merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, the so-called "lawful access" parts of Bill C-2 are especially bad. Here's constitutional law professor Michael Geist's take on it:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2025/06/privacy-at-risk-government-buries-lawful-access-provisions-in-new-border-bill/

"the bill creates a new “information demand” for law enforcement that does not require court oversight."

In other words, if Bill C-2 passes, the police are allowed to demand information from an ISP about someone without a warrant, and it's illegal for the ISP to refuse that demand. There's no oversight mechanism of any kind, and the only requirement is that the cop has a hunch that maybe a crime might be committed. What crime? Any crime.

Know what's a crime? Lying to a cop. So, if a cop has a reasonable suspicion that you lied to them, or will lie to them in the future, that's legal grounds for them to get access to this data from a service provider. You know that every cop going through a divorce will be using this to get info on their spouses. Why not? It's perfectly legal.

Why are these so-called "lawful access" provisions being considered? It's a sore spot with the US that Canadians have a bit more privacy than Americans. And, for some reason, despite the US being incredibly hostile, the government still wants to work on that relationship by giving away Canadians' rights.

So-called "lawful access" is a terrible idea. The supreme court already decided that Canadians have a right to privacy and that giving away this data violates that privacy. These rights shouldn't be given away for any reason, but especially not to curry favour with the US, given that the US is already violating their treaties with Canada. But, even if someone might disagree and think "lawful access" is necessary, give it its own bill. Don't tack it onto a bill about the border. This has nothing to do with the border, and it's an important enough discussion that it shouldn't be hidden in a border bill.

Do you mean governments or people?

People don't have much power here. Other than boycotts, what can people do?

For governments, Israel is fairly powerful. They have powerful lobbyists, and aren't shy to leverage claims of antisemitism against anybody who speaks up against Israel. In many cases, there's also the guilt over how jews were treated in WWII. This is one reason Germany is so incredibly pro-Israel. Then there's the fact that Israel is still more-or-less a democracy, which makes it unique in the middle east. It's the one country in the region pushing back against various Islamic fundamentalist goverments, movements and terrorist groups. Many countries don't want to lose that "friend".

And then there's spyware. Most of the best spyware in the world is produced in Israel. Some cynical people would say that countries don't want to lose access to the world's best producer of spyware. Some even more cynical people would say that that spyware has already been used on politicians and Israel is using it for blackmail. Who knows what the right level of cynicism is.

So, it's not kidnapping?

It's actually kind of liberating when you manage to do that.

It's not true, but if you pretend it is, it allows you to do all kinds of math. Follow the rules as if the spin were real and there were real momentum and it allows you to predict things that you can test. It's almost like looking at a really good magic trick, where you know that what you seem to be seeing isn't possible, but the magician is manipulating things so that your brain can anticipate what's coming next.

IMO there's "the Internet before Canter and Siegel" and "the Internet after Canter and Siegel".

On the pre C&S Internet, not only was nothing monetized, there was a sense that even having an ad for something commercial was against the culture. The downside was that the pre C&S Internet was small, slow and limited.

Overall, I think the 2025 Internet is much better than 1994. But, there were certainly things to appreciate about an Internet without ads, without algorithms trying to win the attention economy, etc.

Yes, that's what makes it so good. :)

I use a different email alias for every service I subscribe to, and my "for humans" email is very different from my subscribe aliases.

Unfortunately, many humans in my life say "oh, merc would like this, I'll just enter his email address on this web form". So, I still get a lot of spam to my "only for humans" email address.

Octopodes.

It's Greek-based, not Latin. English often tries to keep certain rules about loan words from other languages. So, the plural of "alumnus" isn't "alumneses" but "alumni". It also mostly keeps the spelling of loan words, which causes all kinds of problems when that spelling is very different from English spelling. For example, "voila" is so different from how someone would spell it in English that a lot of people write "wala" because they don't know French.

But, I agree that other than having gendered nouns, Spanish is a much more sensible language than English. It does have its quirks though, like "si" vs "sí", "te" vs "té" or "él" vs "el". I get that those are to distinguish homonyms, but are they really necessary? Words like "cara" and "sierra" exist and it's just like any homonym in English. Spanish also has silent letters like "h" so "errar" and "herrar" are pronounced the same but written differently. Also, "y" and "ll" are often pronounced the same way, and many Spanish speakers can't differentiate between "b" and "v".

I could see the value in changing the article if the noun itself didn't change. For example, if Spanish said "la casa" for singular and "las casa" for plural. Then the article would be all you need to know if something is plural or singular. But, every language I'm aware of (which isn't all that many) changes both the article and the noun. Using "the" in English removes this unnecessary redundancy. But, English is ugly in that whether you add an "s" for plural or "es" seems somewhat arbitrary.

