Weekend "Thoughts"

On giving democrats worms; Artemis; working with AI, an Alberta police force, and LNG imports to Canada

Giving democrats worms

One of my neighbors is a liberal: she believes, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Trump is a racist, a rapist, a paedophile, and personally corrupt; that covid was an accident humanity only barely survived; that conservatives see women as property to be dresed in black garbage bags; and, that Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney is an honorable man of principle. I can’t argue with her either: any offer of fact draws an over-the-top emotional reaction, and even when I do convince her to consider a tiny slice of reality, the delusion is back, full force, an hour later.

Hers is a religion -in fact I don’t understand why the billionaires funding this nonsense through media, NGOs, and other means don’t incorporate themselves as religious leaders to reduce their exposure to both taxes and audits. Unfortunately, you can’t argue with religion: think Jamestown, suicide bombers, and martyrs through the ages. So how can she be brought back to reality?

There’s an old bit of wisdom: everybody is conservative on subjects they know something about. So instead of arguing with her, I’ve been planting earworms - well, thought worms. The idea is simple: find something your target knows and cares about and then feed them snippets of information which, if acknowledged, eventually erode their political beliefs.

In her case: she’s a teacher, so I asked for her help in understanding the NAEP (national assessment of educational progress) results in the US on a state by state basis. A few weeks later I got her interested in comparing Canada’s results to the American ones - and, another few weeks after that, I actually got her to read a Fraser Institute analysis comparing the outcomes of federally versus provincially funded schools.

(For American readers: the Fraser Institute does good work and is, correspondingly, considered the enemy of all truth and right by Canada’s progressives - so even getting her to look was a big, big, victory.)

In other year she’ll vote conservative; maybe.

Working with AI

(Caution: techi stuff - skip if your interest is politics)

I have been trying to learn how to do 3d reconstructions of dash cam imagery for ultimate use in the GODOT games development environment. For that I started with colmap on Debian 13. The standard package doesn’t support cuda use, but I have a 16GB 1080T in the machine so.. let’s download source and compile.

This, of course, fails on weird errors in python scripts, libs, and even the G++-14 compiler.

Much, much, interaction with Claude 4.2 later.. it works, uses cuda. Great, but my reconstructions are terrible because I have two dash cams 42cm apart providing 30FPS at 1920 x 1080 and it just isn’t good enough given a minimum of about 15M/sec in vehicle motion. So, over to glomap for several steps instead - but the default Debian package doesn’t use cuda. It works, reconstructions are better, but 800 images from each camera take over 20 hours of processing time on a pretty hot machine - so I need glomap to use cuda.

And that’s where the AI thing both shines and bites. It shines because it is a great, absolutely fantastic, look-up machine. Where before I had to search multiple sites for useful hints, Claude now grabs them in seconds and serves them in a conversational style - complete with the appropriate code snippets. Very useful. But, it doesn’t grok context and purpose - and that bites.

On its advice that glomap/cuda required colmap, ceres-solver, and a dozen or so matching libs to be compiled with G++-13 instead of 14 I spent an increasingly frustrating five hours loading, compiling, editing, cursing, and debugging - before discovering that it’s not true. It may well have been true yesterday, but in open source, everything changes daily and so it turned out that my working colmap, compiled to support cuda, works just fine - but AI turned a ten minute job into an all day nightmare.

There is a lesson here: these things are wonderfully effective search engines with extremely helpful conversational front ends that can make writing stuff like bash scripts trivial - but as soon as you start to feel you are dealing with a person and start taking their word for what needs to be done to achieve an objective it hasn’t got hundreds of references for, you’re probably about to waste considerable time and effort.

And that raises another wound: Yes, I believed and got bitten - but, maybe worse, this type of work where you do something that fails, use AI to find a correction, and repeat for hours leaves you (or, at least, me) with no clear memory of how it’s finally done. Cell phone users don’t remember phone numbers, and I’ll bet Claude users will, in general, not learn coding by copying and pasting from its interface. I know I didn’t.

Artemis

NASA finally announced the obvious: Artemis and the whole SLS is expensive, disfunctional, and high risk - so now they’re trying to reduce political risk by lowering expectations. Well, the whole mess is stupid: yes, Congress mandated the strategy but they did it theoretically on the advice of experts but more probably to protect jobs and donors -so great: just spend the same of amount with the same companies in the same places, but on useful bits of the space program instead of Artemis/SLS.

Develop a plan built around current ideas: maybe spin it out of NASA as a new business using these monies to build infrastructure and supply chain depth for people like Rocket Lab, SpaceX, and Blue Origin; present it to the house to get a “sense of the house” resolution; and go work on deep space nuclear propulsion instead of spending taxpayer monies getting in everyone’s way.

An Alberta police force

Alberta highways and smaller urban centers have traditionally been policed by the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) under contract to the province or municipality. In 2006 then Premier Ralph Klien created what became the Sheriff Highway Patrol force by expanding the court sheriffs service in partial response to federal pressure to pay far more for RCMP services. In 2015 Alberta had the misfortune to dis-elect the conservative government and so allowed the NDP (far left idealogues) into power and they, of course, quickly expanded policing, especially traffic policing, to put a fines collector not quite on every street corner, but pretty close to it.

When Danielle Smith became premier in October of 2022 she quickly re-assigned many of the sheriffs to “junky duty” - nominally to keep our downtowns cleaner and safer, but really to get them off the roads. Since then the federal government has stepped up its attacks on Alberta’s resource industries and now there’s a burgeoning separatist movement adding its support to the idea that Alberta needs to replace the RCMP with a provincial police force of its own.

The current contract with the RCMP doesn’t expire until 2032, but the hand writing is on the wall - they’re going, going, gone with the Smith government recently announcing new training and new powers for the remaining 600 or so sheriffs as part of plan to grow the required new force over a number of years.

I believe this is a very traditional, but not very smart, way to do things - if we’re going to create an Alberta provincial force we should recognize that the history of all such efforts goes only one way: the new organization starts small, with limited powers and a clear mandate; but, over time, mission creep sets in, the organization grows to meet its expanding mandate, and as it grows it leans more and more toward the authoritarian left - and always at the expense of the rights and wallets of those it deals with.

So what can be done? It is actually fairly easy to design a provincial policing structure that won’t grow out of hand - but the people advising the government on this don’t want that, and the politicians have other things on their agendas - so this will become yet another expensive collection of bad compromises.

LNG and TDS - a telling combination

A Bloomberg News headline last week read “Australia Ships LNG 16000 miles to Canada as Asia demand slumps”

The contract price for LNG out of US gulf ports is a bit more than half what it is in Australia - and shipping from Australia to Canada’s east coast is, well, 16,000 miles versus about 1,800 miles.

Canada’s current prime minister, Mark Carney, seems to genuinely hate Trump - and spent years working for the Trudeau family, including the one who, as prime minister, proudly announced (August 22, 2022) that there is no business case for Canadian LNG. What caused this absurdity: TDS? Sinophilia? a backroom deal to save a major investor in Australian mineral development? I don’t know - but Quebec, fronting for the federal liberals, has long stymied Alberta efforts to build a pipeline to supply the maritimes (and parts of the NE U.S.) with Alberta gas and there aren’t many in the industry here who don’t see this as the Carney government giving Trump, and Alberta, the finger, at, as usual, the rate-payers expense.