Quick thoughts and updates
RSS FeedAdded some microblogging facilities for those micro-thoughts I often have during the day, links I might want to share, etc. Yeah, I’m not going to use Twitter, Threads is barely any better (and at this point Meta is basically an arm of the US government), and meh…if I was the only person to ever look back on this I’ll still consider it worthwhile.
While all attention is on the Trump-induced global economic (military, environmental, biological, etc) chaos, Canada was in perilous straights for entirely different reasons. It was a perfect storm that could have been calamitous.
Since the late 2010s and through COVID, we had a real-estate based economy that was juiced by outrageous levels of migration1. Housing prices spiralled upwards and we were all “rich” on paper. Everyone was a real-estate agent, and the few who weren’t would “invest” by buying pre-con condos in the expectation that you’d just flip it for a big profit when complete.
Housing sales were super hot as everyone had a FOMO and newspapers would (and still do) breathlessly report on whatever “it only ever goes up” nonsense real estate groups would feed them. Various levels of government netted big on land transfer taxes, service taxes for fees, and so on.
The government would herald every GDP gain fuelled entirely by a massive influx of people, while Canadians got poorer.
This has collapsed, and was always doomed with an expiry date. Housing prices were utterly detached from any semblance of reality, and could only be rationalized by stuffing a dozen international “students” in your basement. It was a pyramid scheme that was utterly doomed.
So it’s impressive that the hard landing has been softened from this disastrous setup that Canada was in. That is what I was most concerned about — not the frantic chaos from the clown show South of the border — and ultimately Canada seems to have slowly started returning to the rational and became a country that makes stuff and innovates and invents, and doesn’t just go on insanely boring conversations about real estate constantly, which was where we were at as a nation.
There is still a lot of correction that needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of the country, and things are going to be pretty flat for a few years.
Various far-left people would always wave-away the outrageous destruction caused by this ridiculous influx by declaring that it was just illusory, and these people are “temporary”. These are exactly the same people who are now demanding that the government give everyone who came here under one of these temporary visas some sort of permanent status. ↩
I prefer lunch to be merely adequate. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to ponder options or suffer the paradox of choice. I don’t want the “what do I feel like?” pondering.
This is the theory of the Norwegian matpakke. While it ultimately just means bagged lunch, the philosophy of the exercise is to purposefully not make too much of it. To make it satisfyingly adequate, and not strive for “delight me” goals we often sabotage ourselves with.
So often I just want a basic, unadorned sandwich. Some Dempster’s 12-grain toothsome bread. A slice of cheese. Some meat. Maybe some mustard.
For this reason I previously purchased a variety of “adequate” toppings to consider as mediocre candidates, and today is the first time I’ve tried corned beef from a can.
It tasted fine. The bread offers up copious amounts of fibre and nutrients, and the corned beef tasted better than I expected.
The part that surprised me was the macros. I honestly thought corned beef would be terrible from a nutrition perspective, but it’s actually a pretty heavy hitter. This sandwich brought 26g of protein from just the corned beef, another 10g from the bread (+6g fibre) and 7g from the cheese.
It’s the not insane saturated fat that surprised me the most. For that 26g of protein the corned beef brought just 8g of saturated fat. That’s still a lot, but it’s a much better ratio than I would have expected for what I assume is garbage-tier products. If I had four large eggs instead that would have been 24g of protein, but a slightly better 6.4g of saturated fat. Better, but I didn’t think corned beef would even be remotely competitive.
Random Extra Note: This video for GENER8ION - STORM by Yung Lean, is an absolute masterpiece. I enjoy the whole video, but this segment is just ridiculous. Every time YouTube recommends it I play it, each time simply amazed. Extraordinary by all of the participants.
100% serious question: Has the entire US equities market turned into a gigantic shell game where everyone is playing chicken? A scam market? Is there any oversight at all? Are there no concern for fundamentals?
I’m not blaming Trump or his clown-car cabinet for this, and they’re merely a symptom of the end-game free for all that has been happening for some time.
Just look at Tesla, a company whose revenue has started declining in an extremely competitive, low-margin industry where they’re a small potato and who are certain to keep fading away, and whose earnings are barely treading water and giving clear indicators they’re going to plummet into the red.
360 P/E. ~$1.3 trillion dollar capitalization.
Those one million robotaxies super-robots (a field in which Tesla has absolutely zero credibility, and at best has demonstrated some hilariously obvious scams) will surely save the day. Elon — Texas-man with a Canadian citizenship — can keep doing his Matryoshka doll routine where he keeps bundling his losers with his losers and then hide them in his winners, much like the subprime mortgage debacle. Surely nothing to be concerned about.
Ryan Cohen — Florida-man that holds a Canadian citizenship — CEO of failing retailer GameStop, made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay the other day.
And yes, GameStop is a failing retailer. Revenue is falling quarter after quarter despite all the grand ambitions to turn it around, and the operation is “profitable” only via-
Selling off parts1 and constantly shrinking to only the most profitable components left
A gigantic $9B cash reserve that it acquired by baiting a bunch of meme investors and issuing yet more shares of a failing B&M, along with issuing convertible debt backed by that massive cash reserve from meme-investors.
GameStop has a market cap of less than $11B, while it holds >$9B in cash and cash equivalents. It’s basically a t-bill with a guy who makes memelord statements to the press occasionally. He keeps successfully raising money somehow for this failing brick and mortar, because that’s where the US is at now.
Anyway, CNBC tried to make sense of his crazy bid and the interview was an enormous red flag. Cohen later went on Fox — a disinformation shithole that has absolutely no qualms spouting horseshit 24/7 — and he and the host yucked it up.
There is a certain irony that TD Bank — you know, the Canadian bank, named after the city of Toronto and the Dominion of Canada — is who this guy leaned to as the financier of his ebay bid. What in the world is TD doing getting involved with nonsense like this? If that guy believed the shit he serves up for his followers, he’d engage with a big, strong, capitalist American bank. They’d probably have tears in their eyes telling him how great he is.
Seriously though, it’s pretty tough to call what is happening in the US today “capitalism”. It’s just a bizarre shell/confidence game at this point. This sort of nonsense always happened among penny stocks and spam-email blasts/boiler rooms, but now it is mainstream and normalized.
I wrote about statins on here before, with the caveat that I am a layman with limited knowledge of the space. That piece just details the consensus and the current state of cholesterol/statin knowledge, and the disinformation around it that grifters use to try to eke out some attention space to monetize.
I’m certainly not a Harvard/Oxford trained doctor, like Dr. Nick Norwitz who was featured by The Telegraph today in an article titled “This Harvard doctor believes we’ve been getting cholesterol all wrong”. This popped up on my Apple News+ feed while drinking my morning coffee.
Dr. Norwitz’ social media presence1 seems to be fuelled by cholesterol denialism and anti-statin positions. Clickbait YouTube videos like “I Changed My Mind on Cholesterol Medications (After 7 Years)” and “The Oldest Woman Had ‘High’ Cholesterol — Here’s What That Really Means”2. The comments are filled with exactly the sorts of commentary that you would expect because he is aiming for exactly the audience he wants. Or at least he leaned into his audience and is giving them what they demand.
And of course he’s pitching magic longevity vitamins with his own special discount code.
His whole gimmick is that he had high cholesterol so he tried statins3 but found he’s one of the people who have bad muscle pains — statins aren’t a good option for everyone, and lifestyle changes should be attempted for many — so he did a 180 and decided his new angle was to be yay-cholesterol man, leaning far into a ketogenic, ultra-high cholesterol causing diet, courtesy of saturated fats, while casting FUD about medical science and statins. And now he holds himself as the anecdote that proves the consensus wrong, which isn’t how anything works but whatever.
It’s the attention through contrarianism thing, and this is a common, lucrative tactic on social media. Always monetizing this into some magical powder or vitamin sale.
Here’s the thing, though: He’s 30 years old (and has been doing this through his 20s). Having plaque measurable on a CAC or more invasive CCTA at 30 years old would be devastatingly bad. Like, some sort of genetic condition bad. A you’ll-be-dead-before-50 bad. Arterial plaque is a long-developing condition that takes decades to form (most of the early stages being unmeasurable by current tools, not to mention that when you’re young the body is more capable of clearing the issue), with high cholesterol being an extremely well proven influencing factor for most people.