You can express just about everything in any language. It just sometimes takes more words.

French has multiple options because it has 2 genders for nouns "the chair" = "la chaise" (female), "the bench" = "le banc" (male), and it changes the article when you're talking about multiple things vs. single things "the benches" = "les bancs".

So, French really has 3 versions of "the": "le" (male, singular), "la" (female, singular), "les" (female or male, singular).

But German... ugh. There's a 4x4 matrix of German words for "the". German had the wisdom to come up with a neuter gender, but the insanity to not apply it to most common objects. Somehow a knife is sexless, a spoon is male and a fork is female. Making it worse, the version of "the" you use for an object depends on whether the object is the subject of a sentence, the object of a sentence, the indirect object of a sentence or possessive. I don't know if it's better or worse (but I'm leaning towards worse) that they re-use a lot of these articles at other spots in the matrix, so "der" is used for male objects in the nominative case, female in the dative case, and plural objects in the genitive case.

Take "Stein" which is stone, not beer glass. If you're an English speaker and are used to adding an "s" to make something plural, and you see "Der Stein" and "Des Steines", you might think that the version with the "es" is the plural, right? Nope, the plural of "Der Stein" is "Die Steine". "Des Steins" is for the possessive case. You'd use "Der Stein" for "The stone is heavy", but if you want to say "The weight of the stone is high" you have to switch to "Des Steins" -- and to add another twist, sometimes it's "Steines" because of reasons.

"Supposed" is one of those words with a quiet "d" that people seem to often get wrong. Same with "used" especially in "used to" where people write "use to". English sucks, but I still wish people would put in the effort to follow the rules so that they communicate more effectively.

The best part about this is that Unilever basically just bought the brand name. Ben & Jerry's is a perfectly good ice cream, but it's not like there's some amazing manufacturing knowledge that Ben & Jerry's has that no other ice cream manufacturer could match. What they are is a popular brand with well known political leanings and, with fun popular flavours.

If Unilever ever forces them out over too much activism, it would be easy for them to start up a new Ice Cream company and bring all their old customers over. So, Unilever basically has to just accept this activism or lose their customers.

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Well done everyone!

I wonder what it will do to kids these days that they don't use their imaginations like this. Kids today will be glued to electronic devices.

Yep, dirt bike for me too. Maybe it's a lack of really creative imagination, but someone doing parkour couldn't have kept up. A dirt bike makes sense because it could do highway speeds.

Yeah, and it sometimes makes sense just from an acting PoV, so you can forgive it. It's hard to fit all the characters and cameras in a scene if someone lives in a typical cramped apartment. So, like in the Friends TV show, none of them has jobs that should indicate they're rich. But, the sets they use for the apartments suggest they have huge apartments. In that show, Joey's apartment isn't beautifully furnished, it looks fairly cheap. But, it's really spacious for NYC. But, it seems like it's all about giving the director the freedom to frame shots to get everybody involved, and to allow characters to move around.

OTOH, A recent movie, "Black Bag" was terrible for this. I hated the movie because it was just impossible to believe. This guy, who's supposed to be a British intelligence officer (i.e. living on government wages). His wife is also an intelligence officer. Yet, somehow, they live in this condo that looks like it would be about £5m to buy, or about £5000/month. Since the plot revolves around whether one of them is a traitor and is selling state secrets, it seems pretty obvious it's this guy or his wife because no civil servant is living in a place like that on just a government salary.

It's not just Home Alone for me. Almost every show I watch, I look at the places where the characters live with immense envy.

Lord of the Rings: Man, I'd love to live in that hobbit house. That looks incredibly cozy.

Daredevil: That is such a nice loft, and it has such great light. It's unfair that a guy who's blind doesn't truly appreciate his great apartment because he can't see.

Futurama: Fry's a delivery boy and he lives in a robot's closet, and it's still better than where I live.

Only Murders in the Building: NYC and these guys have those kinds of amazing places? (To be fair, this is a major plot element of the 4th season)

I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.

It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).

As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.

No, I'm sure you're wrong. There's a certain cheerful confidence that you get from every LLM response. It's this upbeat "can do attitude" brimming with confidence mixed with subservience that is definitely not the standard way people communicate on the Internet, let alone Stack Overflow. Sure, sometimes people answering questions are overconfident, but it's often an arrogant kind of confidence, not a subservient kind of confidence you get from LLMs.

I don't think an LLM can sound like it lacks in confidence for the right reasons, but it can definitely pull off lack of confidence if it's prompted correctly. To actually lack confidence it would have to have an understanding of the situation. But, to imitate lack of confidence all it would need to do is draw on all the training data it has where the response to a question is one where someone lacks confidence.

Similarly, it's not like it actually has confidence normally. It's just been trained / meta-prompted to emit an answer in a style that mimics confidence.