RE 🇨🇦

Given Poilievre's obsession with tax cuts to solve every economic problem, you could describe him as mono-maniacal. Given his fixation on slogans, you could also describe him as motto-maniacal.

@intothewestaway@mastodonapp.uk yeah, cricket is way more popular outside of Canada. Despite having large English, Carribean, and South Asian populations here, it hasn't really bubbled up into the public consciousness yet. Apparently the US-Canada cricket rivalry is one of the oldest ones, although it's gone on breaks for extended periods of time. I only recently discovered some of the soccer documentary content on CBC Gem. It's on my list of things to watch. Now that I know Barwell is involved, I'll have to bump the priority higher.

@intothewestaway@mastodonapp.uk I was scrolling through CBC Gem's sports offerings, and saw Mackenzie Barwell is doing a thing tomorrow for Canada's pro cricket tournament. Seems OneSoccer/CanPL is contributing not just to the soccer ecosystem, but also to the sports ecosystem more broadly. I do not normally watch cricket, but I'll be checking it out. I'm also impressed that they've organized a pro competition for a sport that is still pretty niche in Canada.

Whenever Trump talks shit about #Canada my reaction is just "Put that on a T-shirt. I'll wear that."

They say that our values are things like freedom, democracy, and rule of law, but our real values are cheap gas.

@intothewestaway@mastodonapp.uk I keep asking them that, but so far no luck.

@intothewestaway@mastodonapp.uk almost got free tickets to go, but the kids weren't interested.

Based on that first poll, I'm somewhat jealous of BC now, seeing the electorate turn on the NDP for their opportunism. Wish Ontario would have done the same to the PCs when Doug Ford called the last election.

I know it's popular to rag on "too many politicians", but I think we're shortchanging ourselves in terms of representation at the provincial level. Hell, Quebec has a smaller population than Ontario and their legislature has 125 seats.

The province should unhitch itself from the federal riding boundaries, and given the population has grown by around 50% since 1999, should probably have at least 130 MPPs if not more. I don't see us ditching FPTP anytime soon. That would at least potentially reduce the distortions it causes.

In 2016, there was an average of 108,482 citizens per riding. As of 2021 (last census with available data), there was an average of 114,709 citizens per riding. Some of those ridings have no doubt grown faster than others, creating distortions in representation (or exacerbating).

Unfortunately, I cannot find a single reference for riding populations. The Wikipedia entry is years out of date, and the Elections Ontario website only lets you search one riding at a time.

What's the opposite of naval gazing?

Can't talk now. Building a Mechanical Turk.

Not a hill I'll die on, but I'm willing to get maimed.

@Jam123@mstdn.ca Yeah. I'm not thrilled about the possible outcome.

@EileenOttawa@mstdn.ca I agree, it sounds reasonable on the face of it. It may actually be reasonable, but it's hard not to read between the lines on it after the recently cancelled initiative. A more charitable reading of it is that they are just asking "How do we go forward with Billy Bishop as it is, now that the expansion is off?"

I'm starting to hate the phrase "carve out".

@brianstorms@mastodon.social I don't think they have. I just think they decided they don't care enough if it means they have to do something about.

@gdinwiddie@mastodon.social Yeah. In Ontario, a great deal of our electricity comes from renewable sources, mainly hydroelectric, as well as nuclear. We have natural gas plants to handle surges in demand, so without building more capacity from other sources, additional demand is likely to increase emissions, even if regulations are not relaxed. Construction is underway to increase nuclear power generation, and there have been investments in solar/wind, so the need to use natural gas would be temporary. In other provinces, with fewer suitable rivers for hydro electric power generation, they might still be relying on coal power (e.g. Saskatchewan). Some jurisdictions are loosening up their emissions regulations for data centres, which I don't think is great. I don't know as much about the heat dissipation concerns.

One of my free market capitalist takes is that if free market capitalism is so awesome, it shouldn't need incentives. The free market capitalism is supposed to be the incentive!

