The X3 CPUs were essentially quad cores where one of the cores failed a quality control check. Using a higher end Mobo, it was possible to unlock the fourth core with varying results. This was a cheap consumer Acer prebuilt though, so I didn’t have that option.

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.

I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

Just to remind everyone: Layton pulled this same stunt, toppling Martin’s government.

Refusing to support a sitting government mired in scandal isn’t a stunt—it’s taking a stand. Calling an election wasn’t just the right thing to do; it was unavoidable after the Office of the Auditor General laid bare the extent of corruption. This wasn’t a minor misstep—it was a government blatantly diverting public funds to secure its own re-election. Propping up such a government would have been a betrayal of public trust.

Pinning the blame on Layton because the only viable alternative brokerage party to form government was the Conservative Party is absurd. That’s not on him; it’s on the corrupt Liberal party establishment of the time for destroying their own credibility. A lot of voters are only used to the reformed Liberal Party under Trudeau, but there was a point in time where the Liberal party apparatus was very different.

Let’s be clear: the fault lies with those who abused their power, not with those who refused to stand by and enable it. Misrepresenting this as opportunism is a deliberate distortion of the facts, designed to deflect attention from the real issue—a government that deserved to fall. Just admit you’re pro-corruption and move on.

The pension is a red herring tossed around by morons. If he didn’t get the pension, he’d get a return of his contributions and just invest it in index funds. People make it sound like a $40k/year pension will make or break his retirement plans lmao.

Parliament doesn’t sit until Jan 26. You still have to get input from NDP HQ and the caucus before you go around voting non-confidence. Freeland resigned a day before parliament was about to adjourn and y’all make it sound like it needed to be a gut reaction.

Why is it the responsibility of a third party like the NDP to keep up the Liberals in power?

If the NDP can steal and win former Liberal seats, it seems really dumb not to capitalize on that opportunity. It’s not like the NDP will form government, nor will the Conservatives lose traction in the next 10 months. There’s a Conservative government coming in regardless of how you feel.

All governments everywhere frame their decisions in a way that is akin to gaslighting. If the majority of Canadians disapprove of Pierre’s actions, or we lose the trade war with the US in a meaningful way that deteriorates our standard of living, then they will lose the next election. It’s that simple.

People blame Trudeau now for all of their ills, as though that he has the power to magically make the economy go up and down with a snap of his fingers. The Liberals made investments in key sectors all the time, including housing starts, climate change and social justice, many of which are never going to be meaningfully acknowledged by people that debate politics online. Pierre is ultimately subject to the same political pressures.

Democracy’s success isn’t measured by how one person feels about an incoming government - it’s based on the strength of democratic institutions, and liberal democracies are further characterized by strong civil societies and human rights regimes. If the majority of Canadians want a Conservative government in power - why do you feel that preference shouldn’t be accepted?

It doesn’t sound like you even want a democracy, you just want a one-party autocracy, given that you feel that people shouldn’t be allowed to have fluid political preferences. That’s a failure of democracy - a one party state with all decisions made by someone on Lemmy.

I’m not happy about an incoming Conservative majority government either, but my gut reaction isn’t to start claiming that democracy in Canada has failed. I’m able to calmly acknowledge that there’s a party right now that is probably going to win a plurality of votes and ridings because the majority of voters align with their messaging. That’s not a failure of democracy, that’s a success of democracy.

A Liberal leadership convention would require ~4-5 months. The Liberals would name an interim leader elected by caucus if JT steps down.

So you’re saying that if a viable parliamentary democracy is functioning as intended, it has failed?

How would a Conservative government be equivalent to Trump’s Canada? I don’t really understand the alarmism. This government was already on it’s last days, and there’s always going to be a point in time where things must get worse to get better. Waiting 10 months to expect a different result other than a Conservative majority is just copium, and Trudeau had the option of not calling a snap election in 2021 too.

The Conservatives will win either way. There’s nothing in the next 10 months that would prevent the Conservatives from winning short of PP beating up children.

Voting no confidence now allows the NDP to viably compete for seats like Ottawa Centre where the liberals are weak and rebuild their influence and standing in the house. I don’t see why it’s the duty of every left-leaning party to prop up the Liberals as the natural governing party. Waiting 10 months isn’t going to cause the NDP to sweep into government, it might at best just delay the inevitable if they’re lucky, but more likely delaying will catastrophically wipe out their party by making them look like Liberal stage props.

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It’s important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn’t going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that’s just good practice. You’re far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There’s only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you’re just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don’t really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.