Hard Pass

FD Signifier says it well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rkhswBLwK4

Mirror

Last time I inadvertently posted an AI cat video here, and I'm still a bit singed by my own own idiocy upon that. Sorry again for that, folks.

*ahem* Now in this video we have an actual cat who is evidently sadly paralyzed. So this is just her routine way of feeding, these days.

Here's her shorts channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@Poongiya/shorts

Two tweets from August 2 2025 or earlier.

bamorav: "What is going on!!! The price of coffee has nearly doubled in the past 6 months. I purchased a 25 ounce container in January for $7.79. Same store, same coffee today is $13.99."

sam.baxendale: "As someone wisely said, your dipshit in chief thought the global economy was 14 years old, so decided to fuck it."

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The new project with Indigenous communities across the Prairies [is] aimed at addressing the capital gap in Canada’s food production and value-added agriculture sector. The work brings together Alexander First Nation, Saskatoon Tribal Council, Whitecap Dakota First Nation and File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council, who will combine knowledge and resources to set up an Indigenous investment group. The group will establish a Fund focused on investing directly into Canadian food and ingredient processors.

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As demand for made-in-Canada food and ingredients grows, this Fund will help the food production and value-added agriculture sector develop and commercialize innovative new products. Its focus on involving Indigenous communities, in particular, will also help to expand access to traditional knowledge and practices, access to land and resources, meaningful employment, cultural diversity and inclusivity, and a commitment to reconciliation and social responsibility.

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Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-05-22/Community_view

TL;DR

Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia's "Vital Articles" are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)

The decline isn't even across topics. Mathematics, physical sciences, and technology are down 43% to 85%; biographical articles and geography are down less than 10% in half the languages I looked at. The per-topic ordering (which have declined the most or the least) is nearly identical in every one of the eight languages.

Freshness of article content matters, but not as strongly as topic.

Canada will pump $816 million into maritime security over the next seven years to strengthen the coast guard's capabilities from the high Arctic to the country's southern coast lines, Defence Minister David McGuinty announced Friday.

"This is an investment in Canada's Arctic security," McGuinty said in Iqaluit. "It's an investment in the people who protect these waters. It's an investment in our sovereignty. It's an investment in the people who live here."

McGuinty said that while the money will be used on Canada's East and West Coasts, in the Great Lakes and in the St. Lawrence River, the funding would focus specifically on strengthening security and defence capabilities in the Arctic.

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Gabbard advised Trump of her intention to ​step down during an Oval Office meeting on Friday, ​Fox News Digital reported earlier. The resignation is effective June ⁠30, it said.

A source familiar with the matter said that ​Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/40125235

Picked up an ix500 scansnap and wondering about suggested workflows for going paperless. My intention is to scan a bunch of documents, but haven't delved deeply into how this will actually flow on the software level. I know I'll need to OCR the scanned documents, and my base setup is:

• Pi with SSD storage running compose version of Paperless-ngx to filesystem mounted folders.
  • Folders can also be accessed over Samba
• ix500 statically assigned over wifi as network scanner.
• A literal filing cabinet, for things I should keep physically.
• Ubuntu computer for browsing

I feel a bit overwhelmed, but am excited to get started. Will be scanning personal document, work docs, whatever else I need to digitize and recycle. All suggestions appreciated!

this picture will never not be funny

just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.

Archived link

Over the past week, a growing number of tech companies have warned that they may be forced to leave Canada if Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, remains unchanged. The government’s response to warnings from Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, and Meta is that the companies are misreading the bill. But the prospect of a tech exodus from Canada rests on clear-cut privacy and security risks that do not apply in the U.S. or Europe.

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The Act’s definition of “electronic service provider” captures any service involving the creation, recording, storage, processing, transmission, or reception of information, provided either to persons in Canada or by an entity carrying on business activities in Canada.

The breadth intentionally covers far more than just telecom companies and internet providers, extending to platforms, messaging applications, VPN services, and device manufacturers. Every ESP is subject to a general assistance obligation under section 7 and to a secrecy obligation that bars disclosure of the existence of requests.

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[Signal’s Vice President of Strategy and Global Affairs Udbhav] Tiwari put the point bluntly in his statement to the Globe: “End-to-end encryption is incompatible with exceptional access, no matter how creative the route taken to achieve it.”

