Porter still barely qualifies as national, and even that’s a super recent development, but I agree. No middle seats, no bullshit, just a cheap and efficient way to get from A to B with minimum discomfort and minimum airport hassle. Porter is awesome. I hope they soon buy dozens and dozens more of those Embraer jets and really give Westjet and Air Canada a real run for their money.

Even better if they can connect up their medium-haul network hubs with the Embraers and continue to use their Dash-8s to provide feeder service from under-served, under-utilized regional airports. I don’t mind hopping on a short connection as long as they can keep the price modest and it’s not connecting at either end of some 50-kilometers-across dystopian nightmare maze like Pearson (which Air Canada always insists on doing).

Porter and Westjet both have right idea spreading the traffic out to other airports around Toronto like City Center, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, etc. Porter has the even better idea of using some of them as hubs instead of Pearson and I’m all for it.

Yeah he’s got some serious abusive spouse energy going on at times with all the emotional whiplash. Beats the shit out of you and then “aww baby, come on, you know I love you” then beats you some more.

This guy vocally praises Hitler and the Nazis. So if you manage to find any people defending and supporting this sack of shit, they are Nazis too, and remember that punching Nazis is not promoting hate, it is a civic duty and a Canadian tradition. I look forward to this barbarian getting his ass handed to him in the election and hope he ends up in jail again.

What they’re saying isn’t wrong, Canadian productivity is very low, innovation is primarily isolated to large institutions, many of which are subsidized, and occasional small plucky outliers who have snuck through the great filter of regulations and usually get quickly gobbled up. The problem is I doubt any solution these tech bros propose will be used to improve it. I don’t trust their motives at all.

I do have problems with the way so many of Canada’s regulations are unfairly oppressive and obstructionist for actual entrepreneurs – I’m speaking of actual single individuals and very small groups, with genuinely limited resources, who don’t have the time or energy or employees or financial capacity to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of tediously expensive, overwhelmingly detailed and sometimes changing regulations. Everyone wants a piece of the pie before you’ve even made any pie. Our regulations tend to be very bottom-heavy and front-loaded and become relatively more onerous the smaller and less well resourced you are, they lack any reasonable scaling, exemptions and incentives for small business and small operations and I think that’s intentional, it is a classic protectionist strategy which immensely pleases many of our entrenched oligopolies.

I can think of many very highly specific examples that I’m not going to share because I don’t want to get into the weeds of highly specific industries, but I think it’s safe to claim that they all have their fair share of anti-small-business regulation. Of course taxes are one issue that every business has to deal with that could be improved and simplified vastly for small business. Tax credit programs like SR&ED that are ostensibly there to foster innovation tend to just become distracting time and effort black holes for small businesses while huge companies like Bell employ or hire experts on this process with a legal team to back them up who help them walk away with millions.

Anyone who’s ever had to deal with Transport Canada for anything vehicle, aviation or rocket or drone related, or Industry Canada for anything radio related, or Health Canada for anything person related, or Natural Resources Canada for the environment, the RCMP about anything potentially dangerous like weapons, or CFIA for anything food related, or CBSA for anything border related, knows that these organizations are deeply risk-averse brick walls for entrepreneurs, hobbyists and innovators alike. And that’s basically their mandate. However the larger and more well-funded you are, the less risky you seem to magically appear to them. I’m speaking from some experience here. And another problem is look how many I’ve just named off the top of my head, it’s not even always clear who you need to be talking to about what. The problem is small business needs to be able to take risks to succeed and if that’s going to cause risks to the public, I understand the concern, but the government and their agencies need to step in and provide tools and regimes where we can test and minimize and manage that risk instead of stonewalling and putting the entire burden on small businesses which simply cannot bear that burden. You’re always guilty until proven innocent when it comes to these sort of regulations and unless you have the resources to prove that you’re innocent you’ll never be allowed to make any progress. And the height of the bar required to prove you’re innocent seemingly changes based on how much money you have, but in the opposite direction of what it should.

If you try to get around the lack of resources by going to the banks for a loan to pay for or hire the resources you need, a) you’ll have to give them collateral and the banks love that, and b) now you’ve got a staunchly conservative bank looking over your shoulder constantly and they hate risk even more than the government agencies, and c) the banks themselves are strictly regulated so even if they wanted to help you they often can’t. That is sort of a crappy way of solving the problem, and so the fact that it doesn’t solve the problem isn’t so concerning, as it wouldn’t even have to BE a problem if all the rest of the regulations on small business weren’t so bad, but it closes off any possible relief valve of letting the banks inject capital into small businesses which could at least mitigate the blockage.

