What is success here? The few founders and VC get filthy rich as the larger population dumps their money into Discord stock while the users and teams with limited foresight, who’ve moved their communities to discord, suffer?

I mean yeah I guess that’s the success Cory Doctorow warns us about again and again.

But that’s not my definition of success.

For context I’ve been on the receiving end of an IPO and the founders and investors made out like bandits while a fair number of employees were stuck holding the bags thanks to lock-ins, dilution and over priced shares.

It’s a fair question.

Carney is a Center-right corporate kleptocracy bureaucrat. I have no love for the gentlemen. He’s the 1%.

His primary opponent however is owned by the far right and will likely govern even more dictatorially at a time when that’s particularly dangerous. He will sell out healthcare, social safety nets, and the environment in a way that puts Harper to shame.

As I see it, the choice is picking stability, crappy as it is, or selling out the most vulnerable among us for a chance at change.

It’s not a great choice - but it’s what we have. Wishing for something else won’t make it so. The NDP won’t rise from the ashes in the next ten days.

So my vow is to swallow a bitter pill and get involved - be the change I want to see.

In the meantime I believe we need (and have) a unified front against fascism and rampant fear/hatred.

That’s a really interesting PoV. I feel as if I’ve been grappling with the same quandary but landed differently.

The NDP is broken. I say this as a lifelong supporter who strongly believes their stated values and goals represent mine.

That said, the current version of the NDP is not viable or working in my opinion. Their actions do not match their words.

I’m resolved to vote Liberal (in a riding where it matters) and then immediately begin to support the federal NDP party to be ready for the next election. Time to get my hands dirty.

Hoping this question is in good faith.

I think that depends on what we mean by “pay.”

My take:

If our lives are better/easier/safer/happier than the lives of those who grew out of wrongs committed by those of our own heritage / lineage, then yes, I believe we should endeavour to make their lives better.

Whether that’s financial reparations, return of property / land, sharing of resources, etc. should be up to communities to work together to decide.

Put another way, if my good fortune rests on the misfortune of others - even in the past - my personal take is that I am compelled to help where I can.

Sometimes that’s a simple as voting for the thing that benefits me less than others or me not at all because it aids those who need it most.

So yeah, we should “pay” but “pay” can mean so many things.

That’s just me.

Except it’s accidentally stabilizing it. Source am a progressive Canadian living in a (normally) regressive Province. Not like Alberta regressive but still surrounded by Oligarchs.

You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.

It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.

You’re right. My bad. Will edit.

You’re right though and I should not have used “totem pole”. Old habits…

I’m with you on all those points. Loblaws is theft of a different kind and to your most important point: these stores have made it impossible for smaller stores to exist - so I also get that you might not have a choice.

And thanks for responding so kindly. Appreciate you.

My perspective here, to share, is that I don’t understand the hard time others are having. Not that I can’t understand - but rather that I am not in their shoes. I’ve been trying to cut all workers slack because they’re also trapped in a system and we’re powerful if we stick together - so forgive me if I also forgot to empathize with you.

I have to ask - how did you think a cashier can help with your request?

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but cashiers are pretty low on the corporate ladder at Loblaws. If you knew it wasn’t their job, what were you looking for and what did you want in response?

I don’t shop at Loblaws. We’ve been shopping locally since the boycott last May.

But one of the things worth considering is what we expect of each other. Was one person’s rudeness reflective of everyone else who works somewhere?

There are so many way we can work together to make our communities and country stronger. Not shopping at Loblaws can be one of them. But for this reason? I’m sorry, it just seems strained and unusual.

Edited to remove racist euphemism.

I’m sorry but I I have to agree

I think that depends on what you’re doing. I find Claude miles ahead of the pack in practical, but fairly nuanced coding issues - particularly in use as a paired programmer with Strongly Typed FP patterns.

It’s almost as if it’s better in real-world situations than artificial benchmarks.

And their new CLI client is pretty decent - it seems to really take advantage of the hybrid CoT/standard auto-switching model advantage Claude now has with this week’s update.

I don’t use it often anymore but when I reach for a model first for coding - it’s Claude. It’s the most likely to be able to grasp the core architectural patterns in a codebase (like a consistent monadic structure for error handling or consistently well-defined architectural layers).

