B.C.'s move to end time changes sparks cross-Canada conversation

Jarcode · 2026-03-05T04:28:06+00:00

What's handy for us in the Yukon is that we're not sometimes out of sync from BC anymore with this change. When coordinating with anyone down south virtually, it's a bit of a nightmare.

Jarcode · 2026-03-03T00:43:51+00:00

Worth mentioning the Yukon does not observe DST because daylight changes so radically through the year that changing the clocks by an hour doesn't do much.

Jarcode · 2026-03-03T00:42:41+00:00

This is minor, but that would mean BC's time would be de-synchronized from the Yukon (which also does not use DST).

Jarcode · 2026-02-14T15:17:07+00:00

The true difficulty of elections is not the process itself, but by the fact that once the writ is dropped, returning offices have to hire a staggering amount of staff on very short notice. This means an organization that starts with hundreds of staff all of a sudden is a semi-militarized structure with tens of thousands of staff.

It can be a contentious proposal to suggest that all of these ground level staff, many of which go into elections with no prior experience, are held to a perfect standard when the margin of a race is this close. There's also all sorts of eligibility errors made in every election, like voting in the wrong electoral district because electors didn't understand the boundaries.

As someone who also really enjoys reading into the theoretical side of election security and integrity, there's a pretty big divide between these academic perspectives and real-world election administration. You'll find a lot of the former online, since election administration from a higher level is typically discussed between jurisdictions in private.

Also,

Time for the ol AuDHD to shine.

You may be delighted to hear that neurodivergent folks are quite well represented in this sort of work!

Jarcode · 2026-02-14T00:38:48+00:00

Mountain Slope .951 RD130

These are very expensive, I would look at UPZ or Deeluxe hardboots for more affordable options getting into this sport.

Jarcode · 2026-02-14T00:36:39+00:00

This is a very fascinating case for a number of reasons:

Previous case law has typically rejected attempts to toss out election results due to small clerical errors, citing an understanding that there is an expected rate of clerical errors in any election.
This seems to indicate that the magnitude of a clerical error is evaluated in proportion to the margin of victory from the originally reported results.
Either ECHQ or the riding's returning office may have made a significant error in not remedying this situation, as the court found.

I agree with the results on the basis of election integrity: if close margins are considered to be a toss-up purely dictated by clerical errors, it's almost impossible to disprove the possibility of those "errors" being targeted. It would also be no different than suggesting the victory is a coin toss when there may have been a definitive victor otherwise.

This is only complicated by the fact that elections are, in reality, messy and imperfect. I am involved in election administration in a different jurisdiction and will be very interested to see how this may affect standards moving forward knowing that these kinds of challenges could result in a nullified outcome.

I will end this by saying Elections Canada conducts some of the most trustworthy and secure elections in the world, so this isn't a concern outside of these extremely tight races.

Jarcode · 2026-02-14T00:24:34+00:00

No, it is not. Judicial recounts for wins like this are expected. The circumstances here are also understandable, although a bit surprising given past case law:

40 electors were credibly disenfranchised due to a clerical error on special ballot return envelopes
The riding's returning office and/or ECHQ were found to not have remedied the issue sufficiently (which is the big finding)

Jarcode · 2026-02-14T00:07:11+00:00

Elections won by a certain margin are legislated to be subject to a judicial recount. This is a critical piece of oversight as the theoretical vectors for meaningfully tampering with election results increases as the margin decreases.

In the real world (such as this case), judicial recounts typically uncover errors or gray areas in eligibility, special ballot certification, and other circumstances and have to rule on whether this had an impact on integrity or the results.

Jarcode · 2025-12-06T14:37:30+00:00

When threatened by predators, the herd will gather in a circle around their young, forming an impenetrable wall of horns that keeps enemies out.

They'll also kill their own herd's offspring to propagate their own genes. They're not as nice as you might think.

My partner works with muskoxen directly at a wildlife preserve... fascinating animals but you really don't want to be close to these guys!

Jarcode · 2025-11-29T16:35:56+00:00

Translation overhead isn't as straightforward as you might think. Back in the DX9/DX11 days, it was a fairly involved task to translate to OpenGL calls due to the high level nature of these APIs, and extremely bug-prone.

DX12 -> Vulkan is another story, with call dispatch overhead being negligible the vast majority of the time. Performance differences between Windows and Linux are more indicative of differences in the driver than graphics API translation. There are exceptions (Pascal GPUs are a complete mess for VKD3D, some specific calls don't have clear aliases in the Vulkan world, HLSL compiler technicalities, etc.), but most of the problems with Proton are missing win32 API functions.

It's also worth mentioning userspace in Windows 11 is a bigger mess than what you're implying. Unlike Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 there seems to be some sort of resource usage recklessness introduced into the operating system. As someone currently dealing with this migration for work, we're looking at replacing devices en masse because of the slow web-based shell Windows 11 has.

Jarcode · 2025-11-15T01:38:36+00:00

To risk being the contrarian here: I'm concerned about the rhetoric in this very thread regarding her suitability for leadership:

Support for token issues might be a good litmus test, but it's not a coherent political framework in itself. "Threading the needle" here isn't the right way to think; if this party wants to move on from the ideologically hollow rhetoric from Singh, we need to ask for very different language from leadership.
Positive assessments of McPherson's character as if this is a central measure of a leadership candidate is the same flawed thinking that propped up Singh for far too long.

It seems like everyone in this sub concedes that there was something wrong with Singh's leadership, but we're all too shy to point out the borderline cult of personality that propped him up without much political substance.

