It was just a cash grab for mega corps. How much money is Amazon and Walmart returning?

None, because the calculation is basically impossible.

The Playdate is easy - it's built in one place and they charged the tariffs as they were charged.

But a product sold by Walmart or Amazon isn't so tidy. Perhaps the supplier discounted their prices, so technically the tariff refund should go to them? After all, the tariff was paid, but the price didn't change. Others they may have decided to absorb some tariffs on both sides. It's basically one huge mess, and in the end, it should be treated as a way to transfer money from taxpayers to corporations.

Because really, the quicker we get to Trump Tariff Taxes as real taxes the quicker we get to realizing we need to get rid of them.

But Trump said it was Gov. Tim Walz's fault! He is responsible for hacking all 100 systems, not the Iranians (or AI, or Canada, or ...). Minnesota is just that kind of state where crazy goes on. Remember to not vote by mail (even though I did)! Vote GOP!

It's all very stupid though, I can still play every PC game I've bought on steam for the last 20 years on any x86 computer I please as a digital license, and I have a shelf of discs that go with them. This was the standard for decades. It's not new. Soon, this will include arm devices as well. GoG packages its game with a compatibility layer too. On the flip side- my steam library needs an active internet connection to launch most of the modern titles on offer and managed to slip that under the radar while MS and Sony got a lot of hate for the same idea.

Even if it's not new, it's nice to see MS is "innovating" and hasn't just given up on Xbox after the last couple of years of missteps. It's interesting to consider the way MS has approached every console generation. They're all a little bit different. The whole Kinect idea was fun. Remember when Sony owned them by demonstrating how to loan your friend a physical disc? How far we've come, huh?

They should really just ask gamers what they want, and do that. Seems to have worked out pretty well for Steam. While it's not perfect, it's clearly working as intended.

There are many games that have been removed (sometimes forcibly) from Steam. And Steam can revoke licenses so a game you bought can be removed. It has happened several times. Sometimes it's as simple as Steam not being able to install a game you own (but if you have it installed somewhere else, you can copy it over). Othertimes, it's Steam having the game removed - it no longer is part of your library.

However, on the console side, we've seen it already with the shutdown of the Xbox 360 and PS3 stores where those games are no longer available for download. Same goes for various Nintendo stores.

Anyhow, the only reason Microsoft can do this is because of the old Xbox One DRM. You remember, the one where the disc was treated as an install mechanism? The license is embedded in the disc, and what happens is every disc contains a serial number on it (this is inherent to the Blu-Ray disc specification itself where every pressed disc can have a special serial number embedded in it). It is what let the original Xbox One DRM system transfer the license between people (i.e., resell games) because the license transfer is similar for disc or digital games.

Of course, gamers hated it, so Sony took advantage and we lost the ability to re-sell digital games. It would not surprise me if Microsoft is simply resurrecting the idea again given it's likely more amenable than it was over a decade ago.

Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.

3iob - its metal. it just won't be on mainstream radio, and metal is niche enough I'm not sure canada has dedicated metal fm radio stations?! They don't around here. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone listened to a lot of metal on spotify in canada that 3iob would be suggested in their discovery queues or whatever; thanks to cancon promotion.

French is an optional language credit to graduate in much of english speaking canada already, and many english language universities i've looked at don't require it.

As for your daughters reading assignments. Those artists aren't simply because "cancon + woke ideology" - oh a first nations person wrote it? Who cares what's in it. Its on the list! That's not quite it. (Although I'm sure you can find exceptions, people are people, and im sure someones on the reading list because they "know" somebody or some other nepotism/wokeism/or even plain old corruption.)

But in principle they are also chosen on the basis of the stories they actually tell. The school system explicitly wants to highlight and expose students to a variety of canadian perspectives and canadian experiences in canadian settings. That's an explicit goal. They want students to read about an immigrant from the middle east moving to thunderbay and navigating making friends and integrating in canada while maintaining their own cultural heritage, they want students to read about an inuit growing up in nunavut, or a small town in rural quebec overcoming lifes little challenges and celebrating its little victories. Even if they aren't subjectively "the best books", these are the types of stories and perspectives and ideas that they want students to be exposed to and to spend time thinking about. Then they include some of the more "important" works, like Animal Farm, the Hobbit, Romeo and Juliette, etc. Its a deliberate part of the breadth of the education.

To layer on top of that, of course its also a good use of public money to buy local, and circulate the money in the local economy; and for learning reading and comprehension, and thinking and writing about structure, plot, themes, allegory, etc, its all fine, and having as much "canadian subject matter" underneath it as possible, just makes sense.

