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brian m. carlson

bk2204@mastodon.social

<p>Polyglot programmer, writer, cyclist; lover of footnotes and epigraphs; cat parent to Tara and Chester; lives in Toronto; speaks en/es/fr/(a little)de; queer, genderqueer</p>

Posts

  • Post #4346381

    The Government of Canada is collecting feedback about AI transparency and what, if any actions, should be taken. The form is a bit long, but I think it&#39;s worth filling out. And you do not need to be a Canadian resident to participate. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/have-your-say-advancing-ai-transparency-canada

  • Post #2146686

    An interesting article about a study which suggests why cats leave food unfinished. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/04/08/japan/cats-meals-unfinished/

  • Post #2146685

    It&amp;#39;s 4°C, so after dinner we had golden Oreo strawberry gelato. Because gelato.

  • Post #2146684

    J&amp;#39;ai visité la bibliothèque Richview aujourd&amp;#39;hui (en Etobicoke) pour emprunter deux romans policiers français. (J&amp;#39;habite au centre-ville.) Je sais que c&amp;#39;est possible de demander la livraison de livres à une bibliothèque plus près, mais j&amp;#39;aime bien l&amp;#39;opportunité de voir d&amp;#39;autres parties de la ville. Les bibliothécaires était fantastique, comme d&amp;#39;habitude.

  • Post #2146682

    If you have a non-discrimination policy, it&amp;#39;s important to have that on your jobs website and that it include specific categories. It&amp;#39;s always been my policy that I won&amp;#39;t work for a company that doesn&amp;#39;t have sexual orientation and gender identity or expression in their non-discrimination policy. Local laws don&amp;#39;t always protect queer people and in any event, it&amp;#39;s easier to enforce company policy than it is to force legal compliance. &amp;quot;We&...

  • Post #2146681

    It&amp;#39;s nice to see that OpenSSL 4 came out. And even nicer to see that it removed SSL v3.

  • Post #2146680

    At some point last year, I installed KDE and my avatar in the system settings got set to this SVG, which looks quite nice when rendered as a circular avatar. Since I didn&amp;#39;t like any of the macOS avatars I had on my work Mac, I thought I&amp;#39;d use this, but I had the darndest time finding the logo. It lives in my home directory as .face (in SVG format), but I cannot for the life of me find this anywhere in any Debian package, which is where it must clearly have come from. 🤷

  • Post #2146679

    Vim has recently added the modelinestrict option to restrict modelines to a small allowlist. This is much like https://github.com/ciaranm/securemodelines (which works back to Vim 7), but built-in. It&amp;#39;s a big improvement in security for those who want to set an option or two (I use it for spelllang) but want to reduce the risk of a vulnerability.

  • Post #2146678

    We rented a car to drive up to Barrie to do some cycling yesterday and we came back during rush hour. On Allen Road, where traffic backs up waiting to turn but there&amp;#39;s a subway in the median, the TTC has installed little ads at each bridge. They say things like, &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Next time take the TTC.&amp;quot; I&amp;#39;m fully in favour and if I didn&amp;#39;t have to do the inconvenient thing and actually return the rental car, I wo...

  • Post #2146677

    I replaced our home server case from a tower case that&amp;#39;s over 20 years old to a rackmount case this morning. (And yes, we have a rack from a former employer who wanted to get rid of it.) I&amp;#39;d wanted to do this a long time, but when the extremely ancient and somewhat nonstandard case fan started making awful noises, I took the opportunity to upgrade.

  • Post #2146676

    When I first learned the term “86,” I understood it to mean that a restaurant was out of something, or that they were ejecting a patron. I later on came to understand its additional meaning as “to kill.” I think that, given those multiple meanings, one can hardly imply a serious threat without substantial further context. Arguing that we should eject a politician from office is a fine and noble democratic tradition, one clearly protected by freedom of speech.

  • Post #2146675

    I registered a .ca domain yesterday and there is a Canadian presence requirement that all registrants must satisfy. You have to pick from a list to indicate which criterion you meet. One of the options is &amp;quot;Her Majesty the Queen&amp;quot;. Note that this is not the Monarch in Right of Canada or a province (that&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Government&amp;quot;). This is Elizabeth the Second and her successors personally registering the domain. I am very curious how many such domains are regi...

  • Post #2146674

    With discussion of expanding Billy Bishop Airport on the Toronto Islands, I decided to see what the difference in travel time is between Pearson and Billy Bishop from Union Station. 6 minutes. The Union Pearson Express takes 25 minutes and the 509 Harbourfront streetcar takes 19. The only practical advantage to flying our of Billy Bishop for me is that it&amp;#39;s a smaller airport and security is shorter. I&amp;#39;d happily spend the extra 6 minutes in transit to keep the islands and harbo...

  • Post #726159

    The AP has done an article on the Feline Oscars. Because you need more cat pictures in your life. https://apnews.com/photo-gallery/romania-cat-show-photos-41dd948ce63a4c3660507867c68124b8