tunetardis

joined 2 years ago
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Summer is an awful season, and air conditioning is a terrible invention and a mistake in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 5 points 59 minutes ago

I do agree with you that summer is overrated. I don't hate it per se, but feel it not up to the hype. There are things I dread about the summer. The bugs (particularly ticks with their lyme disease which seem to be everywhere now), the allergies, the heat waves with their oppressive humidity and crappy air quality, the anxiety-inducing state of my yard, and in general, just becoming a sweaty mess after performing even the most minor of errands.

It's not all bad though. I appreciate the longer daylight hours, the improved fresh produce, the better motor control when not having to wear heavy clothing, and not slipping all over the place on the ice.

I guess I feel every season has its pros and cons, yet somehow summer in popular culture enjoys this vaunted reputation above all the others which may be undeserved?

Trump might have to ask foes like Trudeau for emergency eggs in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 49 points 16 hours ago

Oof.

Or oeuf, as we sometimes say in Canada.

Tradeoffs in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 1 points 2 days ago

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

Ontario: TODAY IS ELECTION DAY in c/canada
[–] tunetardis 3 points 3 days ago

fwiw it does actually tell you where your polling station is, which I was confused about after finding conflicting info online.

Where do you want to live? in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Reminds me of when I was up in Iqaluit (far north in Canada). The best way I could describe it is imagine Mos Eisley if it were on the planet Hoth.

Ontario: TODAY IS ELECTION DAY in c/canada
[–] tunetardis 14 points 3 days ago (4 children)

If you didn't get a voter card, you can get an electronic one by downloading the app. I did that and it was pretty painless. You still need to go to the polling station with a piece of ID but the app generates a bar code they scan and you're in and out of there pretty quick.

Pixelfed ebbing in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 2 points 4 days ago

Ah ok, thanks!

Tradeoffs in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I'm not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I've had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I've learned you have to follow up on it a bit.

Tradeoffs in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 19 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It's batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I'm going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can't remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it's just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I'm not good at that yet.

Toronto’s Pride 2025 festival in peril as large sponsors pull funding amid U.S. backlash against diversity in c/toronto
[–] tunetardis 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Pride Toronto, the non-profit organization behind the annual 2SLGBTQI+ parade, did not disclose the names of the sponsors as it hopes to persuade them to continue their funding.

Well if they don't, please do drag their names through the mud.

Albertan spearheads parliamentary petition to keep Donald Trump out of Canada in c/canadapolitics
[–] tunetardis 7 points 4 days ago

signed

Pixelfed ebbing in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What caused the jump in the first place? I only just opened an account myself because the folks who run my home instance lemmy.ca started up pixelfed.ca about a week ago and I decided to check it out.

10
A busy transition coming for City of Kingston's garbage and recycling collection services (www.kingstonist.com)
 

Big changes are coming. To summarize the main points:

  • The city is switching to standardized bins for garbage and compost that can be lifted and dumped onto trucks mechanically.
  • This will be phased in over the next several years starting in the suburbs.
  • 120L bins will be standard issue: one for garbage and one for compost.
  • You can upgrade to a 240L bin if you need one, but it costs $120 initially + $196/year. The initial fee will be waived if you switch to the bigger bin within the first 3 months, however.
  • The city is outsourcing blue and grey box collection to a company called Emterra Environmental. Whether they choose to go with bins also is uncertain, but that wouldn't change before 2026.
  • You can still bring stuff to the residential drop-off at KARC for the time being.
14
Local News Is Dying. The Consequences Are Worse than You Think (thewalrus.ca)
 

Section relevant to Kingston:

DONNA FORSTER and her husband, Joe Fardella, experienced the retrenchment of local journalism first hand on Thursday, July 18, 2024, when they settled in to watch the 6 p.m. local news in Kingston, Ontario. They expected to see Bill Hutchins, the affable news anchor on CKWS Global News Kingston, deliver the better part of an hour of local news and interviews from the station’s downtown broadcast centre, just as he’d done for twenty-seven years. Instead, their TV screen was blank.