Even the most sensitive CCTA doesn’t detect plaque until the 40s-50s for most. Having a clean scan is very close to meaningless at younger ages, and similarly statins are seldom prescribed at such ages.
That this guy constantly returns to the fact that his arteries are clear (“My arteries are perfectly clean: why should I subject myself to both the known and lesser-understood side-effects of statins?”, an ironic comment given the well known and lesser-understood effects of high cholesterol, including dementia, erectile dysfunction, CVD, and so on), at least via the normal diagnostic tools, is just silly4.
This is the three-pack-of-cigarettes a day guy telling you that they don’t currently have measurable lung cancer, ergo smoking is safe. All the while the area under the curve builds.
His position on insulin resistance via high carb diets is the overwhelming scientific consensus5, just as it is true that arterial plaque is multi-factorial with a lot of influences including inflammation and genetics, and that LMHR are a thing that are worth study. Just as it’s true that LDL is a hugely imperfect measure and ApoB is a better measure that is less commonly used because the test is more expensive, and that statins are not the best choice for everyone.
But Dr. Norwitz purposefully leans into his audience to pad his pockets, and that’s just morally reprehensible. He does the contrarian act for his own enrichment, while trying to ride the fence and hedge just enough to avoid censure from medical peers.
Gross stuff. And this is precisely the sort of guy who’ll be posting a “Why I was wrong about being wrong about” video in ten years once the consequences of his terrible advice — if he actually follows it — comes due.
Peter Attia’s podcast returned to airing new episodes rather unceremonially after the whole Epstein thing. I wrote about my feelings on Attia’s rather pathetic messages to Epstein — he was clearly being a slovenly bootlicker trying to get in the good graces of the ultrarich by shamelessly pandering — and while it’s pretty gross, it doesn’t change my opinion that Attia is a great science communicator.
A recent episode of his — Thinking scientifically: why it’s hard, why it matters, and a practical toolkit — is fantastic. A+ episode from start to end.
I already abide by many of the recommendations made in the podcast. For instance, I’m fully engaged to incorporate new knowledge on cholesterol and statins, but people like Norwitz have so many grifter red flags and logical fallacy tells that it just demolishes any influence they have on my knowledge.
Google categorizes him as an “internet personality”, which is interesting.
If Google reduces your many impressive degrees down to “internet personality”, that’s probably a sign that you’re a grifter. ↩
In the report on an 116-year-old woman, in one of many tests her total cholesterol and LDL was slightly above the recommended range at the moment they tested her. Dr. Norwitz added a conspiratorial note like this was suppressed information — he does this conspiratorial “I’m revealing the information they’re hiding from you!” nonsense in many of his videos — that only his deep investigative work revealed…by looking at test results they included as a figure with the study. LOL. Gottem!
And the funny thing is that her LDL was 122 mg/dL, which is below even what is considered “borderline elevated”, which is why he scare-quoted “high” in his title, because he knew he was misleading his rubes. And her HDL was excellent, from which her “total cholesterol” was slightly above normal, but for a good reason. Her VLDL and triglyceries were fantastic. This woman had what most would consider very good bloodwork.
The best part of all? The woman’s diet was described by researchers as a “Mediterranean diet - made up of lots of vegetables, fruits, legumes and olive oil”. This is who a keto guy is using to reveal the conspiracy to his followers. ↩
Which is a bit odd as cholesterol often isn’t even checked, much less controlled, in one’s 20s, unless there is some familial issue demanding it like a parent that died of CVD at 40 or something. Seems like a convenient “choosing my grifter niche?” decision point. ↩
He frequently returns to the claim that he’s a medical marvel that defies all the textbooks. At one point he claims that his heart should be “clogged up” given his cholesterol levels. In another that he should be “dead”. Again, this guy is 30 years old. Zero medical textbooks predict what this guy keeps claiming they do, and he knows it. But they do predict what he’ll probably be like at 50, so I guess wait and see? And even then that would be evidence of nothing as some small subset of people really are somehow less susceptible to cholesterol-linked plaque, so he could go either way as a single case, though odds lean one way quite heavily.
He does another sleight of hand when he refers to “cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of mortality”, implying that this outcome disproves the consensus as a failure, providing an opening for fanciful contrarianism. Quite aside from the fact that circulatory system deaths are down dramatically in just about every nation per capita (Canada has dropped CVD deaths by over 75% over the past several decades), the more progress is made by medical science the longer people live. The longer people live the more the old causes of death are waiting for their opportunity to shine. People are still going to die of something.
This is similar to rates of some cancers and dementia “rising”, which social media grifters use to fear-monger about whatever current thing they’re targeting (vaccines, 5G, seed oils, etc). Only these are largely a result of a lot more people living long enough that they can suffer such results. ↩
The article twice points to a “growing number of experts” in a rather comical fashion. The first are the statin nay-sayers, which sure whatever you can find contrarians for quite literally anything, and the truth is that many people can control their cholesterol through simple diet choices. But the second, “Norwitz has joined the growing number of experts who believe that a high-carb Western diet leads to insulin resistance”, reads like a joke. It is an overwhelming consensus that a high-carb diet is a problem, particlarly one filled with simple carbs that are unfortunately common in our menus, which is why the prevailing advice is for a well-rounded, balanced diet with lots of proteins and healthy fats, and ideally complex carbs.
Pretending that the only alternative to a bad diet is another bad diet is misleading framing, but this fake dichotomy is a go to among the grifter crowd. ↩
During some nice spring weather on the weekend I decided to take an early morning walk to one of the nicer grocery stores in the area. I needed to grab a bag of lemons for “greek food night” in the household, enjoy taking walks, and it helps achieve daily activity targets.
I have several upscale grocery stores within a short walk, and this location is on the wrong corner of an intersection so it usually isn’t my chosen option, but it was my random target that day so off I went.
This grocery store has a thing they do where loads of stuff has better “member pricing” alongside regular pricing, inducing you to leverage their free rewards program. I’ve long been a member — why would I pay $5.99 for the lemons if I can pay $3.99 just by showing a barcode, and it collects points towards rewards — but often the only thing I carry with me is my phone.
I’m not carrying physical cards, keytags, or any other nonsense just to display a barcode. My phone should be sufficient. It isn’t the 1980s.
I re-installed their app to have it at the ready when a barcode was necessary. I remembered having poor experiences with this app before1, but the industry has progressed a lot and there are loads of great frameworks for creating speedy apps even when your development competency and stack is primarily web tech, with tools like Claude Code to accelerate the effort.
And I mean the version number jumped from the 7.1.69 that I last tried all the way up to 800.0.113, so surely amazing progress has been made. That’s like, 114x better of an app.
Alas, the app is still incredibly bad. It’s an extremely slow webpage wrapped into an app2, decorated with loads of functional failures. And the “display a barcode” functionality is currently broken, so the one thing I was forced to install this app for wasn’t even achieved!
And it currently rocks a 1.3 on the AppStore, 1.5 on Google Play. Read the reviews and you realize those scores are generous, and they’re lucky 0 wasn’t an option that people could pick. This situation has gone on for years.
Bizarre.
This is a ~$1.5B revenue company, and its majority owner is a $7B+ company. Not huge, but big enough that this should be embarrassing.
And who knows. Maybe it’s a single guy responsible for the entire tech stack in addition to stocking the fruits and vegetables section. Maybe they’re working under outrageous requirements. Maybe they’ve had a stuttering rewrite underway for years3. Maybe they have layers of middle-managers all arguing over the colour of the shed, or have a busted corporate culture where everything stratifies as change draws blame.
I have no idea who is to blame here and have no insight into how they have failed so spectacularly, but good god, fix your situation.
And this is where I’m going to say that tools like AI coding assistants can make the largest impact. Where it can be a game changer for low-hanging fruit like this. It is an equalizer that allows small or dubious-competency teams to compete with the bigs and deliver polished, top-tier apps for relatively simple domains like this.
There is no reason why their app should be so bad in 2026. None.
Point Claude Code at your website and iterate over creating the framework for a fresh new React Native or other cross-target option app. Hook it into your APIs. Boom, a one-week project for a single person and you’ve got a foundation that can generate full desktop web apps, mobile web apps, SPAs, and even fully native mobile experiences.
