Spyke

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linux

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Reddit API blew up and now I run Linux?

Your post couldn't be more true. Decades ago I was sold on MythTV, this PVR software but it only ran on Linux and you had to compile it yourself. So I gave Linux and MythTV a shot. As it turned out, both MythTV and early desktop Linux were a buggy, frustrating mess. X broke all the time. Incomprehensible, ungoogleable compile errors all the time.

I spent so much time troubleshooting MythTV and compilation problems that I ended up learning Linux inside and out and the C programming language to be able understand the compile errors. I went on to lead a major open source project and have had a long career as a programmer, using all the knowledge I gained that started with fighting MythTV.

canada

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Ontario fast-tracks order to remove key Toronto bike lanes

This makes no fucking sense - They just finished putting these bike lanes in on big stretches of Bloor and University. These streets are always under construction, it makes no sense to just undo years of work. Did people not drive here before the bike lanes? Cyclists are still going to use these streets and be veering into traffic, blocking that supposed second lane. The second was always blocked with parked cars on Bloor anyways. The bike lane made driving easier and cycling way safer. It was win-win.

The result is going to be driving is going to be way worse on these streets and cyclists are going to die because of this decision. It's also hugely regressive. You should not be driving across Bloor or down Yonge or University to traverse these streets, because there's literally subways under all of three of them.

It's just such piss poor management. The more decisions I see Doug Ford make, the more I see the image of that stupid fucking Ferris wheel Rob Ford wanted to put on our waterfront. Dumb ideas run in the family, apparently.

edit: we have to elect smarter people who aren't going to play these stupid culture wars games and waste our own money doing it. Doug Ford's strategy here is to set up a fight with Olivia Chow in preparation for an early election next year, because he knows the "surburbs vs. Toronto elites" narrative plays well with his base. It remains to be seen if the city can/will meaningfully fight back against this or if our mayor is just going to give us lip service, because she still benefits from this conflict by being on the other side politically.

ontario

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This is malice. Thug Ford continues to ruin the health of Ontarians.

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If you can sue the city for slipping and falling on sidewalks they don't salt, then surely you can sue the city for knowingly changing the design of a road to make it more dangerous, by arguing they have some level of culpability for harm to you if you get in an accident. The city's own study showed it reduced the rate of cycling accident (see Evaluation here) AND reduced collisions between cars.

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Razer settles 'deceptive' marketing FTC lawsuit for over $1 million

It's just another reminder what a greasy company Razer is. They should be avoided because their products are mostly crap, sold at high prices. I remember taking apart my Deathadder about 8 years ago after the left-click went on the fritz, and it was the crappiest, low-quality PCB I've ever seen in a product. I never bought Razer again after that.

Edit: To elaborate, they could have spent like 5 extra cents to get a nicer PCB, but they didn't. The mouse was really nice on the outside, but they cut every expense on the inside.

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Alternatives to Visa and Mastercard?

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To use Wero, both the sender and recipient must have an account at one of our bank members in Germany, Belgium or France (source)

No Canadian bank or credit union offers JCB cards.

Basically the only option is Interac, but it only works inside Canada. If you want to use your Canadian debit card internationally, it's going to go through an American payment network like Cirrus, Maestro, or the Plus network (ie. MasterCard or Visa's network).

canada

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‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics

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every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem

That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it's the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation

Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.

My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don't necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we're observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.

Edit: If anyone reads these links and your eyes glaze over and you don't understand of word of what's written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.

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Rolling my First Self-Made Router

I used pfSense for years and switched to OpenWRT. I highly recommend OpenWRT. pfSense is kinda trash IMHO. I tried to set up traffic shaping, so I could play games while my roommate was watching Netflix, and it just doesn't work as advertised. I tried like 20 different configurations for the traffic shaping, following all the documentation, guides, countless forum threads, etc, and none of it worked properly when you actually test it. At the end of the day, I concluded that nobody understands how to configure traffic shaping on it and even the developers didn't realize it was broken.

OpenWRT, on the other hand, just works better out of the box, and has the right level of customizability for home use. It has a way better ecosystem around it where you can download extra packages with GUIs... it's just much nicer to use, and doesn't have the QA problems I had with pfSense.

alberta

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Alberta premier reveals plans to transfer hospitals away from AHS

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I’m tired of paying more for less

You're completely mistaken if you think the US model is the solution - you have it completely backwards. The US has one of the highest healthcare costs in the world with WORSE healthcare outcomes. They have the highest spending per capita in the OECD. Also, higher mortality at birth, lower life expectancy, etc. In no uncertain terms, the US pays more for less, and this has been extensively studied and is why any sane government wants to avoid that model.

canada

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Poof Goes the Electric Car Dream | The Tyee

This guy's the worst at putting together a pursuasive argument. Almost all the problems he wrote wil have solutions we engineer in the future. Dismissing electric cars, the very real and imminent problem they have of CO2 emissions, based on cherry picking current problems they have in different countries is disingenuous and short sighted. eg. California's CO2 emissions problems at night cannot be generalized to other places.

And the punchline of this article is an apples-to-oranges comparison - you can't harp on transport trucks and then argue the solution is walking and biking.

Lithium batteries (or their successor) will get cheaper, lighter, and more energy dense because there's a massive market opportunity for that now. This article completely ignores our ability to advance technology to solve problems, lol.

canada

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Some kind of crowd-sourced tagging would be a cool anti-troll technique. A lot of less experienced websurfers struggle to spot "inauthentic behaviour" (bots, astroturfing, etc) so it could be beneficial. Reddit has a huge problem with sleeper accounts though, where they build up reputation with low-effort comments over years, then activate when a campaign needs them. The social media marketers seem to sometimes use the same techniques as the state-sponsored troll farms.

main

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Geopolitics community is just a propaganda outlet

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You don't have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it's just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it's going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It's similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.

Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can't just look away and pretend it's harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it's going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.

canada

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OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago

I think this should piss off a lot of people. Instead of doing something, they opted to do nothing, and now they're exploiting the tragedy as a PR opportunity. They're trying to shape their public image as an all-powerful arbiter. Worship the AI, or they will allow death to come to you and your family.

Or perhaps this is all just rage bait, to get us talking about this piece of shit company, to postpone the inevitable bursting of the AI bubble.

Edit: This is a sales pitch from OpenAI to the RCMP, with them saying they'll sell police forces an intelligence feed. It just comes across as horribly tone deaf and is problematic for so many reasons.

canada

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Canada proposes 100% tariffs on Tesla, I have an alternative: open the door to Chinese EVs

The thing is, if Trump wants to kill Canada's role in US car manufacturing, then it will cost him the car markets in Mexico and Canada. If there's no jobs here to protect, then we'll just drop the tariffs on Chinese EVs. (This is speaking like 20 years down the road). We'll all be driving Chinese cars in that scenario. The tariffs are a total lose-lose situation, so dumb.