• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Fuckers can try. I wasn’t directly involved in this but I grew to know personally David Arthur Johnston over (?) a decade ago who spent years in Victoria viscerally protesting right-to-sleep laws/anti-laws and finally won. Due to his tireless efforts, hunger strikes in jail, and community support he helped pave the way for homless people to pitch and sleep in tents for the night on any public property.

    Don’t like seeing poor people on public lands? Okay… be part of the solution.

    That was his message. And here we are still working on the questions involved, and solutions. Good. As long as the convo is still active and we haven’t given up.








  • I just read something the other day that a single query like this one burns enough electricity to charge an iPhone 100 times or whatever the hell. It sounds like hyperbole but I think that number is close.

    This is how humankind ends. A guy asking a fucking computer to validate his insecurity infinite times. This is how ai ultimately destroys us.






  • I’ve used wi-fi calling fairly extensively mostly because I’ve lived in areas where there was zero cell service but ready access to internet (via Starlink or other wireless forms of it). One thing I do know is that my phone co. requests that I fill out a form specifying where I am living currently (whilst using it) so that if I ever need to contact emergency services they’ll have a better idea of where to route the call to. For instance my phone number originates from Western BC but I could potentially be using wi-fi calling from anywhere in the province. I mention this to say, it appears my telco doesn’t have a way to triangulate me with this service.

    I can further attest that wi-fi call & text reception still works fine when I have a VPN running on the router that my mobile device is connecting to. Make of that information what you wish.

    Though that I have read that wi-fi calling is atrocious for privacy reasons that I have not followed up on. Given the above I’m not sure how or why that would be the case, but basically if I’m in an area with cell coverage I turn it off. I’ve always meant to look deeper into how or why it might be bad (or worse) in some way.



  • 100%. I worked with an old-timer Newfoundlander who delighted in telling me that in the ought-sorties when he was a teen he passed out in a dinghy on the dock after a night of drinking and woke up at sea as an accidental stow-away on some merchant ship. He hid as long as he could but eventually got caught and it was some ship/crew from the eastern hemisphere and (to hear him tell it) threatened him with going overboard unless he got to work in the galley so that’s what he did. He said he sailed with them all over the world for two or three years before landing in Canada again and decided to take a stroll around his former community to learn that his family had assumed him dead, had the whole funeral or whatever, case closed in their minds. I asked him if he looked up his people to let them know and he was like fuck that shit I hated all of them with a passion! so he went back out to sea and did that most of his life. He was hilarious.


  • I’m happy they did it. But I’m also questioning how much difference it’ll make in a province taken over by anti-vax paranoia and a whole region of people who more than half believe things life safe-use sites and safer-supply and harm reduction are a scam of some kind, in the face of the tainted opiate crisis that has been raging for a couple decades already. Hundreds of doctors have already been screaming about that.

    TL:DR I don’t believe the wider population gives a flying fuck what doctors have to say at this point. I wish it wasn’t true, but it seems pretty obvious by now.




  • I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.

    For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?