Canadian, solar/renewable energy enthusiast, security person, software engineer, and general doer-of-things @ @tailscale.com Also on Mastodon @andrew@ottawa.place (and one of the admins of that server!)
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Hey Canadian friends, let's sign this petition!! It takes less than 2 minutes and is an official thing you can do đŞ For context, Canada's C-2 bill paves the way for the US gov't to access Canada's private civilian data based on "security of the border", and "other security measures". It's bad!
This should go without saying, but the best thing for Canada to do as the United States quickly spirals into fascism and corrupt autocracy, isnât to try to seem more like the United States. Itâs to quickly double down on being even MORE Canadian. Thatâs the big advantage, the big opportunity.
For anyone that wants to know how parenting is going: Leigh just said that she was planning to start reading Douglas Pikettyâs âCapital in the Twenty-First Centuryâ to him in French during his next wake window đ
Hello Iâve been mostly offline the last few months and also wasnât in Vegas for security summer camp this past week Please say hi to the reason for my absence, his name is Douglas and heâs the sweetest little potato He arrived in early June and weâre over the moon đŠľ
Public cloud, public social media, public dating apps. It sounds unhinged at first but tbh I think creating alternatives with no profit motive could have extremely positive downstream effects to every aspect of society.
Thereâs a lesson here for Canada, if the good people at the CBC want to learn it.
I also worked at Stripe reasonably early on, and did well there (not "can retire", but "bought a house"), and am đ¨đŚ. I really like this article from @avibryant.com, and wholeheartedly endorse this message. âI like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilizationââOliver Holmes macleans.ca/politics/tax...
If your law is good when there are good people in office, but dangerous when there are bad people in office, your law is bad.
It's amusing that Point Nemo is 1) the location of the city of R'lyeh and 2) the point where we aim for our deorbited junk to crash into the ocean. So we've been bombarding R'lyeh from orbit for decades now and sooner or later something down there is going to get cross.
I worry that escalating war with Iran will be used to whip up more fear and hate for non-white immigrants, particularly those of Arab descent, and be used for unjust deportations.
Adam and Eve had no stuff, and were happy. And so, Satan invented stuff. This caused greed, and envyâand worst of all, "needing to remember where you put the stuff." But our parents could still see their stuff, and inventory it. They weren't totally miserable. And so, Satan invented data.
The biggest mistake made by cyberpunk media of the 80s and 90s is that they didnât anticipate the power of NIMBYs.
On the other site I said Visa and Mastercard are the unwilling de facto rulers of the adult industry. In this thread, weâll dig into adult industryâs most exciting layer: financial plumbing! and explore weird content banned not by law, but by interpretation of card rules. đ§ľ
having worked with him for years I can confidently say that Parker is a hella force multiplier, hire him for all your comms / policy / devrel / puzzle needs
Canadians clutching their pearls about ICE barely know the Liberals are pushing through a bill right now giving the gov the ability to check your mail, get your IP and internet history, and makes immigration and asylum seeking way more difficult
Oh awesome! Yeah, the Niro is another great option đ Glad you like it!
My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found heređ www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...
just watched a video on Obsidian that described it as "future-proof," i.e. it uses open file formats so you can easily migrate to a different note-taking app & you're not locked in. could borrow that to explain bluesky decentralized â open â billionaire-proof â future-proof
(if you want to do a neat mental exercise, imagine our current world under even a pre-1978 copyright law: 28 year duration. everything pre-1997 in public domain, as well as everything not explicitly registered. oh and no software. hahaha!)
To understand why Western automakers are so afraid of China's best-selling EV, we drove one on its home turf. It's simple. You get a dignified driving experience for $8,000. If you want that in America, go to the used car lot. insideevs.com/features/761...
I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives: www.404media.co/teachers-are...
This is super cool! Congrats on the launch!
Also, research shows that when anti-violence shelters come to a region, the murder rate against women ticks down a tiny amount, but the murder rate of men by women falls off a cliff. When women have other ways out of a bad relationships, they take them. When they have no hope, they kill.
Also, I donât think that the startup current for a compressor is typically included in load calculations, at least here in Canada. My parents have a geothermal heat pump with a startup current of like 150A, and thatâs totally fine on a 200A service with a bunch of other electric loads.
You could even have them share a circuit with the stove, for example; no harm if the back up heat turns off for a little while when youâre running the stove, especially because theyâre most likely to turn on overnight when people likely arenât going to be cooking anyway.
