This is beautifully familiar.

Am I seeing too many similarities between how Twitter/X was taken over and singlehandedly being irreversibly ruined?

While Windows is stubbornly becoming increasingly user-adversarial (advertising, constant intrusive updates, forced transition from your favorite browser to Microsoft Edge, etc.) and unintuitive (sometimes even counter intuitive) interface design, placement and inaccessible settings.

Well, delighting in schadenfreude, I won’t complain. Microsoft is inadvertently helping me help transition many friends, family and colleagues to various flavors of Linux systems, namely Linux Mint (whichever desktop they prefer) and/or Pop!OS most of the time, but also occasionally Fedora or a particular flavor of Ubuntu.

I never recommend Arch or rolling release systems or immutable systems to first time Linux user so as to preemptively avoid additional layers of complexity, learning curve, downtime and troubleshooting.

Yes, 😅. Thank you for letting me know.

I typed correctly I’m pretty sure, but typing it again now it autocorrects to “C - C - P” now 🫤. Even more confused.

I’ll edit my original post.

• Alpine on Pi4.

• LMDE on recycled AMD systems (phenoms, opterons, FM2 APUs, oh and a recently dead bulldozer fx-8150).

• TrueNAS, OPNsense on dedicated hardware.

• VMware ESXi on my older workstations (currently transitioning toward LXD/Incus and XPG-ng XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra).

Concentrated lemonade…? 😳

• You let it it dilute as you go, as per your taste.

A block of hard cheese…? 😆

• It would be water resistant (waterproof) enough to last the whole shower.

That is an interesting thought experiment that never occurred to me.

The essential part at the end:

“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit’s API FAQ page and said the company couldn’t comment further because it’s in a quiet period and doesn’t “comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements.” ”

We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.

More telling is their silence. Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.

Wow, asbestos pipes, that’s something new I learned today…

Total genius move by whomever designed it and the organization that approved/certified it for human potable water use.

How am I still surprised by these things, long ago we once thought lead pipes were perfect for moving/transporting potable water (apparently, one of the many things that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire).

Nowadays, high density polyethylene pipes are selling like hotcakes and certified for potable water use. Will we find, in a few decades, that micro-plastics are more prevalent than expected and cause innumerable long term health issues? Hence, the new thing to avoid like the Black Plague.

What is wrong with plain old copper pipes, outside of just being expensive due to low supply vs huge demand? (I may have missed the news on how they too affect health)

Thank you for this excellent writeup.

A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).

Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.

However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.

Whelp.

Is this some LLM copy-paste meme? Did I miss some viral post/thread that led to the above text?

I may need some help/context trying to understand all this…

I would welcome US and other countries to purchase drug made in canada. Whiles drugs imported by Canada should be restricted or some kind of reexportation fee should be levied to avoid shortages.

There are several manufacturer based in Canada such as Apotex Inc., Johnson&Johnson/Actelion, AbbVie, Novartis, Merck/Cubist, Pfizer/Hospira, Bayer, Roche, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, etc… Statistics from 2020

I would love to see Canada become a major influence in making high quality generic drugs more afordable to every one on the planet.

I regularly “deep freeze” or make read-only systems from Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Linux Mint LMDE and others Linux Distros whereas I disable automatic updates everywhere (except for some obvious config/network/hardware/subsystem changes I control separately).

I have had systems running 24/7 (no internet, WiFi) for 2-3 years before I got around to update/upgrade them. Almost never had an issue. I always expected some serious issues but the Linux package management and upgrade system is surprisingly robust. Obviously, I don’t install new software on a old system before updating/upgrading (learned that early on empirically).

Automatic updates are generally beneficial and helps avoid future compatibility/dependency issues on active systems with frequent user interaction.

However, on embedded/single purpose/long distance/dedicated or ephemeral application, (unsupervised) automatic updates may break how the custom/main software may interact with the platform. Causing irreversible issues with the purpose it was built for or negatively impact other parts of closed circuit systems (for example: longitudinal environmental monitoring, fauna and flora observation studies, climate monitoring stations, etc.)

Generally, any kind of update imply some level of supervision and testing, otherwise things could break silently without anyone noticing. Until a critical situation arises and everything break loose and it is too late/too demanding/too costly to try to fix or recover within a impossibly short window of time.

Hence, my alternative plan: I suggest planting trees and gardening fruits, vegetables and leguminous plant.

Will it solve anything regarding those conflicts? I don’t know.

But as you have said, any plan is better.

Thus, our human brain are incapable of grasping or begin to comprehend the scale and severity of the climate crisis with just soundbites, anecdotes, news-rants and tiktok videos.

