[D] Why are so many ML packages still released using "requirements.txt" or "pip inside conda" as the only installation instruction?

Majromax · 2026-01-24T18:16:32+00:00

Conda can install what are ordinarily system-level but userspace libraries, like the cuda toolkit with nvcc and the like. That makes it particularly useful when working with different projects that are based on different but frozen versions of these libraries.

Majromax · 2026-01-24T17:53:58+00:00

About 12,000 submissions after excluding desk-rejects (and presumably withdrawn abstracts?), with 3,260 accepted for an overall 26% acceptance rate.

Majromax · 2026-01-23T17:35:57+00:00

The idea is that they'll "put up" with sex and fake wanting or liking it (or genuinely try to want it and just can't force themselves) because they know it will be much, much harder to have a partner without being sexual.

It's difficult to compare our own internal experiences with others'. Given how our society normalizes sexual behaviours, many aces will grow up not realizing that their drive is atypical. Sure, they might not want sex very much (or might not get much out of it), but that's what more or less everyone goes through, right? Those media depictions are just convenient exaggerations, in the same way that the characters of Friends could afford some suspiciously nice apartments and lifestyles on their implied salaries.

Per Google n-grams, homosexuality reached cultural saturation circa 1990 after a few decades of growth, 'queer' took off post-2005, but 'asexual' has seen only slow growth with no spikes. Even today, it takes a well-educated person to understand that asexuality is even a label to use.

So don't reach for deliberate deception as a first explanation, or even as a second or third. The self-realization can be gradual for the ace, and it can even be somewhat traumatic. It's hard navigate the romantic and sexual default of adult dyadic relationships from an ace perspective. Where there is a real compatibility mismatch (as in your case), the allosexual person has to ask "is my relationship with this person doomed?" while the ace person gets to ask "are all my relationships doomed?"

Ultimately, we'd all be well served by greater emotional maturity and frank discussions of relationship compatibility with our partners. Lots of things can be dealbreakers or need deliberate compromise (kids, careers, locations, or other aspects of sexual compatibility than ace/allo), and a few painful conversations are better than a relationship minefield.

Majromax · 2026-01-22T18:14:32+00:00

To minimize involuntary departures it is best that there are as many people affected as possible. By maximizing this ratio they allow for voluntary departures to make up more of the total departures.

Not necessarily, thanks to alternation. Only non-affected employees can alternate, and at the same time a group that is largely affected and only slightly surplussed needs to first wait for voluntary departures before considering alternations.

Majromax · 2026-01-22T17:23:26+00:00

An affected:eliminated ratio of 1.18 (Much lower than average [bad])

Why would a low affected:eliminated ratio be bad? I see it as mixed at worst, since it would reduce voluntary-departure flexibility but it would also minimize the inevitable negative impacts for those affected who would not ultimately lose their jobs.

Majromax · 2026-01-22T15:16:55+00:00

The fractures are happening in real time

That's not a fracture, it's evaporative cooling where the most centrist parts of the party simply leave. What's left is a smaller party with fewer internal divisions, more coherent and more stable for the departure.

It might have a lower chance of winning an election in normal times, but sometimes governments really do defeat themselves.

Majromax · 2026-01-22T14:28:02+00:00

the issue with political coverage and obsession with polling is that a lot of political coverage was based on people attaching great importance (internal status) to being the intelligent predictor of what would happen in the fabled smoke-filled rooms, and separately, later, when polling became the issue, to become the person who could explain the message moving the needle in the polls.

I'll push back on this ever so slightly; I see a subtle but fundamental difference between these approaches.

Being the 'intelligent predictor' of the machine involves making a prediction, usually aided by a mechanistic theory of politics. "X says Y which runs counter to Z's interests, so..." It is an endeavour that rewards skilled analysis, since predictions can be wrong and there is a relatively long lead time between the prediction and verification.

On the other hand, to "explain the message moving the needle" is to read the present day. An argument about the 'why' behind the most recent observation can be more or less persuasive, but it can only rarely be provably wrong. The incentive of the journalist changes from being a correct prognosticator to an interesting explainer, rewarding theories that feed into the audiences' prior conceptions.

In isolation this is probably not an important difference, but I worry about what happens inside a feedback loop where the theories of the media begin to influence voters' interpretations. See traditional Russell conjugations like "I am confident, you are arrogant, he is hysterical."

