@paulbusch@mstdn.ca2025-11-16 14:40:07
Good Morning #Canada
Listening to Christmas tunes and watching the snow fall.
Notable Canadian snowstorms:
- 1913 Great Lakes Storm. The most destructive natural disaster on the Great Lakes, causing 250 deaths & destroying 19 ships.
- 1941 March Blizzard: Brought 100 km/h winds and temps of -45°C to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, leading to the deaths of 72 people.
- 1944: 47 cm of snow hit Toronto in a single day. Unfortunately, the Canadian Army was overseas.
- 1971 Montreal: 45 cm of snow on March 4th & wind gusts of 110 km/h. 200 Ski-Doo owners provided emergency transport.
- 1977: This blizzard struck Southern Ontario January 28 to February 1. Toronto DID NOT call the Army.
- 1999 Toronto Snowstorm: A series of snowfalls paralyze the city, total snowfall for January reached 118 cm. Yes, the mayor called the Army.
- 2007 February 2007: Storm hits Central and Eastern Canada, with Ottawa setting a single-day snowfall record of 35.7 cm.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Snowmageddon
https://www.readersdigest.ca/travel/canada/worst-snowstorm-in-canada/
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social2025-10-14 18:24:02
@tezoatlipoca@mas.to2025-10-14 21:22:35
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-07 12:52:49
Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2025-10-07 00:22:44
What @… said here, and so well said.
Note that deciding it’s the wrong time to rub somebody’s nose in how incredibly wrong they were doesn’t make them any less wrong. Listening is not the same thing as accepting. Sometimes it’s a moment to say “you dumbass,” and sometimes it’s a moment to say “And how did that work out for you?” The wise know the difference.
People who were taken in by the likes of these scammers •can• walk out of it in moments of cognitive dissonance — and if you’re in a position to do what Luna describes with someone you know, you might just change a life.
https://defcon.social/@corbden/115329960629783431
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca2025-11-06 19:58:57
Jason Proctor is contributing to the CBC's live blog scroll from a legal perspective and as always, his stuff is illumniating. I'll paste his report in because it can get lost in the scroll easily.
"Creditors circle as cull looms
Jason Proctor
I'm Jason Proctor, a reporter with CBC Vancouver who looked into a series of lawsuits facing the owners of Universal Ostrich Farms Inc.
Last month, I spoke with three creditors who are watching today's ruling with great interest — and some skin in the game.
B.C. Supreme Court judges have ordered the farm's owners to repay debts worth more than $250,000 but, up until now, the creditors have been unable to collect. Normally in this kind of situation, a creditor would move to seize the business assets — but because in this case those assets are ostriches caught up in a legal battle, that's been challenging, to say the least.
All three creditors have tried to garnish the CFIA to intercept any money the agency might pay out as compensation for killing the birds (potentially up to $3,000 a bird, the CFIA says) but it remains to be seen how that will work. The creditors, however, told me they are anxious to recoup their losses.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/bc-ostrich-farm-decision-scoc-9.6968394?ts=1762453717737
@arXiv_csCY_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-14 09:34:48
The Mechanical Yes-Man: Emancipatory AI Pedagogy in Higher Education
Linda Rocco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10176 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10176
@roland@devdilettante.com2025-10-04 15:14:33
"Let me say this clearly: nobody in this country is safe.
...
But proximity to suspected criminals now means everyone loses their Fourth Amendment rights.
This is collective punishment—the logic of occupation, not policing in a constitutional republic."
https://mastodon.opencloud.l…
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-09-20 17:00:29
I've probably mentioned that I'm working on switching #Gentoo from our half-broken eselect-ldso logic to #FlexiBLAS. This also involves a transition period where both setups would be supported.
A good thing is that the switch is ABI-compatible with the previous state (or at least it's supposed to be — we're working with upstream on fixing function coverage). Since libblas.so, liblapack.so and the rest are replaced by symlinks, programs that link to them will simply start using FlexiBLAS. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, switching the other way doesn't work as well. Stuff newly built against our libblas.so & co. symlinks naturally reads FlexiBLAS's SONAME from them, and links to libflexiblas directly. So should you decide to switch back, some packages will stay linked to FlexiBLAS and will need to rebuilt.
In order to avoid this, I would have to replace the symlinks with wrapper libraries, having libblas.so.3 and so on SONAMEs, and linking to libflexiblas. Unfortunately, a dummy wrapper isn't going to work — the linker will complain about using indirect symbols from libflexiblas.so. So I would probably have to "reexport" their symbols somehow, and ideally split into appropriate libraries, so that `-Wl,--as-needed` wouldn't drop some of them. But how to do that?
Well, let's look at the existing logic for eselect-ldso — clearly both BLIS and OpenBLAS create some wrappers. So I've spent some time investigating upstream Makefiles, and literally couldn't find the respective targets. I mean, these are quite complex Makefiles, but I'm grepping hard and can't find even a partial match.
As it turns out, these Makefile targets are added by Gentoo-specific patches. And these patches are just horrible. In case of OpenBLAS, they create the wrapper libraries by linking all the relevant .o files from OpenBLAS build, plus the shared OpenBLAS library. So the OpenBLAS symbols relevant to each interface end up duplicated in libblas.so, liblapack.so, etc., and apparently the symbols needed by them are taken from libopenblas.so. The individual interface libraries aren't even linked to one another, so they expose their own duplicate symbols, but use the implementation from OpenBLAS instead.
BLIS is even worse — the patch is simply creating libblas.so and libcblas.so, using all BLIS objects directly, plus symbol visibility to hide symbols irrelevant to the library. So yes, libblis.so, libblas.so and libcblas.so are roughly three separate copies of the same library, differing only in symbol visibility. And of course libcblas.so doesn't use libblas.so.
Truly #GSoC quality.
@rasterweb@mastodon.social2025-08-28 21:57:22
Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/
