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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • That’s quite a straw man argument he’s setup there.

    My main problem with this argument is that he’s misdefined “centrism”, and then decided to beat up on the wrong definition. I think we can all agree that his definition of “centrism” would be pretty weak and unpopular politically.

    But what he’s defined here isn’t centrism. Steve’s definition here is that the centrist looks at a single policy, looks at how the left views it, looks at how the right views it, and then tries to craft some in between policy for each and every policy on the map.

    Now that can happen with every party on certain policies — but more typically centrism picks some policies from the left, and some policies from the right. It’s led less by ideology than by science and a notion of “what’s best” — and sometimes what’s best is a leftist policy, and sometimes it’s a rightist policy.

    And it’s not hard to see that this is true with the Trudeau Liberal Government. Marijuana legalization is very much a leftist policy. The National Child Care Plan is 100% a leftist policy. So is gun control. And on the flip side, Carbon Pricing was a 100% rightist policy, as it’s a minimalist market solution to the problem of climate change (one which people need to remember was originally proposed by right-wing think tanks. The leftist policy would have been heavy legislation against industry directly). Modifying the Safe Third Country Agreement also followed the Right’s playbook. As was joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership.

    If you want to boil the three ideologies down to their cores, at the extreme right we have a purely free market system with minimalist government and few social services. At the extreme left side you have a system that heavily regulates and controls markets, but with strong social support systems and larger government bureaucracies. True centrism is effectively the notion that the free market is best in some situations, but government is better in others. For example, that the free market is best for making and selling smart phones (rightist), but government is better at providing health care (leftist).

    That is centrism — and it’s not difficult to look at the bulk of Liberal Party of Canada policies and see that this is the general pattern they follow. Not some simplistic “let’s look at what the left wants and what the right wants on a specific policy and craft something down the middle”. Centrists pick some rightist policies, and some leftist policies. That is what makes them centrists.





  • The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.

    What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.

    It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.


  • Depends on what you mean by “back in the day”. So far as I know you could be ~30, and “back in the day” for you is the 2005 era.

    For some of us “back in the day” is more like the early 90’s (and even earlier than that if we want to include other online services, like BBS’s) — and the difference since Eternal September is pretty stark (in both good and bad ways).


  • It’s horrible she was denied when there was a liver already available.

    Any full cadaver liver that could have gone to this woman didn’t get thrown into the garbage — it went to someone else who would have died without it.

    As for the living donor liver her boyfriend offered, even though he was a match her level of liver failure likely meant that the partial liver her boyfriend could have donated wouldn’t have been successful. Living donors still need a liver for themselves, and we each only have one full liver — so the best they could have done is given her half a liver. Her condition was too poor for this to have a likely positive outcome, which was why this was also denied.

    It sucks, but there aren’t enough donor livers for everyone who needs one. The cadaver liver she was denied however would have gone on to save the life of someone else you’re not hearing about in the press — someone else who may have died without it.

    If the unfairness of it all upsets you that much, then make sure you’ve signed your organ donor card, and make sure your family members know and understand your desire to be an organ donor. And encourage the people you know to do the same. This is only a problem because there aren’t enough donor livers for everyone — when you have n livers, at best you can save n lives — and thus having a larger number of donor livers allows for more lives to be saved, with fewer qualifications.


  • I’ve been a fan for a really long time — Astro Bot Rescue Mission is still one of my favourite VR games ever. Team Asobi really knocked this one out of the park it seems. I’m happy for their success — and happy for us to have such a great game to play (I too only got an hour in tonight — had to put my daughter to bed, and she wants to play with me so I had to put it away until tomorrow).



  • There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.

    Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.

    The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.

    With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.

    Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.




  • Yes. But what if the world was 1/3rd Linux, 1/3rd windows, 1/3rd OSX?

    The 1/3 running macOS (they haven’t called in OS X in many years now) wouldn’t have to worry, because Apple provides kernel event access for security tools running in user space. The CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor driver on macOS runs as a System Extension, and runs 100% in user space (“Ring 3” in Intel parlance) only — so if it misbehaves, the kernel can just shut it down and continue on its merry way.

    The problem with Windows (and to a certain extend Linux) is that Falcon Sensor needs to run in kernel mode (Ring 0) on those OS’s, and if it fucks up you lose all guarantees that the kernel and all of the apps running on the system haven’t been fucked with, hence the need for a full system crash/shutdown. The driver can (and did) put these systems in an indeterministic state. But that can’t happen on modern macOS with modern System Extensions.



  • …until the CrowdStrike agent updated, and you wind up dead in the water again.

    The whole point of CrowdStrike is to be able to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities, including zero-days. As such, they can release updates multiple times per day. Rebooting in a known-safe state is great, but unless you follow that up with disabling the agent from redownloading the sensor configuration update again, you’re just going to wing up in a BSOD loop.

    A better architectural solution like would have been to have Windows drivers run in Ring 1, giving the kernel the ability to isolate those that are misbehaving. But that risks a small decrease in performance, and Microsoft didn’t want that, so we’re stuck with a Ring 0/Ring 3 only architecture in Windows that can cause issues like this.


  • There is always more that can be done, but the effects of the carbon tax go well beyond it being a “tax on life”.

    Take for example Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. They’ve been undergoing a major transformation from using constantly-burning coal to an Electric Arc Furnace — and they specifically call out carbon tax savings as one of the projects drivers.

    That’s but one story of industry putting the investments into greener technologies to save from having to pay the carbon levy. I wish the media spent more time talking about such projects, because the levy is working.

    You know what I love most about the levy? It’s effectively optional. I can’t opt out of making an income (not being born rich and not wanting to live under a vow of poverty), but I can opt out of generating carbon. We’ve been having the carbon discussion for 30 years now (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came out in 1992!), and at least some of us were paying attention and made a plan to decarbonize our lifestyles during the last three decades. And for everyone who has, the Carbon Levy might as well not really exist. If you don’t burn, you don’t pay. Simple as that.


  • Don’t know where you are in Canada (which I’m assuming based on “Social Insurance Number” and “Prov.” fields in the form), but at least here in BC much of what they’re asking for here is illegal to even request in the first place.

    Your Drivers License, and banking info are all personal private information which are covered by the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This guidance document from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC outlines what a perspective landlord can ask for, and what they can’t.

    This is either a scam, or a really shitty landlord. Either way, don’t deal with them. You can open a complaint with the OIPC if you want (probably most useful if you’re sure they’re legit; not too useful if it’s a scam).