@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

keithzg

@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca

My first home on the Fediverse was @keithzg, and I'm the admin here on fediverse.keithzg.ca out of necessity.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Been thinking about getting some sort of Android tablet to read comics on, but worried my preferred feature set ("rectangular screen" "rectangular means the edges of the displayable area are ninety degree angles. that's not a rectangle" "cheap, like tablets were five years ago back when you could still get tablets with rectangular screens" "preferably not Samsung") might reduce the pool of available devices to zero

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mcc Well one upside is if you can find a device from five years ago that can run LineageOS it'll probably be SUPER cheap used now

dmacphee, to Birds
@dmacphee@mas.to avatar

Canada’s bird watchers have a front row seat to climate change - The Globe and Mail

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-climate-change-is-changing-how-we-birdwatch/

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@CStamp @Daveography @dmacphee I can't actually believe they're remotely close to the lion's share of the problem. It seems like grocery store plastic bags: absolutely not helpful for our natural world, fair in principle to be concerned about, but a rounding error compared to the ongoing devastation caused by major industries and as such naturally pushed to make it seem like individual choices can solve things rather than us needing to fundamentally change entire industries and economic systems.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@CStamp @dmacphee @Daveography Compared to the entire forests we keep cutting down to cover in treeless yards surrounded by concrete and pavement? The pollutants we spew out into the air the birds fly in and the water they drink, the pesticides in the bugs and plants they eat?

But it uhh sounds like you have a real personal hatred for cats so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here. (But man, any cat that can get into garbage in Edmonton, give that cat a Nobel Prize!)

wjmaggos, to random
@wjmaggos@liberal.city avatar

He seems to have snuck in here. Somehow almost nobody is talking about it. Welcome @barackobama. Who told you about the ?

HT @mpjgregoire

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire @wjmaggos Account says it's a bot, so that largely explains it I think?

GottaLaff, to Russia
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

Via Kyle Griffin:

GOP Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intel Committee, tells CNN that Russian propaganda has taken hold among some of his colleagues.

"We see directly coming from ... communications that are anti- and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor."

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire @GottaLaff @MikeImBack Hmm I'm not sure that assertion has much guaranteed behind it. Conservative politics in Canada has changed drastically since then, especially out West here, in fact it's hard to imagine any relatively culturally moderate and economically consistent figure from here rising to power like Harper did. His particular breed of Western Tory, which filled out his admin, has all but vanished.

(I say this as broadly a hater of the Harper Admin—but his CRTC was good.)

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire Well for one, I don't remember ten years ago mainstream Western conservatives endorsing anti-queer fearmongering rallies! It was a lot more coy. Maybe the animosity towards renewable energy is about the same, but in a way that's a major regression too since for a while things were at least slowly getting better on the Tory side in that regard.

From what I've observed, a big part of the change is the adoption of American media into a central role in conservative culture. Friends' parents who have always voted Tory are these days imbibing tons of Fox News if not outright QAnon. Public meetings and internet comments seems to really bear this out.

You're making a mistake if you're seeing Smith as an aberration — and remember that even Kenney's party was in many senses catering to her side. He only got into power by merging back with the Wild Rose, and Alberta conservative politics changed seemingly irrevocably in the process—his admin tried to hold a wider coalition together but Covid broke that, and it was mostly a thin sheen of respectability overtop of grievance politics anyways. The shift to stuff like blatant transphobia and similarly scaremongering claims of the downtowns of our cities being apocalyptic hellscapes, while passing rules that ban renewable energy projects from wide swathes of the province (while of course still allowing coal and gas in those areas)? None of that would have felt out of place under Kenney, it just would have been a bit less openly gleeful.

mpjgregoire, to random
@mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca avatar

"In an era of conflicting identities and the rise of identity politics, it is not surprising that the ancient scourge of antisemitism would find new expression. In recent months we have seen it flourish on the secular left and the nationalist right, as well as the usual corners of Islamism. Christians have a duty to see that it does not spread in our own communities."

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/attacks-against-jews-are-attacks-against-christians-too


keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire Another eyeroll-inducing example of Christianism

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire It's simple, I see someone use the deliberately very loaded term "Islamism", especially still using it in the year of your lord 2024, and it tells me a LOT about that someone. And if "Islamism" exists, certainly "Christianism" does — and that side of the past decades has a demonstrably higher body count.

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

I had to watch this 3 times, what a slice of America

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6JCoAoQko

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@seachanger The "ever-shifting stack of third-party contractors who cut costs and we can blame when those cuts cause fuckups" approach to every project in the construction industry is just so fucking problematic on so many levels

tedu, to random

openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma.

Oof.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@lanodan @cakeisnotalie @tedu It's funny how systemd isn't nearly as bad as the most vocal haters say, and also that it's way way worse than that

ramsey, to php
@ramsey@phpc.social avatar

A friend was telling me about guidelines for developing and deploying new services in their company, and one of the guidelines is “new services must not use .”

