No Food for Thought

La « protection de la langue française » ou « défense de la langue française » est une vieille préoccupation, en particulier au Québec. Certes, la domination de l'anglais « menace » le français, mais pourquoi s’attacher à une langue au point d’en faire des lois aussi contraignantes que la « loi 101 »?

Derrière cet attachement au français, on retrouve un chauvinisme et une peur que la culture québécoise soit confrontée à d’autres cultures. J’ai compris depuis longtemps que cette discrimination en fonction de la langue était un cheval de Troie idéologique, mais l'article « Que restera-t-il de nos idoles nationales ? » en témoigne de façon plus claire que jamais :

Selon le ministre Mathieu Lacombe :

When I bought my first TV 5 years ago, it turned out to have a minor display defect. So after a few months, I replaced my TCL Roku TV and decided to go for a Hisense 55Q8G instead. I thought that going with Android TV was a sure way to get something reliable.🙄

The issues I had with that, even just to watch the national news (CBC’s The National), are appalling. There is the flaky, erratic remote, which seems to eat batteries and has stopped warning me it was time to replace them years ago. There is the TV itself, which sometimes becomes mute.

But the worse part is the YouTube application (which unfortunately is less bad than CBC Gem). I have lost at least 1 person-hour, quite probably 2, just because of bugs browsing the channel to simply play yesterday’s full show. After being intermittent for years, that seems to have been solved a few months ago. But a couple months ago or so, the YouTube app brought a new issue: a prompt to select which account to use. Every time I open it, even though a single account has ever been used on that TV. Of course, without a choice to remember.

I was so sick of all that wasted time that I felt ambivalent when I read There’s more film and television for you to watch than ever before — good luck finding it. Part of me is reassured to know I am not doomed or getting crazy, but the other part has its hope of soon seeing things fine after a few lucky bugfixes lowered.

The positive point is that it prompted me to search for that latest YouTube problem, and see that I am not alone having to select my account every time. And more importantly, find an interesting workaround: using a different application to watch YouTube! So 2 weeks ago, I switched to SmartTube, a free software client which is non-trivial to install, but which has been working better so far. I just hope its main/only developer (Yuriy L) sticks until more people participate and that using it is legal even if it does not display ads.

Towards the end of Factfulness (published 2018), Hans Rosling gets to "The Five Global Risks We Should Worry About". On page 237 (in chapter The Urgency Instinct), the very first one he mentions is a global pandemic. If he was still alive, he would have been extremely proud to have made that call by now.

But I could not help being skeptical of the introduction, which starts with the following claim:

Did the Great Influenza epidemic really reduce life expectancy by 10 years⁉️ For sure, 50 million casualties is huge, but how could it reduce life expectancy by 3/10 in a world with a population of 1.8 billion?
The short answer is: No.
The more elaborate answer is that "life expectancy" is based on expectations, so it depends on what your expectations are. The way statisticians compute life expectancy is by projecting from the yearly mortality rate:

And of course, the high mortality rate from these pandemic years was short-lived. In other words, the way life expectancy is computed makes it misleading during temporary mortality shocks.

Life expectancy has its strengths and is useful when discussing the future, but when looking at the past, it is confusing and not the best metric. A better choice would have been to discuss the average lifespan, which would have avoided this confusion―or should we say exaggeration, Pr. Rosling? 😉 Oddly enough, that example merely reinforces the book, providing a great example to back what he writes a chapter earlier (The Blame Instinct, p. 211):

In 2015, things were getting bad for Mozilla. Usage was falling rapidly, as expenses were getting out of control. Scrambling to stay afloat and diversify, Mozilla introduced Firefox Hello, for video calls. It also made a pact with a devil lesser than Google, which was not a competitor: the Pocket bookmarking service was also integrated. Probably anticipating the reaction, Mozilla tried to push through these subtly via a highly unusual "bugfix" release, 38.0.5.

Firefox 39 was therefore the first (major) Firefox version which felt like bloatware, featuring 2 superfluous icons in its default toolbar.
Firefox Hello joined Mozilla's rapidly growing graveyard quickly enough, lasting less than 2 years. But users had to pocket Pocket much longer.

During the initial backlash against Pocket, Mozilla responded by sweeping the issue under the carpet. It pretended the request to remove Pocket integration was invalid. After I asked to explain, it became clear Mozilla was willing to go as far as censoring criticism, and its infamous ":glob ✱" essentially disabled the ticket. But that request had obviously been doomed to fail from the start. Mozilla was eventually forced into going back to an extension, but still shipped by default, which did nothing to help the default toolbar.

Even when I formulated a compromise, Mozilla took it as an attack. Its equally infamous Mark Hammond pretended the issue was resolved and censored the ticket, again. From there, it was clear there was only option we had left: let it die by itself. Which took no less than 9 more years.

