A woman is in critical condition after a driver plunged her SUV into a St‑Léonard strip mall business on Friday afternoon, and she was in the way.
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Kate
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Kate
A man accused of having procured young women for Robert Miller’s sexual use has been arrested and will face charges connected with his alleged activities for Miller.
The Court of Appeal has also ruled that a woman can proceed with her case against the billionaire, after it was tossed out last year. Miller’s claim of being too sick to stand trial isn’t going to protect him from all possible consequences.
bob
The Grim Reaper will probably handle that.
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Kate
The mother of the three-year-old abandoned last month will remain in custody and undergo psychiatric assessment, although I’d have expected something like that to have already begun.
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Kate
The landlord of two buildings where nine people have died in fires is facing a $3,300 fine for obstructing exits in another building he owns. I’m sure the financial burden is keeping him up at night.
What else does this mfer have to do to disqualify himself permanently from owning rental properties?
Meezly
Or to get charged with criminal negligence causing multiple deaths?
Blork
This is where we come up against the limitations of the court, I think. Whatever arm of the law is levying this fine likely doesn’t have the authority to do any more, and that’s probably the maximum fine for the offence of obstructing exits. I’m not aware of any authority by the court to ban someone from owning a rental property.
But surely there’s a criminal angle, as Meezly says. Let’s compare this to dangerous driving, for example. If you are caught driving dangerously there is a certain level of punishment, which is put upon you primarily as a deterrence. But if your dangerous driving causes deaths, a different charge is laid, and if convicted, the punishment is greater.
Robert H
I don’t understand how someone with Benamor’s disgusting record is allowed to own property in Montreal or anywhere. Why can’t the city seize his buildings? How difficult could it be to establish culpability for criminal negligence? How does he sleep? One hopes for some justice in this world, but I’m afraid this shitheel is going to game the system and play for time. Meanwhile he lies low, staying out of the spotlight and counting on an over-burdened legal system, toothless laws, and short attention spans. I’m hopeful the media at least will continue with follow-up reporting in this vein.
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Kate
Reading that generous funding is being poured into Quebec AI projects makes me wonder how much help AI actually needs, and why we’re rushing to make workers obsolete.
(Why do I even ask? The answer is, as always, profit.)
In tangential news, it’s been noticed that the astronauts pictured in AI illustrations at the Planetarium only have four digits…
PatrickC
The article says the problem is that not enough photos of people show all the fingers, but I would argue AI is just reproducing what is found in cartoons, where characters like Mickey M. all have four digits.
Kate
Or the Simpsons, yes.
Kevin
AI is this moment’s NFT, metaverse, blockchain, virtual reality, internet of things, etc…
The only reason it’s being talked about is because there are hundreds of billions of dollars being gambled on (sorry, “venture capitalists are investing in”) the technology, and those gamblers, along with the executives whose major recompense is in stock options, really need share prices to go up.
Those billions are dioing the same thing VC money always does: artificially deflating the price of a service (If they were physical goods, we’d call it dumping) in the hopes that enough people will adopt it as an essential need that those customers will accept astounding price increases when the VC money dries up.
There are signs that investors are running out of cash, OpenAI’s major lender SoftBank is reportedly scrambling to find enough money to finance its current year’s promises, Google and Microsoft have each cancelled multiple data centre projects in the past year because of a lack of demand, and the only reason any company can claim it’s got any consistent users for their AI is because they’ve altered the code on their search engines to make the AI summary the default top hit in response to a query.
Blork
The thing about AI is that there are many very legitimate and good uses for it, such as in medical research and imaging, where AI can parse through enormous amounts of data very quickly, and find things in scans that humans might miss.
There are many other good uses too, such as in design and engineering and even criminal investigations. The main thing is its ability to slog through enormous amounts of data and to summarize it or find new insights and to report on it coherently. Basically, doing the grunt work. We can advance science and engineering tremendously with such applications, and it does not cost jobs; if anything it opens up opportunities for more scientists and engineers and medical researchers to be employed in order to do something with this knowledge and the insights that are gained through AI.
