Update and back on the ATIP train

So...I haven't written anything here in a while. A lot has happened since the last post, where I announced that I incorporated my company.

NeurIPS had come and gone. I went to NeurIPS, armed with a small demo of an LLM running on a pixel phone running with an exposed port, and I met a lot of people. I showed off the demo, talked to some VCs and generally had a good time at the conference. One thing that was painfully obvious is that despite working at a startup at the beginning of my career, I have no idea how to raise money for a startup.

Worse yet, I'm in Vancouver, which is a terrible place to do anything in tech. The only advantage is that it's in the same timezone as Silicon Valley, so I can talk to people in the US and Europe a lot more easily than if I were in Toronto. It's funny, because Cursor says that the cost of living is lower than in Toronto, but the math just doesn't math in that case.

Anyway, I'm still working on the Startup, and I'm back to being the sole founder trying to figure out how to raise and get the thing off the ground. At this point, I'm probably going to keep doing this startup thing until Web Summit in Vancouver, and if nothing happens after that, I'll probably shelve it and go back to desperately trying to get a job. I highly doubt that's going to happen, since Vancouver's job market has been perpetually bad for years now, and nobody is hiring.

So, while that's extremely depressing and bad, let's focus on something else that's also depressing and bad, namely the Canada/US Border, Donald Trump, how Canada is reacting to the huffing and puffing and how it's affecting NOBO hikers crossing the border at the end of their thru hikes. Earlier this year, CBSA announced that they were going to stop issuing PCT Entry Permits to PCT hikers crossing into Canada at Manning Park. As I mentioned before, you can't cross into the United States in Manning Park due to it not being a port of entry, so you have to hike 25 miles back to Harts Pass and hitch back to Mazama. Now NOBO hikers ALSO have to do this, which is a huge boon for the town of Mazama, but at the cost of business for Manning Park Resort.

I posted a TikTok about this, and the comments that I was getting were about migrants and how they're invading Canada or some shit. First of all, I doubt that people crossing the border illegally are going to bother filling out the PDF to get a PCT Entry Permit in the first place, secondly there are far more easier ways to cross the border illegally, both in the backcountry and on the roads near Blaine, Lynden and Sumas. Thirdly, while I doubt that the RCMP will get off their ass and hike down to Northern Terminus (because I doubt that they're physically able to do so), I do know for a fact that US Border Patrol does patrol those trails and does the hike along the Boundary Trail. I wonder if DHS pays for trail maintenance on the US side of the border, since this seems like it'd be a national security issue, since a USBP agent getting all messed up on deadfall would be a massive problem.

So, what did I do when I heard the news? I did what I used to do back in the day. I filed an ATIP request to get the documents that CBSA used to justify this decision. Back in the early 2010s, after I was under surveillance by the RCMP during the Olympics, I filed hundreds of ATIP requests and spent my own money to get documents from the RCMP to uncover the whole surveillance of anti-Olympic activists, and I wrote for Vancouver Media Coop about the issue. I eventually got burned out as politics in Canada and the US shifted rightward and while the left stopped listening to me, the right sure as hell did, and there's no way I'm interested in helping those people.

BUT...I'm personally interested in this issue because I was going to do some hiking of the PCT in the future, and I did want to end my hike in Manning Park, or at least transit across the border to access something like the HBC trail, so I wanted to know what the justification was for the decision. Once I get the documents, I'll probably post them here for download, and they can feed the beast that is the LLM scrapers that feed the AI models that are currently being trained on the public's data.

BTW: I do have a small personal project where I do some basic RAG on the Paroxysms dataset. I'm going to crank up the context window so that I can see if I can get the model to provide more information on myself and see if it can fill in the blanks that are missing in the data. The RCMP heavily redact documents, so it'll be interesting if the model can infer the missing information from the documents that are available in the dataset. It's been years since I last requested the documents, so I may do so again. It's not as advanced as the AI journalism work that HuggingFace did, but I needed to play with LLMs and I'd prefer to do it locally.

The link to that repo is here: https://github.com/infil00p/profunc_ai

If I do anything more with ATIP, LLMs and other things, I'll probably incorporate a second business entity from Baseweight.ai to do that and start a Patreon to fund it, since it's a lot of work and while I don't expect to make any money, it'd be good if it wasn't a giant financial burden. While the government no longer imposes massive fees to thwart ATIP requests, they do dramatically decrease the scope and force you to file multiple requests to get the same information as well as the usual multi-month delays. The thing is that the data is worth it since once we have the data, we can process the data on the models.

That's basically it for now. As usual, baseweight announcements will happen on that blog, and that'll have technical discussions related to the startup. This is basically the personal "how are you doing" blog where I post what's happening in my life. I'll try to do better about posting more often, but no promises.