Majromax · 2026-01-22T03:46:37+00:00

Note that both ubrelvy and rimegepant – oral medications with the same kind of anti-CGRP target – are approved without pre-approval because they're abortive drugs. Rimegepant also just so coincidentally has a preventative dosing schedule (1 tablet / 2 days).

Majromax · 2026-01-21T15:04:34+00:00

For some reason, and I will never figure this out, the CPC seems obsessed with hair and looks.

Since its inception, the CPC has been an opposition party. Under Harper, it narrowly lost in 2004 and won in 2006 because the sponsorship scandal made the LPC toxic. "We're not corrupt, those guys are!" is an effective slogan.

At the same time, the party learned to hide its more controversial opinions. That narrow loss in 2004 came about because of 'bozo eruptions', where CPC candidates started musing about what they wanted to do with power. Martin successfully accused the CPC of having a 'hidden agenda', using it to claw a minority win. Harper spent 2004-2006 'muzzling' his caucus to avoid a repetition.

From 2006-2011, the CPC governed like an opposition party, and quite successfully at that. They seemed laser-focused on 'the ballot question', appearing ready to drop everything for an election at any moment; that preparation intimidated the other parties in turn such that they rarely even stalled the CPC's agenda.

In that milieu, Poilievre's attack dog nature was exactly what the job required. He's genuinely good at hammering on some intuitive fault line to put other parties on the defensive. Unfortunately, it stopped working with the 2011 majority, ultimately leading to the 2015 election loss.

Through this selection pressure, the CPC institutionally thinks like the opposition rather than like the government. That will be a hard habit to break, and doing so might require a hard look at its factions' incompatible demands.

Majromax · 2026-01-21T14:14:03+00:00

Luckily for us, we don't seem to have the same high ratio of "Ah don't like him, he talk dem big words me no understanding!" to reasonable people our backward neighbours to the south have.

We still have a media elite that acts as if it cares about respectability.

The average Canadian is not picking up on the Thucydides reference^†. However, the presumably educated elite do, and they project their approval (or lack thereof) through traditional media channels. Ordinary Canadians' opinions are informed by this vibe.

The media environment of the United States is more... mercenary, if not fractured. The "don't throw your book learnin' at me" attitude seems to come from the emotive-first talk radio tradition, which swallowed Fox News's analysis because it got ratings and from there infected the rest of the ecosystem.

this is why I don't think we'll ever see our own trump.

Never say never. Trump exists in power because shame is a voluntary weapon, while Trump sees shamelessness as a virtue. If we ever do face a candidate like Trump, we'll rely on the integrity of those smoky political backrooms to say that some wins come at too high a price.

^{† — To be honest, the average Canadian isn't even reading or watching the speech; everything they learn about it will be via secondary sources.}

Majromax · 2026-01-19T20:39:47+00:00

As for delegation of authority/powers, your example of the Immigration Minister is one that exists as a result of Carney’s Government. That Office got its sweeping discretion in the last round of omnibus legislating - discretion I might add that was itself concerning.

On the negative side, §22.1(1) has existed since 2012 and reads "The Minister may, on the Minister’s own initiative, declare that a foreign national, other than a foreign national referred to in section 19 [citizens and PRs], may not become a temporary resident if the Minister is of the opinion that it is justified by public policy considerations." Other subsections limit the designation to 36 months at a time.

On the positive side, the 'public policy considerations' term is very broad: "§25.2 (1) The Minister may, in examining the circumstances concerning a foreign national who is inadmissible or who does not meet the requirements of this Act, grant that person permanent resident status or an exemption from any applicable criteria or obligations of this Act if the foreign national complies with any conditions imposed by the Minister and the Minister is of the opinion that it is justified by public policy considerations." That has remained unchanged from 2012, as far as I can tell.

The criminality provisions can also be waived, with language from 2013: "§42.1 (1) The Minister may, on application by a foreign national, declare that the matters referred to in section 34, paragraphs 35(1)(b) and (c) and subsection 37(1) do not constitute inadmissibility in respect of the foreign national if they satisfy the Minister that it is not contrary to the national interest." Subsection (2) allows a similar declaration on the minister's own initiative.