“We just had no idea what had happened,” Forster says. The next day, they learned that the Kingston station had fallen victim to spending cuts by its troubled parent company, Corus Entertainment. When the revamped supper hour newscast appeared four days later, it was unrecognizable. About two dozen on-air personalities, reporters, and support staff at CKWS and the two local Corus-owned radio stations lost their jobs. Hutchins, then president of the broadcast centre’s Unifor local, says that as recently as 2023, the station had seven full- and part-time videographers covering Kingston and its environs. Following the July purge, there were three. What was a locally produced sixty-minute show that included local weather, sports, entertainment, and news about everything from city politics to community food drives now starts at 5:30 p.m. and lasts a half hour. The truncated newscast, anchored out of Peterborough, is recorded and shown again at 6:30 p.m. Producers in Toronto determine the story lineup.

“There’s far, far less information about Kingston now—they usually have one Kingston story, one Brockville story, and one Belleville story,” says Forster, a sixty-two-year-old social worker. By her reckoning, news about Kingston and the surrounding area now lasts about four minutes. As someone who eschews social media, Forster increasingly thinks of that blank television screen she saw back in July as a metaphor for feeling less connected and aware of what’s going on in her community.

She is not alone. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t run into someone who wants to know what happened, why it happened,” Hutchins says. “When you take a seventy-year-old station with deep community roots, and I mean deep, and you just rip them out of the ground one day, people feel hurt, they feel abandoned, they feel lost.” CKWS, he says, specialized in “a little bit of everything that reflected the community,” and people tell him they are struggling to make sense of the remaining local news offerings.

Christine Sypnowich, a Queen’s University philosophy professor and chair of the Coalition of Kingston Communities, says the loss of a strong local television newscast creates “a really bad situation.” The coalition, which brings together nineteen neighbourhood groups, counted on CKWS to cover local issues that it then pursued further in its report cards on openness and transparency at city hall. The station also helped the coalition share its concerns with the public: a CKWS reporter typically sought an interview within hours of receiving a coalition press release. Nowadays, Sypnowich says, attracting media attention is more “hit and miss.”

The CKWS cuts are the latest symptom of decline in Kingston’s once-rich local media environment. The storied Kingston Whig Standard newspaper, winner of two prestigious Michener Awards for public service journalism and a host of other honours, is “less and less relevant,” Sypnowich says. The Postmedia Network–owned newspaper publishes daily only four times a week and is so diminished it sometimes runs Sypnowich’s press releases verbatim. There are just five unionized staff left in its newsroom, down from sixty-nine in 1992.

Kingstonist.com, a digital news outlet, is working hard to fill the gaps, Sypnowich says. But it is a relatively small operation, with just three full-time journalists, a manager who occasionally helps out with news coverage, and a budget for freelancers. Forster and Fardella recently stepped up to support the publication, but their willingness to pay for digital news makes them a rarity. While almost three quarters of Canadians (72 percent) access news online, a majority still believe journalism is best served up free, with 57 percent indicating they won’t pay anything at all for it. Nationwide, only 15 percent of us opened our wallets to support digital news, according to data published in 2024. Just over half of those subscriptions (54 percent) were discounted.

IMO the Kingstonist is awesome! Definitely worth supporting them with a subscription if you have the means. If not, visit them anyway and stay informed.

34
UCalgary alum Sasha Ivanov creates an app to help shoppers identify Canadian products (ucalgary.ca)
submitted 1 week ago by tunetardis to c/buycanadian
3 comments fedilink
 

The app is called Maple Scan. Just downloaded it but have yet to give it a whirl.

297
South Africa suspends American businesses and mineral exports (www.maravipost.com)
 

I wish I could find another source to confirm this, but if true, that's basically the nuclear option to kick out all American companies and halt all mineral exports to the US.

