What does the current cadre of US billionaire tech leaders have in common? They are all giganticly huge losers with the personality of this tissue I just used to blow my nose.
All of them. Born standing an inch from home plate but tell you they invented baseball.
Normally on Remberance Day I talk about the experiences of my paternal grandfather who was a German soldier who got caught in the infamous siege at Stalingrad. Instead I want to share for my American friends the Highway of Heroes.
Canada hadn’t had any military deaths since the Korean War and then soldiers started dying in missions in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When their bodies would return to Canada, they would arrive at Canadian Forces Base Trenton and then be driven to the Coronor’s Office in Toronto via Highway 401.
Without any official organizing, people started standing on the overpasses between CFB Trenton and the exit for the coroner to pay tribute to the dead soldiers and attempt to thank them for their sacrifices.
That 170+km stretch became known as the Highway of Heroes. I see the signs for it any time I drive out towards Eastern Ontario.
I am no fan of our military and no family served. Recoginizing the pointless deaths is still important.
Apple is perma-closing the Support Community site — https://discussions.apple.com/
This is gonna break every search engine result and every saved link on a web page or bookmark.
They likely fed all the existing content into a RAG or specially trained LLM.
I scraped the ~60 pages from the main entry point (it goes back ~5 days). The site was not exactly unused.
Way to go, Apple.
My wife also volunteers at the heritage museum in town. Their poppy project was featured on CTV news. I have met almost everyone in the video.
My hottest take about Canada’s Rememberance Day is that the US should model their Memorial Day after it. Less “how awesome our military is” and more “honour the sacrifice they made.”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/lucan-poppy-project-pays-tribute-to-veterans/
When people would assume I was “good at math” because I could program computers I would remind them I was “good with computers because I got one when I was 10 and was generally smart. I got 51 in Calculus”
here's a take that'll please no one: the belief that computers are difficult to use—especially foss and tools related to programming—is mostly constructed by politics and marketing, not by any inherent characteristics of the software. reasoning: (a) people master very complicated and user-hostile processes *all the time*. knitting, driving a car on the interstate, playing a musical instrument, being a baseball fan, using the subway—all just as complicated imo as (e.g.) learning the command line
I spent some time today getting Evi (one of the Vim versions not accepting LLM contributions) up and running and back to useful coding for me.
It’s funny how little stuff I actually need from my editor these days:
Tomorrow’s task is making sure smart code indenting works and then I think I will be good.
When a crime is just a fine it means rich people can get away with it.
IMO it is ridiculous that a builder can own a lot, lie about having permits to cut down trees, and still be allowed to go ahead with the planned build that could only happen if the trees were removed.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/etobicoke-trees-forged-permits-modcity-9.7412690
RE: https://phpc.social/@joepferguson/117592482272162642
If you depend on Homestead for your day-to-day professional work, you should consider migrating to another tool for local development, as HashiCorp will no longer be supporting Vagrant.
If you or your company would like to hire me to build out S3 infrastructure in your environment so you can continue building and sharing your own base boxes, feel free to email me to discuss.
My “favourite” thing about this article is how the oil companies basically said out loud that they will not build anything new unless the government guarantees them profits.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/oilsands-oilpatch-danielle-smith-royalty-incentive-9.7415489
Chuck Schumer's daughter, Jessica Schumer has lead a major campaign for Amazon in New York City, lobbying against expanded worker protection measures from Zohran Mamdani’s administration.
In September, Open AI hired her.
The blatant corruption in US politics never ceases to astonish me.
I don’t think there’s a single country in the world worth moving to - reasonably safe, reasonably prosperous, reasonably geopolitically stable - that has a “population crisis”. They have a policy problem rooted in racism. So solve that problem instead.
If Canada wanted to make a serious investment in long term prosperity and innovation, the place I’d start tomorrow is “every foreign student who graduates from any Canadian post-secondary institution gets citizenship papers with their diploma”.
The Mayor of Ontario has reached the bonus round!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/doug-ford-alleged-cadet-leader-assault-hamilton-9.7415639
One of the “advantages” of FOSS was supposed to be that if a tool wasn’t meeting your needs, you could either fork it yourself, use someone else’s fork, or switch to something else.
I am a Vim guy on and off for 25 years. I did not like that Vim was creaking a bit and the plugin ecosystem seemed stale so I switched to NeoVim.
Then they started accepting LLM contributions. And the lead dev turned out to be a fan of DHH. Time to switch.
It’s more the DHH thing than LLM’s outright for me as I like to stay employed and got fired over LLM opinions at my last job.
Vim accepted LLM stuff. Damnit, so off to EMacs with Vim bindings. Now the EMacs guy thinks slavery is just fine.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.
I CONTROL NOTHING I CAN USE. ALL THESE LEAD DEVELOPERS ARE HORRIBLE UNAPOLOGETIC ASSHOLES.
Last I checked the LLM-free version of Vim does not compile on Mac.
I might as well use VSCode at this point. At least I know they don’t give a shit.
The Mayor of Ontario is at it again
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ford-comments-osap-changes-student-protests-9.7415127
One of the things that used to be standard practice at an old job was that when an Important Person went to Certain Countries, they got a new phone and a new laptop and both of them contained a carefully curated set of exactly and only what they needed for that trip and nothing else at all.
When they got back somebody with no sense of humor whatsoever met them at the airport, took those devices away and destroyed them off site.
That was just what the trip cost, the price of the ticket.
The one thing every person who says they can live with slavery has in common is an absolute certainty that they will not be the slave
For years I had wondered how to find a copy of this book that I immensely enjoyed as a kid. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I was able to get a copy.
Originally published in 1953, it was reprinted in 2006 for some reason.
I can still remember that old-book smell from it (along with all the freedom that came with that school’s tiny library).
It’s the story a very short big city kid who loves basketball and moved to a small town, finding success playing the sport he loves.
(I never felt like I was up against the world as a kid. I wasn’t popular and that really bugged me as a teen but all the popular boys turned out to be gigantic losers as adults)
I hadn’t read this book in at least 43 years when I was in Grade 6. Reading it, memories came back of parts of the story and even dialogue.
I am not a nostalgic person so please believe me when I say I was not expecting emotions to come rushing back reading the struggles of a 5’2” kid who just wanted to be good at basketball but already was a better person at life.
The aisle between democrats and republicans is shallow and narrow.
The chasm between AIPAC recipients and independent politicians is deep and wide.
Pay no attention to the ‘aisle.’ It's just there to disguise the fact the US is a one-party state with two of them, and that one party has 331 seats.