Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
There’s a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They’ve been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight or CPU cost.
The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so people can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.
The right time to look elsewhere was when Microsoft bought it.
The next best time was when viable alternatives like GitLab and later, Codeberg appeared.
The next best time was when it became clear that they were stealing your code to feed into their sparkly autocomplete and were going to sell it back to you.
The next best time was when they dumped a bunch of vibecoded garbage into the codebase and killed the uptime.
The next best time is now.
You don’t even have to migrate all your stuff. Just start all your new projects on Codeberg, or GitLab, or something self-hosted. Once you get used to the new place, you can migrate your old stuff when you’re ready.
Who’s killing them I wonder?
You sound like a reasonable person who’s given up, and I get that. Given everything we see, it may even be the rational choice, but it’s not the moral one. It’s fine if you want to check out, but that doesn’t explain the cheerleading for policy that will make everything worse. It turns you from a bystander to an antagonist.
If this planet is going to end in fire, I have to believe that Good people are going to fight for it, even if we know we can’t win because “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”.
So this is what we’ve come to.
First it was “global warming isn’t real”, then it was “it is, but it’s not our fault”, then “it’s our fault, but there’s nothing we can do about it”, and now you’re taking the position of “it’s all gonna burn anyway, so I might as well get mine.”
Putting the emotional argument aside for a moment, this is a blisteringly naive position to take. In a world on fire, and with Canada’s terrain the way it is, what could possibly make you think that your home isn’t going to be burning next year? A “full stomach”? In a world on fire? Where do you think the food is going to come from? What in your head tells you that you’re going to be able to afford to feed yourself or your family in a world where crop yields are cratering everywhere? The people with the money, who stand to profit further from policies like the one you’re supporting here will gleefully let you die and not even notice.
For every litre of oil & gas Canada leaves in the ground, the cost of accessing those fossils elsewhere increases. Driving up the price drives divestment and innovation everywhere, and that means fewer burning forests and a better chance of survival.
While it’s true that resource extraction can drive an economy, extracting resources that literally burn the future is at-best shortsighted… extractive if you will. We could be pushing money into electrification, transport, and education, fields in desperate need of support that objectively lead to a stronger economy nation-wide. With the US cratering, we could position ourselves as a cultural hub, or a manufacturing bridge between Asia and Europe… but instead Carney is choosing short-term profits for private companies (protected by public funds!) and increasing our already sizeable contribution to burning the world.
But I guess it’s ok if a few people have some jobs for a few years. You best hope your home isn’t next on the to-burn list.
It also burns the planet. We kinda need that.
Am I the only one that thinks it’s a little silly to blog $2B on a hybrid when you can just run wires along the tracks and go full electric? Given that the grid clearly needs investment, you could expand its capacity and range at the same time with theoretically limited costs.
He’s pissing off the right people!
This is why these rich motherfuckers chose to donate to such causes. They don’t see it as a donation, they think they’re buying a museum to showcase whatever they want.
I swear, the stupid of these people must be contagious. It’s the only thing that explains how they’re not all laughed out of every gathering.
The facts don’t care about the feelings of the electorate, let alone that of shareholders.
With all those forest fires clearing the way, now’s the time to build more climate shredding infrastructure!
There’s something deeply infuriating about a politician citing climate change and energy security as priorities in the same breath as promoting LNG and carbon capture as solutions.
He either doesn’t understand the problem, or he’s hoping we don’t. Both options make him a terrible leader.
Edit: and now I’m at the point where he’s saying that the path to transition is through a period of increased emissions because the shock would be too great. Now where have I heard that before?
Oh right, the last 30 years. Somehow, choosing not to burn the planet is something “Future Canada” will have to do. “Present Canada” is always willing to screw over future generations if it means making fossil companies richer.
Look kids! He’s relatable! He likes ${SPORT}! Pay no attention to how deeply he’s screwing you!
They don’t need to do either of those things. They just buy the legislation they want.
I’ve had a really hard time figuring out how to get cloud native pg working 'cause I couldn’t get longhorn working for disk space.
So instead I went with a separate Raspberry Pi that isn’t part of the cluster to host a single Postgres instance.
It’s inelegant, but has worked for years. Still, I’d rather host a separate pg instance for each project… I just have to figure the above out first.
I’d settle for not aiding the cause.
As Trudeau once said: “I’ve been called worse things by better people”.
At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.
One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.
We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.
My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.
As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.