There are a lot of places where the AI coding tools fail to move the meter on the progress or capabilities of a team, but it was absolutely made for this, and I say this with growing experience demonstrating exactly this pattern.
Wrapping a webpage in WebView was always stupid. Doing it in 2026 is just incompetence.
Their release notes solicit user feedback, so I constructively emailed them feedback in December of 2024. Their app is not only still as bad, it might actually be worse. ↩
Like literally the webpage in a WebView4, now made worse because things like the password manager no longer integrate properly and various web affordances are no longer available. This isn’t even ostensibly allowed by appstore rules, but loads of apps ply this worthless pattern. ↩
I link to that quarter-century old JoS piece for historical record. He was absolutely right at the time, given the tooling, libraries and constraints of the era. Today a total rewrite is often the best path for many projects that are languishing under the weight of obsolete code, frameworks, libraries and technologies, and progress we’ve made in tooling has completely upended the calculation. ↩
Why does their site even advertise the platform apps? Just tell the user that you have a mobile-capable website and call it a day, and skip the fake-app farce. ↩
Caught this article from Axios. Axios, you should know, is yet another American billionaire family propaganda rag, where the Cox family serves up slop for the piggies (that’s how they view the reader).
Several of the quotes are outright hilarious nonsense.
One core dispute: Washington wants to prevent China from using Mexico or Canada as a back door into the North American market — a particular flashpoint for Canada, which recently struck a limited tariff truce with Beijing.
Canada made an agreement with China to sell them our canola1 in return for a tiny number of Chinese cars to be sold in Canada2, to Canadians. You know, the very Chinese cars that are massively popular in Mexico already. In no universe is Canada trying to be a “backdoor” for Chinese goods — whereas Mexico long has, where those goods don’t just go directly to the US — and saying this is a “flashpoint” for Canada is amazing propaganda targeting the ignorant.
Various members of Trump’s administration have warned that Canadians who buy these cars won’t be able to drive them into the US, and the response of Canadians has been a collective yawn.
Saying this is a “flashpoint” is propaganda nonsense. Canada has always been onboard with source of origin tracking and declarations, and has never tried to “backdoor” Chinese goods to the other CUSMA partners.
In reality, they simply want Canada subjugated and reliant upon the US in all ways, and if we’re going off and making our own trade deals, well that works against the goal. In this case they are trying to doublespeak backdoor — which would mean that we secretly buy Chinese stuff, slap a maple leaf on it and ship it to the US under CUSMA — into meaning Canada simply trading with other parties.
“We have issues with Mexico we’re still working through, but Mexico intends on coming to an agreement with us,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rick Switzer said last week at an event organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mexico is literally everything Trump complained about. They long funnelled massive amounts of Chinese goods into NAFTA cum CUSMA, relabelling and hiding the origin. They entirely rely upon the US economy, and the US sells very little to Mexico, and instead its economy exists by undercutting US labour.
The US has 4x the trade deficit with Mexico than Canada, and even that is massively misleading because the bulk of exports the US sends to Mexico are unfinished parts that will end up coming back for the US domestic market.
The only reason the US has a trade deficit with Canada is unprocessed oil that the US imports and sends to the gulf coast refineries to then sell at a massive markup, largely internationally. If you don’t include oil which the US literally makes billions from, the US has (had?) a trade surplus with Canada.
Of course Mexico will play along with the US’ cabal. It is an infinitely more motivated supplicant in that negotiation. When the US is so pathetically desperate for Canada to please bend that they have to prop up Mexico as the good guys…lol. And I’m not blaming Mexico, and they should look out for their own country and treat Mexico as #1, but it’s telling that the US keeps trying to portray Canada as bad relative to Mexico, betraying how poor of a negotiating situation they are in.
“The grown-ups are in the room talking because there’s a grown-up in leadership there. And I would argue there’s not a grown-up in Canada in charge,” Switzer said, referring to Mark Carney, a widely respected former central banker who became the nation’s prime minister last year.
Parody. The US is being run by a clown show of foolish idiots who think they get to throw barbs like this consequence free. Quotes like the above are just an astonishing inability to read the room. Having that idiocracy, with an administration full of unbelievable levels of incompetence and corruption, talk about the “grown-ups in the room” is…well, it’s simply amazing stuff.
They really thought could force Canada to do whatever they wanted. They don’t begin to understand our resolve on this as we pepper-spray these vile people in the face repeatedly in return for their hubris of thinking they just get to have their way.
There will be zero progress on trade until these foolish simps shut their idiot mouths and stop thinking they are some sort of mafia operation that gets to push people around. This article was clearly issued to Axios, desperately trying to coerce Canada to somehow give them a “win” for their failing president. Pathetic.
Want a trade agreement? It’s called CUSMA and was renegotiated from NAFTA by this very same president, and currently the US is in absolute violation of a number of terms of it (steel, aluminum, vehicles and parts, softwood, among others).
When they can’t abide by the very trade agreement they already signed — the very one Trump declared the “best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA” — signing additional agreements with that same group would be the definition of insanity.
Canada had previously imposed a 100% Chinese EV tariff in lockstep with the US to protect what we saw as North America’s automakers (Mexico, you’ll note, never did), to which China retaliated by tariffing Canadian canola. Then Trump declared that actually it’s US auto companies and he should destroy Canada’s integration in the CUSMA3 auto industry — completely in defiance of the very trade agreement this same dipshit signed just a few years earlier (but also, please sign new trade agreements!) — so…get wrecked boyees. We’re willing to see Ford, GM and Chrysler destroyed if they are willing to go along with this. ↩
There’s a social media guy named “Mario of the North” who long lambasted the government for the tariffs on Chinese EVs and the subsequent canola retaliation. He complained that the government was choosing Ontario autoworkers over Western farmers. Then, after the government came to a truce with China, he did an instant 180 and now Chinese spy cars are going to steal all of our secrets and this is insane, etc. He, like so many others in the space, is just a partisan noisemaker, and these people are an absolute cancer on democracies.
When someone demonstrates that they don’t have values they have teams, their rhetoric is betrayed to be worthless noise. ↩
Canada has had a vibrant auto manufacturing industry for about as long as the US has. Indeed, NAFTA replaced the Autopact, and then CUSMA replaced NAFTA, but the basis of all was that Canada would proportionally be involved in manufacturing, or “American” automakers will be shut out of Canada. ↩
This is one of those LinkedIn-style tosser posts where I observe something super obvious to everyone.
Whenever I do things like exercise, I usually fill the air with content1.
Podcasts, music, news, programs.
I always saw it as maximizing the time by getting steps or active calories in simultaneous with listening to the latest episodes or tracks.
Recently I’ve been deeply entrenched in a project and some morning laps around the track saw me instead opt for nothing. I left the earbuds behind because I really needed to think through some implementation issues.
And…wow. It’s pretty weird actually being captive to your own thoughts and having no option but to think deeply about things. It was hugely beneficial and in half an hour I made some decisions that I had stewed over for some time. It provided enormous clarity on some projects.
I lost sight of actually thinking somewhere along my journey. The novelty of having content everywhere, effortlessly, became second nature and I would thoughtlessly fill the air with something, anything, at virtually all times.
The last time I used to really have this sort of purposeful quiet time was when I commuted a distance and would drive purposefully in silence. To a lesser extent I also enjoyed it when I would cut the yard on a multi-acre property, back when we made the mistake of moving out to the countryside (which isn’t really awesome when you have multiple young children). Regardless, the lawn tractor was loud so I’d wear ear protection and would just contemplate during the entire cut. It was almost meditative.
Regardless, I’ve rediscovered this, and I am going to strive to purposefully ensure that I actually think about things more during the day.
Did I just invent thinking about things? Maybe!
Meaning the air between my earbuds and my eardrums, as I’m not a selfish sociopath that forces whatever I’m listening to on unwanted victims. Well…aside from family members occasionally. ↩
One house want I’ve developed over the years is a kitchen area that can be closed off from the rest of the house. With actual doors of some sort. Ideally discrete doors like pocket doors that are out of sight most of the time, but are invaluable when needed. Or some solid-core french doors with double-glazed windows to let light pass through (and avoid opening the door into someone carrying a big plate full of spagoolis), but still block most noise and odours.
