Jaël

Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science at TÉLUQ;
Independent Canadian Election Candidate 2023,2024,2025;
Fier Québécois; Viva Palestina 🇵🇸

[Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project @monopolyproject]

CUSMA should not give Big Tech a backdoor veto over Canadian digital policy.

CAMP’s new brief argues Canada should remove restrictive digital trade rules that limit competition policy, privacy protections, data sovereignty, and platform accountability.

https://t.co/viNaMm6SZ8

[Jaël @jaja360]

@bedesqui Nemo?

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

As an engineer, you should have some depth. AI will probably help you if you let it.
Here is how the story of progress goes in people’s minds.
Our ancestors coded in machine language, then in assembler, then in C, then in C#, then in JavaScript. And now we prompt Claude. Each time, we drop the previous layer.
This is another instance of linear thinking about how progress works. We have seen this linear thinking applied to industrial policies: we no longer need to make steel, we can just order it online.
If you view technology as a sequence of new layers where only the last layer matters, you are shallow. You could say, “Why would Elon Musk need to know how rockets work? He can just outsource these details to people he pays.”
It amounts to saying that once you have the abstraction, you no longer need access to grounded reality. The problem with abstractions is that they are leaky. Here is Spolsky’s law:

Non-trivial abstractions are leaky to some degree. Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There is leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.

By the way, people working for you are abstractions too, they are social abstractions.
If you don't realize that abstractions are leaky, they you will be mislead constantly. The same applies to your own work when you build the architecture of your system. You are pushed in one direction only: more and more abstraction. But your abstractions are leaky. Things go wrong, and you often cannot understand from the highest level what is happening.
We see the effect at the political level. Much of the West today is infected by technocratic thinking. A few smart people sitting in offices believe they can run the world because they have models running on Excel spreadsheets.
I have this same problem as a professor teaching computer science. Why would anyone learn to write a for loop? ChatGPT can do for loops just fine.
As a result, we have an increasing number of students who finish our introduction to programming course without any actual practical knowledge. We fail them and they don't understand why we do so. Why can't they just prompt their AI, isn't it the same as a coding?
Here is what I think a good engineer ought to be able to do: work at different levels.
It does not mean that everyone ought to regularly read machine language or understand the layouts of transistors on the CPU, but you should have some depth as an engineer.
I am reading a lot more assembly today than I did 20 years ago, by a wide margin.
In part because it is much easier.
The same is true at different levels. I can much more easily explore how the microarchitecture of my CPU impacts my code. The information is more accessible. AI can more easily index this information for you.
What this tells us about AI is that it will make the job of programmers more challenging when it is applied, not less. You will need better trained people, not less sophisticated people. Because, at some point, the abstractions will leak. And you'll need a good engineer. Trust me, you will.

[Jaël @jaja360]

@ilamparithi_ja @lemire That's how we do double quotes in French.

[Jaël @jaja360]

@PaulPlamondon 🤔

[Jaël @jaja360]

@jacky_tar @atRachelGilmore The only language police here is Mark Carney forcing his staff to use British English

[Jaël @jaja360]

@manoftheway @ArtirKel @AlecStapp @Noahpinion Thankfully, Casey also has another video debunking that 😉 https://t.co/lcRTFCxZ1x

[Jaël @jaja360]

@KaelumOS What do you mean "in 2023" ?
It was in January 2021...

[Jaël @jaja360]

@SamiParvezQadir @DonovanEckstrom @jazz_viking @johnofly @LongestBallot @WestVanDistrict @famoussandhogs @JohnDaleRural @letmestay2023 @VoteForMario @schoen4LEV @mikebednarski @glen1macdonald @CorRhino @drmistercody I just received mine too. Thanks y'all ! Hopefully we do it again next by-election 😎

[Jaël @jaja360]

@lukesau @R3lD_ @mywheelhouseftw Latest version is 24.04 though

[Jaël @jaja360]

@dracopolul @strajkoski @battleforeurope Literally the first sentence in your link : "None of the emerging narratives surrounding the Nord Stream pipeline bombing really contradicts Seymour Hersh's central allegation that Biden authorized the operation."

[Jaël @jaja360]

@DiscordGauche @LCI @GraphCrimes

[Darren Quinn | Modern Money Economist/Educator @AusMMT]

TAXES

In the MMT framework, taxes serve several key purposes, but it's important to note that they are not primarily about raising revenue to fund government spending, as is often assumed in conventional economic thinking. 1/20

[Jaël @jaja360]

@ThePhDPlace The best font is Papyrus.
https://t.co/VMSlqDiUXi

[Jaël @jaja360]

@BriannaWu I agree, Brianna. Theocracies are bad:

[Jaël @jaja360]

@BriannaWu @longklaw There was no write-ins in the SC primary, so how the fuck do you want people to vote ceasefire?

[Jaël @jaja360]

@malware_yml It makes me *really* faster

[Birth By Fire 🕊 @_BirthByFire]

@Martian_BTC @StephanieKelton

[Jaël @jaja360]

@E_Duhaime Peut-être que si les libertariens comme vous arrêtiez de vouloir couper dans les dépenses publiques, il y aurait de l'air climatisé dans les écoles et on aurait pas besoin de les fermer?

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Imperialism is a hell of a drug.