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mig39

2,475 karma · joined April 20, 2013

Luso-Canadian Big time nerd in Fort McMurray, AB.

https://miguel.click for my YouTube channel.

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mig39··on Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?
I think a lot of is that traplines are a property right that will go away if they aren't inherited. So people use them because they inherited them.
mig39··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
It's a disk image, because in the old days, you'd install apps by dragging them from a floppy or CD to the Applications folder.
mig39··on I'd not buy a LG monitor
how did you convert them? Was it a software or hardware thing?
mig39··on Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.
mig39··on What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?
mig39··on How Alberta Eradicated Rats
I live in Alberta. No rats here. Also the ticks here don't spread Lyme disease.
mig39··on Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
The new TPS reports!
mig39··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
Do you mean the ICRC?
mig39··on Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada
I think you'll need to look at the constitution of Canada (section 35) and the legally-binding treaties that have been signed with indigenous Canadians. There's no "tribal" territory. It's all treaty territory.
mig39··on Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada
Albertan here. I want to remain in Canada. I will leave Alberta if it separates.

This is being driven by a vocal conspiracy-minded maple-MAGA base that got our current premiere her job.

A majority of Albertans are against any talk of separation.

mig39··on The locals don't know
I spend summers in Central Portugal after enduring the winter of Canada's North. Sometimes my Canadian friends want to spend a couple of days in Portugal and ask me what's for a good place to visit, or a good attraction to go to, etc. I always answer the same:

I have no idea. I don't go as a tourist. I go to live in my family's home town for 6 or 7 weeks and not think about work. I don't have any recommendations for a checklist. I avoid the touristy places if I can.

I then turn it around on them. If someone was visiting Canada for 2 or 3 days, where do you tell them to go? I dunno.

mig39··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta
mig39··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done.

I guess it's a form of a canary trap.

It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them.

mig39··on In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition
Coming to Canada soon, though in a limited way:

https://nationalpost.com/news/massive-risk-chinese-evs-are-t...

Hopefully this means competition with the other EV manufacturers in Canada too.

mig39··on How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll
Archive link: https://archive.is/k4Pxr
mig39··on Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
I'm Backblaze user -- multiple machines, multiple accounts. I'm going to be dropping Backblaze over this change, that I'm only learning about from this thread.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

mig39··on 15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die
I didn't know about Webminal until today. Going to try it with some college students this afternoon!
mig39··on Make macOS consistently bad unironically
Base model M4 Mac Mini -- takes 2 seconds to load Word (and ready to type) without it being cached. Less than 1 second if I quit it completely, and launch again, which I assume is because it's cached in RAM.
mig39··on The bee that everyone wants to save
Neither are earthworms.
mig39··on Kuwaiti F/A-18's Triple Friendly Fire Shootdown Gets Stranger by the Day
That could explain one accidental shootdown. It cannot conceivably explain three.
mig39··on US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows
If you read the article, you'd know most of the information came from Bellingcat and ABC.
mig39··on US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows
I think it means that the entire site, including the school and several other buildings, were all hit at the sae time:

> Wes Bryant, a national security analyst who served in the US Air Force, also confirmed it was a Tomahawk missile.

> Bryant added that the evidence for multiple strikes on the entire IRGC compound "is indicative of a deliberate and precise" US operation.

> N R Jenzen Jones, director of Armament Research Services, previously told BBC Verify it was unlikely an Iranian missile had caused the significant blast damage seen at the school because they carry "relatively small explosive warheads".

mig39··on 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack
You didn't read the link, did you? This is addressed in the article.
mig39··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
Why are they using Discord instead of Teams? Is this an internal Microsoft group? They don't dogfood?
mig39··on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
I'm with you. Low-tech works just fine. I hate the idea of having to depend on a working phone just to pay for things.

But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

mig39··on What does Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin teach us? (2017)
It was big on TikTok a few months ago, which makes sense that it's on Instagram now.
mig39··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?
mig39··on Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
And those poor people are objectively poorer because of Brexit. But as long as there's fewer foreigners coming in, then they're happy?
mig39··on Are we all plagiarists now?
I take suspicious student papers and feed them to Turnitin, as well as the popular LLMs. Hey ChatGTP, give me a report on the likelihood that this paper was generated by an LLM. Do that with Gemini, Claude, etc.

Then if there's a high probability, I look through the references in the paper. Do they say what the student attributes to them?

Finally, if I still think it's AI-generated, I have the student in and ask questions about the paper. "You said this here in this paragraph -- what do you mean by that?"

AI detectors are a first-pass, but I think a human really needs to be in the loop to evaluate whether it's cheating, or just using something to clean up grammar and spelling.

mig39··on Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged
No, he's saying that the area is international waters because Finland and Estonia agreed it was not either's territorial waters. It doesn't have to be international waters.
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