Kitchens are loud. Not just loud appliances, but the process of cooking is usually a very noisy affair of smashing pots and banging cutlery and rattling equipment. As someone who frequently cooks, I would prefer to impose less of an audio assault on everyone else in the house when I do.
Kitchens are also smelly, which sometimes is good but often isn’t. Especially when you have children old enough that they’re often making their own creations at random hours, so at 3 in the morning the entire house suddenly smells like nuggets.
Kitchens have unique ventilation needs. Not just smells, but literal pollution. Who wants this escaping through the rest of their living area?
So what is with the bizarre tendency of every home to open-plan the kitchen? In my area literally every home is like this, at every price point. Six million dollar mansions have a centrally located kitchen blended into the primary living rooms. In a way that you can’t even retrofit in any reasonable way to sequester the kitchen area.
Much older homes had an isolated kitchen if there was enough space to facilitate it, but invariably someone since has knocked out a bunch of walls in the pursuit of “sightlines”.
Is this some sort of weird effect of years of cooking shows, and everyone wanting to showcase being a chef as they cook a pot of spaghetti? I know it became the social norm to base social events around the kitchen.
This is a bad trend. Seal off the kitchen. Yes, your stove and fridge are very impressive, but it doesn’t justify turning a practical, functional room into a show room.
Does a custom home really have to be built just for this simple need? Does a home need a show kitchen and a “staff” kitchen to satisfy this want? Apparently these are called “scullery” or “spice” kitchens, and even that is remarkably hard to find regardless of price point.
Open concept in general is simply bad, and it’s a plan that presumes minimal human activity. It was a silly fad that everyone just followed the leader on.
Howard “Epstein Island” Nutlick, that dirty greaseball scumbag, has been trash-talking Canada for well over a year now1, mirroring his boss, who also happens to be a frequent Epstein associate.
For instance dairy. They’re always talking about dairy.
For my American readers force-fed an endless torrent of lies and propaganda from your plutocrat-owned media, here’s the deal: Canada has something called supply management covering a tiny percentage of the economy. This means that dairy (along with a couple of other industries: eggs, chicken and turkeys) are “right-sized” for Canada’s need by the government through industry trade boards. If you want to produce milk in volume you have to buy a slot of the quota from one of the milk boards, ensuring that there isn’t a glut of overproduction.
This means that Canada’s dairy industry generates milk production approximately equal to Canada’s consumption. It is a market stabilizing technique both to ensure food security, and to make for a viable, consistent industry that isn’t a race to the bottom of horribly-treated, steroid-pumped animals. It also ensures farmers aren’t constantly killing themselves, as they do in outrageous numbers in the US, and the government isn’t constantly doling out massive subsidies (again, as they do in the US, where the agricultural industry is backstopped by the US government to such a degree that it’s basically Soviet Russia).
It has benefits and detriments, and is often debated among Canadians if this should be a protected market, but generally the consensus is yes. It arguably makes our dairy more expensive, but it’s a robust, healthy, well-managed industry.
It has been this way for many, many decades.
So when we sign trade deals, we exclude dairy beyond some token amount in both directions: We won’t allow you to flood us with your dead-farmer generating, massively subsidized, anabolic-laced dairy, but on the flip side, we also don’t represent a competitive threat to your industry.
Every single trade deal Canada has signed has started with this basic reality. NAFTA, USMCA, CETA: We entered every one of them with everyone at the table knowing we were largely excluding dairy in both directions2, and it was negotiated on that basis.
This was never, ever a surprise for anyone. When Trump misinforms his cult about Canada’s tariffs on dairy above the trade quota (the TRQ), he somehow fails to mention that exactly the same tariff applies in reverse!
But let’s be clear: If Canada was somehow coerced into removing supply management on dairy, we would destroy America’s dairy farmers. Utterly annihilate your entire industry. Obliterate it.
We have loads of land and perfect conditions to be an unstoppable dairy super power. We have lower input costs across the board.
If you want a teaser for this, look at New Zealand, a tiny country that absolutely curb-stomps America’s dairy industry. Do you really want that, Americans? Be careful what you wish for.
Of course not. And even Epstein-buddy Nutlick knows this. America’s demand isn’t that we abolish supply management, but that we keep it, but also let America’s farmer-crushing outputs flood the country.
That isn’t going to happen. It just isn’t.
On the eve of my honeymoon a couple of decades ago, my manager called me into his office and asked if I could cancel/defer it.
We had absolutely nothing pressing going on in the office. No major project deadlines coming up. No big new clients to wow.
He just saw a moment where a bit of suffering could be applied, and if suffering was applied, somehow the organization would benefit. That he could tell others how good of a manager he was because he forced such a disruption on an underling.
I said no that isn’t going to happen, he understood that I could walk if he really wanted to press this, so life went on.
He is not alone in this incredibly destructive thinking, and many people operate with this busted logic that every negative has an offsetting positive. I’ve worked in offices where no one cared at all if people were working or achieving, but if they worked overtime, well then that’s a big win, right? Get people to come in on the weekends, even if absolutely nothing of value was being produced, and wow what a super achievement3!
Busted zero-sum thinking.
JD Vance recently celebrated that America’s “allies” were hurting more than the US was on fuel disruptions. This was a win to him and something to celebrate. Similarly, Trump sees groups like the European Union as an “attack” on the United States if the group somehow benefits the members. To a zero-sum thinker, if they benefit, well then you must suffer.
This is the brain-dead thinking of someone who sees the world as zero-sum: That any gain anyone else makes must be at a cost to you, and if you can cost others, well somehow that benefits you. That there is no way both parties can benefit.
You see the same thing in the way the US approaches trade negotiations under this administration. Their primary goal is making partners hurt in some way, and to celebrate every pain they cause as a win. Pathetically backwards, self-destructive, nonsensical thinking.
As an aside, the toady Trump enlisted to make some sort of trade deal with Canada, Jamieson Greer, has been plying every manner of “tough guy” rhetoric, and it’s simply pathetic at this point. You don’t have the cards, fool. You’re played out.
But his latest complaint is the most uproarious of all. After over a year of American attacks on Canada (in capricious trade restrictions, arbitrary tariffs, and endless insults and belittling from the Epstein circle of pedos — starting with the “fentanyl” nonsense — by that clown show of mediocrity), this foolish man complained about Canada’s “globalization”. The US could have worked with Canada on a North American strategy that would empower the continent. Instead it started by assaulting and attacking Canada, thinking every harm it caused — which it did explicitly and with great gloating and celebration by Trump — was some win for the US.
Now it’s bitching and gnashing that it turns out we have other markets to turn to.
Get bent.
One of his recent claims is that Canada “sucks”, in that it somehow is a leech off of the US economy. Which is comedic, economically-illiterate nonsense. The US has made untold riches processing and selling Canada’s resources, and indeed the only reason for the purported trade “deficit” the US has with Canada is enormous amounts of Canadian oil that goes to gulf coast refineries to then be sold internationally. The US is “sucking” enormous profits out of Canada, and this is absolutely something that needs to be remediated. It was utter folly that American energy companies were allowed to rape Canada like this. For that smooth-brained wig-salesman huckster creep to use that to denigrate Canada is cosmic delusion ↩
Like every single trade agreement on the planet, occasionally there are disputes. In the rare case where Canada’s dairy farmers had excess production, often it is made into milk-based products and powders that occasionally other trading partners feel shouldn’t be exported in volume. That is for trade panels to deal with ↩
You see this nonsense on LinkedIn where the startup industry tries to announce their suffering to the greatest extent possible, trying to cargo-cult their personal sacrifice into some illusion of achievement. Wow you work 168 hours a week and dedicate your existence to your job…which is meaningless if not mock-worthy if the results don’t correlate ↩
This thing is a storage trojan horse. It downloads every episode of every show you subscribe to by default, on every one of your Apple devices. Is this a rational norm? The overwhelming bulk of the time I have 1Gbps+ high speed data available, and it can cache a whole two hour episode in memory in less than two seconds. For the infrequent case where I might be so data deprived it can’t handle a simple audio program — say on a flight — I can plan in advance and download individual episodes, much like Netflix’s download facility for such cases.
