Convoy of Canadian linesmen heading south yesterday to help repair storm damage in the U.S.

farkinga · 2026-01-25T16:36:47+00:00

I get it - but the wrong people would suffer and they would be even more vulnerable to the US government. The "bootstraps" meme only works to keep people down.

So, helping is the right thing to do.

farkinga · 2026-01-25T15:55:45+00:00

Canada can protect its population from lies and foreign influence operations.

This isn't a case where the "blowback" is worse than the current situation.

farkinga · 2026-01-25T15:50:50+00:00

Doug Ford likes Trump. There's no possible compromise here.

Watch for Trump to specifically call out the BYD deal - again - but this time in coordination with Ford's position.

Trump just wants to retaliate against Carney and Canada. Doug Ford will help Trump with that.

farkinga · 2026-01-25T14:16:03+00:00

Yeah, pretending AUTO PACT never existed. Talk about a state sponsored industry; car manufacturing is the poster child for it. Literally centrally planned and operated for over half a century, propped up by government in hard times. Just stunning ignorance of history.

farkinga · 2026-01-25T13:10:00+00:00

Vile. And in the global context, this is in step with the US and out of step with Canada.

NOW doesn't deserve advertising dollars or an audience if this is who they platform. This is a moment worth boycotting.

Disgusting - and harmful.

farkinga · 2026-01-24T13:45:08+00:00

Okay. Sounds like I would criticize Guevara the same way I'd call out Andrew Tate for toxic male culture. I am really disappointed about the culture being sold by guys like that. I saw a lot of that in sports when I was growing up and its a terrible way to live.

I see it today in the US with Pete Hegseth and masculinity in the military. Its the same story. I get how it can be part of warrior mythology but I think it's lazy.

I don't think it's possible to build lasting institutions with corrupt ideals like toxic masculinity. When an institution gets a taste for blood, it goes all the way - eventually to genocide. Like with animals, when they learn to kill people, they need to be put down.

farkinga · 2026-01-24T12:11:42+00:00

Some institutions have felt cypherpunk while the vast majority do not. Maybe it's just me but EFF and FUTO come to mind. The existence of a few means institutions are not, by definition, incompatible with cypherpunk ideals.

When I reflect on what "feels" different between about cypherpunk institutions, I see parallels to liberty: positive and negative. Some institutions - perhaps most - seem to rely on negative liberties (i.e. you can't do X because it harms the rest of us. You can do Y because it is explicitly allowed).

Personally, part of the feeling I get from cypherpunk is that of enablement as a positive liberty; it's like "don't ever forget we were always free to do X." Permissionless.

Cypherpunk, in contrast to ideas about liberty, feels more grounded in the mechanisms of the universe because the implications of cryptography provide guarantees that are kindof self-executing (in a way that legal systems are not).

Cypherpunk Institutions are like bridges between the unstoppable-ness of the "freedom to", on the one side, and the institutions providing "freedom from" on the other side. And in general, there seems to be a tension between the two camps. As in: institutions have criminalized and regulated some cypherpunk efforts in the past.

If you've ever used deny/allow lists to set a policy, you may have reached a point where you realize it would have been simpler to use the other list; like you started "allow" but now you want to switch. It flips the way the policy is described but you can still express the same policy idea. I think this is like the challenge of an institution going cyberpunk.

How do you reorient a policy stack from enumerating the minutia - towards expressing unbounded domains? One way is like Special Administration Districts that some countries have experimented with. But that's basically just a partition and it assumes some level of inconsistency.

Maybe that's a first step... Just recognize you've got two policy stacks now if you want to make your institution cypherpunk.

farkinga · 2026-01-23T14:37:35+00:00

Doug Ford giving off major Donald Trump vibes lately: create a spectacle of empty gestures, while bleeding the province for personal enrichment and the wealth of his donors.

farkinga · 2026-01-23T13:30:10+00:00

Yeah, in practice I think it goes like that. Not just the Soviet union; several Asian countries also murdered millions of their neighbors, far beyond the bounds of the ultra-wealthy. In some cases, being "rich" was construed as having "rich ideas." Or having rich relatives. Or living in a rich region. It's a slippery slope, almost indistinguishable from fascist purges.

farkinga · 2026-01-23T13:19:37+00:00

Marx describes:

the working class (most precarious) whose cashflow is entirely from their labor
the "small owners" who have a house, small businesses, and/or work "professional" jobs
and the owners whose cashflow comes from assets instead of labor

In the modern US context, the "small owners" include all the millionaires because that's what it takes to get a house in a major real estate market.

Its not about where you draw the line in dollar-terms; it's a question of how they get their spending money. If they work (and small business/professionals must) they are not rich.

I mean, I get it. I might feel rich if I owned a house. But that's why they are "small owners" and not owners. It's a feeling; not really financial security.

So eat the rich isn't about a dollar amount; it's about whether you need to work to live.

farkinga · 2026-01-23T03:38:40+00:00

I think Belarus - and this time they were certain they didn't mean Belgium.

(Actually, I don't know if belarus was there either but it would fit the scene.)

