That’s quite a straw man argument he’s setup there.

My main problem with this argument is that he’s misdefined “centrism”, and then decided to beat up on the wrong definition. I think we can all agree that his definition of “centrism” would be pretty weak and unpopular politically.

But what he’s defined here isn’t centrism. Steve’s definition here is that the centrist looks at a single policy, looks at how the left views it, looks at how the right views it, and then tries to craft some in between policy for each and every policy on the map.

Now that can happen with every party on certain policies — but more typically centrism picks some policies from the left, and some policies from the right. It’s led less by ideology than by science and a notion of “what’s best” — and sometimes what’s best is a leftist policy, and sometimes it’s a rightist policy.

And it’s not hard to see that this is true with the Trudeau Liberal Government. Marijuana legalization is very much a leftist policy. The National Child Care Plan is 100% a leftist policy. So is gun control. And on the flip side, Carbon Pricing was a 100% rightist policy, as it’s a minimalist market solution to the problem of climate change (one which people need to remember was originally proposed by right-wing think tanks. The leftist policy would have been heavy legislation against industry directly). Modifying the Safe Third Country Agreement also followed the Right’s playbook. As was joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership.

If you want to boil the three ideologies down to their cores, at the extreme right we have a purely free market system with minimalist government and few social services. At the extreme left side you have a system that heavily regulates and controls markets, but with strong social support systems and larger government bureaucracies. True centrism is effectively the notion that the free market is best in some situations, but government is better in others. For example, that the free market is best for making and selling smart phones (rightist), but government is better at providing health care (leftist).

That is centrism — and it’s not difficult to look at the bulk of Liberal Party of Canada policies and see that this is the general pattern they follow. Not some simplistic “let’s look at what the left wants and what the right wants on a specific policy and craft something down the middle”. Centrists pick some rightist policies, and some leftist policies. That is what makes them centrists.

Sure, but electrolysis is only around 30% efficient — so you need 3 units of energy to produce the hydrogen to drive a vehicle x distance, whereas a BEV would only need one unit to travel the same distance.

That is, you can use the electricity generated from that nuclear power plant to drive three times the distance with a fleet of BEVs than you’ll get out of a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles.

Ask your dad if he knows why people steal catalytic converters from ICE vehicles.

For anyone not aware, it’s because they’re filled with Palladium — a precious rare earth metal. One where 40% of the world’s supply comes from Russia.

Palladium’s prevalence in the Earth’s crust is about 0.015 ppm. Lithium’s prevalence is 20 ppm — or around 1300 times more abundant than palladium. Which is why people steal catalytic converters in the first place.

The Fediverse by design prevents this, while the internet of the old age had little if any guardrails against this specially since the platforms never really federated with another.

I see someone is too young to remember USENET.

The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.

What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.

It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.

Depends on what you mean by “back in the day”. So far as I know you could be ~30, and “back in the day” for you is the 2005 era.

For some of us “back in the day” is more like the early 90’s (and even earlier than that if we want to include other online services, like BBS’s) — and the difference since Eternal September is pretty stark (in both good and bad ways).

It's horrible she was denied when there was a liver already available.

Any full cadaver liver that could have gone to this woman didn’t get thrown into the garbage — it went to someone else who would have died without it.

As for the living donor liver her boyfriend offered, even though he was a match her level of liver failure likely meant that the partial liver her boyfriend could have donated wouldn’t have been successful. Living donors still need a liver for themselves, and we each only have one full liver — so the best they could have done is given her half a liver. Her condition was too poor for this to have a likely positive outcome, which was why this was also denied.

It sucks, but there aren’t enough donor livers for everyone who needs one. The cadaver liver she was denied however would have gone on to save the life of someone else you’re not hearing about in the press — someone else who may have died without it.

If the unfairness of it all upsets you that much, then make sure you’ve signed your organ donor card, and make sure your family members know and understand your desire to be an organ donor. And encourage the people you know to do the same. This is only a problem because there aren’t enough donor livers for everyone — when you have n livers, at best you can save n lives — and thus having a larger number of donor livers allows for more lives to be saved, with fewer qualifications.

