Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 20 Posts
  • 520 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • While it’s understandable that you might think so, that’s not where this is coming from.

    The white poppy comes from the UK originally where they treat Remembrance Day rather differently from the way we do. While in Canada, it’s a moment to remember the horrors of war and the millions lost when we embrace industrial scale international violence, the UK really doubles down on the whole “To Our Glorious Dead” thing. They take the day to recognise the sacrifices “for freedom” and other deeply propagandistic ideas.

    So in rejection of this, the white poppy came about as a rejection of this messaging. In a way, it’s an effort to make Remembrance Day more how Canadians tend to recognise it.

    If the white poppy is now appearing in Canada, it might be in answer to how the day is changing culturally.

    Source: I was born and raised in Canada. My grandfather fought in our armed forces to liberate the Netherlands and we attended Remembrance Day ceremonies regularly as far back as I can remember. I emigrated to the UK when I was in my 30s, and I will not wear a poppy here. It means something very different.










    • Keep everything in git. You can use third party services like Codeberg, GitLab, or GitHub, or host your own on your NAS.
    • When you’re not working on a project and don’t think you’ll need to reference it for a while, just delete it from your laptop. The code always lives in git anyway.

    In terms of local storage, I usually have everything in ~/projects/project-name, and I don’t have tiny file size limits because I don’t use FAT32 filesystems — that’s the default filesystem you usually get on USB sticks and external hard drives you buy. You have to format those drives to something like EXT4 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) or you get stuck with FAT32 which has 2gb file sizes.





  • Whether you like it or not, politics is into you and directly affects your life. It’s good to learn more about it.

    “Neoliberal” refers to an economic push (typically championed by right-wing parties). The short explanation is that neoliberal proponents want to strip regulation wherever they can, believing that “the market” will provide what the regulations were guaranteeing (safety, competition, etc.) organically.

    An extreme example would be removing any controls on food safety. The idea is that if a company gets a reputation for producing toxic/dangerous food, the market (ie, the people buying food) will naturally avoid that company because they don’t want to get sick and that company will go out of business. That risk is what keeps them in line.

    A more common example is vehicle emissions. We regulate a lot of terrible stuff out of car exhaust — lead for example — because the market refused to do it themselves.

    Opponents to neoliberalism point out that:

    1. The massive amount of money in the hands of corporations means that their ability to manipulate the market (through advertising, media manipulation, or intimidating/buying their competitors) means that the market is insufficiently free for such policies and…
    2. That (perhaps most importantly) the individual often will not make purchasing decisions based on what’s good for the broader public.

    Also, a few thousand dead kids due to some executive deciding to add arsenic to corn flakes to reduce costs is too high a price to pay for “liberalising” the economy.


  • 5-over-1 refers to a building/zoning design where you have one floor of commercial business space on the ground (typically small businesses, cafés, etc.) and then around 5 floors of residential apartments above it. Your classic “mixed use” neighbourhood: great for land values, walkability, sustainability, transit, cycling, etc.

    I’m dubious about the claim that neoliberal policies naturally lead to this design though, as those with the money routinely seem more interested in paving a few hectares of green belt and filling it up with single family homes.

    What would be helpful is for zoning bylaws to start redrawing cities with more 5-over-1 areas, replacing wide/noisy/dirty/dangerous through roads with narrow winding ones and broad sidewalks littered with trees and cafés.