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kbal

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I'd appreciate it if everyone could just stop burning fossil fuels, please. Thank you for your cooperation.

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kbal ,
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Much more fewer people know why to think.

kbal ,
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I was thinking more force his plane to land and arrest him.

kbal , (edited )
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Reported: December 9, 2025
Issued: February 12, 2026

Does this mean it took two full months from the time some obvious "typosquat" packages got added and immediately reported before they were removed? That's for the "finch" ones, looks like they got the others right away. Maybe they were not so obvious?

kbal ,
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As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what's needed. People seem to hate it because it's slightly different than discord, but anything that isn't discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it's not as bad as fucking discord.

kbal ,
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According to radio weather reports in Canada -5° usually "feels like" about -20 according to the elaborate calculations of the wind chill experts, so that checks out.

kbal ,
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Meanwhile I'm reading about the system where "favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law" in a nearby country recently.

kbal ,
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I don't know, you're probably more likely to find Akkoma instances these days. It's pretty similar.

kbal ,
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At the side of the road with a FOR SALE sign that's got a hand-written phone number on it.

kbal ,
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If God wills it the real odds were 100%, so double that can only mean we get two Jesus at once! Hallelujah!

kbal ,
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It's true they wouldn't exist in anything like the form they do today. For one thing they'd be a lot bigger.

kbal ,
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My thoughts are best summed up by the well-known Gamers Nexus video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qbylbEek-M

kbal ,
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I sure hope this is the end of Discord. Maybe only 10% of people will rage quit rather than show their ID, but if every group has one in 10 people they invite say "nah, that's not happening" and everyone has to admit they're probably in the right, it might make some difference.

Linux 7.0 Officially Concluding The Rust Experiment ( www.phoronix.com )

While Linux 7.0 is the next kernel version solely over Linus Torvalds' numbering preference, there is a notable symbolic change that was sent in overnight for this new kernel merge window: formally concluding the "Rust experiment" with upstream kernel developers now in acceptance that Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay. ...

kbal ,
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Okay fine, guess I really do need to learn (the rest of) Rust now.

kbal , (edited )
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Utopia would be nice, but I'd settle for a world where the Star Trek franchise gets better screenwriters. (I'm liking Lower Decks though; thanks to whoever recommended that.)

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How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

Clearly it isn't. Why should it be? It's the far future. Giant prison colony, shock collars, cruelty, punishment with no semblance of a fair trial on screen; clearly the Federation are the bad guys now, or at least adjacent to them. I was prepared to accept that premise. Could be interesting... but no, they immediately shove that concept under the carpet and pretend it doesn't matter because this one person involved feels really bad about it. It was all just another convenient plot device with no meaning, and they moved right on without stopping to think about it. It's utterly lazy writing, the kind where they go with whatever half-baked idea they come up with first whether or not it makes any sense for the characters and story. I say that with confidence because I've seen so much of it before. In this case the character they betrayed was literally Star Trek itself, but they're doing it all the time in smaller ways.

Anyway I'm off to rewatch DS9 instead.

kbal ,
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Once the clean energy transition gets going, people come to their senses, and not everyone continues to drive cars every single time they want to go anywhere, what will all the newly unemployed auto workers do? Build parts for Korean attack submarines, of course! Every hundred billion dollars spent will be repaid many times over in enemy ships sunk when Canada becomes the naval military power it was meant to be and the next great war can finally begin. Submarines: the way of the future.

kbal ,
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Your logic is even worse than mine! It's quite an achievement.

kbal ,
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Yep, we're stuck with it. It's just depressing.

kbal , (edited )
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Not here. It's probably more suited to mastodon or whatever.

kbal ,
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Well I don't know about the bread itself but for things to put on it there are plenty of vegan options which are much better imo than margarine. Peanut butter was my choice until recently.

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kbal , (edited )
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Knowing absolutely nothing about you or your taste in movies other than that you're on drugs, my recommendation is Lifeforce (1985).

kbal ,
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There's no need to resort to bluesky, @avilewis@mstdn.ca avatar avilewis has a mastodon account.

kbal ,
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Goodbye EV sales mandate. Hello purchase rebates.

