Great list. In my area, I only need to avoid Maxi and Provigo.

There are so many small “dépanneurs” and specialty grocery stores.

They all have amaizing deals on their niche products:

• rice, lentils, dehydrated beans, spices, chili, bitter gourd >>>> indian store
• rice, sauces, noodles, mushroom, fish/seafood, daikon >>>> asian store
• beans, spices, coconut, plantain, okra, eddo leaf >>>> jamaican store
• arabic, latin american, senegalese, etc. grocery stores in addition to bakeries, fish mongers, butcher shops, etc.

Every speciaty store has their own fresh produces from typical fruits and vegetables we see everywhere to uniques ones found nowhere else.

This is beautifully familiar.

Am I seeing too many similarities between how Twitter/X was taken over and singlehandedly being irreversibly ruined?

While Windows is stubbornly becoming increasingly user-adversarial (advertising, constant intrusive updates, forced transition from your favorite browser to Microsoft Edge, etc.) and unintuitive (sometimes even counter intuitive) interface design, placement and inaccessible settings.

Well, delighting in schadenfreude, I won’t complain. Microsoft is inadvertently helping me help transition many friends, family and colleagues to various flavors of Linux systems, namely Linux Mint (whichever desktop they prefer) and/or Pop!OS most of the time, but also occasionally Fedora or a particular flavor of Ubuntu.

I never recommend Arch or rolling release systems or immutable systems to first time Linux user so as to preemptively avoid additional layers of complexity, learning curve, downtime and troubleshooting.

I just had a shower thought, probably dumb and I am tired, but how about pipes to deliver regular liquids/fluids? 🤔

I think I read somewhere in Germany brewery would have pipes to bars delivering a continuous supply of beer.

Now let’s do that with ultrafiltered and/or ultra-high-temperature milk (less prone to spoiling).

How about adding pipes for beer (or some other alcohol or wine), cooking oil (whichever most suitable), and any other frequently used liquid I forgot?

If spoilage is well controlled, would that be a less energy intensive distribution method?

TerraCycle dumping “recycling” items in poor countries with inadequate regulations/enforcement (article in French). Moreover, a insightful documentary available on CBC The Recycling Myth regarding all the recycling fraud many multinational companies engages in.

It is not surprising to see environmental fraud happening so overtly under our nose or in plain sight in front of our eyes when there is little to no repercussions for doing so (legal or otherwise). I would even go as far as to suggest it is currently financially extremely profitable for corporation (and people) to lie about all the greewashing they carry out.

Youtube: The Recycling Myth

Pour ce qui est du coût, on est déjà prêt à payer des sommes faramineuses pour les enterrer à quintuple sécurité (et plus encore) aussi profondément qu’envisageable sous terre et continuer de payer le maintien des lieux ainsi que de la sécurité pour les siècles à venir.

Malheureusement, c’est vrai que la technologie utilisée pour atteindre l’orbite terrestre est une «bombe contrôlée» (énergie sous forme chimique) qui tend à exploser catastrophiquement. Je n’ai pas les qualifications pour évaluer la faisabilité de ma proposition avec les technologies existantes. Il se peut que l’idée ne soit possible avec les contraintes de sécurité requis qu’avec des technologies futures.

Cependant, avec les technologies actuelles, pour éviter les dérapages incontrôlés dû à une explosion on peut se limiter à envoyer des quantités minimales dans un contenant/coffre/cercueil suffisamment étanche et capable de survivre à une/des explosions (ou la pire situation que les ingénieurs peuvent imaginer) et de le récupérer sans fuite/contamination dans l’environnement suite à l’incident.

De plus, ce n’est pas comme si on n’envoie pas déjà de matières nucléaires en orbites ou sur d’autre planète, par example les batteries dite «RTG» sont fréquemment utilisés dans l’espace.

I’ll skip. Just like how I skipped AOL, MySpace, LiveJournal, 4Chan, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Blogger, Google+, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Twitch, YouTube, Vine, Netflix, OkCupid, Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Discord, TikTok… oh all of the Apple ecosystem, and many other I missed by being oblivious or simply never heard of…

I liked the Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and now the Lemmy format/style. Will continue to move on to whatever I find stupid simple and publicly accessible I guess. I am naturally lazy, advertisement averse and hate having to provide personal info just to use something non-governmental or non-essential.

Now, with the increasing prevalence of LLM based bots, I will probably ineluctably reduce my time spent posting anything (I certainly hope it doesn’t get that bad, only time will tell) on any kind of “social media” and focus on current and new family, friends, coworkers, colleagues and acquaintances.

Pourquoi pas la lune? On prévoit y établir une base permanente pour les voyage futurs plus distants (Mars, Ceinture principale d’astéroïdes, lunes de Jupiter).

