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pedz @lemmy.ca
Posts 4
Comments 347
Family’s Tesla catches fire in the garage during Helene, destroying their home
  • Is this more common with Tesla than other EVs?

    Electric vehicles can catch fire if they are inundated by saltwater, though the problem is rare

    It makes a good title, and I'm not really here to defend Tesla. I hate cars in general and I think we should have much much more public transit rather than push EVs on everyone, but won't/couldn't this kind of news dissuade some people from getting EVs, and make them think ICEs are safer?

    I guess it's good to let people know about that small possibility, but it shouldn't deter efforts to move away from oil.

  • Why is changing the keyboard layout so complicated in Windows compared to GNU + Linux and other normal OSes?
  • I face the same specific issue. I started with the French (Canada) layout years ago but now Windows sets the default to Multilingual/CSA because it has been made the official one by the government a number of years ago.

    So now everyone that got used the "old" one has to fiddle with keyboard settings every time they use a new Windows session/computer.

    And it's not exactly a breeze to switch, as Windows often keeps the multilingual one and switches back to it when you use a different application. Gotta make sure to delete the multilingual and leave only one layout. It's a real annoyance.

  • Doug Ford says he wants to build a tunnel under Hwy. 401
  • The last liberal government in Québec did that, but for a transit line (the REM).

    They killed the only profitable commuter train line (DM) and literally gave it to a for profit entity (CDPQ) so they can transform it into a metro line. So now the public transit entities cannot compete with the private one, and even has to pay it royalties for something like 99 years.

    I repeat, the public transit entity (ARTM) cannot compete against the for profit one, AND must pay it royalties for every passenger.

    So now the ARTM doesn't have the revenues from its defunct most popular commuter line, and must pay royalties on top of that. Public money, going straight into a for profit organization.

    The new light rail line was not even working in 2023 and the public already had to pay $2.4 million to the CDPQ.

    And those defending that model say that the CDPQ is a retirement investment firm that is profiting Quebecers, but their goal is still to make money. Unprofitable lines will be cut or never developed, even if needed.

    They are literally privatizing public transit and some people are encouraging it saying that's how we now have to build transit. It's the way of the future!

    Meanwhile the public transit entity says it's not sure it can now maintain some of the other commuter lines and will have to look into cutting expenses and/or service.

    Sigh...

    EDIT: Source for the price the ARTM has to pay: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/rem-hikes-per-passenger-payment-from-artm-even-before-it-starts-running

  • The Arctic ocean photographed in the same place, 107 years ago vs today.
  • It depends what. Plastic recycling is mostly a scam/fraud and does not fix nor change much.

    The industry has long known that plastics recycling is not economically or practically viable, the report shows. An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

    In 1989, the founding director of the Vinyl Institute told attendees of a trade conference: “Recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

    Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.

    In 1988, the trade group rolled out the “chasing arrows” – the widely recognized symbol for recyclable plastic – and began using it on packaging. Experts have long said the symbol is highly misleading, and recently federal regulators have echoed their concerns.

    Cited article, and the report's source

    Recycling paper, metal and glass will help and make a difference, keeping in mind that we need to use less in the first place. However plastic recycling is broken by default, pretty much everywhere.

  • Someone needs to train an LLM AI on Trump's speeches. I bet the random gibberish output would be hilarious.
  • I don't think you need a LLM for that. Back before 'AI' was all the rage, there was a website in French that could generate a double speak/political cant with pretty good accuracy.

    It obviously has much more vocabulary, and bigger words than Trump, but I think it could easily be dumbed down to his level.

    Then again, it's probably easier to just collect his non sequitur diarrhea and have a script randomly quoting bits of them.

    Like, there is no need to waste energy and time on random gibberish. He's already doing all the "work". Just collect these and show them randomly for a braindead experience.

  • Ubisoft targets staff to be in the office at least three days a week
  • Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don't think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I'm in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I'm still working when I'm working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!

    I took eight weeks this year. So you're saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?

  • Ubisoft targets staff to be in the office at least three days a week
  • I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I've never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.

    This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking "generous" sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the "no work from home even if sick" policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.

    My current employer allows me to WFH and I've been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.

  • Noise Pollution ruins quality of life
  • And those motocross. My family lives in a rural area with a rail trail. So to go there I often just cycle on the rail trail.

    Unfortunately it's also used by a local motocross group. They're not supposed to but they obviously don't give a fuck.

    At least you can hear them coming from kilometres away. Which is interesting because the police or whoever is supposed to enforce "bicycles only" on that bike path doesn't seem to hear them. Nor see the very obvious tracks.

    The most insulting part is that they close the path in fall, winter and spring because they don't want CYCLISTS to damage the bike path, yet there's assholes on motocross driving on it.

  • Working from home
  • I have been working from home for years and my employer is not watching our screen. However about a decade ago we received a company wide email from an admin reminding everyone that they can see DNS requests when we're connected to the VPN.

  • Montreal mayor criticized for blocking social media comments
  • And I'm sure they already have a team filtering through that crap. Poor them.