I think you are perhaps a bit too cynical here.

Guess how many people speak welsh in Wales, or Finnish in Finland? 10 million is a LOT of people. And lets be honest here, its still french. Sure its a dialect, but if you know Canadian french and put in a bit of effort, its not exactly hard to pick up Metropolitan french, belgian french, swiss french, etc, etc, etc.

French class is basically a 'a bit of exposure to even the idea of an another language (in this case french), a bit of canadian history (esp french canadian), oh... and its a bit of an art and drama class too'. For fucks sake its 30 minutes a few times a week in grade school.

Nobody is expecting you to learn conversant or fluent french from gradeschool french class.

If they dedicated the the time to arabic or hindi or mandarin, it would be just as ineffective at producing speakers of those languages. Meanwhile, french has some canadian significance in terms of heritage and culture, and its an official language... so what are you really on about here??

Heavy metal isn't mainstream. What part is confusing you?

It is exactly that. Its abused by many actors, and imperfect, and there's plenty of canadian crap as a result. There's also quite a bit of good stuff, and plenty of it is even made by white men (a tragically marginalized group, according to you apparently.)

Being worth consuming doesn't mean you'll hear about it. Wasn't that your very own argument about 3 inches of blood??

Lots of canadian content worth consuming wouldn't gain traction without the promotion. Your right, a lot of it isn't worth much, but frankly, a lot of is. So lets hear about it. What's the real problem here? You can't find enough quality american content to consume because canadian content is crowding it out of the marketplace? For realsies?

Meanwhile, take a look at all that top tier quality we're missing out on thanks to all that canadian content rules. American TV is full of promotion for low rent garbage reality TV, cake baking contests, hoarders, absurdist dating contests, and so on. American netflix is full of cheap comedy specials and low budget subtitled filler from their foreign studios, American spotify is full of AI slop music.

So yeah... if some of that is getting pushed below the surface some canadian crap is getting promoted instead. So be it.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

Nope. If you want to watch Stranger Things on Netflix, you select (or find) Stranger Things and that's it.

The OSA only requests that streamers prioritize Canadian content so if you're trying to determine if you want to show a film from the NFB (National Film Board) or some classic US film, the Canadian version is preferred. The other aspect is that a certain amount of Canadian income is spent on Canadian productions (about 20%). Which streamers like Netflix already greatly exceed since they film in Canada. (Those productions do count as "Canadian" I believe, so Netflix can promote its own series as "Canadian" content).

Of course, if you want to sell service in Quebec, you have to obey their laws too. (Many companies simply don't - there are many Canadian companies who simply do not ship to Quebec to avoid those laws, and many American companies often do "Canada (excluding Quebec)". That stuff is legal to do and is a business decision by the companies that want to go into Quebec. Nothing bars Netflix from not serving Quebec if they want to avoid French content rules.

Which doesnt âoefixâ the underlying issue - the browser is leaking data about you against your knowledge and permission.

That sounds like a flaw in the browser. That should probably be fixed.

Most browsers have fixed it. Firefox, for example, uses software libraries that implement high precision math so every Firefox user ends up looking the same because the fingerprint you get comes back the same.

Safari does something different, and it adds random noise to the audio waveform so the same browser will continually report a different fingerprint every time it's run.

I believe Chromium simply blocks the script

Before Silicon Valley, a lot of tech was done in the East. It's why some of the biggest "tech" companies were based on the east - Kodak, for example. But other ones like IBM were based on the East Coast. And many early computer companies were started in the East.

The westward migration created Silicon Valley as companies like Fairchild and such created companies in the orange groves of California.

Well, I'm pretty sure your bank has a web interface, so you don't have to use the banking app to do your banking.

Your work auth app may be more complex - if it's TOTP, you might be able to export the seed and key and there are plenty TOTP generators. (It's also one of the easiest programming assignments to do so any competent programmer should be able to come up with something in under an hour without vibe coding). Unfortunately there are a few TOTP systems that make it extremely difficult to get the seed and key values to use a third party TOTP generator.

Your state legal filing app, well, I'm sure there's a web based version of that as well - I can't imagine the state restricting legal filings to owners of Android or Apple phones.

Now, the car sharing app might be more complex - I think most car sharing sites have regular websites so you can book them from the desk, but there is also a good possibility a lot of them are app only for no good reason. Though many do use app based "car keys" which use some NFC thing to control the car.

If the C code does something unsafe, how can it be machine-translated into safe Rust, without knowing the intention of the programmer?