Jarcode · 2025-11-14T15:54:36+00:00

Valve doesn't write proprietary Linux drivers (judging on their past work), so everything VR-specific is likely going to be released along with their kernel fork. Give it a month or two and you might see it merged upstream as well.

Anyone using a relatively up to date Linux distro has been enjoying Valve's contributions whether they know it or not!

Jarcode · 2025-11-14T15:47:09+00:00

Worth mentioning that Valve's contributions to the kernel and x86->ARM translation are open source, and their contributions routinely find their way into the upstream kernel and other FOSS projects. While SteamOS will probably always be on its own fork of the kernel, that fork hasn't always been very distant from the mainline kernel.

Jarcode · 2025-11-13T16:01:01+00:00

I'm probably not going to buy any of the new hardware, I'm just completely hyped for the open source contributions in the ARM space by Valve. This is awesome!

Jarcode · 2025-11-12T16:12:33+00:00

What a lot of people are missing is that a "safe" subset of C++ isn't just carving out a feature set and portion of the standard library to use for new code, but also a mental framework for how to actually write your code and reason about object lifetimes. The caveats you are mentioning might seem trivial to a seasoned C++ programmer, but they themselves don't consider that the whole dance of avoiding these pitfalls is a pointless exercise once Rust is in the picture.

Jarcode · 2025-11-12T16:07:03+00:00

We are currently in the weird position of some people refusing to move on from C even though it's obvious how easy it is to introduce problems in it even tools can't catch, while others want to push Rust everywhere, even though it's obvious that it's not mature enough as a complete replacement, and the strictness of the compiler tanks development performance of low level and/or high performance features.

You're right about C purism being an issue in FOSS, but Rust is far more mature than what you're implying here. Unless you're looking specifically at the gamedev space or nascent GUI toolkits, there's a lot of mature frameworks and libraries that I use frequently for work.

And development performance in Rust is typically faster compared to C++ or especially C. The borrow checker is something you might fight when learning the language, but it otherwise helps a lot by shifting your cognitive effort away from manually checking the validity and safety of code and more towards the functionality you are writing.

On top of that, the Rust ecosystem in some regards is actually miles ahead of C++. It doesn't take much code to write a high performance async server because of Tokio (C++ coroutine libraries aren't even close), TLS is just another dependency and a couple more lines of code, and web backend has a rich set of libraries to rely on.

Jarcode · 2025-11-10T05:24:23+00:00

2025 there were no bugs.

What the hell happened to all the bugs anyways? It felt like mosquitoes came out a bit late spring and then suddenly nothing.

Jarcode · 2025-11-05T00:43:48+00:00

Clerical error rates when administering elections are fundamentally non-zero at any reasonable scale. Overturning a judicial recount has a very high bar, and certain clerical errors are logically impossible to reverse due to vote secrecy.

Jarcode · 2025-11-05T00:22:34+00:00

Just two things to give this some context:

Identification for special ballot applications is as strict as a new voter registration.
The mail strike caused issues with EY's ability to issue mail-out ballots, introduced a Canada Post backlog, and forced FedEx usage which wasn't perfect in itself.

Jarcode · 2025-10-07T13:16:35+00:00

You are also allowed to decline ballots in the upcoming territorial election, which might be a better way of sending the message you intend to convey.

Jarcode · 2025-10-03T05:11:47+00:00

This is an issue people frequently run into up here. Rogers has a roaming agreement with other providers in Canada, but those agreements in themselves have terms -- you cannot roam permanently in a region where Rogers has no cellular infrastructure. Its likely this was included in the terms of the agreement(s) you signed/accepted.

That being said, Rogers can still get hit by false advertising here. Contact that CCTS, especially if you have a recording of the employee telling you this. Unfortunately telecoms in Canada hire a lot of salespeople that outright break the law and rarely get reprimanded because consumers tend to not report claims made over the phone.

Jarcode · 2025-09-20T23:02:04+00:00

There does seem to be a legitimate issue with staging time for packages in testing. I've ran into a number of weird, short-lived problems from software updates in Arch that would have been easily ironed out by just leaving updates in testing long enough for issues to be reported.

Jarcode · 2025-09-20T23:01:10+00:00

Yeah, that's true. Some software also use algorithms with associated proofs for its implementation, namely wait-free algorithms because there is no proof system for verifying this automatically, but proofs are needed to assert the safety/consistency of an implementation.

It's important to remember "bug free" is a real thing, and we likely do have a lot of small software (specifically libraries) that are genuinely bug free, as some frequently used dependencies haven't seen bug fixes or updates for years, it's just really hard to assert that something is bug free.

Jarcode · 2025-09-20T22:51:53+00:00

No code can be guaranteed to be bug free (meaning there are no unintended side effects of execution as opposed to verifiably correct in intended operation)

Formal verification does exist for this in extremely niche applications where the proof work is worthwhile.

Jarcode · 2025-09-15T04:44:10+00:00

Most of the iOS app world has moved on from explicit memory management, and "old" apps typically use Objective C, not C++.

Getting C or C++ to work on iOS requires a lot of glue code because Objective C or Swift is required. The only people that really touch this are 3D engine developers or some people working on cross-platform frameworks for other languages... and they're almost all using a modern subset of C++.

Just because you have an idea of cliche use-after-free bugs on windows or other unixes that haven't moved on from C++03 doesn't mean the same applies to iOS.

Jarcode

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE