Reminder that these rewards are paid by the interchange fees that credit card processors charge to the companies accepting them as payment. Australia and the EU have legislatively capped interchange fees, which helps keep prices down, but ends up limiting these reward perks. I would love to see Canada try to bring down those fees too, but I worry consumers would object to losing their rewards.

My knee-jerk response is to be indignant about a cop being let off lightly, but the article does describe him as remorseful of his behaviour and taking steps to deal with his own issues. So he sounds like someone who is unlikely to reoffend, and therefore should not be punished harshly. In our justice system, I believe a non-cop would have been sentenced similarly.

But I don’t like the idea of him continuing to work as a cop, at least beyond in-office work, as the police should be held to a high standard. He’s going to work on his own issues, but such work isn’t always quick or smooth. Being in the field dealing with challenging people raises the risk that he runs into another situation where he loses control. I don’t know what the policies are of the Guelph police, but I hope they keep a high standard here.

Nice review of the historical trajectory of desktop Linux. I was surprised that the article mentioned Homebrew rather than Distrobox. This is the first time I’ve seen Homebrew given as a solution for command-line tools on an image-based desktop.

define harmful speech

From the post you are replying to:

if some use their free speech to actively/directly hurt or incite harm to others

Do you feel that definition is lacking? If so, what should be clarified?

FYI, here is the article that the graph is from. It includes some other data too, on dropping travel to the US and reduced orange juice imports.

You might be interested in Parabola, an Arch-based FOSS-only distribution. If you don’t want to switch to a whole new distribution, maybe you can use its repos from Arch (not that I’ve heard of anyone trying that).

Sounds like you want Luanti.

That’s a nice analysis. I also want to share Ka-Ping Yee’s 2D simulation visualization from 2005 that really highlights the theoretical problems with plurality (aka first-past-the-post, FPTP) and instant runoff (aka IRV, “ranked ballot”). Also see Brian Olson’s and Warren Smith’s additional simulations.

I’d like to get into an even broader discussion. I’ve noticed discussions about voting systems tend to assume a single winner, because most of our political systems are set up to require a single winner. Most commonly, this is the people in an area choosing a single representative. But if we’re flexible with our political systems, we can expand the possibility space in all sorts of interesting ways.

A simple example: the city of Guelph elects two councillors per ward, with each voter choosing two of the candidates and the winners being the top two (see 2022 election results for details). This is almost like a blend of plurality (aka first-past-the-post) and approval voting systems. Anecdotally, I feel that this creates a better political climate in Guelph, because candidates can’t be at each others’ throats when they will end up sharing voters and eventually sharing power.

Some other examples:

• BC-STV would have created multi-member ridings with an instant-runoff-style voting system (proposed but rejected for BC provincial elections).
• MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional) creates two categories of representative to create proportionality by party (used in a number of countries, was proposed but rejected for Ontario provincial elections).
• Or completely rewrite the concept of representatives and do direct representation and have an unlimited number of representatives independent of ridings with varying voting power in the house (and then we can argue about voting systems for legislatures).

That centralized low-power machine can even be your phone, if it has enough storage for your needs.

This is exactly how I use Syncthing, and as the author says, it sure would be nice if more things were just files. Really, most things are stored locally as files, but not always in a way that plays nice with syncing. Like, I can sync my Firefox profile between machines (it’s all in one folder), but I found it prone to conflicts, with little to resolve those conflicts.

In a similar vein, local-first apps built with Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) can be another way to avoid server dependency. I haven’t seen any significant apps built this way yet (just occasional blog posts about it). I imagine the CRDT approach would work better for individual apps, since conflict resolution can be written in a way that works best for a given app, but I also imagine that such apps would not play nicely with a generic sync solution like Syncthing.

Where is “here” for you? I’ve never heard of a place with variable speed limits.

Actually, it’s more the opposite. Sorry, I don’t think I explained too well. The watch works just fine on its own without a smartphone. For functions that require phone and watch working together, Gadgetbridge lets them communicate (e.g. when you receive a text message on your phone, Gadgetbridge will let you read the text on your watch).

The apps on the watch will work with or without a smartphone. However, installing apps from the Bangle app loader requires the watch have a Bluetooth connection to a phone or computer. After apps are installed, they will run even without the Bluetooth connection.

Finally, note that the Bangle does not have an internet connection on its own; it has no cellular or wi-fi radios on board. So any apps that require a network connection (e.g. weather) will only work when paired to a phone with Gadgetbridge. I think there are other watches with wi-fi, but I’m not familiar with them.

I have been using a BangleJS 2 for the last year, and have quite liked it. There is a companion app, Gadgetbridge, to install on your phone, which is available through F-Droid (there is a Bangle-specific version of it, or a generic version that supports a bunch of other smart watches). There is also an app store (all free software) for apps that run on the Bangle itself. It includes a heart monitor, but no music streaming.

I’ve also been watching rePebble as they start making new Pebble smartwatches. I’ve never owned one, but a lot of people swear by them. They are now fully open source and have an app store. No idea if they can stream music.

I believe that’s pretty much what happened after the dot-com crash. A lot of fiber was laid during the bubble, it went dormant after the crash, but it was useful afterward as the internet continued growing.

Are you talking about the calendar that appears when you click the time on the (by default) right side of the task bar? Because mine shows a full month. This is how it’s been since I upgraded from Windows 10. So I don’t know what setting you have to change, but at least it’s possible.

There’s was no mention of the functionality the the 145 release notes.

That’s because it was in the 144.0 release notes, but rolled out gradually.

Yeah, this one’s completely different from the one I remember. I found this blogspam around a greentext that matches my memory.

I just looked it up. It’s actually 61,839 blocks in each axis.

Just finished Stray. Yes, I got it because you play as a cat (who was created with great detail), but it also has solid storytelling, world building, and level design.