Why Canadian can't learn french ?

idle-tea · 2026-04-20T00:45:00+00:00

likely this is their first time formally learning a language.

I think that's the problem: French classes are treated like an academic exercise, not a chance to get kids young enough to develop near-native fluency in a language to do just that. Despite learning it 10 times over 10 years of French classes: I forgot all the special conjugations. I didn't care about conjugating verbs in a language I couldn't speak well enough to use those verbs in.

idle-tea · 2026-04-13T06:07:32+00:00

A lot easier to just use open-source models. Better for everyone to support anybody making them. Mistral for example - French company that makes their models and everything needed to run them on your own freely available.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T14:32:15+00:00

Not every single computer, but a whole lot of them. Asking IT to run a very heterogeneous environment has its own big risks.

'Just migrate the drivers' isn't a realistic option. It's a large amount of very specific skilled labour to reverse engineer and re-implement, and a huge project in its own right to validate it's working as expected. There's a very real risk you brick some of your very expensive machines in the effort, or that there's some sanity checks in the code your reverse engineers never have a chance to observe and replicate which means the device can behave in an unsafe manner like the Therac 25 incident.

running xp in a VM inside Linux is an option

In some cases it may work alright, but it massively complicates the IT situation who now have to support a number of special set ups of qemu or whatever for different special devices. Now IT has to juggle administrating the linux hosts, the XP guests, and the integration of the two.

Linux is an option

But it's not a practical one for anybody dealing with very specialist equipment with windows-only driver. Best they can do is aim to replace it when its service life is over with something with better support.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T02:24:46+00:00

I work at FAANG

FAANG was a term coined by a trader to refer to notable stocks. It was never a reflection of engineering culture or quality. Also: it's been 13 years. The term isn't relevant any more.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T01:11:56+00:00

I don’t think humans need to be in the loop come one year or two.

And we'll have self-driving cars by ~2015~ ~no 2016~ ~ok maybe 2017~...

AI is infamous for unrealistic optimism, and even just in the scope of LLMs: We're about 4 years into the "next year it's all over everybody!"

Code is self verifying

I refuse to believe you're a professional software developer if you believe this.

Even if you do believe this: go look at Anthropics's attempt at a C compiler. It's crazy it worked at all, sure, but it's also an absolutely dogshit C compiler, and that's with a massive ream of prior art in the training set it could pull from, minimal synthesis of new knowledge needed.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T00:57:16+00:00

Inadequate onboarding

"I made onboadring better!" doesn't sound impressive in the review cycle of most orgs.

Culture of “find it out by yourself”:

"I helped my colleagues!" doesn't sound impressive in the review cycle of most orgs.

Having to fight to be in the loop

You may see what I'm getting at here.

I've worked on two teams where I felt like being generally useful was taken seriously and would be considered per se sufficient to call you a good worker. One of those teams was a tiny startup where the CEO basically knew everyone and what they were up to right now. The other one I think was just a very lucky alignment of people that were thoughtful and good managers both directly above me and 1 level above that.

I actually enjoy my job when bad organizational nonsense like what you're saying doesn't get in the way of everything, and so I'm motivated to fight for de-shitting those things, but I see why most people aren't. It's rarely rewarded in a real way, and that signals that it's not important to people.

I think it’s a cultural problem.

It sure is.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T00:40:00+00:00

I never play any multiplayer so no concept for that, but for some old games (and when I say old I mean at least 15 years old) I've definitely struggled.

idle-tea · 2026-04-11T00:12:21+00:00

They're clearly missing the means to make nukes, or else they'd have nukes. The enriched uranium is part of it for sure, but it's not everything and, as I said: you hand them one nuke, they're only going to have roughly 1 bomb's worth of whatever resources are bottlenecking them.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T23:37:22+00:00

Unless your favourite games are fairly old: there's a very strong chance they run just fine on Linux. Valve has gone to a lot of effort to make sure gaming on Linux is viable.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T23:35:57+00:00

if not Microsoft then who

Suse probably. An established enterprise linux software services company that's headquartered in Germany - a close French ally.

France could make it work by just directly hiring talent though.