Of all the politicians, only Mr. Carney has the expertise, foresight, and economic sophistication to do exactly the wrong thing with such precision.

kbal ,
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I'm not a fan of having the government subsidizing new car purchases. It's the last thing we need. The sale of cars that run on fossil fuels should be banned ten years ago or as soon as possible. If the government wants to spend more money it should go towards alternatives to cars, not to bribing the relatively wealthy people who shop for brand new cars to put even more of them on the roads.

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Tankies (for any reasonable definition of the word) and fascists should always shunned and opposed, by communists and anarchists alike.

kbal ,
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Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, is very keen for Canada to become an “AI powerhouse,” calling this our “Gutenberg moment.”

Maybe it's actually our Guttenberg moment, as in Steve Guttenberg in Police Academy (1984). AI plays the role of "Ax Murderer" of course. I'm keeping an eye out for the Michael Winslow character.

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Growing by 3.6% less is not the same thing as shrinking by 3.6%, economists. Personally I'm for open borders and zero GDP growth, ideally.

kbal ,
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The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.

kbal , (edited )
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If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It's a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There's currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It's the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they're run the way they are now. You can't reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

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Can't say I have a whole lot of faith in the accuracy and diligence of the Todayville espionage section, but for a moment it did have me wondering if whoever controls China's foreign influence operations shares my view that a Liberal majority would be bad news for Canada. But no, they probably don't care. More likely they perceive the Liberals as more of an annoyance to the USA than the current opposition would be.

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I wonder what's the average age of cable TV subscribers overall.

kbal , (edited )
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65 according to reddit.

kbal , (edited )
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I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn't really any reason why she shouldn't. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that's nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn't work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.

People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.

kbal , (edited )
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There's really no need to recycle this misleading headline forever, they're not in short supply.

kbal , (edited )
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The typical hybrid is still 100% powered by fossil fuels. The main thing they've done for us is demonstrate the Jevons Paradox.

kbal ,
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Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Is the role of a government to do the will of the people, or to do whats right for the country?

Im reflecting from the pov of a parents role re: the kids. If you give the kids what they want, its going to be soda and candy every day of their lives. Some deciaions are tough, e.g. delayed gratification, and holding ones ground, but do voters even care about stuff like that? ...

kbal ,
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The role of a government is to do what's best for the government. That usually involves keeping the people from getting too unhappy with them.

kbal ,
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Maybe what's needed is a "this is what I'd write on my blog if I had one" community to redirect people to when they try to wedge things in here by forcing their thought into the form of a question.

kbal , (edited )
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People old enough to remember when you didn't need any ID at all for domestic flights?

The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time...

Since Discovery, despite the Star Trek writers repeatedly beating us over the head with this, I still somehow didn't catch onto the pattern. If there is a through-line to all the new shows, the notion that acknowledging one's own vulnerability is a sign of individual strength, and that showing support when others are being ...

kbal ,
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For a more serious critique of new Trek that you might find more interesting than the angry tweets you refer to, consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB5DroolqFU

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Sure they were subject to all the constraints of commercial prime-time TV, but as that video discusses in some detail with respect to DS9, the writers still had freedom within that corporate framework to tell woke anticolonialist stories beyond the classic sci-fi adventure fare of TOS which itself often explored what was new ground for commercial television at the time. Under some other corporate masters it might've been possible for the new crew to find similar freedom today, if things had worked out differently — and if any of them have the ability to do it and the willingness to try. But Larry Ellison and the forces he's standing in for seem far more alert to the subtleties of it than they used to be. There's bigger money involved now and they're keeping it on a tighter leash.

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I don't know. It just seems like one plausible explanation for what's been produced. To me it has that feel to it.

kbal ,
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Some people like AI because they treat it as if it's the voice of God speaking directly to them.

kbal , (edited )
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It is not, so far as I know, an "extra network." It's one of many types of instance on the fediverse. Many of them have features that do not perfectly interoperate with others. The more popular ones eventually get to be widely supported as things evolve. Mastodon is not the standard, it's just one among many.

Also, you're a lemmy user. It's one of the worst when it comes to interoperating smoothly with the rest of the network.

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Where's the "4chan" one?

kbal ,
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Somebody once told me that it's easier if you bring the water to a boil first before you put the eggs in to cook, as well as putting them in cold water afterwards. It seems to work for me.