Poilievre did a great job keeping the Conservatives out of power for a while. It was just bad luck for Canada that he did such a good job of it that the Liberals got a majority.

The monthly active users count there is not down compared to last year at this time, although it’s not up by as much as even the small amount that it was a couple months ago. Holding steady is a departure from the trend, the best it’s done in a long time.

Previously I noticed that Firefox user count had stopped declining for the first time in many years. Only later did I realise that it was probably due to all the fuss about Chrome dropping MV2, not anything Mozilla themselves had done. Hopefully this will keep the trend line going up a little further. Who knows, maybe Mozilla will miraculously come to its senses before it resumes the long slow decline.

Not everyone interested in piracy acquires all of their games that way, and even those who do sometimes buy them on Steam anyway — for example to support the publisher. Not that Gog isn’t better, but Steam obviously has most of the market.

This is a piracy-oriented community, so …

So there tend to be a fair number of gamers around.

Edit: The “join today” included in all the user’s posts almost certainly means that this is spam.

But to call them ignorant would be naive.

I used to believe that sort of thing, in my callow youth. They’re rich and powerful, they must know what they’re doing. It’s hard to imagine how anyone paying attention to the news these past ten years could still believe it. There’s no mysterious logic behind their nonsensical decisions. There’s no more than luck involved in any success those decisions have brought them. When they behave like clueless twits it’s because they’re clueless twits.

It seems like I’ve completely quit because all the smoking didn’t make me crave a cigarette even once. Back in E1 I did feel a slight nostalgia for the inexpressible feeling of crawling around in the gutter looking for butts and finding a good one, a feeling made much better by the knowledge that I’ll never go through it again.

I guess when you’ve preemptively announced that you’re not going to retaliate against the illegal tariffs in any way that would get their attention, such as putting export duties on petroleum products, you end up with little choice other than to give them whatever they want.

He wasn’t exactly sphynx-like in the speech I was thinking of. He spoke with eloquence, but directly and plainly. It did indeed seem clear that he sincerely believes that the existing banking system — which he had a hand in running for so long — operates in service of the public good.

When it was announced that Mr. Carney would run for office, the first thing I did to find out about him was to watch a video of one of his recent speeches to a big business audience. There is no way he would think of MMT as acceptable. He’s a huge fan of the way things are, so we will keep spending a significant percentage of the government budget directly on satisfying the greed of the rentiers.

Of those, defence needs mentioning as it is the biggest by a large margin.

You mean we could afford it now, or we could afford it if some form of MMT were adopted? I think readers might benefit from it being noted that there is a difference.

Throwing money at established for-profit real estate developers: Not the best thing they could be doing, but maybe it’s better than nothing?

Apparently the new units will have access to an indoor bicycle parking area, so that’s nice.

Nyah!

As was said elsewhere on the Internet:

Don’t get me wrong, I welcome this policy, I just wish the “one line zinger” was a little more detailed, because if you come away from the article without reading on (or, more realistically, if secondary sources pick up this quote without the surrounding context), one could easily get a wrong idea.

Your critique of Modern Monetary Theory does not suggest that your study of the concept has been comprehensive enough to include glancing at the Wikipedia page about it.

The policy summarizes itself this way: It’s fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

Saying that “it’s fine” seems a little overly broad, because sometimes it isn’t, but I suppose that by “fine” they simply mean that it’s not forbidden by the policy. A more complete summary would also mention that where it is allowed, disclosure of LLM use is required.

Personally, on the few occasions where I’ve resorted to querying an LLM it’s been very much the same kind of experience that using Stack Overflow used to be. It’s a quick way to see one way that other people have done some thing, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it being the right way.

I see no reason why advocates of MMT wouldn’t have the same kind of reaction I do to the spending on oil pipelines, the military, the capital gains tax cut, the new ministry for AI, the new ministry for online censorship, the carbon capture idiocy — you’re spending how much on what!?

People were complaining about .ml long before I thought it was justified, but I looked again recently and yeah, maybe. This instance doesn’t federate with it so I don’t see it often. Based on my quick impressions the other day it’s gotten worse. Not that it’s an “echo chamber” and I don’t mind hanging out with communists, but there’s too much low-quality noise.

Personally I wouldn’t block the whole server if it were up to me. There are still good people there. Just be quick to block the people and posts you really object to.

Protecting children from accidentally seeing anything slightly sexy is naturally the top priority. That’s what is harmful to minors. We better all stick to legally safe things like racism-based disinformation.

… but yeah, the designers of mastodon deliberately chose to avoid posts any longer than very short.