What about putting an EVSE-style load management device specifically on the backup heat strips? Depending how big they are, that could be enough to get you down below the total load. Since all of the them Iâm aware of are essentially just resistive heaters, it shouldnât hurt anything.
Do you mind if I ask: what are the primary contributors to those peaks?
Ughhhhhhh that sucks. 800A service is *ridiculous*, tooâthat's almost 200kW of power! What do they think you're running, a DC fast charger?! I think this is the company I was thinking of? www.pspproducts.com/load-managem... It really does seem to me that this needs to just ... be a product though.
For that many subpanels, itâs probably worth talking to an electrician about how much it would cost to get field approval for something a bit more custom? You could get a bunch of listed relays/contactors and a PLC in an enclosure maybe?
Yeah, agreed. Honestly, other than the "integrating with various bespoke vendor things" part of it, it wouldn't even be that hard to make a product out of thisâthough I'm sure the various certifications would be đ¸. I don't have the time/expertise to found a company, but I hope someone does!
As for the "why verified people"âthat's a great question, and one I'd love to know more about myself. I have some theories myself, but since I don't work at Bluesky, they're just that, theories and guesses.
To your first point: đŻ absolutelyâscams that are driven from organized crime pose as anyone that they think will allow them to obtain funds; the war in Ukraine is/was another one, for example.
The only similar thing that I know of off the top of my head is www.openevse.com - you can publish a MQTT topic of "current power draw for the house" and configure it to dynamically adjust the charge current to keep the total power under a limit. (It also supports "only charge from solar", too!)
Ah, I see what you mean; yeah, this is still throttling at the breaker/outlet. It would be *really* nice to have the ability to control that stuff from inside the building, yeah.
These guys support general purpose devices, not just EVSEs: blackboxinnovations.com Thereâs another product from a different manufacturer that I canât seem to find again; let me do a bit more diggingâŚ
1. Three AI data centres in Kamloops 2. The hottest city in Canada 3. With the most water stress of any city >100,000 people in the country 4. In a wildfire zone 5. In a semi-desert, semi-arid mountain climate I have Questions.
I do not have a job and I'm unlikely to get one any time soon, so I cannot give directly. What I can do, however, is offer shiny goodies. If you donate at least $20 to any of the three charities from earlier posts in this thread and DM me, I will send you one of these cute sparkly "Moxie" decals.
For folks in the replies here: itâs important to realize that some scammers arenât just a random individual; scammed funds can help support human trafficking and other heinous shit. Itâs not âjust a scamâ! More info and research in my thread here: bsky.app/profile/andr...
Things that feel better than doomscrolling: -cleaning your home -taking a walk -playing with a pet -calling a friend -donating to charity -reading a book -taking a hot shower -eating a meal -building a puzzle -stretching -working on a craft -planning how to spite your enemies -going to sleep early
Literally no one has ever changed their mind from a sufficient volume of strangers yelling at them on the internet, and what I said about morally motivated networked harassment applies to *everyone* regardless of which "side" they are on.
It absolutely is, and I've seen at least one now-deleted account that I personally verified had no (visible*) verification from her and still put "Verified by so-and-so" in both the bio and messages they sent. * - I didn't see any messages/replies from her that mentioned that account or name
I do not care if Canada post is ever profitable. It is a public service, everyone owns it. Thatâs valuable in and of itself. We donât ask the emergency room or public schools to turn a profit. We ask them to be accessible for everyone to use.
we got an EV recently for our limited car needs and, enh, it's a car, fine, but a thing that's interesting is how it reveals just how much energy driving takes; I am currently using V2L on our fridge during some electrical work and an 80% charge could keep our food cold for like 3 months
Love in the Time of *Gestures Frantically*
I got a speeding ticket from an automated camera but my lawyer got it dismissed by proving I was stationary at the time of the photo. Thank you to the fine attorneys at Zeno & Associates
LLMs are nifty. Kind of cool. How they're being offered is so very terrible that I think we'll never see the best applications of them because the marginal-to-absolute-garbage applications of them being shoehorned in wherever they might fit is causing the AI term to be toxic.
What has personally radicalized me on this is that there is basically a universal consensus in America (including both police and prosecutors) that it should be legal to murder people with your car, and as a pedestrian, I take that kind of personally.
