I lived in Ontario for 20 years then I lived in Seattle for the next 17, I assure you that the healthcare I receive and received is pretty much the same - except in Ontario it's way cheaper.
You're talking about cutting edge technologies available to the tiniest sliver of people - I'm not even able to get access to much of them with my private FAANG insurance - and drawing a false comparison.
Nope. I've not only lived in both countries, I work in healthcare so I'm very close to who gets access to what.
And it's not "the tiniest sliver of people", we're talking about disease like cancer. Check out the CAR-T rates in the US vs. Canada, the difference is stark. And CAR-T is standard of care in some types of lymphoma.
Hell, ask parents with autistic kids what kind of early intervention is available to them in Canada. I had a coworker who moved to the US so he'd have much better access for his kid at a time when it had a big impact.
Look at access to the cystic fibrosis therapy that effectively cures it (e.g. Orkambi). It was paid for by insurance (and Medicaid!) from the day it was launched and avaiable to everyone it could help. In Canada some provinces just started paying for it, but only kids, adults are shit outta luck.
And I don't know the details of your FAANG insurance, but my US insurance (typical corporate insurance) pays for all these new technologies.
Canada is great if you have a routine issue. If you need something specialized you're going to be treated with therapies that are a decade or more old. Hell, even the CBC wrote a whole story about 2 friends with breast cancer and the differences in treatment.
"Then I found out that this other country — which I thought had a healthcare system that was so superior to the U.S. — doesn't test for the tumour marker that saved my life, and doesn't cover this drug that is responsible for pushing my cancer into remission after traditional chemotherapy failed to do that."
It's not though. It's fast enough for many applications but if you need to write a hypervisor then suddenly bounds checks and atomic pointers become significant. Not to mention that rust dramatically reduces your ability to control where memory is allocated.
I write in rust and c++, rust isn't as fast. Rust is easier to work with and, compared to the Java crap it's replacing at my work, it's a lot better but it's certainly not zero cost abstractions the way c++ can be, nor is it great for data oriented design because you're hoping the compiler will do the right thing, consistently.
And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
> I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
When AI use starts to be a line item cost on public companies' financial reports + Anthropic and OpenAI have IPOed and have to file financials too + they kill their growth-hack monthly all-you-can-eat plans.
The entire house of cards falls down when the success metric shifts from "Are you using AI?" to "What return value are you getting for the money you're spending on AI?"
Some smart companies / departments are going to be able to demonstrate stellar AI ROI, but I'm going to be shocked if the bulk of current demand isn't revealed to be naked. Mostly because middle management is always stupid about adopting and using new technology.
There's nothing people run out of faster than other people's money. I expect this second half of the year we see that the cracks in the AI business grow and bring the whole thing down.
Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
> I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
AI companies are running out of money to subsidize those queries, and worse are needing to show a profit. All while they are having a harder time to raise more money as investment.
If nothing changes, things should become more rational soon.
... now... IMO, I place the odds of nothing changing very low...
How? Any world wide company will have local offices for local operations. They are big enough that they have whole data centers there. Of course they'll hire some locals.
Calculated risk? Nah those guys are gloriously insane. They do minimize risks, but they also go into the air wright-bro-style except instead of a glider that will go 200m they're strapped to two experimental jets in an airframe that was welded, not pressed ^^
I am not saying that test pilots are not brave. They certainly are. However, they are brave + skilled + practice + smart + can perform under stress.
This is a slightly stretched analogy, but test pilots make me think of Alex Hannold. In the movie Free Solo he is presented as some insane person... it turns out that he is extremely intelligent + skilled + practices a lot + can perform under stress.
In both cases, they are the best of us. However, being brave/nuts is the elementary school version of understanding what it takes to be these people.
Most of them involve very weird and unlikely scenarios and bad security practices or access to the ffmpeg binaries and being allowed to run arbitrary commands at an elevated permission.
In and of itself there's not a massive issue from what I can see, they're entry vectors that can lead to worse situations.
That's not to say they're not serious but if a Russian hacking group is using one of them it's in conjunction with other exploits or security flaws. Which is common in practice when it comes to decoding.
Speed and security are not good bedfellows. Combine that with really shitty standards and dozens of years of development...
Oh, and licensing. Licensing is the real killer. I could just write my own mp3 decoder easily (the format not the file type) but I'm not gonna risk my company getting sued into the ground by doing that.
> I could just write my own mp3 decoder easily (the format not the file type) but I'm not gonna risk my company getting sued into the ground by doing that.
I am confused.
> The MP3 format is now patent-free and requires no licensing fees to distribute or use. Fraunhofer IIS and Technicolor officially terminated their MP3 licensing programs, with all core patents having expired. Anyone can encode, decode, and distribute MP3 files or software without paying royalties.
Sorry I was painting a broad image. I'm also worried about copyright infringement, discovery, someone switching to a different different that requires glpl, etc
You raise a good point. You can substitute "MP3" with any patent-/copyright-/license-laden important media codec and you will face the same issues. Your comment would be very timely in the year 2005, when MP3 licensing was a serious issue for game devs.
I don’t think this is necessarily true! Constraints can be liberating: a language that allows strong encoding of invariants makes it easier for the language’s compiler to optimize.
I agree about long periods of development and difficult standards, though.
Forcing developers to consider and more is harmful though. You're arguing to put all of the forethought upfront, when you have the least context and least understanding of what can go wrong, and carrying that complexity forward rather than starting simple and refactoring over time.
You're talking about cutting edge technologies available to the tiniest sliver of people - I'm not even able to get access to much of them with my private FAANG insurance - and drawing a false comparison.