Whitecaps are the best Canadian club at 8th place.

The understanding amongst the motorists in my circles was always that speeding would be tolerated as long as it wasn't excessive, but if you failed to stop at a stop sign and a cop saw you, you'd likely get a ticket. Even rolling stops weren't tolerated.

I donno, this doesn't sound like #NoJetsTO to me. (link to fb post in alt text)

Note that the particular species is swamp milkweed. I bought one plant from an Ontario native plant grower, then I bought a pack of roots at Costco (didn't realize it until I got home that both were the same).

This was a good weekend for Canadian Rugby. The men's team beat the higher ranked US team. The women's team tied England, having a much better game against them than the Women's Rugby World Cup final, and breaking their 39 game winning streak. #Canada #Cdnsports

@fname@kamloops.social proud of myself for posting this before I saw he was doing that. He managed to make both sentences relevant in one go. https://mstdn.ca/@hewer_of_code/117344515596851473

Along with the net favourability score, they should publish a 'net familiarity score', calculated as the difference between the percentage of people with a positive or negative view and the percentage of people who don't know.

Now and then I see some counterarguments to claims that GenAI is harmful to the environment. That would be great if turns out to be true, because it would mean we don't need to compromise on environmental regulations to accommodate people/orgs that want to build AI data centres.

I don't know if I was living in a bubble before, but it really seems like people stopped stopping at stop signs since, say, 2019. I see the same driver behaviour at the intersection where my kids wait for the school bus. It's a 4 way stop, but even rolling stops can't be counted on.

Just spotted what I think is a tiger bee fly in my yard. Most species of bee fly that I know of are smaller than a typical bee, but this thing was huge, bigger than a horse fly, which was until today the biggest species of fly that I knew of.

@davetron5000@ruby.social Interesting to hear you say that, because I've been wondering for quite some time what happens to frameworks when vibe coding predominates. I imagine you don't see the parts that could go into a framework when you don't type them, and you don't need them as much if some prompt can create the equivalent code.

I don't know if I was living in a bubble before, but it really seems like people stopped stopping at stop signs since, say, 2019. I see the same driver behaviour at the intersection where my kids wait for the school bus. It's a 4 way stop, but even rolling stops can't be counted on.

Apple's Macintosh brand (now just Mac) is named after the McIntosh apple. It's one of the USA's most iconic brands. The McIntosh apple is Canada's national apple. It's Canada's national apple because it originated here. Was it Trump who said the USA doesn't need anything from Canada?

It's a nicer looking plant and flower than common milkweed, IMO, and blooms longer and later. By the time I saw an monarchs around here, the common milkweed had finished blooming. The swamp milkweed has been going strong for weeks.

@davetron5000@ruby.social They would just ask the AI to create the framework, and give it the 👍because the AI created it, then write a blog post on linkedin. There seems to be a lot of throwing caution to the wind when it comes to AI, and I'm not sure if the boosters care that there are more errors.

If there's a general decline over all of Southern Ontario, what would account for the sudden drop compared to last year and the years before that?

Same video in portrait mode https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TzuW9Z7sBYc

I'm fairly certain in guessing that's still the majority opinion, but it's not nearly as universal as it used to be.

Poilievre's role in the Harper government was attack dog. I don't think he's able to shake whatever is that made him suitable for that role, and that makes him unsuitable as leader. Why does he look so awkward trying to be Ordinary Guy? Because it's not part of his core persona.

@crispius@mstdn.fname.ca Oh yeah, those too.

I called my daughter out, because she's into bugs and stuff. While I was showing it to her, she spotted another bug on the milkweed. Asked me what it was, and I think it might be a milkweed beetle, which I'd never heard of before. This plant choice is nonstop winning for me.

Good luck debugging AI generated binaries that don't have some kind of human readable form in between the inputs to to LLM and the machine code it generated.