I’ve been a fan for a really long time — Astro Bot Rescue Mission is still one of my favourite VR games ever. Team Asobi really knocked this one out of the park it seems. I’m happy for their success — and happy for us to have such a great game to play (I too only got an hour in tonight — had to put my daughter to bed, and she wants to play with me so I had to put it away until tomorrow).

There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.

Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.

The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.

With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.

Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.

The people who follow those religions would disagree. The Copts even have their own Pope, so it’s pretty hard to consider them “Catholic” in any normal sense of the word.

You don’t have to run in Ring 0 to detect events occurring in Ring 0.

Besides which, as kexts are being obsoleted by Apple getting code to run inside Ring 0 in macOS that isn’t from Apple itself is going to be extremely difficult.

Yes. But what if the world was 1/3rd Linux, 1/3rd windows, 1/3rd OSX?

The 1/3 running macOS (they haven’t called in OS X in many years now) wouldn’t have to worry, because Apple provides kernel event access for security tools running in user space. The CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor driver on macOS runs as a System Extension, and runs 100% in user space (“Ring 3” in Intel parlance) only — so if it misbehaves, the kernel can just shut it down and continue on its merry way.

The problem with Windows (and to a certain extend Linux) is that Falcon Sensor needs to run in kernel mode (Ring 0) on those OS’s, and if it fucks up you lose all guarantees that the kernel and all of the apps running on the system haven’t been fucked with, hence the need for a full system crash/shutdown. The driver can (and did) put these systems in an indeterministic state. But that can’t happen on modern macOS with modern System Extensions.

Actually pretty much the only Christians until Martin Luther and the Reformation.

I think the Coptic Church (AD 41), Greek Orthodox Church (1st century AD), Syriac Church (514 AD) would like to have a word.

…until the CrowdStrike agent updated, and you wind up dead in the water again.

The whole point of CrowdStrike is to be able to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities, including zero-days. As such, they can release updates multiple times per day. Rebooting in a known-safe state is great, but unless you follow that up with disabling the agent from redownloading the sensor configuration update again, you’re just going to wing up in a BSOD loop.

A better architectural solution like would have been to have Windows drivers run in Ring 1, giving the kernel the ability to isolate those that are misbehaving. But that risks a small decrease in performance, and Microsoft didn’t want that, so we’re stuck with a Ring 0/Ring 3 only architecture in Windows that can cause issues like this.

That company had the power to destroy our businesses, cripple travel and medicine and our courts, and delay daily work that could include some timely and critical tasks.

Unless you have the ability and capacity to develop your own ISA/CPU architecture, firmware, OS, and every tool you use from the ground up, you will always be, at some point, “relying on others stuff” which can break on you at a moments notice.

That could be Intel, or Microsoft, or OpenSSH, or CrowdStrike^0. Very, very, very few organizations can exist in the modern computing world without relying on others code/hardware (with the main two that could that come to mind outside smaller embedded systems being IBM and Apple).

I do wish that consumers had held Microsoft more to account over the last few decades to properly use the Intel Protection Rings (if the CrowdStrike driver were able to run in Ring 1, then it’s possible the OS could have isolated it and prevented a BSOD, but instead it runs in Ring 0 with the kernel and has access to damage anything and everything) — but that horse appears to be long out of the gate (enough so that X86S proposes only having Ring 0 and Ring 3 for future processors).

But back to my basic thesis: saying “it’s your fault for relying on other peoples code” is unhelpful and overly reductive, as in the modern day it’s virtually impossible to do so. Even fully auditing your stacks is prohibitive. There is a good argument to be made about not living in a compute monoculture^1; and lots of good arguments against ever using Windows^2 (especially in the cloud) — but those aren’t the arguments you’re making. Saying “this is your fault for relying on other peoples stuff” is unhelpful — and I somehow doubt you designed your own ISA, CPU architecture, firmware, OS, network stack, and application code to post your comment.