Maybe it’s that podcasts are an “extra” for me, and are not an obligation. I subscribe to podcasts I like to have easier access to them in an interface that really wants to push their recommended bunk otherwise. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to dutifully listen to every single episode like a todo list. Instead, I listen to a episodes here and there, depending on if the topic and description draw me in.
So the cache “hit” rate of the app default downloading everything is already low single digits, but once you add that it does it across my Apple devices it falls below 1%.
This doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal, but for people who use this app you’re eventually going to find that you have 200GB of podcasts clogging up your drive. And while I assume it has some logic for pruning…eventually…it’s a bit like SQL Server in that it seems to assume it has the run of the place except in total exhaustion of storage, which is a recipe for trouble when there are multiple apps all plying the same pattern.
Eventually you’ll find that it’s doing this, unasked, and disable downloading episodes and purge what you have locally. You need to make sure to disable it on every single Apple device you own, as it doesn’t sync this behaviour and will just default every new device to download 100s of GBs of patter.
Problem solved, right? I learned my lesson and disabled it, and the space was freed up. Yet I just did a periodic disk usage check on my primary Mac1 to find it again consuming 100GB+ deep within the user’s Library subfolder structure. This time it was the “Sync library” function. Downloads had long been disabled on every device, and I purged said storage everywhere, but still there’s some mysterious sync floating around.
I’m a big fan of Claude Code, and lean on it heavily. It’s a fantastic work partner and tool in the toolbelt.
With Claude Pro you’re going to always find your quota exhausted, waiting for session timers to expire and logging extra usage charges: It’s too little usage for the average developer, and simple activities will leave you maxed out. So like many I upgraded to Claude Max.
Now I have to seriously work to exhaust the usage (to “get my money’s worth”), or to get anywhere close. I understand lots of other people have no problem saturating it, but I like to audit its creations, to understand its output, and to be careful in my trust in its choices. I’ve “caught” it making a number of egregious, critical mistakes over projects, and am constantly correcting the direction back to optimal. That isn’t a criticism, and it’s exactly what I do when working with other developers as well. But it is a natural rate limiter, and I’m not just typing prompt after prompt.
I really feel like Anthropic monitored developers and set subscription levels such that Pro would be below what the average developer needs, and the next step is a big jump up in capacity and price.
Which would be a trick they learned from Apple (to loop back to Apple and storage sizes). Apple long did this scheme where if the optimal amount of storage on a device was 16GB, they’d offer an 8GB option and a 32GB option. When the norm moved to 32GB, they’d offer 16GB and 64GB. For generations of devices they did this marketing pattern where you had to either underbuy and regret it (and then apps like the podcasts entrant would do their best to clog up the overpriced storage you did get), or overbuy for extra you likely wouldn’t need. It’s a good tactic for revenue maximization.
Since I touched on politics in other areas, I will spend a moment criticizing the politics in my own province, Ontario.
Ontarians don’t really pay much attention to provincial politics generally, and it’s treated as almost an afterthought. So standards are incredibly low and incredibly weak performances and platforms go with almost no question or attention.
We have political parties spending over a billion taxpayer dollars to cancel needed and underway natural gas power generation station projects purely to try to buy two ridings that looked flippable on the eve of an election.
And then we have the current Ontario government, whose agenda seems to be overwhelmingly alcohol and gambling based. Oh, they also paid hundreds of millions of dollars — some say over a billion — to sell alcohol in more locations slightly earlier, in a province with $500B in debt and no end in sight to deficit spending.
At this point I’m actually seriously concerned that my province is full of alcoholic degenerate gamblers, because the government’s agenda constantly returns to more places to buy and drink alcohol2, and more ways for degenerates to blow everything up with gambling. It’s utterly bizarre.
The gambling problem is hardly limited to Ontario, though. It is perverse how almost all media is sponsored by degenerate gambling ads3 now, which is an extremely bad, dystopian sign.
And to be clear, provincial governments have the enormously important portfolios of healthcare and education, given which you’d think every moment would be improvements and questions about those imperfect systems.
Best we can do is now you can chug keggers in the park while online sports betting. Deal?
This entry is apropos of nothing1, but was inspired by commentary regarding the current insanity with Iran2. I keep seeing people saying “they thought this would be like Venezuela: drop a few bombs and take over the country”.
That isn’t what happened in Venezuela.
Venezuela was a coup, carried out with the US as the tip of the spear in cooperation with participants in the Venezuelan government and military3. The moment CH-47s were filmed flying over predictable travel paths this was the only possible explanation.
Maduro was garbage4, and clearly some insiders in the Venezuela government, likely including the entire military chain of command, wanted him gone. So they all stood down and left him and his Cuban guards to be removed by a foreign element where they could claim no involvement and avoid blowback.
The US could strike a couple of vacant anti-air installations. MANPADS were locked away in bunkers. Some pawns had to be vaporized to make it all legitimate looking. What’s a little murder?
There were no magic weapons that discombobulated everyone. No super covert operation. Everyone looked the other way while a US team removed their nuisance. Everyone got their show and a story to tell of overwhelming military might achieving the goals with ease.
Some Venezuelan generals are probably living in the US now with a paycheck.
Which is why the new government plays ball with the Trump admin. They aren’t some cowering supplicant, but are partners in the action.
Hopefully it turns out well for Venezuela (which went from one group of despots to another). But it isn’t the precedent it has been held as.
After I wrote that “Dear America” piece, I received a dozen+ emails that were some variation of “I like your stuff, but please leave politics out of it”. Man, I wish I could just ignore politics, but every morning it’s some new thing from that freak show of depravity and attention-seeking trash.
The entire world would like if they would lay off the brinksmanship, theatrics, and war crimes for just a day or two. But they just can’t. Every single day it’s something new.
But ultimately I’m not too worried about losing “fans”. There are only two groups that are still team-Trump-
a) The impossibly stupid5. Look, it’s okay to be dumb. Live and let live, and genetics and environment rolls the dice and we all cover the gamut in our capabilities and aptitudes. But historically if someone were incredibly dumb, they’d focus on pursuits with their hands, contribute to society in meaningful ways, and so on. Now they’re dogshit MAGA loudmouths who think having opinions — the stronger held the better! — is the great equalizer.
The impossibly stupid are the vast bulk of the “still all in on Trump” group, and these idiots can barely read, so they’re not a concern.
b) The ultrarich who are profiting off of the catastrophic mismanagement of the United States. These people despise Trump and his halfwit cadre — they see him for the garish classless clown he is — but they like that he’s ensuring they can easily skirt tax, can operate lawlessly, and have an easy get out of jail card for any misdeeds6. The ultra-rich don’t care if people criticize the orange goblin, and they know he’s running on borrowed time. So hello to my ultra-rich readers, and you understand why I’m writing this.
While I was authoring this, an online firestorm erupted about a member of parliament from Winnipeg using the acronym MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. The speaker is an aboriginal opposition MP from a minority party, and the context is that she was criticizing the government for reducing indigenous funding, lamenting how that would affect some subgroup of that acronym. Specifically the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women part of it.
Indigenous women in Canada have dire statistical outcomes, for multi-faceted reasons and with no easy answers, and are grossly overrepresented in victim statistics. It’s a serious problem and a horrible tragedy.
Does the gigantic acronym help in any way? Absolutely not. It’s a ridiculous acronym that only a very tiny fringe of Canada takes seriously, treating it as some sort of weird oppression olympics where everyone is jockeying to get their own set of letters in the forever growing letter salad.
Eventually it will settle on being the “No Homers” club: Just call it the “No Straight, Conventional Males” and get it over with.
I don’t mean to be dismissive to a wide range of groups that suffer real harms and problems, but farcical nonsense like that acronym help absolutely no one, and it rightly rings of parody. The NDP7 repeatedly is the source of such nonsense, including another recent video where, in yet another display of oppression olympics, various speakers were all declaring that they were more aggrieved and entitled than other speakers, each adding more qualifiers to declare why they are out-oppressed.
They aren’t helping themselves. And they aren’t helping Canada’s image as time after time a far-left party, far into the weeds, is presented as all of Canada.
Of course the clowns of the internet8, including head jester himself ketamine-rot Elon Musk (and some of his brainless dipshit cling-ons like Rob Schneider, reminding everyone he pathetically is still alive), had to weigh in on this. Despite this woman lamenting the government of Canada, somehow this isolated case is the downfall of all of Canada, and merits its dissolution. It, these addled fools surmise, justifies Alberta separatism.
