Remember, just because the USA and Russia are all in favour of it that doesn’t mean Alberta separatism is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea no matter what they say.

An X.com link to someone blathering about an imaginary “partnership with China”? I can’t be bothered to dig for anything meaningful in this puddle of murky effluent.

A quick grep | wc of the Wikipedia list of Toy Story characters suggests that they’ll run out somewhere around the year 2120 if no new Toy Story movies are made. Perhaps Debian should start getting its movie studio department working on a new one before then, just in case.

Storing data in Canada won’t make it any safer if Bill C-22 (formerly part of C-2) passes and leads to a data-sharing agreement with the United States.

One thing you might want to mention in your letter to your member of parliament is that this bill would not only endanger Canadians, it would hurt Canada’s international reputation as well. The whole world would have good reason to think of Canadian electronic service providers as less trustworthy.

It may be true that Canada is behind some of its peers when it comes to spying on its own citizens and making secure communications illegal, but this bill would go beyond “catching up” and would put our country near the top of the list of the worst offenders among countries normally thought of as democracies.

What could possibly go wrong?

Noise? Traffic? Parking? Endless construction? Corruption? Wasted investment? Climate change? Opportunity cost of not doing something more useful with waterfront property? All I know is Doug Ford’s in favour of it, so it must be a bad idea.

Congrats to GameStop on being described as “struggling” when I would’ve expected “defunct” by now.

Them going “retro” makes sense to me. I happened to be near one of their locations the other day and remembered that the last time I went in there it was to ask if they still had a bin full of second-hand PS3 discs somewhere. All I got was a succinct “no.”

It wasn’t that it’s a bad analogy that provoked my ire (although it is) — it was more about the apparent intention behind it. The problems with “social media” are not inherent to social media. It’s not a fundamentally dangerous drug, it’s a whole universe of different forms of telecommunication which people have come to rely on in myriad ways, the most prominent of which are badly designed for nefarious reasons that are completely avoidable without demonizing the whole concept. Aim to stop the abusers who’ve taken it hostage, not to abolish the whole concept or restrict it through unconscionable intrusions on civil liberties.

I can only assume that you’ve never known anyone who lost their life to an opioid addiction. There’s nothing wrong with that; lucky you. I remain in favour of your right to express your thoughts in public even when you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

If it’s a wasteful outrage machine why are you here?

How is it that people are even talking about a “social media ban” as if it’s a thing that could actually happen in Canada? WTF happened to you Canada?

Browsing around nethack.org I found this link if anyone’s in need of an introduction to nethack: https://web.archive.org/web/20210212161326/http://www.linuxvoice.com/nethack/

The comments are full of people sharing their yasd stories.

The significance of the number is not that it “lost 0.8%”, it’s that this month’s number is like last month’s well above the previous trend line, making the record high look that much more like a meaningful change and not just a random fluctuation.

The data is still noisy month-to-month and just how meaningful it is remains unclear, but this data point is nothing but good news for linux market share and framing it as somehow the opposite is misleading.

Early 90s the pirate BBS scene was still going strong. You could dial in and tie up your phone line for days at a time. My guess is it was about as common then as it is today, relative to the size of the game industry.

It’s tempting to think that the Russians are better at propaganda because their government has apparently been more successful in manipulating the minds of the people in recent years, but really I think that’s more a function of their more complete ability to suppress dissenting views.

Neither the Russian nor the American state propaganda seems like it’d be all that convincing to people who have a decent education and routine access to diverse sources of information. But the Russian stuff has caught up in sophistication, and now the Americans are trying to catch up in shutting down the uncooperative elements in their own mass media.

American propaganda getting more blatant and crude (thanks to the Trumpists) is probably one reason why more Canadians are falling for the Russian stuff lately, as people look around for any alternative. All I can think of to counter it is to invest in education and journalism.

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Rust-coreutils may eventually become a suitable replacement for coreutils but it hasn’t yet existed for long enough to iron out all the bugs and there’s no real advantage to using it right now.

The idea is that Rust will make everything easier to maintain and improve in the long run, or something like that. It’s somewhat plausible, but it’s not totally obvious whether that will prove correct. So it’s easy to suspect that there must be some other unstated motivations behind it, although to me there don’t appear to be any in view.

Everyone is targeting everyone with disinformation. It’s the international pastime of the 21st century.

The total amount of money that’s spent on roads and driving in car-oriented cultures is absolutely fucking astounding when you add it all up. Counting only “highways” is just the tip of the iceberg.