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.

Strange how Denuvo being cracked doesn’t change how I feel about it at all.

It would probably be similar to a PC from 5 years ago. The consoles don’t have any real advantage over their more-functional PC counterparts any more. Even the GPU is not much different than an RX 6800 or something.

the high-speed rail, the gun buyback program, external consultants, the federal bureaucracy, and foreign aid

If we vote hard enough can we get an opposition leader who attacks the government for the stupidly wasteful things they do — i.e. the gun buyback and consultants — and doesn’t just reject every single normal Canadian thing including building trains and funding the CBC?

Some people are just more comfortable with good old familiar units like baby elephants per corgi. What do they even use for that in the metric system? Millihectares per decilitre or something? Whatever.

You know, I hear there are several things other than electric cars that Canada also imports from China. Enough so that all the focus on EVs looks a little sus.

It’s Wab Kinew so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his intentions are noble and good. Presumably he acts out of ignorance, led to a policy he doesn’t understand by people he shouldn’t have trusted. He probably thinks the only consequences will be that children aren’t allowed to use social media and AI any more.