Nextcloud Notes or Joplin (nevermind all the other features Nextcloud provides) tick most of your boxes. They’re more productivity focused than privacy focused, it doesn’t do “zero knowledge” encryption the way you’re describing, but I don’t really understand the point of that when you’re self-hosting and the server host belongs to you anyway. The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

They had freaking Fred Penner performing! Can’t get more Canadian than that! (For any non-Canadians, he’s like a musical version of Bob Ross)

When it comes to TikTok it is less clear to me what a good decision would be

the fact a foreign and potentially hostile state can influence the people is a serious threat.

That seems pretty clear to me.

fail2ban is mandatory equipment for any ssh server accessible to the public especially on its default port. It’s highly configurable, but the default settings will do fine at making it statistically impossible for any user or password to be brute forced.

China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.

He’s also expanding their mandate to cover more local news, so that’s going to have a lot of costs that won’t be going to executives.

Porter still barely qualifies as national, and even that’s a super recent development, but I agree. No middle seats, no bullshit, just a cheap and efficient way to get from A to B with minimum discomfort and minimum airport hassle. Porter is awesome. I hope they soon buy dozens and dozens more of those Embraer jets and really give Westjet and Air Canada a real run for their money.

Even better if they can connect up their medium-haul network hubs with the Embraers and continue to use their Dash-8s to provide feeder service from under-served, under-utilized regional airports. I don’t mind hopping on a short connection as long as they can keep the price modest and it’s not connecting at either end of some 50-kilometers-across dystopian nightmare maze like Pearson (which Air Canada always insists on doing).

Porter and Westjet both have right idea spreading the traffic out to other airports around Toronto like City Center, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, etc. Porter has the even better idea of using some of them as hubs instead of Pearson and I’m all for it.

This guy vocally praises Hitler and the Nazis. So if you manage to find any people defending and supporting this sack of shit, they are Nazis too, and remember that punching Nazis is not promoting hate, it is a civic duty and a Canadian tradition. I look forward to this barbarian getting his ass handed to him in the election and hope he ends up in jail again.

What they’re saying isn’t wrong, Canadian productivity is very low, innovation is primarily isolated to large institutions, many of which are subsidized, and occasional small plucky outliers who have snuck through the great filter of regulations and usually get quickly gobbled up. The problem is I doubt any solution these tech bros propose will be used to improve it. I don’t trust their motives at all.

I do have problems with the way so many of Canada’s regulations are unfairly oppressive and obstructionist for actual entrepreneurs – I’m speaking of actual single individuals and very small groups, with genuinely limited resources, who don’t have the time or energy or employees or financial capacity to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of tediously expensive, overwhelmingly detailed and sometimes changing regulations. Everyone wants a piece of the pie before you’ve even made any pie. Our regulations tend to be very bottom-heavy and front-loaded and become relatively more onerous the smaller and less well resourced you are, they lack any reasonable scaling, exemptions and incentives for small business and small operations and I think that’s intentional, it is a classic protectionist strategy which immensely pleases many of our entrenched oligopolies.

I can think of many very highly specific examples that I’m not going to share because I don’t want to get into the weeds of highly specific industries, but I think it’s safe to claim that they all have their fair share of anti-small-business regulation. Of course taxes are one issue that every business has to deal with that could be improved and simplified vastly for small business. Tax credit programs like SR&ED that are ostensibly there to foster innovation tend to just become distracting time and effort black holes for small businesses while huge companies like Bell employ or hire experts on this process with a legal team to back them up who help them walk away with millions.

Anyone who’s ever had to deal with Transport Canada for anything vehicle, aviation or rocket or drone related, or Industry Canada for anything radio related, or Health Canada for anything person related, or Natural Resources Canada for the environment, the RCMP about anything potentially dangerous like weapons, or CFIA for anything food related, or CBSA for anything border related, knows that these organizations are deeply risk-averse brick walls for entrepreneurs, hobbyists and innovators alike. And that’s basically their mandate. However the larger and more well-funded you are, the less risky you seem to magically appear to them. I’m speaking from some experience here. And another problem is look how many I’ve just named off the top of my head, it’s not even always clear who you need to be talking to about what. The problem is small business needs to be able to take risks to succeed and if that’s going to cause risks to the public, I understand the concern, but the government and their agencies need to step in and provide tools and regimes where we can test and minimize and manage that risk instead of stonewalling and putting the entire burden on small businesses which simply cannot bear that burden. You’re always guilty until proven innocent when it comes to these sort of regulations and unless you have the resources to prove that you’re innocent you’ll never be allowed to make any progress. And the height of the bar required to prove you’re innocent seemingly changes based on how much money you have, but in the opposite direction of what it should.