Which is…ironic. Alberta is 100% subject to aboriginal treaties that make separation quite literally impossible, and the foolish traitors who think they get to walk off with it ply a funny route when they make fun of…aboriginals or aboriginal issues. They are exactly as smart as we would expect (their leader literally defrauded vulnerable relatives, so they have exactly the morals you would expect as well).
It’s time for Canada to start deporting these people. I’m not remotely joking. Send them to the MAGA cesspool that they so desperately want to recreate.
My free time has been filled with work on my RTS/4X hybrid game that I mentioned previously, so apologies for the lack of content ↩
I made my feelings known about this administration’s shocking gap of competence in my “Dear America” piece. Trump openly gloats that he surrounds himself with “losers”9 — he is quite proud of this — and the fact that this clown-show of depravity, grifting and idiocy fails at everything is utterly inevitable. The worst possible people in every position.
Successful large entities, whether it’s the USA or Microsoft or Tesla, have a surprising amount of inertia, and can seem immune from the consequences of poor decisions for years on end, rolling forward on the success of the past. Until reality is no longer something they can hide from and the costs all come due at once. The illusion of invincibility disappears and the many faults are laid bare.
The staggering level of damage that has been done to the United States by this circus in barely over a year cannot be overstated. I’d like to say that there’s an easy way out of this — “just vote blue in the midterms and voila, problem solved and everything is fixed!”10 — but the sad truth is that the damage is severe enough that decline is essentially guaranteed now. I say this with no glee, as not only do I not want to see the good Americans hurt, the fall of the US will invariably drag Canada along with it.
Canada has been rapidly diversifying away from the US, not only because it’s an utterly unreliable circus (with shocking levels of in-the-open corruption just tolerated as a normal way things work, when in any functioning democracy with actual laws this stuff would see scumbags rotting in prison), but also because it’s a rapidly declining empire.
The USD is done as the international currency of exchange. There is no going back. US payment networks are doomed everywhere they exist outside the US. US military suppliers are going to find extremely rough waters ahead. US organizations that always lean on the government to make threats to avoid accountability in foreign nations are not going to like what’s coming. US debt sales are going to find a cold market in the years ahead, and it’s unlikely those multi-trillion dollar deficits are going to be a thing of the future.
Any agreements with US governments are worthless. Trump keeps flapping his idiot mouth about NATO, but the truth is that every NATO country is moving to a post-America reality, and absolutely no one expects the US to lift a finger if it were needed. Several NATO countries are going to come out of this as new nuclear powers (joining France and the UK, both of whom are going to expand their arsenal), and indeed we’re going to see unimaginable nuclear proliferation in the next few years.
Endless words can be written about the generational, deadly destruction this crime spree has meted out to US institutions. All to then post a two trillion dollar deficit. Just shocking, stunning failure in every single dimension, which is precisely why they’re inventing some new distraction with every passing day.
There are good odds that in the near future Taiwan simply joins China in a “two-state” solution (or I guess three-state?). Many alliances are going to shift in a way that Americans are going to be unpleasantly surprised by. Elections, it turns out, have serious consequences.
Pax Americana is over, and everyone is going to suffer the consequences. Most especially Americans who have lived in ignorance of the systems that made them the richest large country on Earth.
Even American media domination…I don’t think it continues. The lustre and illusion of America is pretty much tarnished worldwide. In a way that can’t be rehabilitated. The mythology has been undone, and every time that flabbering clown starts saying his vile, impossibly stupid nonsense and lies it suffers further blows.
So everything is going to keep seeming to be normal for a while, but it isn’t. The collapse is well underway11 ↩
Likely coordinated through Russia who was willing to give up Venezuela in return for some concessions on Ukraine. Ukraine and European allies are rightly treating the US as an untrustworthy partner. As an aside, Trump keeps talking about weapons to Ukraine, but just to be clear, the US is giving nothing. Everything is being bought by Europe, Canada and others ↩
Think of Maduro as Venezuela’s Trump: A criminal grifter stealing from the people and ruining everything for his own enrichment and adulation. Pretty bad, right? ↩
I should clarify that I’m not talking about the intellectually disabled, most of whom are actually wonderful people and have nothing to do with this. I’m talking about the mediocre 90 IQ dumbshits that absolutely dominate political discourse. They’re intelligent enough to realize that they aren’t exactly intellectual giants, but insecure enough that they think that they can rewrite the rules by just being as loud and as obnoxious as possible. This is MAGA. ↩
The moment someone is exposed for fraud, sexual assault, or worse is the day they make the magical transition to being hardcore MAGA, probably claiming to be born again evangelicals to complete the scam. This act has become so transparently laughable, but somehow it still works on the ultra-dumb contingent ↩
The NDP was once the “worker’s party”, advocating for worker rights and social programs for Canadians. Somehow they have evolved into the mass immigration party (perversely, as this is the greatest assault on workers and worker rights), coupled with making their core positions fringe issues and identities, devolving more and more away from rational positions. The NDP largely continues as a going concern via protest votes by people who are angry at the other two parties ↩
Having Americans giving their takes on the “problems” of Canada — usually fringe nonsense — given the current situation there, is pretty bizarre stuff. It is a stunning lack of introspection when people in an unbelievably corrupt, failing empire/plutocracy have to desperately scramble to find fringe examples in other countries to feel better about their own lot.
I think having a pants-shitting, dementia-addled self-dealing rapist criminal dismantling democracy, while plying by far the most corrupt administration in US history (tinpot dictator levels of corruption, in the open), might be a bigger concern than some fringe politician in Canada saying an acronym you don’t like. What a pathetic situation ↩
As pathetic as this administration is, nothing tops the pathos that are JD Vance and Marco Rubio. These clowns aren’t as stupid as the rest of Trump’s criminal administration — both are fairly smart guys, which is why they both have a long history of warning about the dangers of Donald Trump — but they thought they could wallow around in the sewage and then redeem themselves at the end. There isn’t going to be a redemption arc. These foolish opportunists cooked themselves, and their future is burned. To ensure this, Trump periodically has both of them go in front of the cameras and eat dog turds, figuratively, in displays of shocking humiliation ↩
Everyone realizes that there will be no fair and open elections with this administration, right? Surely people aren’t walking blind. Trump’s various illegal voting proclamations are purely to muddy the waters such that he/they (his criminal garbage conspirators like Mike “Fanatical Evangelical Nutbag” Johnson) can dismiss results they don’t like. That’s how criminal liars work, and it was utter folly to give this malignant narcissist the reigns again.
Trump is openly promising pardons to everyone in his circle, overtly and directly encouraging criminal acts. This is so astonishingly outrageous that it should lead to a military ouster of his whole administration. It is perverse. But the US has fallen so far and so fast that it’s just another day in the crime-spree that is Trump, a foolish clown that American voters decided to give another shot at looting the country. Astonishingly sad stuff. ↩
The most bizarre cope for the obvious decline are those so deep in the cult that they try to make lemonade out of these lemons. Apparently being a collapsed once-empire led by oligarchs is some achievement. Because you’ll, like, make your own gravel or something ↩
Recently monitored my basement for radon levels, discovering it was approaching 200 Bq/m3. That’s at the edge of recommended corrective action, according to Health Canada.
Canada has significant uranium deposits across the country, and radon is frequently cited as something to be aware of. And we’re big fans of basements, exacerbating the issue.
As a bit of background, radon is a noble gas that is a decay product of uranium (through a long and complex decay chain with many other elements in between). Once the decay chain makes it to radon, it can permeate through rocks and soil where it finds its way into our homes, usually via the basement.
Amazingly radon only has a half-life of 3.8 days, then decaying to polonium-218 and then lead-214, then to a more stable lead-210 (still radioactive, but with a half-life in the decades). The transition from radon to lead-210 happens in just a couple of hours, but in between there are radioactive solid particles that attach to dust and the like and can be breathed in. Those particles throw off DNA-damaging alpha-radiation when they decay, so they’re best avoided where possible.
Alpha particles only travel a few cm, and can be blocked by something as simple as paper. They can’t even make it through skin. But if you breathe in those transition elements and it then decays internally, the alpha particles can cause DNA mutations in the lungs that could lead to cancer. For the same reason you don’t want to eat sources of alpha particles.