I’m not making this up, and this isn’t hyperbole. They actually have this listed on their company documentation.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@ramsey @blogdiva Using about 337 different NPM packages, however, is definitely A-OK I'm sure

mcc, (edited ) to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Thirty minutes into my coding work being blocked on picking over documentation trying to figure out how to use my package manager, I realize I have a second problem because the installed version of my package manager is too old for a feature I need. Now I must (a) determine which package manager I used to install the package manager [Debian? The other, older Python package manager I used to install the newer Python package manager?] (b) figure how to use that other package manager

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mcc Don't worry, the Red Hat folks solved this by inventing a meta package management layer called PackageKit, so that there's a single consistent layer to use and query across package managers and distros.

Wait I'm getting word that the Red Hat folks then invented a containerized package format and manager for it and decided it shouldn't integrate with PackageKit in any way and in fact PackageKit was now deprecated

keithzg, to email
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

Soooo how do I find other folks on Fedi? I say this because I’m wondering how to keep track of what seems at least to me to be the current big issue, which is that so much spam is apparently being sent from *.outbound.protection.outlook.com servers that one of the realtime blocklists we use at my work has just been blocking random Microsoft outgoing email relays. Which is very funny to me, and I’d personally just wash my hands of it, but most of our clients apparently outsourced their email to Microsoft so it’s become a problem I’ve been told to care about :P

ned, to random
@ned@mstdn.ca avatar

"Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

The assumption of Anarchism is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how."

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@cthulku @AmeliasBrain @ned The shopping cart example is an interesting microcosm of things.

I remember Superstore always having loonie carts, but earlier in my childhood no other grocery stores did. With a parking lot twice or more as big as most others, perhaps the anonymity of that size of crowd led more people to avoid a sense of social gaze, and/or a larger entity could better afford methods of control.

But also: the implementation elsewhere seemed to me to be in part just done out of over-concern of homeless folks taking the carts, which I certainly know prompted one store (Safeway IIRC?) at one point to get carts with wheels that would lock past a certain point. And I find it notable that I have since seen the abandonment first of wheel-locking carts after they were much more trouble than they were worth, and then even most grocery stores that adopted coin carts seem to have given up on them. The only places I've been to that still have them are the ones of Superstore size.

To me a lot of what is implied there is that, for one reason or another, people are more likely to behave in pro-social and considerate manners when in contexts where they're existing more as individuals rather than part of a crowd—and/or the larger the institution the more likely it is to have a pessimistic view on expectations of human behaviour. Which isn't exactly a huge revelation, and certainly doesn't contradict anything y'all have said in this thread (if anything I'm mostly just belaboring a restatement of some points already made :P) but I do think it's a really fundamental principle that a lot of things spiral out from, yaknow?

18+ mpjgregoire, to random
@mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca avatar

Listening to this morning, they said that had been defeated, "trounced", that Mr. Trump had won by a strong margin in Ms. Haley's home state, etc. But no figures.

I see that it was actually 60-40. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/south-carolina-2024-republican-primary-results/story?id=107417386

While it doesn't seem likely that Ms. Haley will win, that shows there's life in her campaign, that many Rs prefer her. Mr. Trump ought to be ashamed that he's afraid to debate her — though of course shamelessness is one of his traits.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire I don't disagree in principle, it's cowardly from Trump now, and was cowardly from Clinton in 2016. I just think it's a little silly to expect presidential candidates to do anything other than what is in their strategic self-interest, and the American media has at this point firmly established that they won't cause any downsides to happen for frontrunners who avoid debating primary opponents.

Frankly, assuming neither keels over dead before then, I would bet we see few debates between Biden and Trump, as each campaign tries to leverage things to favorable debate conditions rather than accepting debates as a given, and furthermore is tempted to avoid debates if current polling looks good for them personally.

ned, (edited ) to random
@ned@mstdn.ca avatar

As a car-free job seeker right now, I'm running into this constantly. I was a licensed driving instructor before I went car-free. I taught thousands of motorcycle students how to stay safe on the streets. Why do I not qualify as a "Bike Educator", because I now ride a "Bike"?
I ran photo studios for 15 years, but now I don't qualify for any jobs as a photographer because I'm not driving a car? I was fine without for 10 years, in much higher professional positions than I'm applying for.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@ned @AmeliasBrain Every day my half-joking policy position that "no City employee with an office downtown should be allowed to drive to work" becomes less of a joke

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

The phrase "I want someone to invent the AK-47 of ebikes" keeps drifting through my head

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@irenes @mcc Every time there's a major development in an industry, companies do their best to use it as an excuse to run away from standardization and towards proprietary nonsense.

Frankly probably our best bet for any sort of standardization of ebike parts is if the EU drops an edict on it.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

Regarding the “ActivityPub vs. Bluesky” controversy, I’m getting tired of the tech press treating the Fediverse as though it’s some sort of hivemind. So if you’re a journalist who’s following me, please know this:

I am part of the Fediverse. I don’t base my opinions, decisions, or actions on the whims of a mob. Nor do I base things on an unwritten “social code” – which no one has exactly articulated in any exact detail.