Understanding complex systems is hard and requires continuous concentration over months and years. Even more so for the Hyperobject that is ephemerally understood as Climate Change.

We can barely begin to collectively acknowledge that perhaps something is indeed wrong with :

• all the burning forests just because of the smoke/smog “inconveniently” smothers our cities (occasionally burning them for being too close)

• atmospheric rivers drowning towns and cities in flash floods

• high altitude glaciers irreversibly melting and disappearing

• Greenland and Antarctic have only accelerated their ice loss from sustained glacier retreat

• the thermohaline circulation slowing down due to all that melted water (less dense due to higher temperature and less salt) staying on the surface of the water column

• the migration of millions of humans mostly from regions with latitude between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn due to drought, crops loss, famine, extreme storms, natural disasters and violence or wars

• the increase in frequency and length of heatwaves

Unfortunately, we will probably sooner or later go to war over made-up fantasies or leftovers of a ruined planet before finally collectively understanding and tackling the complex thing that is currently (for now) known as Climate Change.

Oh no‽

Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).

Any viable/preferred alternative?

Man, is this seriously going turn into into the Iraq has WMD boondoggle/fiasco:

“Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, in which he detailed false intelligence gatherings provided by the Israeli government regarding Iraqi WMD.”

Source 1: Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence

Source 2: Israel knew Iraq had no WMD, says MP

I forgot it was Israeli Intelligence source back then 🤔. I only remember Bush insisting there are WMDs and Colin Powell’s declaration at the UN. All of it was proven fake of course, and 20 years later it has become the biggest and most expensive Intelligence blunder.

Hopefully, I am wrong and we were smarter to verify everything before repeating the same reckless mistake.

I try to not comment on controversial issues particularly when I don’t have any qualification or first hand knowledge/experience, however this is looking more and more like an unmitigated overreaction.

All these first-past-the-post voting systems (here in Canada too it’s a problem) need to be relegated to a bygone era, it’s so bad that even placings names on a board and throwing darts blindfolded for every MP positions would probably give a better and more representative outcome.

Welp… it will probably be after something akin to world war 3 that we (the ones luckily still alive) would all sit down and set out to fix the many obvious and perhaps not so obvious issues with governance, lack of immediate consequence to lying, independently peer reviewed education system absent of political/religious/vested/private interest or influence, broken taxation system enabling billionaires, the lack of thorough independent study of environmental or health concerns before even granting any permit (problems tend to always be discovered long after it was commercialised/contructed/).

Sad to see the state of affairs in every country 😰😱, nevertheless just as we can see/imagine/iterate/improve our ideas of what each one of us would consider better systems, we should implement, test, cross pollinate, evaluate (scientifically, quantitatively and qualitatively) and keep what works better than before and reject/shun/disqualify what obviously causes issues or collateral damages.

Hmm… how will a return work? 🤔

Put it the car back in a box and drop it at the nearest dropoff store or UPS/FedEx? 🤣

Will there be a 30% restocking fee?

What if the car just doesn’t work after delivery? Missing parts?

Will there now also be a Amazon Warehouse Deals for used cars?

Small question (perhaps dumb on my part as I haven’t slept yet), do these desalination system remove other chemicals such as PFAS, arsenic, lead? I think I read that they use nanofiltration membranes to remove almost everything. How about molecules that are smaller than water (H₂O)? Do they get filtered?

It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.

Then there is general intelligence (g factor or general intelligence factor) which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):

Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.

Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.

Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.

Neat question indeed. 😆

Sad to see another country descending into perpetual civil war and slowly turning into a failed state (hopefully not, and I’m completely wrong).

The people deserve better, but old power cannot let go of their darn solid gold toilet (metaphor).

Good for them for fighting back, but it should not have gone this far. As too many innocent are being sacrificed.

Please freeze your credit file at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. It’s free and you can unfreeze it anytime you want (or whenever you judge its a valid credit check for something you actually requested yourself).

Whether you have a low/medium/good/perfect credit score and are satified with the credit cards and mortgage/loans you already have or lived without ever having a credit card and loans, it is of utmost importance to freeze your credit files to preempt any future identity theft from becoming a life upending disaster.

Some helpful links:

American Express | How to Freeze Your Credit at All 3 Bureaus—For Free

nerdwallet | How to Freeze Your Credit

Federal Trade Commission | What To Know About Credit Freezes and Fraud Alerts

For the fellow Canadians reading this, freezing your credit file has been enshrined in law in Québec since February 2023. I have frozen mine on the first week of February. However, I am unaware of the availability of that option in other provinces, please check with your bank or provincial service bureau (equivalent to Services Québec here) or directly contact Equifax and TransUnion.