Anyway, being just under the remediation limit wasn’t comforting, so I researched things I could do quickly. One easy recommendation was to seal off the sump pump, if one is in place. And indeed there is the classic Canadian home sump-pump in this basement, with a pit with an installed pump to ensure that groundwater doesn’t rise too much around the base of the home. It is the one area of the foundation where there isn’t a thick cement layer blocking gases from getting in.
Sealing it off was nothing more than some plastic wrap taped to the discharge pipe and then tented securely around the base, preventing the circulation of air around the sump pump from mixing with the general basement air. There are a number of third party plastic covers that achieve the same goal.
Almost immediately the radon level dropped to below 50 Bq/m3. Over time an imperceptibly thin layer of Pb-210 will cover the inside of this enclosure as the radon is forced to complete its decay chain in this plastic prison, throwing off a minute number of alpha particles that fall harmlessly off in a remote corner of the basement.
I’m a big fan of 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate: 4 eX*) and RTS strategy games, my experience starting with Empire on the Atari ST1.
I played every Civilization (4X) game, every Command & Conquer (RTS) and Warcraft (before it became an RPG it was an RTS). Every Age of Empires (RTS).
A 4X game, as background, is usually turn based and slow-paced, where an RTS is generally more fast-paced. Some RTS games have a significant overlap in philosophy with 4X games — the goal is still the same 4Xs — just at an accelerated pace.
But I always wanted more. There were always features that I wished these games supported. A sphere-based map, for instance, is missing in most of these games. A basic, customizable logic system (“AI”) for units so the game doesn’t end up being mired in bureaucratic hand-holding and micromanagement in the later stages, as it does in most Civ games for instance.
I’ve had various abandoned mini-projects to scratch my own itch and create a multiplayer 4X RTS game that would satisfy all of my wants and learnings from years of playing these games, but it was always a side project that I didn’t want to spend too much time on. It couldn’t interfere with normal professional pursuits, and it required that I stay motivated enough for the side-project to proceed. If the meat of the project — the rewarding part — was behind a lot of preparation work, it was easy to get waylaid. And the moment you’re talking about a multiplayer game on the internet, there is a lot of preparation work.
So it ends up being a chicken/egg thing where there are a lot of things I know that are necessary for a v1 end up being things I just don’t want to work on, so I just put it off.
I recently restarted this initiative, starting with Claude Code/Opus 4.6 as my assistant.
What a revolution in side projects!
Suddenly I’m blazing through the unpleasant-but-necessary structural work that makes the meat of the project possible. In three days I’ve accomplished more than I have in years of starts-and-stops on this venture. I’m still overseeing every line of code, the entire design and every interaction between services, but the structure that builds out around these is close to effortless, comparatively.
Magical. My motivation has stayed sky-high.
At every stage I’ve had to leverage decades of knowledge and experience in guiding the LLM — this isn’t anywhere near the state where a layman can “vibe code” something like this, and I’ve had to pull it back from making a few terrible choices along the way that would have utterly doomed the project — but it’s like having a team of very competent senior devs doing the most time-consuming parts with oversight.
Fascinating stuff.
I’ve never developed a real project in Rust in my professional career2. I’ve done some brief tutorials, know the philosophy and trade-offs of the language and tooling, and respect what they’ve accomplished, but it never came into my sphere on the projects I’ve worked on.
Nonetheless, for the gateway, api and game server, Rust3 is being used4. It is the proper choice for a variety of reasons.
Security. Efficiency and performance. The ecosystem of tooling. Rust is perfect for this use.
It turns out that Claude is actually a pretty great Rust developer, so it enabled me to use the right choice despite some temporary discomfort. And while of course most modern languages are largely fungible in a way, auditing the code has given me an insanely rapid deep dive into Rust. It was a very rapid acclimation, and I’ve rapidly achieved a pretty high degree of Rust competency.
Friends would stay over during summer break and we’d spend sweltering summer nights taking turns at the keyboard completing our Empire rounds. Eventually the sun would come up, and then we’d bike ride to a beach 16km away. Great times. ↩
My professional life has been filled with Python, Go, C(++), Java, Swift, (Object) Pascal, C# / .NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, among others. To some degree all modern languages are variations on a theme, and it is usually fairly easy for an expert in one to become competent at another. Rust is, I think, the least like the others and the one with the highest learning curve to transition to. ↩
Rust has every indication of being the future of compiled code, for a wide variety of reasons. ↩
The game runs via a web client, using WebGPU or WebGL as available on the client, so that side is being developed using Typescript, Three.js, Vite and node. ↩
This entry was inspired by an email I received about my prior entry concerning whey-producing fungus, so apologies for harping on this subject.
The food world has been in a bit of a protein hype cycle for the past few years, with seemingly every category of food offering protein-enhanced alternatives, usually at a significant price premium.
Tortillas, Breads. Drinks. Cereals. Everything comes in +protein variations1.
So there is a bit of fatigue on the topic. Whenever discussions arise about protein options on sites like Reddit — say discussing a new protein drink, for instance — invariably the top ranked replies will be some variation of “I’m so sick of all this protein stuff. You are all getting enough protein already so cut it out with this silly fad. Care about fibre instead2!”. Like clockwork.
I think most people would be shocked at how little protein they actually get in an ordinary Western diet3. While many people might hit the 0.8g/kg RDA minimum (largely via low quality proteins), few hit the optimal 1.0 - 1.2g/kg RDA (1.2 - 2.2g/kg for athletes). And this is a heightened concern for older adults where 1.2 - 1.5g/kg is necessary to avoid sarcopenia. Ideally high in glycine and leucine.
I’m about 78kg, and auditing my own diet — a reasonably healthy diet by most standards — I was nowhere near 78g of protein per day on average, much less the optimal 93g4. And note that I eat lots of meat, eggs, cheese, milk, and so on.
I started paying more attention to protein in my diet, and increasingly supplemented protein drinks and bars when I find I’m falling short of targets. I more conscientiously considered protein as a macro in meals.
Your body can create carbs (e.g. glucose) from fats or some proteins, but your body can’t create proteins from oils or carbs. It is essential.
If you aren’t actively targeting a level, you’re probably falling short as a result of incentives in our food supply chains.
Protein is the expensive macronutrient, while carbs and fats are incredibly cheap. This yields supermarkets that have the bulk of their floor space occupied by negligible protein products: There are an endless number of ways to remix flour, sugar, oil and flavourings into an unending array of products, and these are what many people end up filling their daily caloric intake with. When products cut costs, invariably it is the protein that is downsized, the space filled in with carbs and fats.
Many people would benefit from increasing their protein intake, ideally without increasing their saturated fat consumption.
I can’t broach this topic without noting RFK Jr. and his MAHA movement, where they claim they’re going to “end the war on protein”. Which is a weird claim to make in the middle of a protein craze. I suspect their original slogan was that they were going to “end the war on saturated fat”, but cooler heads prevailed. ↩
Why not both? Most people are also painfully deficient in fibre-intake. A lot of protein-enriched options often crank up the fibre as well, so two birds one feeder kind of thing. It was never a choice between one or the other. ↩
I mean, supposedly the average person eats their minimum RDA of protein, but monitoring my own macros that certainly wasn’t true for me. Are people eating multiple burgers every day and having 3500 calorie diets? I guess like everything your mileage may vary. ↩
Now that I’m in my 50s I should probably start categorizing myself with the “older adults”. Hard to believe, I know. But that would push my ideal intake up to 117 grams a day. About 19 large eggs a day. Easy. ↩
To get it out of the whey (lol), I’m not a vegan. Nor a vegetarian. Though I respect the conviction and choices of people who choose those paths.
I drink milk. I use protein powder that was extracted from milk, as whey happens to be the perfect protein. It is complete, fast-absorbing and highly bioavailable. It’s the gold standard of protein sources.
Most people don’t get enough protein, particularly high quality proteins like leucine. Carbs and fats are our fuel sources, while protein is the essential building blocks.
Meats are extremely resource intensive and have some attached moral issues, and you can’t supplement some meats in your drinks or processed foods. I mean, I guess you could, but that probably wouldn’t taste very good. It would probably be weird if your high protein sliced bread has chunks of chicken in it.
