> If you elected a businessman or a lawyer, he/she'd tell you that Canadian exports to the US are 2x the imports from the US,
An honest one wouldn't, because it's categorically untrue.
"U.S. exports were $441 billion, while imports were $482 billion, resulting in a United States $41 billion trade deficit with Canada."
This doesn't even count the multinational tech corporations providing services in Canada through a local subsidiary, something that is not counted in balance of payments.
But this is probably culture-specific. When Finnish media describes someone as (the Finnish equivalent of) a businessman, he is almost certainly doing some shady stuff and has often also committed crimes. People described as entrepreneurs tend to be more respectable and more likely just doing legitimate business.
I'm from Lithuania and lots of people would do the same. I assumed this is some brainrot relic from soviet union, but thinking about this more, most of europe have same weird sentiment.
So you're entire point is the US economy and population is larger, so it can bully its allies and economic partners more despite having a trade surplus in excess of 90 billion (including services which simpy makes sense, especially considering the size dichotomy you point out). That's a salient point in today's political climate, the US doesn't have allies or partners anymore.
Showing just how uninformed you are, Prime Minister Trudeau resigned already, and mostly unrelated to the US. Canadians were going to vote the out the Liberals largely over increasing dissatisfaction with his leadership long before the election. His resignation is allowing new leadership to take over the liberal party (being voted on this week), and then federally we will likely be going to the polls in the coming months to decide between them and the Conservatives (who are closer to your Democrats than most of you realize)
Whichever party wins, all of them are unified in standing strong against bullying tactics. You can hurt us, but you'll be surprised how resilient we are and how willing we are to fight economically or otherwise.
We look forward to being friends with most of you again after this bullshit is over.
Aren't there already a ton of startups doing finetunes for their local niche? Many aren't even "AI" companies - it's pretty easy to slap a finetune together if you enough data.
If you mean developing a model from scratch just for your niche - the bitter lesson is that scale is everything and that a finetune from an internet-scale model will outperform you easily.
DeepSeek has some something pretty remarkable. It’s certainly not “just” fine-tuning a Llama or a GPT prompt. More of a order of magnitude optimization
Unfortunately, the current available version doesn't have the agent stuff yet.
Hopefully in a week, realistically two.
I had the existing client app I've released-but-not-released-out-loud. Couple days before Christmas, for fun, I spent a couple hours wiring up the Anthropic Model Context Protocol filesystem server example. Within an hour it was clear this was special and I needed to get it out ASAP. Stunning stuff in action.
The website for your editor (https://telosnex.com/) has some... character. However I do believe its worth a second look at making it look nicer, I know you aren't a designer and probably think you're going for a more "raw" and "friendly" look by not putting that much effort in and using conflicting fonts, colour schemes etc, and I agree there is a lot of value in avoiding corpo-internet styles, but I still think it could stand to look less like a mixture of ai sludge and poor photoshop jobs on the homepage.
I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees.
I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm.
I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words.
> there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
I have learned to varying degrees Mandarin Teochew Cantonese Japanese Spanish French German (and Latin lol) I was shocked at how intuitive Italian was when simply walking around Italy after having a grounding in so many adjacent languages (and learning classical music).
Admittedly I am atypical in my exposure to languages and I do enjoy linguistics but it seems to me there's a high initial barrier to the dialects but after the initial wall is overcome it just becomes a mapping exercise and a handful of idioms.
I'd be curious to know which bits of Mandarin you find difficult? Vocab? The grammar is close enough that you have a huge advantage over almost every other language in the world especially for the everyday stuff. Reading and writing, if you know traditional you'll pick up simplified in no time (speaking from experience backpacking through China armed with only a paper dictionary we didn't have smartphones back in my day) the Cantonese tones are quite wild but if you can do tones you have a huge advantage of languages which don't have tones.
If I'm allowed an uncharitable take, my experience has been that a lot of people from China don't feel a drive to learn more languages maybe with the sole exception of English. Maybe it's the result of being in a country of a billion+ that all ostensibly speak the same language. I've always found it so frustrating encountering people who move to the UK to study and they can barely hold a conversation in English despite doing A levels, Bachelor's and Masters in the UK sometimes. For all the complaints that dialects are hard a lot of south east Asian people back in the day would pick up a handful of them and often learn the basics of other languages like Bahasa. This kind of mindset and interaction reminds me more of Europe in the sense that people are more adaptable out of necessity
High-skill immigrants disproportionately found companies (whose very existence implies driving up demand in the labor market), as well as disproportionately induce new consumer demand (high-skill -> high pay -> high consumption), which again drives new companies.
Out of America (and the world's) only $1T companies:
Brin and Huang are 1st gen immigrants.
Nadella is a 1st gen immigrant; he brought Microsoft out of it's malaise.
(Jobs' bio father was an immigrant, as was Bezos' adoptive father)
3/5 ain't bad. (2/5 if you're a stickler)
Tesla, which at one point was a $T company and is currently pretty close, is also famously founded by an immigrant.
There are very few people in tech in America who will not have worked for an immigrant founder/CEO at some point in their career.
> Nadella is a 1st gen immigrant; he brought Microsoft out of it's malaise.
I agree with most of what you posted, but not enough credit is given to Ballmer here. He set Microsoft on the trajectory that Nedella followed and got the fuck out of the way. There were a lot of cringe Ballmer moments but he had a profound impact on Microsoft, probably much more so than Nadella so far. And none of this is meant to take anything away from Nadella's competency. Just that Ballmer gets blamed for a whole lot despite setting MSFT up for the success Nadella (and shareholders) enjoy.
I'm imagining something like an GPT-4 agent that has connections to your Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce, etc.
You ask it a question and then it iteratively queries your data and produces some an answer/some code/ a graph. Or it generates a plan that you can edit a bit and then it executes.
That sounds like it would be pretty useful copilot for me? I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of analytics work though.
An honest one wouldn't, because it's categorically untrue.
"U.S. exports were $441 billion, while imports were $482 billion, resulting in a United States $41 billion trade deficit with Canada."
This doesn't even count the multinational tech corporations providing services in Canada through a local subsidiary, something that is not counted in balance of payments.