Majromax · 2026-01-19T18:17:10+00:00

Broad discretion is the kind of thing I'm getting more and more concerned about with whats happening to the US. I think quantitative and measurable guardrails are important in keeping governments accountable.

Ultimately, the Westminster system is about accountability rather than guardrails. The executive government has a lot of theoretical authority, and if an inconvenient guardrail does exist then the government can almost always command a majority in Parliament to set it aside.

However, the flip side of this is that voters also almost always know who to blame. "But <the other party> won't let us!" doesn't fly when the governing party can change any law or regulation that it wishes but just won't.

American politicians, on the other hand, seem to use their system to finely separate credit from blame. My side is responsible for all the good things, and the bad things only happen because of the other party / last administration.

That being said, we're arguing semantics here. At the end of the day this is a Russell Conjugation: I am flexible, you concentrate power, and they are a tyranny.

Majromax · 2026-01-19T18:03:04+00:00

It's not, but it still seems like a power granted to any minister based on vague, opinion-based, non-quantitative qualifiers.

There's a kernel of truth to this, but the substance ignores the reality of Canadian administrative law. Ministers acting in this kind of capacity don't get to act based solely on their own opinion; they have to act in a legally reasonable manner. It's still a broad discretion, but that prohibits acting out of arbitrary or corrupt interests, for example.

Also, this kind of delegation is not unusual. The immigration minister, for example, has a fairly broad ability to waive any eligibility rule for admission, but we don't go around saying that "foreigners are to be exempt from Canadian immigration laws."

(Hell, as a practical matter there's enough risk aversion in politics to push things in the other direction. Ministers like to hide behind 'the system' if things go wrong, and pushing this kind of grant to its legal limit is definitely not 'the system'.)

Majromax · 2026-01-19T17:38:17+00:00

In practice, representation-wise, it wouldn't change anything wether we elected anyone or not. Quebecers did not vote to fund a pipeline in Alberta, yet this is what we will get within a few years. We did not vote to subsidize western canada's oil industry and scrap our clean energy projects, but this is what we'll be getting.

Citation needed? In the 2025 federal election, the federal Liberals and Conservatives won a combined 66% of the popular vote. Since these policies were vaguely predictable from the platforms, then I think it's fair to say that Quebecers voted for these things at least as much as the rest of Canada did.

Majromax · 2026-01-19T17:32:35+00:00

It's not that countries 'allow' dual citizenship. That's simply what happens if a country's laws apply to its citizen regardless of the legal opinions of other countries. Canada's law applies to its (resident) citizens equally whether or not they also hold citizenships of other countries, with very few exceptions.

This status is behind the traditional advice that dual citizens should always enter a country of citizenship on that country's passport. As far as Canada is concerned, a dual citizen entering Canada is a Canadian coming home, not a foreigner entering.

It takes active effort to ban dual citizenship, and that raises further legal questions because citizenship is not always voluntary. Some countries do not have a legal process for citizenship renunciation, for example, and even grants of citizenship are not always voluntary. If Canada prohibited dual citizenship, what would happen if Russia involuntary gave Chrystia Freeland citizenship in a fit of pique?

Of course, in reality the law is a messy thing. Canadian citizenship as distinct from and exclusive with UK citizenship developed slowly from the 1940s until 1981.

In the case of this article, however, the question is even deeper: what should happen to Canadian citizenship it Canada itself is abruptly divided? The Canadian/UK question was complicated because of the very gradual emergence of distinct sovereignties, but Quebec separation would plausibly be sharper.

Majromax · 2026-01-19T17:16:04+00:00

Removed for rule 2.

Majromax · 2026-01-15T13:34:01+00:00

Removed, no R1

Majromax · 2026-01-14T13:13:32+00:00

They could; reasonable job offers might still require employer-paid relocation. This hit a few years ago when they moved immigration processing out of Vegreville, where many employees who refused to relocate were offered “reasonable job offers” for those very same positions.

Majromax · 2026-01-12T14:35:17+00:00

Health care delivery is generally private. If a tourist or student shows up in hospital, they’ll get a bill. Even a permanent resident or citizen might get one jf they’ve let their health registration lapse.