Milk is similarly resource intensive, requiring a whole process that most people would rather not think about.
Occasionally I take a look to see if there has been any progress in synthetic or engineered whey. Turns out there actually has been progress.
Some groups (for instance Verley) have used the genes responsible for whey production in cows and encoded them in fungi (e.g. aspergillus oryzae). They let the fungus loose in a vat, feeding it a supply of sugars, and the fungi ferments that into whey proteins. When extracted and purified it is indistinguishable from milk-sourced whey proteins.
Fascinating stuff. I doubt it is economically competitive, but once perfected and scaled up who knows. One day we might have Fungi Farms keeping society healthy and nourished. I guess we already have mushroom farms, of course, but expanding on that.
Found this all very interesting.
There is something magical and motivating about March. After the sparse sunlight and extreme cold of the winter, feeling the sun’s warmth during the lengthening days is liberating. We’re in that transitional period where it’s -12C this morning, but it will be 17C in just a couple of days, veering back and forth as the seasons battle.
I love winter, and all the seasons we enjoy here in Ontario. But there is a point where the cold and glum has overstayed its welcome, and by the end of February we’re done with it.
Time to do some big things.
I wrote previously about the Apple Neural Engine. Came across a fun entry this morning where a skillful practitioner delves into the hardware. I am a little skeptical of their INT8 conclusion — the industry standard of FP16 x 2 = INT8 only holds where one FP16 op translates into two INT8 operations, and it would be nonsensical if you just wasted half of each operation — but for a reverse-engineered effort it is fantastic.
FlashAttention-2 is a Python package that can significantly improve the performance of attention mechanisms in transformer-based models when running on nvidia hardware1. A 7-10x speedup. It does it by some clever memory optimizations, leading to more of the attention operations running within SRAM instead of constantly having to communicate back to GPU RAM (e.g. HBM).
Installing it is often a beast. While there are prebuilt wheels (those are from the official source, but there are community wheel builds as well, offering a more comprehensive collection), builds need to be targeted to a specific combination of flash-attn version, GPU hardware generation (e.g. Blackwell), CUDA version, Torch version, and platform (e.g. x86-64, ARM64, etc.). The community builds has some 384 different variations, and even then it often isn’t sufficient.
So most of the time you end up building the wheel on your hardware. This is the point where a lot of people have issues and abandon the effort and just go flash-attn-less.
It’s a resource intensive build. The ninja build system will use all available cores, each build thread consuming enormous resources, which you might restrain by setting MAX_JOBS to some low number, maybe even 1. Still you’re going to find the build consuming enormous amounts of memory, grinding into paging hell, because while ninja only uses one thread, it calls out to NVCC which then has its own horizontal scaling tendencies, spawning out many copies of CICC (CUDA Internal C/C++ Compiler). CICC makes heavy use of nvidia’s CUTLASS templating engine, and every instance is going to consume 5 to 8GB, even when doing marginal processing.
You reign CICC’s insanity in with NVCC_THREADS, which will restrain NVCC from going wild with its own process spawning tendencies.
# 1. Restrict the build system to 1 file at a time
export MAX_JOBS=1
# 2. Restrict the CUDA compiler to 1 frontend process at a time
export NVCC_THREADS=1
# 3. Target Blackwell (change for your target arch)
export TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST="12.0"
# 4. Build without isolation
pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation --force-reinstallWith both thread-scale optionals set to 1 a build will take hours and hours, but it isn’t going to churn through your flash storage endurance endlessly paging and will actually succeed. Higher numbers are viable on decently equipped systems.
Just an FYI. I’ve encountered this on just about every new install and finally thought I’d comment on it. It’s the NVCC_THREADS that seldom gets mentioned, when it is by far the most effective way of reigning in outrageous memory needs to install a package.
there are ports for AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon variants, but the main use is against nvidia ↩
Another Winter Olympics has come and gone. It had some moments.
I’m not a huge Olympics watcher — not even for the big nationalistic showdowns — and honestly many of the events are positively ridiculous.
Like, how many people on the planet are doing luge or bobsled? There should be some minimum accessibility/participation floors for sports to be included, and events that require enormous facilities yet only have a tiny handful of involved athletes worldwide probably shouldn’t make the cut.
Kudos to Norway and the Netherlands on just completely dominating again. These countries absolutely owned cross-country skiing and speed skating, respectively, and should be proud of such a stunning overachievement. And to be fair, cross-country skiing and speed skating are both fairly accessible, or at least the base competencies are.
And congrats to the US on winning gold in both gender divisions of hockey. Great performances, and the US dominated opponents in seeding rounds so thoroughly they looked unbeatable. Did not think those games would make it to overtime.
Though the aftermath of that win, particularly the men’s hockey team, has been…well, unfortunate. From the most unathletic FBI director ever trying to steal some of that glory on the taxpayer’s dime, in just a grotesquely inappropriate “me too!” bit of selfishness, to Trump pushing AI fantasies about how he’d win the gold himself and beat up Canadian players, all while dismissing the women’s hockey team’s accomplishment…good god. Just world-level sore-winner cringe.
Unbelievably pathetic, third-world despot type behaviour. North Korea-level stuff. Teams turned into political pawns to try to scrabble for some win among a year of chaos and losing.
Congrats on the win. It’s too bad a political movement tarnished it for their own gain. These vile goblins try to drag everyone down with them, and anyone foolish enough to help normalize their deplorable, childish behaviour has to be considered a willing participant.
Early this month I mentioned that I was taking on the CMHA push-up challenge. Proud to say that I just hit 2000 moments ago. Three days early! Every one of those two thousand push-ups has been full range and of excellent form, as I’m a stickler for stuff like that.
Is this impressive? No. Am I proud that I stuck with it? Yup. Actually incorporated more of a daily target for a variety of similar exercises and will maintain this as an ongoing thing.
Conditioning is a fascinating thing. Three days in my chest and triceps absolutely killed, and carried from day to day, and eking out 10 reps was unpleasant. I had to go to the well frequently through the day to try not to fall behind. Now on day twenty, there is zero residual pain or fatigue day to day, and banging out 25 reps on demand is easy.
To try to spin this as broadly wise, we all have an enormous number of ways of staying fit without needing expensive equipment, memberships, and so on. The basics are all that most people need. For almost all of my adult life I’ve carried one or more gym memberships, taking advantage of it sparingly. I’ve probably accomplished more just doing a random challenge this month.
A few days ago I noted that I use a lot of Apple devices because of their hardware excellence. CPUs, top-quality screens and speakers and batteries, even storage systems are just class leaders. And performance on Apple devices is seemingly effortless, where my entire history with competitors is that it was basically just a boast, especially in mobile form where if you actually use the capabilities you’ll have blasting fans and a 30-minute battery life.
I’m looking forward to competitors legitimately catching up and giving us options. So when I saw a huge wave of hype-pieces for Intel’s new Panther Lake class of processor, it caught my attention. Pieces with titles like “Intel’s M1 Moment is Finally Here”.
What almost none of these reviewers disclosed, however, is that Intel did a whole press junket where they flew all of these guys out to Intel’s Arizona fab for a whole dog and pony show, wined and dined them, and basically ensured that they would write fawning pieces. Whatever claims any of these people make about how this doesn’t coerce them is delusional nonsense. It instantly puts a shroud over any sense of credibility.
This junket thing is a very old strategy that is massively corrupting, and it is done specifically because it’s an easy way to buy off foolish people who will declare how it totally doesn’t influence them at all and their words are all their own and…
Anyway, it’s an interesting processor. Still uncompetitive single-core speeds, but it makes it up in cores while still being surprisingly power efficient, and it features a very decent GPU.
Some of the makers of laptops with this chip have stepped back from the dodgy “stick a bunch of stickers all over the laptop” garbage they’ve traditionally done as they target the Apple market. Most reviews comment on this (remember the junket, where they were fed narratives), vendors amazingly realizing that sticking of a bunch of ridiculous looking stickers all over a device is not wanted. Probably still going to stuff a bunch of crapware in the OS, though.
I will check it out. Give me a durable, robust laptop featuring this processor at a price that reflects that it still isn’t Apple Silicon tier and it’ll do numbers.