I make my own judgements based on my own values, not the mob’s.

And my judgement says that if the majority of interactions on Bluesky prove to be negative, I will block the bridge – just as I have with Nostr.

I speak for myself. Do not mistake the mob’s opinion for my own.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@atomicpoet @jalcine In many ways the code of the software here is the architecture, and just like in real life it can encourage and facilitate, or discourage and impede, specific behaviours in the people living in and passing through it.

jwildeboer, to random
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

Running your own e-mail server might seem complicated and geeky but will you trust those US based megacorps managing your digital existence once Trump gets elected? Especially when you’re not an US citizen? I decided many years ago.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@jwildeboer @lauren Same experience for me, with the two differences being (1) at my work we host physically from our office in a residential area, and (2) after setting up SPF I uhh haven't bothered with DMARC. Or DKIM? I did one of the two but not the other, I remember that much, and it hasn't been enough of an issue ever for me to be reminded of which or even to read up on what either really are.

mrawdon, to random
@mrawdon@sfba.social avatar

It’s been gratifying to see more people on social media recognizing that the is a bunch of apologists and a Republican Party mouthpiece.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@mpjgregoire @not2b @mrawdon @rustoleumlove I cannot see him doing that. Among other things, it has to loom heavily in his mind that he was convinced by the Clinton campaign (by way of Obama) not to run in 2016...

tychotithonus, to random

Tell me you've never helped seniors with tech, without telling me you've never helped seniors with tech.

And I don't just mean the person answering this question. I also mean whoever decided to remove this option.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@glitch @cakeisnotalie @Aphrodite @tychotithonus To be "fair", Google doesn't seem to have maintained that feature very well since they implemented it, and if you do app pinning and have gesture-nav set as the bottom nav system option (at least on Google's Android distro), there is actually no way I have found to end the app pinning other than restarting the phone! Which actually makes it kinda even more secure, accidentally, but shows the neglect that's been shown to this Android feature.

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@Aphrodite @cakeisnotalie @glitch @tychotithonus I'm similarly on a Pixel 4a XL for as long as I can manage, no security updates from Google anymore so I'll have to switch to LineageOS or such soon but that's one of the things that keeps me using Android, I can actually install other operating system distributions and am not just at the mercy of the megacorporation that sold it.

It's also far more possible even without that to not use Google on Android than it is to not interface with Apple for iOS—in fact F-Droid just got the ability to auto-update apps on any old Android device (that's running OS versions at least not too many years out of date). You could buy a phone right from Google and then proceed to never use or sign into any Google service, yet still have large catalogues of applications to run on it, and develop and run one's own software without paying anyone. I haven't gone a far de-Googling my phones myself, but that I can is something I can't bring myself to give up—much like how my Internet connection at home isn't fiber-optic because no ISP in Canada will give you such a connection without using their own router.

I really, really wish I could get away with something that's neither Android nor iOS for the computer that's always in my pocket. Alas, stuff like my banking app just ends up being too useful to give up, and it's hard to get a phone with a good AMOLED display and good cameras without going to one of the big corps and either Android or iOS. So for me, Android is the lesser evil of the only two I can entirely reasonably choose from. But oh, how I dabble in being irrational, and how nice it feels to just go out with, say, an old Sony Xperia running a Qt and Wayland and systemd . . .

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@cakeisnotalie @Aphrodite @tychotithonus @glitch Oh yeah the ISPs all allow passthrough, it just philosophically bugs me that I still have to run their hardware, even bypassed (which in my experience at my work can sometimes glitch back on, but it's not even really for such a practical concern that I'm annoyed).

The real fundamental problem is that when the Trudeau admin got in originally, the Liberal party's historical chumminess with big eastern telecom companies meant they killed the fibre-resale rules. So the really good ISP I use, Teksavvy, hasn't ever gotten the chance to resell fibre, only cable or DSL. Funny enough I still get better pings on my old cable connection using Shaw's physical cable lines than the fibre-backed Shaw connection at my work! And I can still download even 4K videos faster than I could watch 'em, and live alone so I'm not sharing my bandwidth widely. So I haven't (yet) felt the desperate need to move on from cable, much like how my old a-series Pixel with a headphone jack has remained Good Enough for now...

keithzg,
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

@cakeisnotalie @Aphrodite @tychotithonus @glitch Yeah more than anything it’s (a) I just philosophically hate the idea of having to run extra useless hardware that is only working for me if it does nothing, and (b) Teksavvy is so much nicer than Telus or Shaw (now owned by Rogers) and I don’t wanna give ‘em up. (Like, if I’m having a problem I can call them up in the middle of the night and get a well-supported, non-script-reading person on the other end of the line helping me! Unfathomable from either of the big two or any other company of their ilk.)

keithzg, to random
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca avatar

It's truly astonishing to think of how much money and suffering we could save by not having cops

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/fire-breaks-out-while-edmonton-police-carry-out-court-order-7-people-hospitalized-1.6743323

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