——- ^0 — Indeed, all four of these organizations/projects have let us down like this; Intel with Spectre/Meltdown, Microsoft with the 28 day 32-bit Windows reboot bug, and OpenSSH just announced regreSSHion.
^1 — My organization was hit by the Falcon Sensor outage — our app tier layers running on Linux and developer machines running on macOS were unaffected, but our DBMS is still a legacy MS SQL box, so the outage hammered our stack pretty badly. We’ve fortunately been well funded to remove our dependency on MS SQL (and Windows in general), but that’s a multi-year effort that won’t pay off for some time yet.
^2 — my Windows hate is well documented elsewhere.

They are, but you still need baseload. Solar and wind are great — when it’s daytime and/or the wind is blowing. Coal (and natural gas, hydro, and nuclear) can provide more scalable power on demand. These fill in the gaps for times when solar and wind production are lower.

But China isn’t likely to convert existing coal plants to natural gas. If they wanted to do that they could do it already — they have an LNG pipeline from Siberia. But instead of replacing existing coal power plants, China keeps approving new ones — it was reported last year they were approving two new coal fired plants per week. So even if they increased their LNG imports (they’re looking to open a second pipeline with Russia on the western side of the country), those coal plants aren’t going anywhere — with the rate they’re building new power plants, they’re not likely to be “upgrading” any coal plants to LNG anytime soon — they’ll just build additional LNG plants (and likely further coal plants) alongside those existing coal plants instead.

Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.

Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.

(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).

Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.

(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).

This is how the LNG argument typically goes: if we build up LNG capacity, we can ship it to China who can use it to replace coal burning power plants which emit significantly more CO2 than LNG fired plants do.

That sounds nice — but do we have any_ commitments from China that this would actually happen? Or is it more likely that they’ll just build more LNG capacity on top of their existing coal capacity?

To me, the latter seems more likely than the former.

I certainly wouldn’t run to HR right away — but unfortunately, it’s true sometimes that people just aren’t a good fit for whatever reason. Deadweight that isn’t able to accomplish the tasks that need to be done doesn’t do you any favours — if you’re doing your job and their jobs because they just can’t handle the tasks that’s hardly fair to you, and isn’t doing the organization any good — eventually you’ll burn out, nobody will pickup the slack, and everyone will suffer for it.

My first instinct in your situation however would be that everyone has got used to the status quo, including the staff you have to constantly mentor. Hopefully if you can coach them into doing the work for themselves and keeping them accountable to tasks and completion dates will help change the dynamic.

I’m a tech manager with a 100% remote team of seven employees. We’re a very high performing team overall, and I give minimal hand-holding while still fostering a collaborative working environment.

First off, you need to make outcomes clear. Assign tasks, and expect them to get done in a reasonable timeframe. But beyond that, there should be no reason to micro-manage actual working hours. If some developer needs some time during the day to run an errand and wants to catch up in the evening, fine by me. I don’t need them to be glued to their desk 9-5/10-6 or for some set part of the day — so long as the tasks are getting done in reasonable time, I let me employees structure their working hours as they see fit.

Three times a week we have regular whole-team checkins (MWF), where everyone can give a status update on their tasks. This helps keep up accountability.

Once a month I reserve an hour for each employee to just have a general sync-up. I allow the employee to guide how this time is used — whether they want to talk about issues with outstanding tasks, problems they’re encountering, their personal lives, or just “shoot the shit”. I generally keep these meetings light and employee-directed, and it gives me a chance to stay connected with them on both a social level and understand what challenges they might be facing.

And that’s it. I’ve actually gone as far as having certain employees who were being threatened with back-to-office mandates to have them converted to “remote employee” in the HR database so they’d have to lay off threatening them — only 2 of my 7 employees are even in the same general area of the globe (my employees are spread in 3 different countries at the moment), and I don’t live somewhere with an office, so having some employees forced to report to an office doesn’t help me in the slightest (I can’t be in 6 places at once — I live far enough away I can’t be in any of those places on a regular basis!).

Your employees may have got used to you micro-managing them. Changing this won’t happen overnight. Change from a micro-manager into a coach, and set them free. And if they fail…then it’s time to talk to HR and to see about making some changes. HTH!