Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

We need a pithy, demeaning nickname to sum this up, something that’ll really get under his thin skin. I’ll suggest PINO, “President In Name Only.” Open to suggestions tho!

As a Canadian, I’m all for targeting red states where possible but I fully expect the blow back to hit all Americans. Tariffs are a relatively blunt instrument. If we put a 25% tariff on softwood lumber for example, I don’t think we get to say that only purchasers in red states have to pay it. Every American purchaser has to pay an extra 25% for those 2x4s, or car parts, or potash, or crude oil, or electricity, or aluminum, or steel, or raw minerals. Those purchasers will inevitably download that cost onto their customers, which means that ultimately American consumers collectively are going to foot the bill.

Some of these Canadian response measures will even come back to harm Canadians! There are plenty of instances where Canadian companies sell raw materials to US companies and then Canadian consumers buy back finished products that incorporate some of those materials. As such, some of the added cost of Canadian tariffs is going to be paid by Canadian consumers. Regular citizens on both sides of the border are in the some boat, and Trump put us there with his stupid, stupid choice. Canadian or American, we would all do well to remember that because I’m sure that Trump would love nothing more than to see us divided and hating one another.

I’m sorry for the economic damage that this fight is going to cause all of us, on both sides of the border. Please remember that Trump started this fight, and Canada will not roll over. I think Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney summed it up best in this BBC interview. The whole interview is worth a watch, but the link goes to the highlight to which I’m referring. Here’s the transcript of that highlight:

Interviewer: It’s pretty clear that [Trump] thinks [Canada] can be pushed around.

Carney: We can’t.

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.

That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.

I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.

In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

Except the car’s HVAC system passes air through a filter. How much of a difference that makes is going to depend on the type of filter and whether it’s been changed sufficiently often, but it’s definitely doing more than nothing.

Gosh, it’s like companies in a capitalist economy have absolutely no moral center whatsoever and will do whatever they can get away with to maximize profits!

Father David Michael? Never trust someone with two first names.

Beware of reverse survivorship bias. We’d know relatively little about the smart deviants if they rarely get caught.

Now it’s just the Center for Disease.

was there iconic scratchy rapid frenetic drum electronic scraping noises before Bowie?

You can find elements of that in earlier 90s industrial, like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Bowie collaborated with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on the Outside Tour, which supported Bowie’s prior album Outside, before the release of Earthling. They also collaborated on remixes of I’m Afraid of Americans. You can probably also find some elements Earthling’s sound in earlier drum and bass, techno and jungle music.

Skrillex’ influences include 90s industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, plus 90s electronica acts like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Bowie’s Earthling reminds you of Skrillex because the two share many musical roots.

No, the opposite actually! Any amount of exercise will help with GI motility, but intense exercise causes the digestive system to slow down (source).

None of the above. The correct answer is walking. Moving around helps kickstart the GI tract.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

And it definitely ticks the box for “fucking brutal.”

I don’t believe it actually does grow back faster, it just seems that way. The first inch or so gives the impression of growing back faster because the hairs are thicker at the base so they’re more visible and less prone to breakage.

Is there any benefit at all

Maybe! There’s at least some scientific evidence that chemical compounds in mushrooms can have medicinal effects.

Bias disclaimer: I put a lion’s mane mushroom tincture in my morning tea because it may have a neuroprotective effect (source). My father’s father had dementia, my father is currently in a home with profound dementia, the chances it’s going to happen to me are very high. It’ll be years before I know whether lion’s mane mushroom will do anything for me (and even then you couldn’t claim anything from one data point), but I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s affordable and has at least some plausible evidence behind it. This isn’t the only thing I’m doing of course, I’ve also overhauled my diet (MIND diet) and lost 30 pounds (obesity is correlated with dementia).

why can’t you make it your self by pulverizing dried mushrooms of the same variety they use into powder and making the coffee yourself?

You absolutely could. Or, you know, just eat some of the same mushrooms. The benefit to dried products like Ryze, or tinctures like the one I use, are that they’re convenient, easily transportable and self-stable. I’ve cooked up fresh lion’s mane mushrooms several times, but not super often because they’re not in many stores in my area and tend to be pricey for the amount you get. I’ve also grown my own from a kit but that takes significant time and a little bit of daily attention to maintain optimal growing conditions. The tincture is convenient and relatively affordable as far as daily supplements go.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

The part where he complains about how “it’s such a callous indifference to the sacrifices made by (Trump’s) supporters on (Trump’s) behalf” just sent me. He thinks Trump is being callously indifferent now? Amazing that they’ll never allow themselves to realize or admit that Trump never gave a shit about them in the first place.