In the west we're used to driving with relatively little driver to driver communication other than signal lights and brake lights. In countries where drivers use horns more, it really does increase communication between drivers about intention and whether or not another driver is willing to accomodate. For example in one country spent time in, to change lanes you signal (sometimes) but you usually just put your nose into the gap and honk. If the other driver is okay with that---and courtesy and etiquette means they most often are, they will let you in. If not, they honk twice back. It makes for a more orderly system in heavy traffic, if more noisy.

If you come to North America and do that, it will not end well. Horns mean little to North American drivers other than FU or get out of my way, idiot. And they are always in a hurry to get to the next light. Courtesy and etiquette are just not a thing, although maybe self-driving cars will fix that!

I'm not convinced we'll get to 1 million satellites before kessler syndrome is triggered. Kessler's group just barely released a report using updated numbers and it's not looking good at all. We're way past the threshold. It's just a matter of time now, for the 500km zone.

It's very interesting that supporters of this administration have been saying loudly for nearly 10 years that the epstein files indict prominent Democrats including the Clintons. Because democrats are all pedophiles. You'd think they'd be champing at the bit to get even highly selective evidence of that out there. But they continue to resist doing even that, which is quite telling about the guilt of one man in particular.

As for Gates, Clinton, and every other rich and powerful person to have associated with epstein, I have a hard time believing anyone could associate with epstein without getting a pretty strong whiff of a putrid smell. They had to know at least some of what he was up to, if not buying some of it. They might not have know the full extent of his abuse of children, but they had to have known some of it. No one who associated with Epstein is innocent or completely ignorant.

Agreed about the boot thing. If Google is to be believed the modern term is now "SystemReady." That means UEFI and ACPI, and supports the various ARM system standards, and can boot generic distros with stock, unmodified kernels without needing devicetree.

ARM is currently a bit of wasteland when it comes to proprietary kernels and downloading OS images from dodgy download sites. Sadly RISC-V is no better currently.

There are ARM systems out there that meet these requirements, but they are expensive. System76's Thelio Astra starts at $3k for a desktop tower.

Niche roles eh? Let's see you live your modern lifestyle without what those "niche" forms of transport provide.

You do realize that solar and other renewables are just a few % efficient right? But it doesn't matter! And similarly if the source of electricity for synthesizing fuel was from solar, wind, hydro, efficiency here does not ultimately matter. Only net carbon emissions matter. We already know how to virtually eliminate nox and particulates.

But nothing beats the energy density of a hydrocarbon. Combine this with solar power generation and you have carbon-neutral green energy storage that works with existing infrastructure. Obviously there are losses in this method of storing energy (making fuel). But if there's enough solar input to make it happen, and if it can be scaled to a level that is meaningful, the efficiency doesn't matter as much.

I've long maintained that in order to get off of fossil fuels we have to find a way of replacing those fossil fuels with renewable fuels (biofuels, whatever) for most applications including trucks, tractors, airplanes, ships, etc. There are a whole host of mainstream operations that run on fossil fuels that aren't likely to be replaced by battery-electric any time soon.

Most do. Apple does. Most Android phones do too. It's mainly just Google Pixel devices that don't for some stupid, inexplicable reason. Hooking up a projector to a phone with HDMI over usb to show a video or image for a presentation is very common.

That's news to me. Between NewPipe and Grayjay it's easy to watch YouTube without being swamped by ads. Both are available in F-Droid. Don't need a rooted phone for any of that either. And with GrayJay you'll often find that many of your content creators post to other services like Odyssey too. Nice to have it all in one place.

What Canadian industry? How could it become "more balanced?" And if US industry has been failing as you suggest, how would Canada fair any better? Canada does have auto plants, true, and that is a part of the overall economy. But they are all foreign owned; we have none of our own. No car companies either.

