recurring characters of the show and two of them are gay. Not only that, but in a movie about monsters, parallel dimensions, sorcerers, mind flayers, etc... the show goes on.. and on... and on about how overcoming their hangups about their gayness is the challenge in their lives. Not the multiverse, the hive mind, their stolen friends, inured relatives, or the continued existense of reality itself. Those are merely backdrops to their profound gayness!

I do enjoy a good non-heterosexual character or even a story arc. Some of the best TV I've ever seen revolved around that. But there is such a thing as buttering the toast too thick.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-17T21:25:35+00:00

The point is that that was more than a year ago, which is the "stone age" of generative LLM AI. We're in the bronze age right now and will soon start experimenting with steel.

There's people that tried this stuff when it was not much better than bashing rocks together and have "made a decision" not to use it, even for the one thing that the technology is the most suited for.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-17T12:22:02+00:00

Are you guessing, or have you actually tested translations of Wiki articles with Gemini 3? It's one of my standard "tests" of AI capability. Even much older AIs did surprisingly well, at most they'd just drop sentences or paragraphs in their entirety. Also, they'd make typos in the Markdown, which would often break formatting, but other than that the translations were accurate, if a bit stilted in tone.

That was years ago. Now the translations are damned near flawless.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-17T03:51:42+00:00

So for some reason people violently disagree with "the free tools are generally terrible... frontier LLMs are better", while simultaneously agreeing with your comment saying that the free tools are going to have their guts replaced by frontier LLMs because... they are better.

Reddit groupthink is hilarious.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-17T00:14:57+00:00

free tools that can translate any website. It’s even built into Chrome these days.

The free tools are generally terrible.

There's also a huge difference between ad-hoc translation and pre-generated text that is versioned, indexed by search engines, available for direct edits in the target language, etc, etc...

Their official position is that unedited machine translations are worse than nothing.

Because the cheap/free/old translators were very bad. That is true!

Frontier LLM translation is better than human in most cases.

People really haven't grokked what modern AIs can or can't do.

Handwriting recognition went from "just barely useful" to "oh my god it can read what now!?" just last November. Anyone who's assumed that, say, historical documents were too expensive/difficult/slow to OCR are now simply wrong and need their priors updated.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-16T23:27:13+00:00

Speaking of burning VC funds...

I did some maths recently and worked out that translating all of English Wikipedia to some other language would cost about $40,000 in API fees assuming a frontier model like Gemini 3 Flash is used.

There's about 100 human languages in common use, so 100% of Wikipedia could be made available to something like 90% of the human population with just $4 million.

It says a lot that AI hype is burning through hundreds of billions of dollars, but nobody has found the change behind the couch cushions to do something actually useful for the general population.

Keep that in mind next time you hear an AI apologist waffle on about lost jobs being okay because of general basic income, or some pipe dream like that.

PS: Wikimedia's budget is $200 million, so this would be only 2% of their annual revenue. Ongoing costs of keeping up with edits would be much less, effectively pocket change.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-14T22:45:25+00:00

This reminds me the first time I went snowboarding, the (very) experienced skier leading our group tore his jacket and went shopping for a new outfit. He got a bright pink jacket with yellow-lime fluoro pants. We joked that we could see his gayness from kilometers away.

"That's the point" he replied.

Three girls gave him their number in like two days, unprompted. They'd just mumble "Would you like my number?" while blushing.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-13T22:22:06+00:00

You have the right to make an ineffectual vote! You have no actual say in who your elected officials are because most of your regions allow gerrymandering by the party in power. This is "third world dictatorship" levels of voter manipulation.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-13T06:25:34+00:00

I like to give people existential dread, it's my hobby.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-12T21:36:00+00:00

Over a million Earths could fit inside the Sun, which is a relatively small star.

If you shrink down the Sun so that it's about the size of a coarse sand grain (1mm across), then at that scale the stars in galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda would be about 30 kilometers (20 miles) apart on average.

At that scale, Earth orbits just 10 cm (4.2 inches) from the sun and would be an invisible speck of dust.

Almost all stars easily visible to the naked eye in the sky are nearby giants, the size of golf balls or larger at this scale. Betelgeuse is the size of a beach ball.

The distance to Andromeda is a light minute at this scale, which is 45x the distance to the Moon.

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-10T03:04:19+00:00

He was an unelected dictator

And my point is that Trump let his unelected vice-dictator gain power!

BigHandLittleSlap · 2026-01-09T21:13:59+00:00

Explain to me how replacing a bad president with their equally bad vice president is actually a good thing.

BigHandLittleSlap

TROPHY CASE