… as opposed to English, which was carefully crafted by experts scientifically putting each word in exactly the right place and deriving the most consistently logical system of orthography.

I’ve been to Calgary. If there’s a war on cars there, the cars are definitely winning.

No goats either.

A car is pretty much the last thing you’d want to have a network connection. I’d sooner hook up my refrigerator and let it send analytics data to Frigidaire.

Greenwich?

Yes, that’s the prime meridian, so if you’re looking for exactitude in your hemispheric definition it is the one to go with. Any system of coordinates is an arbitrary choice imposed on the universe for our convenience. It may seem attractively rebellious to reject the one we have, but you’re not going to gain anything but confusion by picking a different one.

That remark was so outrageous that it only took two days of polling data for Poilievre to find out that he disagrees with it.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.