But most of what we hear about in discussions of AI is generative AI (ChatGTP, Midjourney, etc.). I am not a fan of those. Not only do they make a lot of valuable human work obsolete, they retard younger peoples’ learning of those basic language and creation skills. (It’s one thing for people like us who know how to write to enjoy the convenience of ChatGTP, but it’s another thing for a 12-year-old to realize they never have to bother to learn how to write because their phone will do it all for them.)
Even worse (I think) is that generative AI de-values human skills and talent. That’s a whole conversation in itself so I won’t even go there right now.
Jim
Blork’s third paragraph really hits the pain point. It’s a common consequence of many technological advances. It’s not unlike the introduction of personal calculators in schools back in the eighties.
A decade after, when PCs became common, we expected a new generation of computer wizards. In my own work environment, I often see that younger generations lack even basic PC skills mainly because they’ve grown up doing everything through automated website scripts or mobile apps, relying on organizations, companies, or service providers to handle the complex stuff. Not everyone of course otherwise we wouldn’t even have AI.
That said, it’s here, it’s impressive and in my opinion best to get familiar with it and make the most of what it offers. It can be a lot of fun, too.
EmilyG
Generative AI is also really bad for the environment.
Blork
Following up on Jim’s comment… We’re in a very different place now than we were 20-30 years ago, when the joke was always that you needed a 15-year-old kid to do your computer setups and configurations. As Jim says, now it’s the opposite. Most kids are completely helpless with that stuff. It’s the older people (Gen-Xers in particular) who understand how computery things work and how to configure them.
My spouse taught a class at UQAM a few years ago and she was amazed at the level of tech ignorance among the students. They all knew how to use their phones and social media, but many didn’t even know what a URL was or where to enter it in a browser. All they knew how to do was click a link or use Google.
bob
And most drivers don’t have the slightest clue as to what makes their car go.
As to skills, in classical Greek antiquity there were people saying that the advent of notepads would destroy peoples’ ability to remember anything. Nostalgia notwithstanding, technology that gets adopted is usually better than what came before, which is why we adopt it. There’s a great little film that captures this – “Farewell etaoin shrdlu” — https://vimeo.com/127605643 . Irony – daily news on paper is becoming a buggy whip.
AI is 95% hype. Much of what is being touted as AI is not AI because it lacks the I – fraudulent. And AI without the I, i.e., machine learning and cybernetics, has been around for decades, only no one called the products “intelligent” because they aren’t. Also because marketing departments and tech bro capital vampires hadn’t gotten hold of the concept.
The popular concept type AI is bilge. It’s a carnival show. Companies that think they can replace people with AI will fail. Companies that train their people how to use AI are going to thrive. But the huge gains made by anything approaching real “AI” are in machine learning, which is an instantiation of some cybernetic principles established by eggheads in the 50’s, which themselves were partly based on an analysis of machines that use their output as input. A simple thermostat qualifies as such. The huge gains to human knowledge that have been the result of machine learning algorithms are in areas like astronomy, genetics, protein folding, material simulations, etc.
The AI that steals jobs from coders is simply cutting Google and Stack Overflow out of the loop (if you code, you know exactly what I mean). If you use AI to get information, keep in mind that the product is at the level of asking some random twit on the internet to Google it for you.
Artificial General Intelligence is just pure science fiction.
Kevin
While I don’t code I know exactly what *bob* means.
The issue is that executives who don’t code think they can replace coders with AI at its currently discounted price, not realizing that very soon that price of less than a dollar per query is going to be more than $200, and the answer is going to be garbage that doesn’t function.Modern economics is based on dumping.
Mozai
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hopes this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” — Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (“Dune” by Frank Herbert)
Kate
A writer called Joanna Maciejewska said on X: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
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Kate
LaSalle College is being fined $30 million for having too many English-speaking students.
Later it’s reported that the college plans to fight the fine, which would probably put it out of business – probably the CAQ’s ultimate intention.
Heathcliff
This is a private vocational college with about 15,000 students/year, not a multinational corporation. How is this not front-page news? To financially kneecap an educational institution for the crime of… attracting students. It’s absurd, it’s punitive, and the silence around it is just as disturbing.
Ian
CAQ hates people getting jobs. The wrong kind of people, anyhow. It all fits within their punitive narrative of replacement theory.
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Kate
Weekend notes from La Presse, CTV, CityCrunch, CultMTL.Heat and humidity are in the weekend forecast.
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