    That reminds me that the mayor of Paris decided to just quit that shit hole last year.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/27/paris-mayor-anne-hidalgo-quits-x-calling-social-media-site-a-gigantic-global-sewer

    It also reminds me that lots of media sites won't allow comments on their YouTube videos or on some of their articles because they can predict exactly the kind of BS they are going to get, and nobody from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is saying that it's unreasonable and limiting people's freedom of expression.

    They can still reach the mayor's office through official channels. They can write open letters in the media. They have multiple other ways to make their shitty opinions heard. X formally known as Twitter is not fundamental to freedom of expression.

  • Montreal mayor criticized for blocking social media comments
  • When I saw the title through my news feed, I knew exactly what it was about.

    And it's totally ridiculous and unrealistic to expect her to allow every right wing asshole on X formally known as Twitter to send her heinous messages and ad hominem. She should just quit that cesspool.

    I went there for a while and every fucking post that I tried to make, or follow, within my "community" and followers, ended up being flooded by hateful messages, the worst ones being from paying accounts and highlighted by Twitter itself. I really liked the small community of people that were progressives and pro-cycling on Twitter, for Montreal. But every time they comment or if you dare reply something nice, you or them will get flooded by loads of insulting, hateful, shitty replies. I gave up. It's untenable.

    If you spend just a few minutes through her posts and their replies, you can see exactly why some of them are being blocked. The people criticizing her are unrealistic. They are not receiving personal threats and insults as "messages from their constituents".

    Again, I think she should just quit the cesspool that is X formally known as Twitter. There is nothing to gain there.

  • To help you decide on your next daily driver
  • No, I linked those because I have had this argument for years now and it's tiresome. People driving cars can clearly get away with much more than if they were not in a car.

    The last incident I just read about was a cyclist that was killed by someone in a car. He was in a group of 10 and the driver claims she didn't see him. No charges, it was "obviously" an accident. Someone is dead, killed by someone driving a car, and it's no biggie. It's just an "accident".

    So, whatever the clearance, either it's a huge pickup or a sedan, it doesn't really matter if the driver can see people in front of them or not, they can just say they didn't see them, it's an "accident".

    There are indeed statistics on how clearance and the height of a vehicle can be more deadly, but again, it doesn't really matter because nobody cares about deaths caused by cars.

  • To help you decide on your next daily driver
  • I don't have a license nor a car so it might be more suspicious in the first place. I also don't want to murder anybody. But seeing how our society considers deaths cause by cars as normal and unavoidable "accidents", I'll probably still have more chances of getting away with it.

    Like, sorry, I didn't see them, I'm just learning, it was an accident. The person just jumped in front of the car, in dark clothing, with no reflective gear.

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/you-can-kill-anyone-you-want-with-your-car-as-long-as-you-dont-really-mean-it/

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328812169_If_You_Want_to_Get_Away_with_Murder_Use_Your_Car_A_Discursive_Content_Analysis_of_Pedestrian_Traffic_Fatalities_in_News_Headlines

    Deaths caused by cars are horribly normalized.

  • toronto.citynews.ca Ottawa gives Via Rail 30 days to make changes after passengers stranded

    Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez is also asking for an independent investigation into the incident in which passengers were stranded for 10 hours

    Ottawa gives Via Rail 30 days to make changes after passengers stranded
    12

    Last three weekends at Yamaska National Park in Québec

    I've been doing some rail trails on the "green roads" (routes vertes) to visit my parents for the last three weekends and I stopped at the park for overnights as I didn't want to cycle the full 140 km in one shot and then back. It's getting greener!

    The Yamaska National Park is a small park located around a reservoir in southern Québec. From there it's possible to access multiple rail trails and "linear parks" going in all directions.

    More pictures in the comments.

    6

    And Debian is supposed to be the stable one

    The last two upgrades have broken my audio setup.

    First the options for Network Server and Network Access in paprefs were greyed out and my sinks disappeared after upgrading to bookworm. I just had to create a link to an existing file and it was working again but, it's weird that it was needed in the first place. Pretty sure it has something to do with the change from pulseaudio to pipewire but I'm not very up to date on that subject and I just want to have my current setup to continue working.

    Then yesterday I just launch a simple apt-get upgrade and after rebooting my sinks disappeared again. The network options in paprefs were still available, but changing them did nothing. I had to create the file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/10-gsettings.conf and stuff it with "pulse.cmd = [ { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-gsettings" flags = [ "nofail" ] } ]" in order to have my sinks back.

    I know it's not only a Debian thing, as I can see this happening to people on Arch forums, but as Debian is supposed to be the "stable" one, I find it amusing that a simple upgrade can break your sound.

    48

    Any way to report ads?

    Using Boost for Lemmy, I got an obvious political ad from the right asking to sign a petition to scrap the gun "ban" in Canada (it's a registry not a ban).

    Now I understand this is an ad but I don't appreciate having propaganda from the right injected into my browsing on lemmy. Have better ads, or let us report them.

    67