If you try to get around the lack of resources by going to the banks for a loan to pay for or hire the resources you need, a) you’ll have to give them collateral and the banks love that, and b) now you’ve got a staunchly conservative bank looking over your shoulder constantly and they hate risk even more than the government agencies, and c) the banks themselves are strictly regulated so even if they wanted to help you they often can’t. That is sort of a crappy way of solving the problem, and so the fact that it doesn’t solve the problem isn’t so concerning, as it wouldn’t even have to BE a problem if all the rest of the regulations on small business weren’t so bad, but it closes off any possible relief valve of letting the banks inject capital into small businesses which could at least mitigate the blockage.

Canada seems to have this general attitude that treating small business and large business exactly the same is exactly what makes their regulations fair and even-handed when in fact and in actual outcome it’s anything but. “Bank of Dave” provides a great illustration of some of the unfairness in this kind of unnecessary and harmful overregulation of very small fish in a very big pond and the way it inhibits actual entrepreneurs and entire communities from achieving success, it’s UK based but I think the general concepts translate pretty well to Canada too.

There are some parts of it that aren’t great and maybe it could be streamlined, like the cookie warning which should be implemented technically in the browser and part of the cookie protocol. Transition it to making it legally the responsibility of tech giants and advertisers like Microsoft and Google to comply and be honest about what they’re tracking, rather than the sole burden falling on each individual website. Somehow I doubt that’s the only thing they’ll be interested in discussing but I’m going to wait and see what they actually do before I judge.

The United States of Canada has a better sound to it than the 51st state if you ask me.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support. If you do have an argument to make, feel free to do so. I may or may not respond. But in case my own point’s not clear, I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel, and I think they try to cast it in as negative a light as they possibly can, and I don’t think their perspective is even worth considering as they continue their ghastly sprint to destroy the future of life on this planet so they can earn money.

Why is this always worded in such a shitty way that makes it sound like a bad thing. “swamps the grid” “overwhelming the region” “prices slumping”. Fuck all the “energy companies” and their bought politicians and journalists who think or at least talk this way.

Here let me fix it for you: “France now has abundant solar energy, providing free electricity to all homes and businesses that want it, while plenty of solar capacity remains in reserve, available for meeting increased demands or storing for later or night-time use by refilling hydroelectric reservoirs”

Yes please. Happy to see the Green Party putting out some solid ideas.

Yeah Carney’s pretty unequivocal support of this guy was a big blunder and significantly eroded my confidence in him. Fortunately for Carney, he’s still the leader I’m most confident in, but that’s only because he had such a strong start and because he’s up against such uninspiring and unpleasant alternatives. It’s not because he’s playing his cards particularly well. If this election is going to continue to devolve into picking the least worst candidates, I may yet change my mind.

Celebrity culture is gross, but if you’re going to watch that nonsense I agree Canadian is better (and somewhat less gross) than American.

I’ve got plenty, if the Americans invade, I’ll share.

Yeah when I first started there was one guy whose code reviews I dreaded, he would nitpick every detail and he would stand by it, he would tell me to do it a completely different way that was 10x more work. It felt like I would never get my stories done because I had drawn “that asshole” in the code review lottery.

Years later, I came to realize that he was actually the best, he taught me so much about the way I should be thinking of things and structuring things, that have saved so much time and trouble later on, I now specifically reach out to him for a review when I am trying to do something complex because I know he’s going to give me an honest, thorough and useful review. Nobody’s doing anyone any favours in the long run by rubber stamping things, it may help you keep your sprint velocity up, but it’s not going to result in high quality code, and the bad quality code will inevitably bite you.

I actually dare them to try. I’m really looking forward to the massive paychecks I’m going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I’m so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.

My advice: Practice going over other people’s code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won’t always be right, you won’t find them all, but you’ll learn lots of skills you’ll need in the future. Whatever you do, don’t undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun “solutions” out of. Half the time they don’t even compile, nevermind work properly, or efficiently.

I feel like 99% of the time that’s just a lazy or misleading excuse. I’ve worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.

The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they’re not allowed to share simply doesn’t hold water in the vast majority of cases.

More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).

Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It’s not simply that they’re embarrassed by bad code, it’s that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it’s not just a risk it’s a certainty.

The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I’m fortunate that the company I’m working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.