23
ICC issues arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister and Hamas chief over alleged war crimes (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 3 months ago by tunetardis to c/canadapolitics
0 comments fedilink
 

If I'm not mistaken, this means Netanyahu would be arrested on the spot if he set foot on Canadian soil. Trudeau has indicated as much. For its part, The US does not recognize the ICC's authority.

6
One day at Ribfest (self.lemmy_guess)
 

Every year in September, the city where I live holds a ribs and craft beer festival on the fairgrounds. This year, the band I play with landed a gig there.

Everything was going well until, partway through a set, I noticed one guy who looked a little out of place at such a venue. He was dressed in a 3 piece suit, brandishing a large briefcase, and walking around purposefully. He looked like a lawyer. And wouldn't you know it, he's striding right up towards the stage. Uh-oh…

What happened next stopped the show and left us all with jaws dropped. I'll leave it at that for now.

21
Maternity madness (self.lemmy_guess)
 

I seem to recall an incident the day my daughter was born that saw 3 large axe-wielding men bursting open doors in the maternity ward as alarms blazed across the hospital. And yes, it was my fault.

236
Lemmy should have a community called lemmy_guess (self.showerthoughts)
 

Posts would describe bizarre situations people have found themselves in, and commenters would take a stab at what put them there.

46
Getting into the Senate is the politician equivalent of an academic getting tenure (self.showerthoughts)
 

I have no idea how true this is? It is just a random shower thought.

It may be more true where I am in Canada than in the US? Here, senators are essentially appointed for life. I understand US senators are elected but have longer terms and generally more stable careers than their counterparts? In either case, there seems to be a lot of prestige that comes with the position.

39
Major Russian disinfo site featuring anti-Trudeau articles prompts calls for new focus at public inquiry (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by tunetardis to c/canada
5 comments fedilink
11
Canadian university cities facing surprising rental market downturn (www.theglobeandmail.com)
submitted 6 months ago by tunetardis to c/kingston_ontario
3 comments fedilink
 

Of relevance to Kingston:

For the last 10 years, Amélie Brack’s property-management company had no trouble renting out both halves of a duplex near St. Lawrence College in Kingston, one of Canada’s most notable student-dominated cities renowned for its high proportion of out-of-town students, with both St. Lawrence and Queen’s University in the area. This year, it’s still not rented out as the fall school term is about to start – a first for her. It’s not the only unit going empty, after demand for student housing in Kingston drastically fell in the past few months. “Up until last year, we would get 25 to 50 inquiries per week in August. This year, it’s been crickets. It’s quite a surprise,” said Ms. Brack, leasing manager for Limestone Property Management.

It’s a phenomenon that hasn’t shown up yet in any official statistical reports. But it’s one that many at ground level are observing, a noticeable U-turn from the last few years where there were often frantic bidding wars for student housing in the months leading up to the start of the fall term. They point to the cap on international students as a significant factor behind the drop. “The international student reduction has definitely affected us,” said Ms. Brack, who said that large, multibedroom houses in what’s called the student ghetto in Kingston are also going unrented and owners are finding themselves having to list them for rents closer to what a family could afford, rather than what five desperate students (or their parents) might be willing to pay: $2,700 a month for a four-bedroom, rather than the previous $4,000.

The cap for 2024 was set at 360,000 study permits for the country, a 35-per-cent reduction from the previous year.

In Ontario, internet searches for student housing near universities in Waterloo, Hamilton, and Kingston are down 46 per cent to 55 per cent, Ms. Yiu said.

49
Pierre Poilievre has a housing plan ready for Ottawa’s bureaucrats. Documents reveal some don’t believe it’s ‘grounded in reality’ (www.thestar.com)
submitted 6 months ago by tunetardis to c/canada
11 comments fedilink
 

The thrust of it is that the federal government would withhold funding to municipalities unless they meet certain home-building targets.

Critics worry that this will accelerate suburban sprawl in order to meet quotas. There are some provisions regarding rental housing and transit infrastructure, but with unrealistic time/budgeting constraints.

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