Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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  • 191 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.








  • 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.





  • So my first impression is that the requirement to copy-paste that elaborate SQL to get the schema is clever but not sufficiently intuitive. Rather than saying “Run this query and paste the output”, you say “Run this script in your database” and print out a bunch of text that is not a query at all but a one-liner Bash script that relies on the existence of pbcopy – something that (a) doesn’t exist on many default installs (b) is a red flag for something that’s meant to be self-hosted (why am I talking to a pasteboard?), and (c) is totally unnecessary anyway.

    Instead, you could just say: “Run this query and paste the result in this box” and print out the raw SQL only. Leave it up to the user to figure out how they want to run it.

    Alternatively you can also do something like: “Run this on your machine and copy/paste the output”:

    $ curl 'https://app.chartdb.io/superquery.sql' | psql --user USERNAME --host HOSTNAME DBNAME
    

    In the case of the cloud service, it’s also not clear if the data is being stored on the server or client side in LocalStorage. I would think that the latter would be preferable.



  • Generally, I agree. I think what I meant by the above is “how would you tell someone how to use the thing”. My favourite example is email vs email-with-PGP.

    How do you send an email?

    1. Open client
    2. Click “send new email”
    3. Type your email
    4. Click send

    How do you send a PGP-encrypted email

    Let’s first talk about this thing called a “keyserver”. Once you know what that is, you’ll have to go out and find some keys to add to it. We’re not going to talk about styling your message 'cause that’s not something you should be able to do… etc. etc.


  • This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it’s our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.

    Here’s a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you’d still want to use the project. Only after you’ve worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.