Si jamais on retournait au moyen âge par négligence (3ème Guerre Mondiale, Changement Climatique, accident nucléaire/biologique grave, etc.) ou juste naturellement (pandémie plus sérieuse, volcanisme, astéroïde, etc.) on pourrait garantir que même si les déchets nucléaires était oubliés, ils ne seront accessible qu’à ceux ayant les connaissances, la coopération et la prudence d’atteindre l’orbite terrestre et la lune de manière contrôlée sans périr en chemin. Ainsi, ayant les connaissance technique pour détecter/remédier à des déchets nucléaires

Notez que la lune n’est qu’un exemple proche, on pourrait tout-à-fait dédier une astéroïde ou même une orbite de rebut parmi les trajectoires héliocentriques.

Concentrated lemonade…? 😳

• You let it it dilute as you go, as per your taste.

A block of hard cheese…? 😆

• It would be water resistant (waterproof) enough to last the whole shower.

That is an interesting thought experiment that never occurred to me.

The essential part at the end:

“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit’s API FAQ page and said the company couldn’t comment further because it’s in a quiet period and doesn’t “comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements.” ”

We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.

More telling is their silence. Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.

Wow, asbestos pipes, that’s something new I learned today…

Total genius move by whomever designed it and the organization that approved/certified it for human potable water use.

How am I still surprised by these things, long ago we once thought lead pipes were perfect for moving/transporting potable water (apparently, one of the many things that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire).

Nowadays, high density polyethylene pipes are selling like hotcakes and certified for potable water use. Will we find, in a few decades, that micro-plastics are more prevalent than expected and cause innumerable long term health issues? Hence, the new thing to avoid like the Black Plague.

What is wrong with plain old copper pipes, outside of just being expensive due to low supply vs huge demand? (I may have missed the news on how they too affect health)

Thank you for this excellent writeup.

A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).

Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.

However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.

Unfortunately, the solutions are fairly easy but it would be political suicide for anyone who would even dare to actually propose anything that would ruffle the feathers of the vested interests, the powerful or (God forbid /s) the wealthiest 10%, or the “untouchable” 0.1%.

Simplify/Regularize the tax code by eliminating all ambiguity :

• by removing exceptions and loopholes for corporation and individuals (it only helps the wealthy with “top gun” accountants to “legally” avoid/reduce taxes).

• pre-filled tax declaration should be expanded or made automatic for every individuals with simple tax situations (they should not be worrying about taxes and tax credits when their income in lower than a inflation indexed preset treshold)

• make everyone’s tax information public or accessible for every citizens similar to Tax transparency in Finland (PDF) it helps prevent/detect/reduce social inequalities and keep every one accountable toward each others

• exclude tax filling softwares and companies whom have vested interest in making tax declarations as complex and as unintelligible as possible by lobbying government

• increase the progressive taxe rate for higher income brackets, add new higher brackets (over 60%) for yearly income over a million, over tens of millions, over hundreds of millions, etc…

• eliminate Religious Tax Exemptions as they have been [abused and misappropriated more often without any real public oversight] (https://centreforinquiry.ca/religious-institutions-and-your-tax-dollars/)

• increase financing and auditing of Canada Revenue Agency to help better pursue, prosecute and recover wealth hidden in tax Havens, or create a new separate branch of the CRA tasked exclusively to handle corporate tax shenanigans/evasion and deep pocketed individuals

This is a partial, but relevant, copy of one of my previous post (check my post history for the original long post).

Whelp.

Is this some LLM copy-paste meme? Did I miss some viral post/thread that led to the above text?

I may need some help/context trying to understand all this…

Unfortunately, the solutions are fairly easy but it would be political suicide for anyone who would even dare to actually propose anything that would ruffle the feathers of the vested interests, the powerful or (God forbid /s) the wealthiest 10%, or the “untouchable” 0.1%.

On one side Simplify/Regularize the tax code by eliminating all ambiguity :

• by removing exceptions and loopholes for corporation and individuals (it only helps the wealthy with “top gun” accountants to “legally” avoid/reduce taxes).

• pre-filled tax declaration should be expanded or made automatic for every individuals with simple tax situations (they should not be worrying about taxes and tax credits when their income in lower than a inflation indexed preset treshold)

• make everyone’s tax information public or accessible for every citizens similar to Tax transparency in Finland (PDF) it helps prevent/detect/reduce social inequalities and keep every one accountable toward each others

• exclude tax filling softwares and companies whom have vested interest in making tax declarations as complex and as unintelligible as possible by lobbying government

• increase the progressive taxe rate for higher income brackets, add new higher brackets (over 60%) for yearly income over a million, over tens of millions, over hundreds of millions, etc…

• eliminate Religious Tax Exemptions as they have been [abused and misappropriated more often without any real public oversight] (https://centreforinquiry.ca/religious-institutions-and-your-tax-dollars/)

• increase financing and auditing of Canada Revenue Agency to help better pursue, prosecute and recover wealth hidden in tax Havens, or create a new separate branch of the CRA tasked exclusively to handle corporate tax shenanigans/evasion and deep pocketed individuals

On the other side, beyond the well meaning but hastily half-baked (I am unqualified to properly evaluate such plan) Canada’s Housing Action Plan, we should create a long term Strategic Urbanization and Cooperative Housing Fund somewhat akin to the Strategic Innovation Fund whereas :

• local-first sustainability, durability, climate change mitigation/adaptation and energy efficiency are prioritized and audited/inspected for renovations and all new future developments

• refrain housing from switching owners too frequently (control exaggerated speculation) or make public a historical record of all inspections reports, renovations, purchase price, owners and in case of an auction make the bidding process, name and amount of bidder transparent to all participants (better overall)

• limit to let’s say 3 to 6 (anything beyond 10 becomes onerous) the numbers of residential building/house/condominium/apartment complex/senior housing/long-term care home a corporation, partnership or a individual can own/manage. 67000 homes owned and managed by a single entity is far beyond reasonable.

