Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.
Who ever wants to manipulate the user using their PII and associated metadata - Retail, Marketers, Political and Security Apparatus... the world is your dystopian oyster in that regard.
It just has oil. While it is nice having low taxes because of all the oil money, it can also be draining being surrounded by people who want to be annexed by Trump, or hold socially regressive views. But economically yes it's a great province.
As opposed to the very productive and diversified Canadian economy? Over 50% of Canada's exports are natural resources and the rest of the economy is basically just downstream from that.
Where are the tech giants or manufacturing giants? We have 1 tech giant who constantly criticizes Canada, 1 large manufacturer that gets bailed out twice a decade and otherwise we're just a country of housing schemes, financial services and fast food/retail.
It's funny the housing angle that parent poster is playing, too. While Edmonton at least has made sensible decisions around its housing stock, the real reason why Alberta has "affordable housing" is that the absolutely brutally cyclical and volatile nature of the oil industry there means that every few years a wave of unemployment and poor economics knocks real estate prices down. Every time there's low oil prices there's hand wringing all over Alberta. It's just a volatile place to invest.
Alberta real estate is affordable relative to the rest of Canada because it's actually not a good investment. Not that I think real estate should be treated as an investment, and this isn't a knock per se, but it's also nothing to brag about that every few years scores of people in Alberta are losing their shirts on real estate.
I'll probably buy a house next year in Edmonton for my daughter to use (and rent out) while she's at the UofA, but I fully expect to either lose money or not gain on it.
Can't comment without knowing more specifically what you're comparing. Massive variation across both provinces, of course.
The standard unit in rural Alberta is the quarter section - 160 acres (half mile by half mile). Greater Edmonton is surrounded by mostly flat quarters in every direction as far as the eye can see.
It is interesting to consider what will make AI generated works great, if we reach a point where they're seen as such.
For painting, realism was really what made works great for a long time. Then photography came along and realistic depictions of things were no longer novel, so painting became about representing things in a more surreal way, and novel representations of perspective and emotion became great. Meanwhile with photography initially just capturing a clear image was impressive but now you need to capture something truly rare to have a great photo.
With AI I'm struggling to imagine what will be hard enough to achieve that it remains novel.
Interesting. I'm 29 and hate downloading apps on phone or pc, if I can use a website I'll choose that every time. Unless performance matters like a game or media editor.
the mobile website is just the PC website with css responsiveness, you can just enable "show desktop version" on mobile if that helps reduce your paranoia
The other common reason I use "show desktop version" is when the mobile "version" displays nothing but "use our app", while the desktop version actually provides the content.
I've had to use this a few times when on my phone to be able to actually access the webpage.
Many years ago, there was a trend to show a different website, sometimes on a different domain and often with more differences than just a mobile version of the stylesheet. Sometimes the mobile version was not updated enough, or there was a reduction in functionality, hence the paranoia.
That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.
The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.
If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...
I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE.
For example, I used to do integrations for sports betting sites. AI is going to help with the basics, like understanding the default puck line is 1.5 in hockey. AI is not going to realize that Bet365 changes their API endpoints for each season, so you need to be ready to fetch the updated ones before the new season starts, whereas most other sportbooks have consistent endpoints that you don't need to keep updating.
How much domain knowledge is actually unavailable to AI is going to vary by domain, as will the value of that. Chess is probably one extreme, where all knowledge is public, whereas something like military R&D might be the other extreme where domain knowledge is tightly guarded.
I think you're largely right - but there are some challenges.
Talking requires that the interviewer be competent and care. Which seems like a low bar, but it easily degrades. When an engineer is burned out, or is interviewing for a project they have less stake in, or has business requirements forcing them to hire someone fast, the bar lowers. Those engineers now are the gatekeepers, and they let in even weaker engineers.
Even worse, any utility from this is predicated on the founder making good hiring decisions. If they don't understand how to hire a competent engineer and make them care about the company, then it's dead from the start. And a lot of founders or execs in general are awful at this.
Companies that maintain an excellent work culture such that engineers deeply care about the team and have stake in any project they conduct interviews for will do well with this model. I hope we see it used by them.
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