nyan @ nyan @lemmy.cafe

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2 yr. ago

Open up the back of the device and check inside. If you see something that looks like a lump of modeling clay with wires sticking out of it crammed into the corner, your device has been compromised, and you should maybe try to remember whether you bought said device during a visit to Lebanon. After you put it in the middle of an empty driveway with a wall of sandbags around it and call the bomb squad, that is.

(Trying to associate literal exploding pagers with hacking borders on the surreal.)

For those unable to read the article, and who haven't heard about this through other channels . . .

The issue is that Quebec is actively throwing Francophone minorities in other parts of Canada under the bus, which goes beyond them being "reluctant to defend" them. The Quebec government doesn't seem to care that the weapons it's using against its Anglophone linguistic minority can be turned around to attack Francophones in the rest of the country. What they do doesn't necesarily stop at their borders.

It's been a while since I had any reason to talk to a Franco-Ontarian about Quebec politics, but Quebec used to be considered snooty, obnoxious, and out of touch at best.

One question I haven't seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn't have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.

I would have been more amused if they had "mined" the gold from old tailings piles (the ones around Kirkland Lake used to have enough gold still in them to make that feasible, although I don't know whether that's the case anymore), or at least some mine with an associated settlement, rather than one located way out in the wilderness.

Y'know, if something seems too good to be true, it pretty much always is. Batteries are no exception.

In other words, the article specifically says that they don't know (or at least, the RCMP won't say) what led to most of these firearms being reported as lost (we have external invormation in a few cases, like the trailer theft mentioned by another commenter, but not for most). There isn't even enough information there for us to be able to tell whether all detachments use the same criteria in deciding whether a firearm qualifies as lost.

The article isn't clear on what is categorized as "lost" in this context. Are these all "we know for sure they were stolen" or are some of them "we couldn't find them when we did inventory, but they might just have ended up in an incorrectly-labeled box"? While neither of those is good, one is clearly worse than the other.

Oh, for the love of . . . If you need, or even just want, accessibility options, including larger pointer targets, they should be available to you, but as options, since not everyone needs the same ones, and things that help one person's issues can actually make another's worse.

The killer combination is to have both ramps for those who need them and stairs for those who can use them, coequal and well-maintained. Sometimes space may dictate that you can only fit one in, in which case you should choose the ramp, but a dozen different Windows skins would take up less space on the install media than one flop "feature" like Paint 3D, and I assume it's the same for a Mac. Part of the reason for the currest state of affairs is that corporations are horrified at the thought of giving people actual choice and letting them find what works best for their level of ability as well as their preferences. They might make $0.01 less per unit that way, you see.

If people liked it, that’s what we’d have. Surely this is a simple concept?

It's bullshit. Most people choose from among the handful of things the corporations offer them. You have to be exceptionally blockheaded to stay with an OS that no longer receives security patches, even if you prefer its interface paradigm, and if you're not the one controlling the machine you may not even have the option. The type of retrofitting I've done on my work machine is just that—work—and I understand why people may not want to do it, or may not be able to do it if they'd have to fight a draconian IT department for permission.

Furthermore, most people aren't designers or even terribly compute-literate. They don't necessarily understand which design elements are causing them to be so inefficient when they move to a different OS version, or how to revert them in cases where that's possible. They're stuck with Microsoft-Apple-Google's poor design decisions, until the same corp hands them another set of poor design decisions. The corporations don't want to decouple the UI from the OS the way Linux and other Unixoids do and let people choose, because the shiny new UIs are an advertising opportunity and impress certain types of reviewers.

TDE. Mate would work too, I suppose, but I imprinted on KDE3 early.

Given the amount of electricity training and running all these LLMs requires, they might, like cryptocurrency, become drivers of climate change as they cause polluting generators to be built or unmothballed.

Yet do they use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.

Yes, actually—I have a VM reserved mostly for 16-bit software.

Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.

Yes, actually—the Windows machine I'm forced to use for work restores as much of that aesthetic as practical, sometimes with the help of third-party software. My main home machine features a Linux DE whose appearance is largely the same as it was circa 2005 and whose development team is dedicated to keeping that look and feel.

Some of us do put our money where our mouths are, although I admit that isn't universal.

It's true that some level of padding is necessary in a UI, but the amount present in contemporary design is way too large for a system using a traditional mouse or laptop touchpad, which are capable of small, precise movements. Touchscreen-friendly design is best saved for touchscreens, but people don't want to do the work involved to create multiple styles of UI for different hardware. I've never encountered anything touted as "one size fits all", whether it be a UI or a piece of clothing, that actually does fit everyone. At best, it's "one size fits most", and I'm usually outside the range of "most" the designers had in mind. At worst, it's "lowest common denominator", and that seems to be the best description for contemporary UI design.

Then it won't exactly be the first, "Teens are [doing thing]! It's horrible and we have to stop them!" overblown moral panic in the past century. (It'll suck for some teens who don't fit in with the people they're required to associate with in meatspace, but that's another thing that's always been true.)

Even if only 5% of cops are dicks, that's way too many for people in a position of power. Ask the two in your family what they did the last time they saw a fellow officer pulling some kind of icky crap (this, racism against someone Indigenous, whatever). Maybe they're genuinely good people and called their fellow cops out, I don't know. If not, I'm sorry to say that they're part of the problem.

People involved in law enforcement have a higher obligation than the average citizen to follow the rules, except where specific affordances are made for them so that they can do their jobs. This is not one of those places.

When was the last time a federal government managed to balance a budget? Trudeau-the-elder landed a smallish surplus once, back in the late 1970s, I think. I'm not aware of anyone having pulled it off since.

As with any devil's bargain, one must evaluate whether it's really worth it or not.

If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.

Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that's also a "yes".

I'm willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.

You may be able to prove that a photo with certain metadata was taken by a camera (my understanding is that that's the method), but you can't prove that a photo without it wasn't, because older cameras won't have the necessary support, and wiping metadata is trivial anyway. So is it better to have more false negatives than false positives? Maybe. My suspicion is that it won't make much difference to most people.

Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.

Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.

In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.

It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.

Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it's just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but "rooftop wind" isn't exactly a common catchphrase.