Canada seems to have this general attitude that treating small business and large business exactly the same is exactly what makes their regulations fair and even-handed when in fact and in actual outcome it’s anything but. “Bank of Dave” provides a great illustration of some of the unfairness in this kind of unnecessary and harmful overregulation of very small fish in a very big pond and the way it inhibits actual entrepreneurs and entire communities from achieving success, it’s UK based but I think the general concepts translate pretty well to Canada too.

There are some parts of it that aren’t great and maybe it could be streamlined, like the cookie warning which should be implemented technically in the browser and part of the cookie protocol. Transition it to making it legally the responsibility of tech giants and advertisers like Microsoft and Google to comply and be honest about what they’re tracking, rather than the sole burden falling on each individual website. Somehow I doubt that’s the only thing they’ll be interested in discussing but I’m going to wait and see what they actually do before I judge.

The United States of Canada has a better sound to it than the 51st state if you ask me.

I guess they ran out of Public Integrity to report on, there’s none left.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support. If you do have an argument to make, feel free to do so. I may or may not respond. But in case my own point’s not clear, I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel, and I think they try to cast it in as negative a light as they possibly can, and I don’t think their perspective is even worth considering as they continue their ghastly sprint to destroy the future of life on this planet so they can earn money.

Why is this always worded in such a shitty way that makes it sound like a bad thing. “swamps the grid” “overwhelming the region” “prices slumping”. Fuck all the “energy companies” and their bought politicians and journalists who think or at least talk this way.

Here let me fix it for you: “France now has abundant solar energy, providing free electricity to all homes and businesses that want it, while plenty of solar capacity remains in reserve, available for meeting increased demands or storing for later or night-time use by refilling hydroelectric reservoirs”

Who would’ve ever thought we would’ve ever needed something like this. I am glad my veteran father never lived to see this happen, it would’ve broken him. This is what he fought against.

Celebrity culture is gross, but if you’re going to watch that nonsense I agree Canadian is better (and somewhat less gross) than American.

I’ve got plenty, if the Americans invade, I’ll share.

I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.

My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile, nevermind work properly, or efficiently.

I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.

The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.

More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).

Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.

The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.

There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?

I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked then all your accounts with the same password will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts and cell phone number/identity locked down like Fort Knox, since email and phones can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.

Lots of leopards eating people’s faces these days. Probably shouldn’t have voted for the leopards eating people’s faces party.

I have never understood why people are so unequivocal and quick to take sides in this conflict. Either people insist on “No criticism of Hamas” or “No criticism of Israel”. It has always seemed clear to me that both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are victims of their and each other’s respective warmongering hardline governments. It is possible for both sides to be completely in the wrong, and arguing about which is “more wrong” and trying to tally up historical injustices to debate who has the biggest total is fruitless and counterproductive. Until both sides are willing to admit they’ve been wrong and done wrong to each other and accept that very justified criticism, the violence is never going to end. Criticism of both sides is not only deserved it is necessary and probably the only answer. Both sides need to be forced to take responsibility for what they’ve each done wrong instead of justifying and defending it and acting like they’re completely innocent before this is ever going to have a chance at resolution.

The only conclusion I can draw is that some people REALLY don’t want it to ever have a peaceful resolution, and I think that’s probably closest to the actual truth of the situation. Really sickening and sad, for everyone victimized by this conflict. And I’m not even going to start getting into all the various foreign governments “supporting” both these sides. These are the ones who don’t want it to ever have a peaceful resolution, I suspect.

I am hoping that maybe these protests are at least a sign that Gazans are willing to start vocally criticizing Hamas’ role in perpetuating this violence. Now for us to be getting somewhere we’d need to start to see the same from the Israeli people too. But I’m not holding my breath. These protest efforts may be too little too late. Israel is clearly the better equipped and supported regime here; globally we seem to be returning to the horrible principle of “might makes right”. As we know history is written by the victor, and genocide is an unfortunately practical and well-tested way of silencing your critics.

If you yourself use/are familiar with Linux and willing to actually test and polish your Linux version to the same standard as your Windows version, then a native Linux version is always appreciated.

However these days, it’s probably not necessary and a lazy afterthought Linux version is like a bad console port, and because we DO have the option to run the Windows version, it’s probably worse than no Linux version at all.

So it really depends on your personal feelings towards Linux, and nobody’s going to judge you for not providing a native version you can’t personally test and support. That’s why we have Proton.