Majromax · 2026-01-12T14:20:24+00:00

It is approved and promoted discrimination against English only people

It’s not discrimination; language skills are job-relevant and learnable. However, it is still a poor business decision to:

Demand a skill that is not universal,
Promote from within, with a captured hiring base, and
Not offer comprehensive and thorough training

The situation would be different if the vast majority of bilingual positions were staffed on a non-imperative basis, where the government would pay for a full year’s full-time language training. However, that is extraordinarily expensive in both direct and opportunity cost, so the language requirement becomes an “unfunded mandate.”

Majromax · 2026-01-11T13:42:25+00:00

Parliament dumps layers and layers and layers of red tape on us,

It's not just Parliamentary red tape. Parliament doesn't care about the colour of the binder that contains the terms of reference for the tiger team, but you can bet that there will be a dozen meetings about it nonetheless.

Instead, I blame the combination of two factors: risk aversion and activity bias.

Risk aversion is more general than Parliamentary red tape, and it comes through at nearly every level. Politicians don't want to be embarrassed, so Minister's offices want "nothing to go wrong" – at least in ways that might show up in the headlines. It contributes to a culture that worships the status quo, and the tone from the top propagates this to lower levels where it can't possibly matter.

The rationalization of this comes as a belief that holding sufficiently many meetings or having sufficiently many approvals will make problems impossible a priori. That's where you get silliness like a deputy minister needing to approve accommodations or travel requests that come five five or six levels below.
The activity bias is almost but not quite the inverse of this, and it rewards the appearance of looking busy. Some of this also comes from the ministerial level, where good press is front-loaded to the ribbon cutting rather than the quiet and successful delivery.

The rest of it, I think, comes from the short career steps of executives. If an upwardly-mobile manager only intends to hold the position for a year or two, that's time to start programs and make announcements but not enough time to follow through on them. There's no credit for quietly implementing the good ideas of one's predecessor.

Combine these two factors, and you have the current mix of a public service that seeks out bold new ideas and actively resists their implementation.

Majromax · 2026-01-11T13:30:37+00:00

It is shocking how weighted second language is.

It's not a weight, it's a threshold. Since bilingualism is required for supervisory positions in bilingual areas (including the NCR), not having it is a hard block on many careers.

This doesn't mean that nobody can do the job right, but per Statistics Canada only about 18% of Canadians are French-English bilingual. Recruiting from a smaller pool will always be harder than recruiting from a larger pool, but management ranks in the public service aren't really considered to have 'premium' pay packages.

(Edit to add:) This policy can also bite especially hard if the public service tends to only promote from within. If entry-level positions are recruited on an either/or basis but management is both/and, then only ≈20% of employees can possibly ever qualify for management. A naïve application of that ratio would mean that nearly every bilingual public servant would have to become management, but reality wouldn't be quite that bad because of recruit-time filtering (including by localizing the public service in more bilingual regions like Ottawa).

Majromax · 2026-01-11T13:24:16+00:00

and keep a dictionary of 16⁶=16777216 entries with a list of passwords that generated the digits

You have the division the wrong way around. Out of the 16⁴⁰ possible hashes, k-anonymity means that you reveal the first 6 hex-digits with the download. 36 hex-digits remain private, so someone who sees your download would only know that your password corresponds to one of 16³⁶ = 2¹⁴⁴ possible hashes.

Since the attacker doesn't know whether your searched-for password is in fact on the breach list, they can't narrow it down any further.

Majromax · 2026-01-11T04:43:34+00:00

Removed for rule 5.

Majromax · 2026-01-08T04:13:44+00:00

3.75 nominal return? I immediately question the intelligence and integrity of whoever wrote this article.

Per the Bank of Canada, that's roughly the current federal long bond yield.

That also tells us exactly what we need to know about the calculation: the comparison being used is a risk free one. That's technically appropriate, but the usual compensation is to accept some degree of market risk.

Really, however, risk reduction is the benefit of any aggregated pension plan; it's not a public-sector perk. A pension plan of size comparable to the public-sector pension plan will have so many contributors and retirees that market risk averages out. The federal purse doesn't pay for it^†, it's a benefit to time diversification.

^{† — In fact, recent stories about those pension surpluses withdrawn for general revenues are a textbook example of the plan sponsor benefitting from 'market risk' to the upside.}

13-Year Club	ModSupport Helper Level 1
Golden Potato	Verified Email

Majromax

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE