No, Alberta isn't trying to seceed. Our quisling premier tried rabble-rousing with a referendum on whether to have a referendum to try to seceed and the separatists got crushed at the polls.

Hopefully we can put this idiocy to rest now.

It was only "divisive" in the minds of fringe imbeciles. This should never have come to a ballot.

Cosmically abundant, but not abundant on Earth. Or any terrestrial planet, for that matter. The problem is that helium is both extremely light and chemically inert, so it quickly escapes into space from any celestial body smaller than a gas giant. Earth lost all of its helium almost immediately after it formed.

The helium that it does have is stuff that was produced deep in Earth's interior as a result of radioactive decay. When an atom releases an alpha particle as part of a radioactive decay chain, that's a helium nucleus. The helium seeps upward through the crust and gets trapped as a contaminant of certain natural gas pockets. The helium we harvest industrially is extracted from those particular natural gas wells as a byproduct of four billion years of radioactive decay. When it gets released into the atmosphere - such as when it's used in a party balloon or blimp - it disperses into the upper atmosphere and is lost to space. One use, then it's gone forever. Eventually those natural reservoirs it's being extracted from will run dry and that'll be it - no more helium available on Earth.

I really hate party balloons. What an utterly ridiculous waste.

I'm all for AI, personally. When using it as a programmer it's a huge force multiplier, just pay attention to what it's doing.

Nice. All available in a torrent; citizen journalists have at it.

Not just to boost the payload, but to reduce the wastage of literally irreplaceable helium as well. It's a completely non-renewable resource and there are other applications that there are no substitutes for (such as coolant).

Thanks for at least not being so angry you didn't bother adding that edit, I was very "wut?" There. :)

It's really kind of baffling just how bonkers the right wing has gone over transgender issues. I mean, not really baffling - you pick a random scapegoat and hammer away, that's how authoritarianism works. But why transgender? So weird. I guess it's a bit easier because of how humans often get excessively wound up about sexuality, just look at basically every religion ever.

I worked for a Microsoft studio for a while that took forever to allow Copilot to be used internally, and they were all Microsoft. It was very frustrating, especially given that permission was finally granted for Copilot use just a matter of weeks before the whole studio got abruptly shut down anyway.

Corporate bureaucracy. Weird and dumb.

Well, open weight is not open source. There's a lot of black box still left in those models.

It's still far more open to investigation and analysis than the likes of ChatGPT, though. Lots of work has been done to allow some degree of investigation into how the "brains" of an LLM work and in the case of Deepseek you can actually apply those techniques to the model you know you're using.

There are different levels of trust one can apply. In the case of Deepseek you can run the model on your very own hardware with no external connection to China at all. You can abliterate and fine-tune the model's weights yourself. You can observe all of its reasoning text as it works.

So I think I'd trust Deepseek over the likes of OpenAI, who insist you send all your data to them and be happy with whatever they choose to send back to you.