When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.

So two regions declare they want to be closer and your reaction is “we should conquer a couple countries just to show them up”?

This is exactly the problem.

What specifically do you mean “under the wings of the US?”

So the implication is continue doing that?

I’ve always been told don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.

The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the US anymore. Not for military protection, not for defence procurement, and not for trade or supply chain. That legacy has ended entirely by choice of the United States.

The problem has moved beyond monetary trade value and into existential risk.

A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.

Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.

To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.

Cloudflare has gotten out of hand for me lately. Not even solving a challenge will get me through many times, I'll just get straight up blocked from normal browsing. I guess because I do crazy things like use Firefox and block some trackers I get punished more than the average internet user.

I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.

The manufacturer does not known there is a problem. You will be counted as a bot in Cloudflare's reporting, and most people do not question that.

Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.

They already knew to drain the basin. Control-F in a PDF is way less annoying than watching a 9 minute long (for the algorithm) YT video.

Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.

This was my thinking. It seemed easier to find the exact instructions for my dishwasher and most of the advice available was for newer models that had different control layouts.

Plus, the repair manual is full of flowcharts for diagnosing and resolving issues, which is very useful.

I've yet to find a video as straightforward as the manual. Not only do you need to find a video with the right information, you need to find where within the video that information is.

Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.

> In fact, with Astra and Fable I feel like not only are the costs astronomical, but the models are also just not for me as a software engineer.

This is how I’m feeling as well. The models are so happy to run and implement that they forget to keep me in the loop or make it understandable.

If I want to magic something into existence or one shot an analysis, the model is happy. But if I want to direct, understand, and manage they fall completely flat and are unable to explain things for me.

It’s even hard to discuss planning because Claude will run off and start pulling data and analyzing my projects and spend 5 minutes on something not needed, when I need a rubber duck that can sanity check things and push back.

My non technical colleagues love it, but I’m fighting the thing all the time.

It’s a contrived example, but also not very far from the mark.

The spinner with random claudisms is what makes the game, mixed with Claude helpfully deciding to pick up some tasks along the way.

I feel like most of my conversations with Claude lately are a battle of “I am a technical user, share technical details, but not random superfluous gibberish”

This hasn’t been my experience at all

There are differences in labour and environmental laws that I do actually want a tariff to equalize.

If we have standards and laws it’s unfair to allow outsourced competition to skirt them and collect the savings. That’s a recipe for disaster.

I would be lying to say this doesn’t piss me off. I’m very angry.

My wife made a great point: this is a wake up call for me to channel my frustration into local activism. So I’ll be doing that.

If any other angry Canucks are reading this, consider doing the same. Use that anger to make our beautiful country stronger.

Americans should do the same.

Stop believing that nothing matters, stop believing the propaganda that leads to empty cynicism and learned helplessness. The only reason we are where we are is because of who stepped up and who stayed home.

It’s definitely a heavy thinker, like most Qwens.

I see strings like “write, now.” In the thinning traces then it goes on to think for a lot longer, so it’s kind of weird.

I haven’t figured out hope to use this effectively yet on my strix halo.