Right… but maybe the 5% is warranted, because of the ongoing collapse of American hegemony?

We need Middle Powers to have leverage, and part of that will depend on being able to collectively stand up to military aggression from our “allies”, let alone rivals.

In other words, what is the likelihood that Canada faces an existential crisis due to having insufficient investment in our military, and how much investment is required to mitigate that risk? What’s the cost-benefit analysis?

I don’t pretend to know enough to have an answer, but there are real concerns, not just posturing to placate a petulant would-be dictator.

CachyOS has been great for me. Granted, I’m comfortable enough with computers that I can search to find answers to things, so I’m not sure if I rolled through issues that might challenge others, but it’s been a fantastic experience. I switched about a year ago. Couldn’t be happier with it, and I’d recommend it for anyone who’s put off with the limitations inherent in running an immutable distro.

I have a long list of complaints about the Carney “Liberals” (more like a PC party, imho), but his government leaning on his connections with European business leaders, bankers, and politicians to pivot away from America is exactly what I was hoping we’d get from this government. His Middle Powers speech was exactly the right message.

The US is in decline, and they are no longer a dependable ally. We also don’t want to lurch to a new geopolitical order dominated by China, or any single country, for that matter. By working together, we can keep economic and social progress despite the collapse of American hegemony and, hopefully, come out on the other side of this with a more stable world.

But, Jesus Christ, Carney’s government is making a mess of a lot of things domestically, eh? Still better than PP, but only because they aren’t completely socially regressive in addition to being ruinously neoliberal.

Sure, but if they sold it, they’d have less losses which is strictly better.

Can’t you download the old update, though? I think that’s a thing, anyway. But maybe not in this case because…

Music licensing is its own insanity, and game publishers are kinda screwed on those rules. Licenses in music only permit distribution for a certain timeframe, and digital downloads are considered distribution, so when their licenses expire, they can’t legally distribute anymore.

And the RIAA are litigious assholes, so you’re gonna get sued if you don’t comply.

What banks charge fees for web banking!? That doesn’t make a lick of sense, imho… That incentivizes using much-more-expensive in-person banking.

Also, even if there are some banks that don’t have web banking, it’s easy enough to switch banks (at least, in the countries I know about). Some people even regularly cycle through institutions to get sign-on bonuses a couple times each year.

But, yes. It’s less convenient to use platforms that respect privacy, and requires some trade-offs.

It’s easy enough to work around most of it, with web apps. You can even install them to have separate icons. Granted, there are some things that are impossible, like digital ID, but there aren’t any that fundamentally affect phone usability, for my personal use.

What’s holding me up is work stuff. I get a stipend to have a work phone, so I just use my personal device, but I’m getting a separate device for work soon so I can cut out everything Google/Microsoft on me personal device. Digital control and privacy matters.

Is it, though?

As with all things PC gaming, it depends on the game.

Is it capable of 4K@60Hz in some games? Absolutely.
Is any computer capable of 4K@60Hz in all games? Of course not!

To me, this change is just clarifying things for people who are ignorant of technology, and to avoid stupid/silly complaints that the Gabecube can’t run the latest and greatest at 4K/60 fps.

I doubt it, personally, but even if you’re right, Single Transferable Vote would be a much better system to allow people to vote for alternative parties with similar ideals instead of feeling compelled to vote strategically.

FPTP is one of the biggest problems in Canada, and it’s upstream of just about every other issue of significance.

This is the solution!

The games still run great, but the setting didn’t migrate to the new name.

The same thing happened when I first installed CachyOS; there was no compatibility tool selected by default, so almost nothing showed as playable.

The contrast between the Ubuntu and Arch lines slayed me.

I use Arch, btw.

It’s tightly interconnected with accessibility because alternative input systems, like eye gaze input, macros to expand text, and other accessibility tools for alternative input hardware all friends in the same types of window-agnostic input interacting. (Similarly for output hardware, I think?)

Like, custom text replacement with XCompose breaks because of how Wayland “silos” programs, which is why ~/.XCompose files only partially work in KDE Plasma. If Wayland/KDE fully implemented accessibility tools, then it would be possible to solve all of these problems.

Or, at least, that’s my layman’s understanding of the situation.

There was a fantastic blog post about accessibility problems with Wayland, but I think Wayland is upstream of KDE, isn’t it?

In other words, do you know if what you’re suggesting within scope, or is it upstream? Or maybe it’s both, and KDE and Wayland both need changes to enable proper accessibility?

I don’t know enough, but I’ll see if I can track down that blog post and post about accessibility. Worst case, it lets KDE devs know that accessibility with KDE/Wayland is a major issue for many users.

Edit: I found the post: My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland

100%. It’s impossible to time a crash, but I’m so ready for the circular investment house of cards to come falling down.

The longer this goes on, the more wasted “investment” there will be in the sunk costs of datacenters for demands that will never exist, and the worse the recovery will be.

I doubt we’ll see an 89% 1929-level drop in the markets, but 80% wouldn’t surprise me. It’s going to be very hard for a lot of people if market loses that severe materialize.

Yeah, but that’s not their fault, it’s the capitalist system as it’s been twisted by neoliberal economic theory.

What we need are rational marginal tax rates (80%+ on income over $10 MM/year) and no significant capital gains exemptions (say, 50% inclusion on first $10K capital gains, 65% on next $40K, and 100% inclusion advice $50K). Add a 1% wealth tax on all wealth above $10 MM, 2% above $100 MM, and 3% on wealth above $1 B, then billionaires aren’t nearly as much of a problem any more.

The US started its death spiral in the 1976 with Buckley v. Valeo. I don’t see how they can reverse course, now, but that was the start of the end.

Not sure what you’re getting at, here. Are you expecting Steam to sell these at a loss (or even just break-even) out of the goodness of their hearts or something?

And then have scalpers resell at a tidy profit because they’re selling the hardware for less than the current market rates, for that matter…

I’m in a similar situation; I built my computer a few years ago, and now, 3+ years later, my machine would cost like ~50% more for similar specs. It’s nuts.

Like, I would be the target demographic for this, if hardware prices weren’t fucked right now. I fully intend to buy one, but only once the price drops in a couple of years, once the AI bubble bursts and chips get re-prioritized back to consumer hardware again.

If my computer died today, I’d probably try to buy a Gabecube to replace it, and install CachyOS on it to use as a desktop computer and Steam Big Picture mode for gaming with the controller. (Nothing against SteamOS — I love it on my Decks! — but I’d want something more focused on the desktop experience as my main computer.)

Exactly. And the few things GenAI does well aren’t that compute intensive and can run on local models.

LLMs are terrible at writing new text that matters, i.e. anything at all technical or important. But they’re good at reformatting content into properly structured English, editing text for grammar, and explaining everyday concepts. But they’re so good at those things, that a tiny model running on consumer hardware can do it.

So, I don’t understand how anyone can possibly expect LLMs to be a profitable business. Where are the moats?

In my experience, the trick to this is to get a list of changes to make yourself, rather than trusting the machine to actually get it right. (Unless you’re in a dev/test environment and don’t care much if it fucks it up.)

I feel like this will massively backfire. You get the best outcomes from your workers when they feel valued, are given agency, and take ownership of the work. If this is perceived as being used to monitor performance, then the damage done to the employer-employee relationship will have much more adverse consequences than the marginal gain they glean from task analysis.