• favor and help fund Mass Timber projects instead of concrete construction, by using prefab Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and Laminated Strand Lumber (LSL) for multistory residential habitation. By increasing Mass Timber adoption we help sequester more and more carbon into inert materials (although technically still combustible on the outermost layer).

• prioritize housing co-ops projects that aim to offer affordable housing similar to namely in British-Colombia or in Québec - Interloge (PDF)

• (not a immediate priority, but crucial for the future of Canada) help set up a publicly accessible, interoperable, provincially and municipally controlled and constantly evolving : 5 years/10 years/25 years/50 years/100 years/200 years development roadmaps of natural, public, private and industrial lands/sectors/infrastructures/housing. Doing so will ensure everyone is on the same page with what is happening and what are proposed to happen in their neighborhood within their and their childrens lifetime. Everyone, from scientists to farmers, from residents to international students, from local business owners to local homeless, should be able to submit justified concerns/updates/changes/refusals to any future proposals/projects. Likewise, project proponents should be able to convince, demonstrate, allay, include, update, justifiably dismiss or preallocate equitable compensation publicly. By the time the yearly roadmap is on its way, anything without consensus or majority approval should be reported into the future or rejected, thus no surprise should remain (excepting a archeological/historical discovery or unforeseen dangers/accidents during excavation/construction/renovation).

Well that became more of a long winded exasperation on my part…

But thank you for reading my probably pointless TedTalk®©™ 🤣

Oh no‽

Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).

Any viable/preferred alternative?

Man, is this seriously going turn into into the Iraq has WMD boondoggle/fiasco:

“Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, in which he detailed false intelligence gatherings provided by the Israeli government regarding Iraqi WMD.”

Source 1: Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence

Source 2: Israel knew Iraq had no WMD, says MP

I forgot it was Israeli Intelligence source back then 🤔. I only remember Bush insisting there are WMDs and Colin Powell’s declaration at the UN. All of it was proven fake of course, and 20 years later it has become the biggest and most expensive Intelligence blunder.

Hopefully, I am wrong and we were smarter to verify everything before repeating the same reckless mistake.

I try to not comment on controversial issues particularly when I don’t have any qualification or first hand knowledge/experience, however this is looking more and more like an unmitigated overreaction.

All these first-past-the-post voting systems (here in Canada too it’s a problem) need to be relegated to a bygone era, it’s so bad that even placings names on a board and throwing darts blindfolded for every MP positions would probably give a better and more representative outcome.

Welp… it will probably be after something akin to world war 3 that we (the ones luckily still alive) would all sit down and set out to fix the many obvious and perhaps not so obvious issues with governance, lack of immediate consequence to lying, independently peer reviewed education system absent of political/religious/vested/private interest or influence, broken taxation system enabling billionaires, the lack of thorough independent study of environmental or health concerns before even granting any permit (problems tend to always be discovered long after it was commercialised/contructed/).

Sad to see the state of affairs in every country 😰😱, nevertheless just as we can see/imagine/iterate/improve our ideas of what each one of us would consider better systems, we should implement, test, cross pollinate, evaluate (scientifically, quantitatively and qualitatively) and keep what works better than before and reject/shun/disqualify what obviously causes issues or collateral damages.

First, get to know as much as you can about Canada, its Provinces and Territories. Like you asked, you will get a pretty good overview of its culture, food, festivals, history, climate, geography, economy, demography, governments (federal/provincial/municipal).

Secondly, get know the many generations of Ukrainian Canadians that live here throughout Canada. You may find long lost relatives or even old friends 😁 and then Canada won’t be much different from Ukraine, just more people of various culture, religion and walks of life, everyone chipping in trying to make a positive difference in each others lives (although Canada has it own assholes and criminals, they generally tend to not openly/bombastically flout the law).

Work wise, I would recommend to focus on anything related to sustainable development, climate change adaptation and the tech sector as those are where all the investment are being thrown into (renewable energy sector, electric transportation and manufacturing chain, mineral resources exploitation, forestry and sustainable agribusinesses, etc.)

Hopefully, my Canadian 2 cents helps. 😆

I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inkless monochrome printer.

A bit like How to Cut, Score, and Engrave Paper With a Laser but without the need to use dedicated laser cutter.

With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I’m just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.

It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.

Then there is general intelligence (g factor or general intelligence factor) which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):

Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.

Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.

Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.

Neat question indeed. 😆