I'm really sad that MinIO turned their self hosted version to shit considering it was actually kinda neat for reference, they basically nuked everything from their agpl builds: github.com/minio/object... 114k line removal btw
đ¤Łđľ
Thatâs ⌠genuinely an improvement over what I remember đ
I havenât run phpBB for like ⌠10 years at this point. Has it gotten any better? Iâd be up for running a forum again TBQH, for the right reasons anyway.
As promised, here's my matching donation; thanks to @drsaddison.bsky.social, @michaelmac6072.bsky.social, @grumblebee.bsky.social, @glhaynes.bsky.social, and some folks that sent proof via DMs for donating (in no particular order).
Thanks for donating!
You can just take academic papers and paste them into Gemini 2.5/ChatGPT o3/Claude 4 with the prompt "build me a game based on this paper, make it interesting and thematic but still conveying key findings" and get a tiny working educational game. (In this case, I used Gemini)
And thank you!
Thank you!
is there any other decent marine internet solution other than starlink yet?
Yeah, +1 to Ed; excellently put đŻ
Thank you â¤ď¸ I'm going to wait a few hours (or maybe tomorrow) in case anyone else donates, and then do a matching donation with the totalâhopefully it'll save the charity/charities a bit on credit card processing fees.
The thing I see missing in most of the discourse around fundraising scams (and non-scams) on here is the sheer degree to which fraud & scamming has become industrialized over the last 5-10 years. Folks working close to the problem know, but itâs hard to convey unless youâve witnessed it directly.
** Relief Fund, oops
So, Iâll put my money where my mouth is now: Iâll match up to $500 in donations to any one of these reputable organizations: Palestine Childrenâs Relied Fund: www.pcrf.net The UNRWA: www.unrwa.org Palestine Red Crescent Society: www.palestinercs.org/en
The problem is: itâs impossible, at scale, to tell the difference. Organized crime runs this like a business: if they see something working, thatâs what theyâll copy. Posting âaccount verified by $PERSONâ, even if that account hasnât been, is one specific thing Iâve seen (on a now-banned account).
I want to be very clear here: Iâm *not* saying that every Gofundme on here is a scam. Iâm not even saying that every scam is organized crime! However. Some are. And sending money to those supports the human trafficking of (often young) real people.
In some cases, it goes beyond trafficking for scams and into even more heinous shit like organ trafficking and people being sold into slavery. Sources: www.npr.org/2023/12/10/1... theexodusroad.com/online-scams... www.csis.org/analysis/cyb... (and many more)
Palestine *IS* experiencing a genocide right now. However, organized crime *IS* also using Gaza as a way to divert funds away from Palestine. Being âokay with getting scammedâ isnât a harmless choice; those funds support human trafficking in SE Asia. Donate to a reputable org, not an individual.
When I say "organized spam cartels", this is what I am talking about. People who don't know the scope of the problem or the egregious human rights abuses it involves always liken this to a person saying "if you give a homeless person $20, they'll only use it to buy drugs" and similar bullshit.
While in the LOTR movies Denethor just randomly went crazy, that's not the whole story. Denethor became a doomer. He spent all night scrolling through bad news on his magic device, because the Dark Lord only let him see bad news and not good, until he lost all hope and it broke him.
If you are going to be angry, be angry the spam cartels have managed to divert so much money that people want to go to aiding Gazans into supporting human trafficking! And, of course, angry at the crisis that means pretending to be a Gazan in need is a successful tactic for them to engage in.
I spent 72 hours checking the posting times of every Gazan account I saw fundraising. More than 2/3 of them were inconsistent with Gaza but consistent with Myanmar or Cambodia, where hundreds of thousands of people are trafficked into doing scam work under threat of violence or death.
Here's a gift article folks because it is really good. www.thestar.com/business/opi...
Albertans have good reason to be angry: their real wages are down 10%, their minimum wage is frozen, their inflation is worst in Canada, their health care's at risk. None of that was caused by the rest of Canada. My take in today's @TorontoStar: www.thestar.com/business/opi.... #cdnecon
The steady deterioration of First Amendment rights and the conflation of violence with dissent is a result not just of an authoritarian regime but of a press culture that is feckless at best and authoritarian-fluffers at worst. The New York Times is beyond redemption.
Nation building project! It could be the first of many. Nice to see the Yukon and British Columbia signing an agreement to explore connecting our electrical grids. An electrified North benefits Canada as a nation: www.yukon-news.com/news/nation-...