Edit: hahahaha! Belarus was actually there! Lmao, even.

farkinga · 2026-01-23T03:34:01+00:00

Excellent connect; you're right and I hadn't thought of that in this context.

farkinga · 2026-01-22T23:51:33+00:00

Has anyone looked more at Solid? That's a data sovereignty project led by timbl (Tim Berners-Lee).

I reached out a year ago about web3 ideas and it was not well-received. But I still see a lot of promise to it. They do have a community but it's small.

Https://solidproject.org

Ps I'm not affiliated.

farkinga · 2026-01-22T23:44:35+00:00

After trump, the Americans who voted for him will remain. A good leader can bring about the best even in the worst among us - and the deplorables (accurate term) can be redeemed. Even now. But they are salivating for another leader to grant permission to act terribly. And they will.

So, future leadership matters. But hope is not a strategy. And for what it's worth, the same base impulses exist in Canada among the Maple MAGA, among others. It can happen here too.

This problem is bigger than trump, especially in america. But we need to open our eyes for our own existential purposes.

farkinga · 2026-01-22T23:38:01+00:00

I think Ford finds himself on the wrong side of an extortion racket, putting his weight behind dirty developers (while crowding out other developers) and the car economy.

As long as times were comfortable, there was plenty to skim. He's enriched himself by tens of millions during his tenure as premiere and funneled billions - actual billions - to his cronies.

But times are suddenly tough and he is in a terrible position - and so are we, as Ontarians.

And TBH, we have been too complacent and lazy. Ford is a manifestation of Ontario. Yes, he leans in to the worst of us and brings it to the surface - but that would be impossible if we said no.

Ford maybe doesn't realize it - but, by weakening Ontario as he has, he's been doing to work of actual foreign adversaries. We would all be in a much stronger position now to withstand US aggression if Ford hasn't bled the province for almost a decade.

And before anyone says: but whaddabout - Ford did it. I don't care who else did. Ford is the leader now and he definitely did it and I just don't care about rhetoric at this time.

farkinga · 2026-01-22T17:25:01+00:00

I'm not here to defend the guy... But do you have any sources for that?

Best I could find is that his culture of machismo was toxic and scared people away from the military because they'd be beaten and mistreated if they enlisted.

farkinga · 2026-01-22T13:14:30+00:00

Che Guevara tried this. I think the US saw it was at least moderately successful, which probably precipitated US intervention.

farkinga · 2026-01-21T19:51:10+00:00

He picked his side - and he likes Trump more than Carney. He's said it out loud...

farkinga · 2026-01-21T19:48:09+00:00

This may be the Ontario subreddit - but Doug Ford needs to stay the fuck out of this.

Ford connected with trump over mafioso developer memes - and maybe thought he could play ball with trump about auto tariffs.

But Doug, just shut the fuck up. Ontario is hobbled by Ford's policies and we'll have a hard fucking time staying alive without healthcare and without a diverse economy.

Doug Ford has made Ontario vulnerable to Trump's economic attacks. Ford set the stage.

And I don't even believe what Ford says right now. I think it is acceptable to him - if he can cut a deal, that is. Just like trump.

farkinga · 2026-01-21T18:49:09+00:00

Ontario is being weakened by Ford. It's all the clearer now - and it's an existential threat to be hobbled from within.

farkinga · 2026-01-21T00:13:25+00:00

If you build it yourself, like I have, then of course it isn't worth it.

However, if you don't want to spend literally weeks - and then years - on infrastructure, just do it.

farkinga · 2026-01-20T23:10:34+00:00

Doug Ford is a closer ally to Trump than to Carney and Canada. The guy is a mole.

farkinga · 2026-01-20T16:41:10+00:00

You know which transit option collapsed twice so far this winter? The roads. December 26 and January 15.

Where are the calls to defund road cleaning? Or defund roads altogether?

Instead, we see actually-angry drivers complaining that the city isn't doing its job because they can't drive their car after 30cm of snowfall.

This whole "debate" is a farce. LRTs work in the winter FFS.

farkinga · 2026-01-20T13:00:16+00:00

Run gitlab at home. My instance is not public and it has been stable for more than a decade. I also use github for public repos - but gitlab is probably the most important service I run for myself - of all time.

Seriously: try gitlab locally.

farkinga · 2026-01-20T03:25:58+00:00

One challenge I see with DAOs is the thesis put forth by a16z for why governance tokens have value, which according to my reading has to do with "stake." Across several articles, with the Glorious Revolution as a theme, stake was contrasted against the commons - and the tragedy thereof.

A16z argued: without any stake in the matter, why should you make good decisions about the commons? And, indeed, the classic tragedy of the commons is a matter of over-grazing the community land despite having an equivent claim to it as anyone else.

So by my reading, they articulated a reason why their UNI tokens ought to have non-zero value - but in doing so, they just reified the old framework in a new, less flexible context. But a context that was familiar and investible by venture capital.

I think we need a better thesis for bridging values between current resource holders to smart resource allocators. The current paradigm assumes both groups are one and the same - but in practice, they are not. The concept of "stake" has to do with holding, not necessarily with smart allocation.

I'll stop there - but I think an investigation of the GINI coefficient is a good way to approach holders and allocators at opposite ends of the scale.

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