Gradually, we all become aware that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of fossil fuels.

Huh, weird. The only thing I can think of is to check /etc/security/limits.d to see if there’s another conf file in there setting it to 4096.

Are you sure you really need 1048576 open files? It seems like a lot. But you’ll probably want to set “soft” as well as “hard” limits. Then you need to log in again for the change to take effect.

I wonder how Cloudflare estimates the increased rate of false positives they’re getting after they made their bot detector even more oversensitive in recent weeks. It no longer likes my default javascript-enabled browser profile and I don’t always bother to load another one when I get cloudflared, so >50% of visits from me are “bots”.

I don’t know how many minutes of this I’ll be able to take. Already I’m getting tired of watching this group of a dozen unfortunate souls stuck standing there behind the speaker, acting as human furniture, smiling and pretending to be impressed for the full hour from the looks of it. I hate it. It’s got to be going out of style some day soon. If not, maybe they should be first in line to have their jobs replaced by AI.

“Too often, AI is talked about …”

So true. I’m going to stop watching right there. Looking forward to getting my official government AI learning kit in the mail so I can learn to AI all the AI in the new AI-powered Canada.

Federal and municipal social media bans are also unlikely to work. It’s best regulated at the household level.

Much as I would like to completely ban everyone in the world from visiting facebook and twitter, you can’t really do that and still pretend to have a free society that cares about human rights. What you could do instead is outlaw the surveillance capitalist business model they depend on — universally, through strong privacy laws not aimed specifically at social media or any other narrowly-defined type of application.

The collection, use, and disclosure of personal information must be limited to reasonable purposes, which organizations must identify to individuals at the time of collection … Organizations must limit their collection of personal information to that which is necessary for the purpose identified to the individual.

That’s what Canada’s Vehicle Cyber Security Guidance says is required by Canadian privacy law. Maybe start enforcing that law, then? If that principle were adhered to in reality, cars wouldn’t collect any sensitive data at all. It would not have intelligence value for friends or adversaries if it didn’t exist.

Even after two rounds of everyone pointing out that it’s an incredibly bad idea, they still plan to make some cosmetic changes and push it through. The arrogance of this government is stunning.

I would take that as good news if it said “building” instead of “leasing.”

I just checked, and it is apparently called “Default”.

You don’t have to be rich for that, just stupid.

I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I’m not sure if they’re completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it’s like.

Coincidentally, today I removed systemd from my laptop (Debian Trixie.) It was reasonably easy. I booted from a USB drive into a shell through debian’s “rescue” mode and typed plausible-looking apt commands until it worked. For some reason it didn’t create /etc/inittab and I made a typo when I tried to do it myself, but other than that no problems. Differences noticed so far that a normal user would care about: none. If nothing goes wrong I guess I’ll do the same on my desktop at home this weekend, because why not.

Nothing against systemd, but I think it’s valuable to continue having other options and it was fun to see that it’s still pretty easy to use them (maybe harder if you’re a GNOME user, idk.)

That was based on the quote from the article. Are your numbers for Manitoba? By “constantly” do you mean “on average”?

No, and I didn’t really mean to pick on you specifically — it just seems that way in general.

There’s something magical about solar power which makes people think “it’s only 12 thousand acres of solar panels, sounds easy!” You could probably fit them all in an area the size of Manitoba’s second-largest city, no problem. Let’s go ahead and start building a city-sized grid of access roads out in the woods to be completely levelled and filled with high-tech electronics, batteries, inverters, transmission lines, switching stations, and more solar panels than currently exist in Canada — how hard can it be?

I dunno, it’s not impossible. It’s just… there might be better ways to solve the problem.

Retention of metadata may not even be considered a search or seizure, it’s unclear to me how likely it is that it might be declared “reasonable”, taking it to the supreme court would require many years of work during which irreparable harm would be done, and whichever parts of the law were struck down it’s likely that others would stand — and every part of it is irredeemable.

The whole bill is so blunt, crude, and stupid that I think there’s hope that it might be somehow arranged that it gets stuck in committee until it’s forgotten about.

the potential to generate an average of 6.6 kilowatt-hours of electricity per square metre, per month.

That seems like not much. A household using 1kW (slightly below average) would need more than 100m² of solar panels, which seems like a lot. I’m open to being convinced that solar pv has gotten so cheap that it’s worth using on a large scale even in Canada, but I’m not sure if those numbers are going to add up. I’d expect wind power to be a better bet.

If it gets to the courts we’re probably lost.

Personally identifying information here, but I don’t mind telling you all that my exact time of birth was 1970-01-01-00:00:00.000000.