Beginning at 2:01 AM UTC on Friday morning, May 23, all British territories will have been simultaneously forsaken by the sun.
The hell with generative AI, I want *degenerative AI* - Servers based in Innsmouth, MA - Literally hallucinates 119% of the time - Extra fingers and bulging eyes are not a mistake - The stars are right - Lose 1d4 SAN - Is it REALLY hallucinating though? - You see farther than any person before - Ia
If you look at the map of where protests would be prohibited in Ottawa with such a bylaw, I'd be very curious if this would be considered "reasonable" in court. (not a lawyer though!)
The Charter's section 2(c) has been pretty clearly upheld in court to allow protest on public streets; see e.g. Garbeau v. MontrĂŠal, 2015 QCCS 5246. It's typically been considered constitutional to have "reasonable regulation", and to not allow literally blocking people (Guelph (City) v. Soltys).
I'm _real_ curious how this holds up in the inevitable court challenges. Also, Ottawa passed a resolution instructing city staff to come up with a bylaw within 9 months, too: ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-...
Even if youâre not a fan of black metal, itâs worth a listen, IMO. Epic, orchestral, and one of only very few black metal albums that I would describe as legitimately beautiful.
Courtesy of another thread here, Iâm reminded of one of my favourite weird metal albums: Caladan Broodâs âEchoes Of Battleâ. Itâs an album about the series Malazan Book of the Fallen, and is some of the absolute best epic black metal I have ever listened to. caladanbrood.bandcamp.com/album/echoes...
I think Liturgy might give them a run for their money, but Sleep Token isnât a bad choice either đ
I see once again Iâm going to have to beg pundits who havenât lived outside of Toronto in decades to stop opining on how useful Canada Post is. I donât care how little you personally get or send mail. A public postal service with a mandate to get mail to every address in Canada is a public good.
starting to develop a historiographic theory which can broadly be expressed as âon a roughly 1.25x a century repeating waveform graph of society, you can express the proximity to the next major cataclysmic upheaval by estimating how many major news stories are caused by implausible cartoon villainsâ
My expectations of Canada Post are: ⢠that it provides reliable, affordable services throughout Canada â even (especially!) rural locations; ⢠that it does so through the efforts of an adequately-remunerated workforce. My expectations of Canada Post are NOT: ⢠that it turns a profit. That's nuts.
Things have escalated considerably at the Charge-Victoire game.
Great to see a Canadian headquartered company return to Canadian owners. This is the second day in a row Canadian investors have stepped up to buy a legendary Canadian retailer, or at least that retailer's IP and assets. Yesterday HBC. Today MEC. #retail
so to be clear about what happened here, the Trump White House released audio meant to make Joe Biden look bad to Axios hours after the US's credit rating was downgraded. Trump wanted a distraction and the usual suspects in the press are happy to oblige.
Your periodic reminder that one way to think about privilege is: who's allowed to make mistakes?
we looked at how well the congestion tax worked in NYC and said âtrying to improve society is illegal now actuallyâ
(And sorry, the âsticking their head in the sandâ comment was not aimed at you; itâs just something Iâve seen elsewhere on social media)
đŻ exactly
And to clarify what I mean by arrogance: Canada and Canadians are not somehow special in a way that makes us immune to propaganda and foreign influence. People that say âwell that wouldnât work in Canadaâ without substantiation are sticking their head in the sand, IMO.
I don't think this is paranoid at all. I think it's realistic; we've seen a similar playbook before in a variety of places, and it'd be naive and frankly arrogant of us here in đ¨đŚ to think that it couldn't happen here, or couldn't work here if we don't take steps to counteract it. And quickly, too!
I'll be speaking at the Ontario #Cryptography Day! ontario-crypto-day.github.io Where: University of Waterloo Davis Centre (DC) 1301 and 1302 When: Friday, June 6, 2025, from 10am to approx. 4:30pm I hope anyone in the area interested in cryptography is able to attend!
If you're over 30, quote this with some life advance. Trite perhaps but one often forgotten online at least: use the principle of charity. (At least among comrades.) Take the most charitable interpretation of a comment as your initial point of interaction; do not take the least charitable.
OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/
Waking up to discover that Google has finally introduced more options for Docs code blocks. We've got Go, we've got Rust, we've got Protobuf, we've got SQL!!! It's like Christmas over here.
Good morning from Canada, everyone, where none of that stuff is happening