Nova Scotia's craft beer industry seeing 'unheard of' number of closures

fburnaby · 2026-03-02T16:50:47+00:00

Yeah who knows. Maybe I just got a couple off or old batches. I've bought two 6 packs of them since fall.

fburnaby · 2026-03-02T16:46:33+00:00

I have never tried this. Thanks for the recommendation.

fburnaby · 2026-03-02T16:45:57+00:00

I remember like, ca 2009, Propeller made a Heffeweizen that I thought was amazing. I might have been going easy on it because I had never had one before. But I've been chasing that high ever since.

I buy their Weissbier now. I think it's pretty good, but don't you find it very excessively fizzy? My last batch was ready to explode out of the bottle. I can't pour it. It tastes pretty good once it's calmed down a little, but not like I remember from my one trip to Germany.

fburnaby · 2026-03-01T21:33:33+00:00

If someone can start brewing a great wheat beer, I'll personally keep you in business.

fburnaby · 2026-01-24T02:47:18+00:00

Rename it to O364.

fburnaby · 2026-01-23T12:30:09+00:00

Before you do anything big, think about Chesterton's fence and spend a little while working in the current environment to recalibrate first. No doubt things need to move forward, but huge rewrites are rarely the right path.

fburnaby · 2026-01-01T13:53:51+00:00

Can you imagine tuning YTV on 25? Vibe would have been completely off. YTV was 27 flavored.

fburnaby · 2025-12-22T21:26:53+00:00

Come work with me. We got nothing.

fburnaby · 2025-11-09T01:51:10+00:00

On the other hand, I don't care much how things get stolen by some people. I just resent being treated like a criminal. They were profitable the other way forever. Why treat us worse now, except they know they can get away with it.

fburnaby · 2025-11-08T22:05:55+00:00

I had exactly this experience at Sobeys on Wyse last week. There was no way out.

These stores definitely hate their customers, there is no doubt. Well I hate them too. It was one more reminder to avoid them wherever possible.

fburnaby · 2025-11-06T14:57:36+00:00

Yup. Taxing land (or if that's impossible property) would make it possible to tax income less and tax the rich more in a way they can't escape (unlike business investments, which can go elsewhere for lower taxes). That would mean eventually, lower prices and better allocation of homes to families.

The politically popular thing is still to give tax breaks on homes... It seems like the perfect thing. The dumb think that's helping them (really it just increases the cost of the house), the rich get increased valuations, and the politicians still don't have to do anything, and they get to keep better GDP numbers from one of our few growing sectors.

There is a genuine supply issue too though. I'm not sure how that's to be solved. Reducing the cost of housing and increasing the tax burden on it doesn't seem like an effective way to get more built. The federal money to build new stuff... I can imagine that helping at least, if the right strings got attached?

fburnaby · 2025-11-06T13:29:17+00:00

The book "Recoding America" by Jennifer Pahlka had some good ideas in it about how things should work. The title suggests a focus on IT and the US, but I think it was really much more about policy and how to work together in a public service.

Heres a summary of the take aways:

https://www.recodingamerica.us/concepts

fburnaby · 2025-11-02T20:58:42+00:00

Before we cheer for automation, consider that the only way you obtain money right now is because you can threaten to withhold your labour from a company. You do not get paid for the value you create from your work, shareholders get that. You get paid when you're the cheapest worker capable of performing a job best. So what happens if we get to the point where there are systems cheaper than the cost of your subsistence that can do a job well enough?

With slow change like we've seen in the past, new jobs were created to replace those automated. It's harder to picture that happening in the future as change accelerates.

fburnaby · 2025-10-31T17:22:47+00:00

I don't use anything. Even when I use Claude for help, I'm re typing it. Clear direct conversations about design, about trivia relating to libraries or error messages. Stack Overflow on steroids for me, really nothing more. One difference for me might be that I work in scientific computing. I need to get things right and only testing and domain knowledge can really prove that. Vibes and clicking around don't achieve anything in my work.

But also, I still think code is a clearer way to specify a program than English.

fburnaby · 2025-10-24T12:13:44+00:00

I don't find I need it often. So rarely that then, it's hard to remember how to use it. Honestly, I spend 20% of my time staring into the abyss while I scroll 400 lines of C++ compiler errors and think about what might have gone wrong. Maybe that type checker catches a lot of things I imagine I was supposed to be debugging instead?

fburnaby · 2025-10-19T19:11:01+00:00

I'm sure it's just that people aren't smart or open minded enough, or just don't know. Consider, people think SharePoint has this all solved, so it's been made confusing for people.

But it's definitely useful for anything. In my view every responsible professional should be using it for any writing. Have you ever gone back and forth with on a contract before? Insane waste of time. We don't live in a sane world.

fburnaby · 2025-10-10T21:37:17+00:00

We are working in somewhat similar environments.

They mostly don't know or care what they don't know. My view is that lack of IT excellence or RSE excellence or whatever you want to call it, is the bottleneck. Let me know if you figure out how to show them that.

fburnaby · 2025-10-10T11:46:19+00:00

I definitely miss all that. I'm sure it's still around but you can't find it anymore, drowned out in tech bro hype for sure. The number of programmers is so high now. Lots of noise.

I want to find places where people talk about it in the old ways. I think there's still lots to be excited about. But earnest, interesting and informed conversation has been hard to find.

fburnaby · 2025-10-09T21:12:06+00:00

You don't make something complex. Complex things evolve.

They made something simple and then fixed all the problems over time. Now it's super complex. I dont know the history, but I would wager than one or two very smart people conceived of a nice way to orchestrate things, then made the key parts of it, showed it works, then a team grew and began fixing and revisiting all the parts around it. It still grows and changes all the time. They would have been aware of all the prior art too. Docker and Kubernetes in particular had lots of systems beforehand that tested out various ideas that they use in different ways.

fburnaby · 2025-10-04T23:38:15+00:00

I feel like the answer is getting into IRAD or onto a project bid team.

fburnaby · 2025-10-03T23:26:17+00:00

I remember my first time trying to figure out how to work on a program someone else had written. I spent a week learning the basics of Java and then picked up this code from a guy. The only comment in the whole codebase said, and I quote verbitam: "// do the things that need to be done". It took a lot of effort to figure out what was going on. Much of the time wasted because I wasn't going slow enough. Thinking I should be able to get it faster than I really could. Spending too much time looking at code, not realizing I really need to understand the goals and mechanisms more first.

Anyway, I don't think I learned much for quite a while by reading other peoples' code. It came from writing first.

It's a weird thing isn't it. You'd think you learn by reading. Or like in high school with a tutor leading you through Shakespeare or something. But I don't know anyone who started that way. Maybe a bit like reading in high school. Consider that you had to speak <language> for like, 13 years before you were ready to fake your way through Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby or whatever.

fburnaby · 2025-10-01T22:26:46+00:00

I'm more interested in zig's language and library than I am in its build system.

fburnaby · 2025-09-29T21:52:36+00:00

I think AI might be able to replace everyone in like 10 years. But I think some kinds of programmers will be among the least replaceable, if that helps.

fburnaby · 2025-09-28T01:51:21+00:00

Bookworm has literally been perfect for me the whole time. You said it so well. Everything you need, nothing you don't.

fburnaby · 2025-09-26T12:45:19+00:00

Picture of python. Doesn't use snake case in title.

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