The key word being "if".

There's a ton of C code out there, the vast majority of which doesn't do anything unsafe. Take say, Apache httpd - what unsafe thing would it do? It just forks, spits a file out over a socket and that's it. The most unsafe thing it does would be to run a plugin, but that's mostly handled by the dynamic loader.

In fact, most userspace code out there isn't really doing anything irrational or unsafe - they're using kernel interfaces to do the unsafe bits, and everything else is just system calls and library functions.

And even if you can't convert all code, you can protect most code. Never let perfect get in the way of good enough. The few bits of C code that need to exist because it's unsafe is much easier than millions of lines of C code that doesn't do unsafe stuff but can become unsafe in certain weird situations.

It's not just compensation. Compensation for electricians is quite high already - the problem is the ramp up to those levels is long tedious and hard.

Pay for apprentices is abysmally low - honestly, it's not much above McDonalds, and the physical strain and effort of the work is similar, if not more. (Which is why "join a trade" is not quite a solution - most trades are physically demanding jobs and unless you start in your 20s, you won't be able to do it in your 40s. But by then you should have enough to either be leading a bunch of apprentices or running your own business).

Also, the historic demand for transformers, breakers, and other such equipment has usually been sufficient to keep the few companies in business. If there's worldwide demand for say, 12 mega transformers a year, and everyone has surge capacity to produce say, 15 transformers a year, you don't invest in a new factory because demand is unlikely to change. Things like AI datacenters and such have driven the demand up - but it takes years to bring on new factories and they'd want a solid order book confirmed before they invest millions to make 15 transformers a year because if demand drops back down to 12, you're screwed because now you have a factory that isn't being used. And this stuff is custom manufactured so you can't even make a spare.

It's why Airbus and Boeing have 5-7+ years of orders for new aircraft (and likely closer to 10 for both). Ditto things like fabs - ASML is the only company to make it not because they're the only ones that can do it, but because they fill worldwide demand. A competitor starting up will need to make a case for competing in a segment where current production satisfies demand and future demand will not only increase, but stay increased to keep both companies viable because if demand suddenly drops, then it can be hard to get a return.

Right now the lead time on many parts is in the 4-5 year range, and it's hung around that for the past 4-5 years now showing production and demand is basically steady. Someone might be able to produce more but then orders are going to run out and now you've got no customers because you've emptied the queue.

You're not understanding the incentive structure that led to this state of affairs in the first place. To use USB would mean that they would have to do a ton of driver work. They would have to implement these generic control surfaces and they would have to ensure that their hardware does what the USB specs say it should. You'd end up with a USB RGB controller chip.

If you haven't noticed, RGB controller chips are a lot more electronically simple than that. They are small-project simple I/O-programmed chips running on simple control buses clearly designed and implemented in a hardware world of Arduinos and Raspis, GPIO buses, I2C, the old stuff. If you were around in the 1990s, you would recognize this immediately for what it is: the way things were done before NT, when DOS and Windows software frequently shoved the OS aside and ran on bare metal. In the late 90s as NT crept toward the home PC world, the impending loss of direct hardware access was one of the obvious compatibility issues visible on the horizon with the NT world-to-come, and the begrudging acceptance that this stuff was all "legacy" and we'll all have to drive our hardware like grownups in the future began.

There is a USB driver designed for simple things. It's called USB HID. And while "Human Interface Device" is actually very misleading because it's really a way to send things via USB that can be described as a report. And USB HID is a standard interface, because well, human interface devices use it. But also things like UPSes and anything else.

You want RGB control? HID provides a stupidly simple way to do it, and you don't need anything high speed.

Alternatively there are plenty of I2C busses on a PC - the modern chipset provides easily a half dozen serial-bus controllers which can be made into UARTs, I2C, SPI or other devices. You don't have to hang it off SMBus. It's just a minor BIOS tweak to initialize the chipset serial I/O controller to the right setting. The reason manufacturers don't like this option is they have to write a driver and getting it WHQL signed and all that. But the Intel and AMD chipsets likely have reference drivers.

If you're worried about costs, I'm sure there already is a USB RGB chip from some Chinese supplier. And likely a half dozen RPi Pico versions.

And likely why bother with RGB. There are USB to WSxxx addressible LED chips out there so you can control those addressible pixel LEDs from your computer

Heck, there are ESP32 projects where you can control those LED arrays over the network so you can have your room and PC dance the same 2way.

He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.

OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.

But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.

The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.

Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.

All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.

There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.

Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?

China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.

And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.

Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.

Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.