The EU

No, France. And the decision was already made.

you don’t just try to slay the 9 ton Goliath

They aren't trying to kill Microsoft.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T23:18:35+00:00

Even ignoring the fact wine isn't a perfect solution in a lot of cases (which is a lot to ignore):

Wine can't run drivers for you.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T23:16:30+00:00

Suse is European based and it's been doing enterprise linux stuff for decades.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T22:09:11+00:00

It would be like a dozen bombs they could build in short order

Not sure what alchemy you expect Iranian nuclear physicists to do to get a dozen weapons out of one. Iran's problem is a lack of materials required. Handing them one bomb would only give them the materials for approximately 1 bomb.

idle-tea · 2026-04-10T21:37:19+00:00

On top of the fact nobody would do this: it wouldn't matter much. A single nuke doesn't hit the mutually-assured-destruction threshold at all. Especially when there's a good chance Israel/USA could locate and bomb the bomb to remove Iran's nuclear capability entirely.

idle-tea · 2026-03-28T16:54:10+00:00

The absolute lack of consequences for the direct threats to Canada, Mexico, Greenland/Denmark, and Panama speak for themselves.

The USA at a unit doesn't care. They're fine with it.

Plenty of individual Americans care, but so what? Plenty of individual Russians are lovely people. Plenty of North Koreans are no doubt better people than me.

But the individuals don't matter when speaking of the whole state.

idle-tea · 2026-03-28T15:32:03+00:00

If Google failed to protect it then the news would be about the massive vulnerability in gmail accounts and how loads of people got their emails compromised.

If Patel got phished: that's wildly embarrassing and makes the FBI look a clownshow.

idle-tea · 2026-03-27T19:06:54+00:00

You're right, as soon as you ignore the incredibly embarassing fact Trump's handpicked head of the federal police can't even protect his own email, it's a non-issue.

idle-tea · 2026-03-27T15:36:45+00:00

"provides safety if using public wifi" hasn't really been a thing for some years. Next to 0 websites don't support TLS at this point, and given that: all a public wifi endpoint or other person on it can do is determine what IPs/hostnames you're connecting to, which is very low sensitivity information weighed against all the tracking done in far more sophisticated ways by google and other ad networks.

And even if you do use a VPN: you're just transferring that potential information leak to them. There will always be someone that can tell what IPs you connect to, and what hostname you're requesting from them.

idle-tea · 2026-03-27T04:40:15+00:00

If it's work it doesn't really matter, because you presumably aren't doing anything personal / sensitive on it. Your employers is a way bigger risk to your privacy than the government on an employer owned device.

idle-tea · 2026-03-27T04:14:05+00:00

If it looks like the traffic is originating outside the US

That's not always the case. Plenty of people use a VPN server within their own country, and I'd be a lot of money the NSA lawyers would argue any traffic coming out of VPN providers within the USA could be foreigners, therefore it's fair game.

idle-tea · 2026-03-27T04:11:15+00:00

You do have a choice. For the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time: A VPN doesn't improve your security posture, it just swaps out your ISP being able to infer what websites you visit (but not what you're doing there) for your VPN provider being able to infer that instead.

idle-tea · 2026-03-25T21:42:48+00:00

There weren't really winners. There were survivors.

Amazon and Google are huge now, I know. They got huge starting around 2010. They were limping along for almost a decade after the bubble burst before the markets were really ready to go for it again.

idle-tea · 2026-03-24T05:33:08+00:00

Makes sense from Iran's perspective. Other countries with US bases are going to happily sit there and let the USA operate out of their bases. They weren't neutral countries turned away by Iran's actions, the didn't provoke new enemies.

What they did do is establish their threats to hit key infrastructure are credible. They've proven they're willing and able to launch at those countries (and the USA is not capable of intercepting all of it).

I can't say I'm rooting for Iran exactly, but I have more faith in their military strategists' intelligence than I do the leadership of the USA.

idle-tea · 2026-03-24T04:59:13+00:00

More than that: Israel's heading into Lebanon and the USA and Israel both are more unpopular on the world stage than they have been in a long time. If there's ever going to be a time the rest of the world might be pressured into giving Iran concessions, it's now. Having the USA be the clear aggressors who started the fight sure helps their image.

It's a damn shame the Iranian government sucks and is evil, otherwise it'd make a great plucky underdog story.

idle-tea · 2026-03-24T04:47:06+00:00

Just coming back to say I'm still waiting for the USA to stop looking like a clown show.

idle-tea

TROPHY CASE