As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

I never really got into tea because I always found the flavour disappointing compared to its aroma. But I recently tried yerba maté, which isn’t a tea but definition, but is similar. It’s made from the leaves and stems of Holly and has a strong, bitter flavour that definitely does not disappoint. It’s enjoyed in places like Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. Now I start my day with a mug of coffee, then sip on maté the rest of the day.

Dogs taking away jobs from humans? What a disgrace! Surely dogs are DEI hires, if I ever saw one. They’re not even people!

There are very many normal human sounds that are not speech, including, but not limited to: laughter, crying, yelling/screaming/yelping (in surprise, pain, fear), groaning, moaning, yawning, sneezing, coughing, vomiting, singing, whistling.

What constitutes human speech? There are languages that have sounds that don’t exist in other languages (said as someone still trying to get a hold on rolling my Rs).

In any case, we should all learn some sign language. Seriously, it’s useful to be able to communicate silently or just visually (e.g. Across a noisy room), plus it makes life way more inclusive for Deaf people.

Zarqa, the funniest thing I’ve ever watched. A spiteful, middle-aged, Pakistani Muslim divorcee in Regina tries to manage/rehab her reputation and ego… With disastrously hilarious results. It’s a short mini-series that can be watched in about two hours.

I just stumbled upon Gangnam Project. It’s about two biracial Korean-Canadian teens who go to S. Korea to connect with their roots and get all caught up in the K-Pop making machine. It’s meant for the tween market, but it’s just so different than anything I’ve seen (maybe I haven’t seen much) that I find it interesting. Plus who doesn’t live an eternally optimistic lead when the real world is crazy times? Obviously it’s dramatized, but I am kind of peripherally aware that idol-culture is a very serious deal in Asia, esp Korea. (Last year some K-Pop star publicly apologized for having a boyfriend?!) I wonder how much of it is based in reality and how much is just made up.

DEI can still be achieved without using that terminology directly.

I agree that not longer having a policy or metrics around diversity doesn’t mean that the people in a company won’t still value it. I’m a part-time student and the school’s director recently did an AMA. He said an upcoming event was renamed to avoid the threats that are being directed at “DEI”, but the event itself is still about cultural diversity. I forget what the new name was, something about the stories of our people or something like that.

If this doesn’t work for someone, there’s also Red Cross. They have volunteers teams that help people even with small scale disasters like someone’s home burned down. It’s not a big disaster, but for a family that’s perhaps lost everything, having someone to sit with them, give them blankets and maybe some food is a help.

https://www.redcross.ca/volunteer/emergency-management-volunteering

I absolutely agree that Internet should be a nationalized service, with the option of private players. Saskatchewan has (for cellphones) Sasktel by the government, and all prices are lower even from the for profit companies. We should have crown corps + private enterprise for everything that is an essential service. Mail has Canada Post + private couriers.

The nationwide Rogers outage… When was that, a year ago? Put all kinds of businesses, banking, local payment systems, etc. on hold. How is it acceptable to the nation that essential infrastructure is entirely private?

ISPs will provide service so long as it is profitable. It is not profitable to go to northern, remote areas through all the trees and terrain for the relatively few people who would be customers, even at 100% market share. If there was profit to be made by expanding to remote places, they’d be there already.

Although this thread is about Internet, this is also why it’s incredibly stupid for people to whine about Canada Post not being profitable. Of course its not profitable, its a national service that services literally every unprofitable community and person in the country. Even with the recent price increase, it definitely costs a lot more than $1.24 for Canada Post to deliver a letter from Windsor to Iqaluit.

Carney’s win was not a surprise, but I think the margin that he won by was a surprise for many.

The best use, for me, is asking ChatGPT to give me five (or however many) scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on a topic. Then I search for said articles by title and author name on my school library database.

It saves me so much time compared to doing a keyword search on said same database and reading a ton of abstracts to find a few articles. I can get to actually reading them and working on my assignment way faster.

AI is a great tool for people who use it properly.

I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.

The problemo see with this construct is that it only benefits current actors. There won’t be space for a new generation of actors.

My bro, or sis, if you’re not going to Canada because of righties and anti-immigration, I got some bad news for you about Aus…

There’s no point in not buying one day, people should permanently be switching stores to support good, or at least less bad, ones.

Last year Canada got pissed off at a grocer (Loblaws) for price gouging and a boycott movement started. It was kind of amazing to see the desperate lengths the company went to to try to keep customers, everything other than lower prices.

They gave (crappily made) trading cards for minimum purchases, their hired media mouthpiece insulted their customers (basically called them stupid so they may as well stop boycotting), introduced monthly loss leaders, and most recently had a scheme where if you buy enough, you can get pots and pans (for the cost, you may as well have just bought better ones, plus they didn’t have stock).

Loblaws is nkw, IIRC, 14% down compared to last year.

Now Canada is pissed at the US over threats of annexation and tariffs. Buy Canadian Bye American has been going on a few weeks now, and while I’m sorry for normal American people suffering economically for the President’s doings, it’s been a boost to the smaller Canadian economy and suppliers. Long term it’ll hurt both countries economically, but my point is finding permanent alternatives is how to actually send a message.

About cars, and not necessarily designed poorly, but definitely designed by a man for men: cars that, by default, automatically, immediately unlock all doors when the engine is turned off. A man might be car jacked or robbed, a woman might be car jacked, robbed, or raped.

(Of course men can be raped too, but it’s not as likely to happen by a strange woman threatening violence than a woman is to be raped by a strange man threatening the same.)

I’ve been waiting five years for Ruthie!