What places the Canadian tech sector at risk of an exodus is that U.S. law imposes neither obligation. There is no federal mandatory data retention law in the United States, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented across more than a decade of failed legislative proposals. The closest analog, the preservation provision in 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) of the Stored Communications Act, allows the government to compel a provider to preserve existing records for up to 90 days while it obtains a court order, with a single 90-day extension available. It is a reactive, targeted mechanism tied to a specific account, not a forward-looking retention mandate covering every user of the service.

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A U.S.-based VPN or messaging service can therefore lawfully maintain a no-log approach, which is precisely how the no-log policies are built. Given the choice, VPNs and other services will surely leave Canada rather than architect their systems to retain metadata on every single user for a year.

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In Europe, the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down general data retention regimes in Digital Rights Ireland in 2014 and Tele2 Sverige in 2016, and has continued to constrain them in later rulings. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has imposed similar limits, and general retention obligations on email providers remain unlawful there. The jurisdictions that have moved in C-22’s direction are precisely the ones where major services have begun to exit or restrict features.

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The United Kingdom’s Investigatory Powers Act sparked Apple’s withdrawal of its Advanced Data Protection feature from the U.K. market rather than comply with a Technical Capability Notice ordering it to create access to encrypted iCloud data, and Apple is now litigating that order before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

Switzerland’s recent attempt to extend its surveillance ordinance to VPN providers and encrypted messaging services prompted Proton to begin moving infrastructure out of the country to Germany before the Swiss Federal Council paused the amendment pending an impact study. Where jurisdictions impose obligations of the kind Bill C-22 contains, privacy-protective services have either left, scaled back, or restricted features.

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The compliance obligations on Canadian electronic service providers under Bill C-22 do not apply to a U.S.-based competitor, are limited or unconstitutional in much of Europe, and have led to exits or feature withdrawals in jurisdictions that have imposed them.

The companies aren’t bluffing, and they aren’t misreading the bill. Rather, they are responding to an outlier approach that threatens the Canadian tech landscape with obligations that place the privacy and security of millions at risk.

Excerpt:

Education matters because it exposes these tensions earlier than many other institutional environments. Schools and universities sit unusually close to the developmental layer of cognition that other institutions quietly depend upon but rarely evaluate directly. Educational systems are not simply supposed to produce outputs. They are supposed to cultivate interpretation, reasoning, uncertainty tolerance, revision, attention, contextual judgment, and intellectual maturity over time. That makes schools unusually sensitive to changes in how cognition itself is organized, externalized, accelerated, and evaluated.

That is what makes this moment so important. The long-term danger is not simply weaker essays or more automated assignments. It is the possibility that institutions across society gradually become better at coordinating polished epistemic performance while becoming worse at cultivating the developmental conditions required for thoughtful judgment itself.

Samsung Electronics narrowly averted a walkout by nearly 48,000 workers this week, after executives agreed to a tentative deal over bonus payments. But the labor union’s demand for a bigger share of profits from the company’s semiconductor business has sparked questions — in South Korea and elsewhere — about who benefits from the AI industry, and whether its rewards should be shared more equitably.

Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chip maker, has reported record profits in recent months amid a global shortage of memory chips. The labor union had demanded the company allocate 15% of operating profit to bonuses for all workers, not just those at the memory chip division that supplies Tesla, Nvidia, and other big tech companies.

“As the AI industry drives record operating profits, union members are in a structure where they cannot receive the performance-based rewards they deserve,” Choi Seung-ho, head of Samsung’s union, told Rest of World. “We want to change that.”

Archived link

The Royal Australian Navy’s Anzac Class HMAS Toowoomba and Royal Canadian Navy’s Halifax Class HMCS Charlottetown frigates joined forces for a range of cooperative activities, aiming to increase interoperability and regional collaboration.

For over two weeks, the frigates worked alongside each other as part of bilateral and multinational activities, which HMAS Toowoomba Commanding Officer Commander Alicia Harrison said represents the allyship between the two nations.

“As a Pacific partner, Australia welcomes Canada’s continued presence in the Indo‑Pacific,” she said.

“It is vital that like‑minded nations work together to promote a prosperous, open and inclusive region, and to collectively uphold maritime security.”

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“Training alongside trusted partners allows us to broaden our perspective and strengthens our collective ability to safeguard the region we call home,” CMDR Harrison said.

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