Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.

Debian Testing is unstable?

Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s

Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.

Be lucky if we get out of this with only a recession. The slogan might as well have been Make America Great Depression Again.

Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”

Second mood activated.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

Market capitalization is just simple math, multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares that have been issued. Tesla has issued roughly 3.2 billion shares and is currently trading at around $550, which makes their current market cap about $1.75 trillion dollars.

I don’t understand how the value can be that high compared to all of the other companies, especially China.

On its face it seems utterly nonsensical that Tesla is worth as much as all other auto makers combined, when Tesla only accounts for something like 5% of total US car sales. There are two reasons I can think of why this is currently so:

• Tesla accounts for roughly half of all US electric vehicle sales, and electric vehicle sales are roughly 10% of all US vehicle sales. If electric vehicles largely replace ICE vehicles and if Tesla maintains that share of EV sales, then Tesla will be an extremely valuable company. Investors might be betting on a) electric vehicles and b) Tesla continuing to the win the lion’s share of electric vehicle sales.
• Tesla investors are irrational. Personally, my money is on this one. I think long-term Tesla is going to get crushed by cheaper and better-built EVs, probably from China but also possibly from other existing car manufacturers. Sometimes I’m tempted to short Tesla’s stock based on this belief, but to quote John Maynard Keynes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

And it definitely ticks the box for “fucking brutal.”

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

That’s exactly it. If affluent countries can get on the same page, they can neutralize the “wealth flight” argument and we can start shifting the balance back toward something that remotely resembles equality.

Billionaires, as a class, are likely already spending that much or more on lobbying for lower taxes. Or really lobbying for the status quo, since existing loopholes allow them to achieve an ultra low or even 0% effective tax with alarming regularity. The threat they make is wealth flight. “If you raise our taxes we’ll take all our wealth somewhere else!” As a result taxes on the ultrarich have essentially been a global race to the bottom for decades. At least now there finally seems to be some indications that wealth inequality cannot be ignored the way it has been for so long. My hope is that we’ll eventually see some international framework that effectively raise the tax floor for the 1%. It won’t cover every nation, but if it encompasses the EU, US, Commonwealth and other aligned countries then that would go a long way.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

Am I understanding this right that the scalper buys a legit ticket to extract the token, then it can be used any number of times to get in a venue? I thought their system should be able to identify a token/ticket has already been scanned after it’s first used? That’s why there are no re-entry rules at most venues.

I don’t think the intent of the scalpers is to allow ticket reuse. Like you say, there are likely additional checks at the gate when a bar code is scanned. If a rotating barcode is cloned, only the first person to scan is going to get in. Everyone else who tries to use a clone of that now-used barcode is going to get denied entry because the door staff’s scanner is going to throw a “ticket already used” error of some kind. So while it’s technically possible to clone one of these rotating barcodes, just like it’s possible to have multiple authenticators producing the same OTPs, there’s no point in doing so.

What the scalpers are after is a platform that allows them to resell tickets without giving TicketMaster a cut. TicketMaster allows their rotating-bardcode tickets to be transferred to a wallet app like Google Wallet. Wallet apps like Google Wallet have features to allow you to transfer tickets to another user’s wallet, but the wallet specification also includes a flag for whether wallet-to-wallet transfers are allowed. TicketMaster sets that flag so you cannot give (or sell) your ticket to someone else using your own wallet, instead you have to go through something that TicketMaster controls. For transfers to friends and family, TicketMaster forces you to use their app. For reselling tickets, TicketMaster forces you to use their reselling site. TicketMaster’s primary motive is obvious: they want to take a cut of ticket resales, and this is how they do that.

The whole thing is a legal fight between two utterly shitty groups, TicketMaster and scalpers. Here’s hoping they somehow both lose.

The money came from products they sold online as well as their OnlyFans sites

Why do these guys have OnlyFans revenue? I doubt they’re selling pics of themselves. Why would the models featured in those sites not cut out the Tate brothers and just deal with OnlyFans directly? The models provide the content, OnlyFans provides the platform… so what value do the Tate brothers provide? I have to imagine the answer to the first question is “threats” and the answer to the second is “nothing.” These guys are just digital pimps.

Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.

A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north. We have huge problems with cost of living, especially housing, which our current government is failing to address. We have a multi-party system but in my lifetime the national power only ever oscillated between two parties, Liberal (roughly equivalent to US Democrats) and Conservative (roughly equivalent to US Republicans pre-MAGA, or maybe even pre-Reagan). Based on current polling, Canadian discontent looks set to sweep out the incumbent Liberals and sweep in the opposition Conservatives sometime between now and Oct. 2025. I don’t think the Conservatives are going to do any better at addressing cost of living, but fear that they’ll bring in a bunch of regressive crap while they continue to fail in the same way the Liberals have failed. There are lots of other areas where Canada has room for improvement, but within the very narrow scope of how Canada runs its elections, that I will claim we got right.

It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it.

First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.

What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering?

That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.

Or maybe a worldwide pandemic?

We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.

There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count.

Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.

Why not machine certify and hand-count verify?

Because the manual system works well and costs little.

Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term.

Canada already has hand-counted and verified results the same day the election occurs, in a country with a population roughly equivalent to the state of California. Adding machine counting would only add complexity and cost while producing no additional benefits.

Have the voting machine

Canada doesn’t have voting machines, nor do we want them. Our ballot system is a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s it. That’s our whole voting “machine.”

The real genius is in how the vote counting process works. Every candidate is allowed to provide a representative, often called a scrutineer, to oversee the counting process at each polling station. Scrutineers are allowed to challenge a ballot if they feel it has been attributed to the wrong candidate or should have been considered a spoiled ballot. The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.

Under the Canadian system, for all practical purposes it would be impossible to perpetrate election fraud. A candidate would need to somehow induce Elections Canada employees and/or volunteers at multiple polling stations to miscount ballots. They would also need to convince multiple scrutineers to turn a blind eye, scrutineers who were nominated by their opponents. Each riding typically has 4+ candidates (at minimum Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, and Green party candidates, plus often some independent or fringe party candidates), and every single one of those candidates is allowed to provide a scrutineer at each polling station. There will be many polling stations across a single riding, so that’s potentially dozens or hundreds of people that would need to be coerced or convinced to contribute to the election fraud. And that’s just for one single riding.