The telcos had a brief opportunity to repair their reputation in Canada by riding a wave of patriotism. But no…

I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.

Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?

In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.

This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.

For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.

Huh. I always thought he was from Aurora, Ontario.

Yeah seriously don’t tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it’s going to go badly…

I saw one of these on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix AZ, but never heard one played. It’s so huge you can’t reach those frets at the top there, so the inventor had to come up with a keyed mechanism you see the guy working in the photo.

Given how things are these days, I fear this would be the day you’d be forced to go into work to make up for any wfh you do.

That’s cute!

My daughter has a chinchilla who likes to hold up signs like this.

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Climatology and meteorology are separate disciplines with their own very different modelling. I studied the former way back when, and it wasn’t even in the same department at my university (geography vs physics). Climatology is about long-term trends and focuses more on energy fluxes, general circulation patterns (both in the atmosphere and oceans), the hydrological cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. Meteorology is about the near-term. It focuses on the fluid and thermodynamics of specific weather systems, and how to process/interpret real-time data.

Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I’d get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you’re doing. As long as it doesn’t clash…

Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!

One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.

Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?

Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.

Really! Could you play it again?

Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I’m sure I could harmonize to it! 👍

I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I’m hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

I’ve been playing around with the free-threaded build of 3.13 and it seems pretty stable with the standard library at least. Most of what I’ve read suggests the only problems have been with 3rd party libraries that make unsafe assumptions about the GIL being around. But I’ve tried it out with my own production code and it’s been rock solid and performant (at least by Python standards).

I see what you’re getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you’ve got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it’s possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don’t function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it’s possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

But you have to consider that averaged out, you’re looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that’s a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it’s not up as much.

My choirmaster years ago taught us that raising your eyebrows actually does help you reach the top of your vocal range, so that might actually be technique? Though I’m not a professional singer by any stretch, so who am I to say.

For me, I think it’s whatever face I make when I’m in the zone. I’m not really aware of what I look like or contrive to look a certain way. But if I crack a smile, that’s a pretty good tell that I goofed up somewhere.

One time I was playing a Robbie Burns event where we were all encouraged to wear kilts. I made the mistake of putting my phone in the sporran (a kind of purse that hangs right over your crotch) and it started vibrating incessantly. I can’t even imagine the faces I was making that night!

About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.

But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.

I suppose if some sort of critical mass is reached, it could push the world from x86-64 to arm? Every modern OS supports it at this point and emulators have come a long way for older software that needs them.

As much as I hate Doug Ford, every time he does something that pisses me off, Danielle Smith is right there like “hold my Kentucky Bourbon…”