Economic interdependence isn't inherently bad. The US and Canada have been interdependent for a hundred years or more, to each others' benefit. Granted the relationship has always favored the US at some expense of Canada, like all of the US trade deals, and all deals between parties with very unequal power. But it was still a net positive for both countries and makes sense to continue it, if that were possible.

Really only Tesla (reminder to Trump: an American company owned by your friend who benefits from this) will really benefit from the drop in tariffs. Tesla was importing approximately that many cars per year from China before the tariff. Also they are one of the few companies that can even sell cars in Canada from China because they already meet North American standards. As for the flood of cheap chinese cars, it's not going to happen. Canada is way too small a market for Chinese companies to customize their offerings to meet safety crash test standards here. If the US started importing them, that would be another story.

Now of course if Canada could change the rules to allow vehicles that meet European standards, that would change the landscape pretty significantly.

I wasn't happy with having to use the Java sledge hammer (and all the maven-downloaded dependencies) to make such a simple thing work, so I had Claude make a simple python equivalent, which only needs odt2txt. It seems to work nicely, but probably has edge cases I haven't addressed yet. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Ftorriem%2Frez.... Claude produced some rather reasonable documentation for it I thought. Use at your own risk of course, but works for me!

Yes there's no way I'd let Claude anywhere near my github account. I can't fathom why anyone would want to connect Claude Code directly to github. Note that Claude can do a bit of its own revision history and roll back things if you ask it to.

There's nothing like posting to slashdot to get one to do some research after posting!

There's a utility called ReZipDoc to assist in using git with OpenDocument formats. By converting the file to an uncompressed zip file, git can deduplicate the parts of the file that didn't change, even though they are still inside the zip file. And it sets up git to give you a plain-text diff for human consumption. Pretty slick. And on a modern filesystem like ZFS, BtrFS, or BCacheFS, you get get compression at the file system level so you don't need zip compression anyway.

When working with AI, the first thing to always do is commit everything to git, then make a branch and see what AI can do. Once it's done, merge it back in. While the concept of diffs don't make as much sense when it comes to spreadsheets and documents[1], git is still a decent framework for managing projects with them in it. If you use LibreOffice you can store in "flat" versions of the formats (such as .fodt) which are single-file, uncompressed xml files. But the diff won't be very readable to humans.

[1] I've long thought git should be able to better deal natively with modern document formats that are really just xml inside of zip files. Although a diff of an XML file is probably not too useful for humans. Still, it would be nice if the parts of the document that didn't change (style sheet etc) would be stored in a way to avoid duplication. Can anyone point me at resources to do this better? Surely there's a git-based utility out there to make this happen.

So much there in that short paragraph. Saying Canada shouldn't antagonize Trump is fine, but the problem is there's *nothing* we can do that *won't* antagonize him and nothing we can do to placate him, short of inviting him to come be a king. What can Greenland do to not antagonize him (what can Ukraine do to not antagonize Putin)? See the problem?

The last trade agreement trump himself signed granted quite a bit of access to the Canadian dairy market up to a certain cap, which has never been reached, so those high diary tariffs have never been levied. Trump is lying about them. But even further, if Canada opened up the the entire dairy market, while it would destroy the entire Canadian dairy industry in one fell swoop it would hardly register as a blip on the scope for the fortunes of American dairy. A lot of American companies don't realize how small the Canadian market is compared to the entire US market. Canada is littered with the corpses of US companies who tried to enter completely unprotected markets. Lowes and Target to name two. Besides that, to eliminate the trade imbalance Canadians would have to buy 10 times the number of US products. How many cars does Trump want us to buy? 10 per person?

As far as tariffs go, you want the US to reduce its "subsidization" of Canada by... taxing Americans? It's absolutely bonkers to me how GOP voters are so excited about some of the biggest tax raises the US has had in decades. Yes tariffs hurt Canada and drag our economy down. Congrats on that. But they are a tax on US citizens!

As far as broken relationships go, so many of my friends and relatives in the US think that things will go back to normal after Trump's done in three years. But I just don't see any possible way that's going to happen.