I just recently cancelled my one month trial of Gemini - it was pretty useless; easy to get stuck in a dumb loop even with project files as context.

And GPT-4/o1/o3 seems to really suck at being prescriptive - often providing walls of multiple solutions that all somehow narrowly miss the plot - even with tons of context.

That said Claude sucks - SUCKS - at statistics - being completely unreliable where GPT-4 is often pretty good and provides code (Python) for verification.

Recently switched from VsCodium to neovim - but still use Codium for some specific tasks.

My setup customization focuses around Telescope, Treesitter, Trouble & Blink.

But the advice I got was to start with vim keybindings in VSCode. I used those for six weeks until I got the hang of the basics and it had gone from frustrating to somewhat second nature.

Then I made the move.

I still use Codium for Terraform work (I have struggled to get the Terraform LS working well in neovim and I don’t use it often enough to warrant the effort) and as a GUI git client - I like the ability to add a single line from multiple files and I haven’t looked up how to do it any other way - I’ve got other stuff to do and it’s not slowing me down.

But I grew to hate Codium / VS code tabs in larger codebases. I was spending so much time looking for open tabs ( I realise this is a me problem). While neovim has tabs, it’s much more controlled and I typically use them very differently and very sparingly.

If I need to look up a data structure I just call it up temporarily with Telescope via a find files call or a live grep call (both setup to only use my project directory by default), take a peak, and move on.

The thing is - security risks are going to exist anywhere you install plugins you haven’t audited the code for. Unless you work in an IDE where there’s a company guaranteeing all plugins - there are always going to be risks.

I’d argue that VSCode, while a bigger target, has both a large user base and Microsoft’s security team going for it. I don’t see the theme being compromised as much as problem because it got solved and also prompted some serious security review of many marketplace plugins. Not ideal, but not terrible.

Beavers have very yellow, almost orange/brown teeth. Why? Because they have a very high iron content coating to make them tougher, you know because cutting down trees.

This is an imposter Hollywood beaver.

As per my other comment - the algorithm is only part of it.

A big aspect however is the slickness and ease-of-onboarding for mega-Corp apps. It’s a thing that would relatively easy to begin work on.

I’ve seen first hand the amount of time and money even growth-stage startups spend on onboarding and have lots of first-hand reports from peers at the big girls - it’s a critical part of success. Make it easy to get started and easy to stay using.

It’s missing from most fediverse experiences. Pixelfed being a serious contender for an on-boarding rethink.

“time-to-value” - we want that as low as possible.

Mother would be proud.

Email is notoriously hard to self host. It requires constant care, planning, and interfacing with the big guys when your email can’t get delivered despite jumping through all the hoops (DKIM, DMARC, SPF and more).

I used to run email services for my small business and former start-up. It was a never-ending pain. IP warming, monitoring, deliverability checks…. blah blah blah.

Both Google and Microsoft would regularly blacklist massive IP address blocks because of one bad IP address. Days to weeks for resolution in some cases.

I’m a little salty though ‘cause I just switched to proton away from RackSpace. There are so few good and reliable options that aren’t the big guys and the big guys want it that way.

I agree.

As someone who uses a number of LLMs often as a pair programmer / sounding board - they’re incredibly useful if you have a very clear idea of your goal and also a solid idea of the architectural patterns you’re going after because they’re so often flatly wrong or suggest solutions that are wildly inefficient/inappropriate for larger projects/applications.

The more context you can provide the better it does but it still falls over often - suggesting courses of action or solutions that are completely hallucinated.

The one thing that’s consistently true is that the better I can describe my goals the better the response tends to be.

The best part about using them is that, for the most challenging work, I find that forcing myself to clearly explain my problem and goals in writing often leads me to a solution without ever having to submit a request.

There’s something about trying to clearly explain the problem to someone who “doesn’t know the space” that’s been helpful to finding the solution.

It’s odd that I had to rediscover this in such a visceral way after a previous life as a tech product person.

I believe only on QMK models?

I’m reasonably sure, but not 100% sure, that the light button in non-qmk keyboards isn’t passed on.