In May, in a blog post "cleverly"😒 titled "Investing in what moves the internet forward", Mozilla announced that Pocket was basically bankrupt and also moving to its now busy graveyard. So it's only yesterday, after 10 years, that the release of Firefox 140 finally ended that saga. Well, you'll have to look closely at the notes to notice it, but they did put it, in the otherwise empty "Changed" section🙄 Of course, after all that cash burned, there's not much left to compensate the poor users who did invest in Pocket; Mozilla will merely refund what was left from their annual subscription.

All of this is a pretty unfortunate way to announce that Firefox 140 is a nice release. If Mozilla had allowed unloading tabs a decade ago rather than integrating Pocket, perhaps it wouldn't have lost the vast majority of its market share during that time. But Firefox 140 is a significant step in the right direction. Here’s hoping Mozilla will take Cal Paterson’s analysis seriously starting from now.

Having spent all my life in Quebec, flashing green lights have nothing mysterious for me. But that was until I found myself in Vancouver (British Columbia), about to turn left and noticed multiple cars in the opposite direction crossing the street, before I overcame my initial shock and turned, looking in the opposite direction's lights to confirm that they were also green, at the same time. I had visibly missed the primer on British Columbia's traffic code.

Lewin Day’s article on the topic explains my confusion and the meaning of the flashing green in BC. An idea surely intended for safety, but so non-standard it is dangerous. Indeed, a sign which is generally reassuring is―in BC― instead a sign requiring extra caution! (Still better than Quebec City's flashing greens, which in certain cases are ever less safe than regular greens, years after I reported it to police.😒)

I can't complain about British Columbia's road infrastructure for cyclists, except for that, vegetation (including roses!) obstructing bike paths, and Google Maps sending you through unlabelled alleys all the time, though. Way better than Quebec city!

Cela commence à faire un bon moment que la science découvre à quel point… elle est douteuse. Suite à la publication de Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (un essai qui semble lui-même inexact), on parle maintenant de crise de la reproductibilité.

Mais un reportage de Découverte sur l’enjeu n’a pas que des mauvaises nouvelles. Comme bien des crises, celle-ci pourrait avoir du mérite, en améliorant les pratiques scientifiques, accélérant la solution de problèmes indignes de la science. Malheureusement, je ne peux m’empêcher de trouver que le reportage minimise le rôle de la fraude dans cette crise. Un problème qui pourrait lui-même s’expliquer par un conflit d’intérêt des journalistes de Découverte…😒

Vive la science, vive la Bonne Science (et surtout la bonne méta-science)

How can you resist a bilingual product madde with so much Canadian pride?

Depuis plus d'un mois, Windows 11 m'harcelait constamment avec des erreurs/avertissements comme quoi je consommais une trop grande partie de mon quota de stockage OneDrive. En réalité, j'avais effacé le dossier problématique il y a longtemps, mais il était encore sur le serveur, car OneDrive n'arrivait pas à synchroniser la suppression.

Voyant que les semaines n'arrangeaient pas les choses, je me suis résigné à contourner. Je suis allé sur le site web de OneDrive. Le répertoire supprimé s'y trouvait toujours. Mais quand j'ai demandé à ce qu'il soit supprimé, j'ai eu un nouveau bogue : une erreur « L'opération tentée est interdite, car elle dépasse le seuil d'affichage de liste. » :

Capture d'écran de l'erreur

Avec un message aussi utile, j'ai tôt fait de me diriger vers Google, qui ne m'a fourni aucun résultat de recherche pertinent. Après plusieurs minutes, j'ai fini par dénicher une discussion sur la même erreur, malheureusement sans réponse utile.

Néanmoins, en voyant le message anglophone (« Operation is not allowed because the number of affected items exceeds threshold »), j'ai réalisé que le message francophone est complètement erroné. On devrait plutôt lire « L'opération tentée n'est pas supportée, car le nombre d'éléments (fichiers) affectés dépasse le seuil. »

On ne spécifie toujours pas de quel seuil il s'agit, mais voilà qui est quand même plus utile! Une fois ce bogue dans le contournement identifié, on peut envisager contourner le bogue dans le contournement… en morcelant la suppression. Et en effet, si on entre dans le répertoire pour supprimer ses sous-répertoires petit à petit, le répertoire parent finit par se supprimer tout seul! Encore là, c'est bogué, mais on y arrive sans trop de mal.

Ma paie pour avoir perdu ½ (1?) heure avec tout ça? Cette perle de la documentation Microsoft :

Mieux vaut en rire!😂

L'année dernière, j'ai travaillé pour le gouvernement québécois. Le principal projet qu'on m'a confié a échoué, pour de multiples raisons. Une des importantes était l'obligation légale de garder les données hébergées au Québec, ce qui n'était pas possible avec la solution qui avait été prévue.

À l'époque, cette obligation pouvait paraître exagérée, puisque le fournisseur aurait pu héberger les données aux États-Unis. Mais les derniers mois ont montré sa sagesse. Le gros nuage qui bouillait depuis longtemps aux ÉU est devenu suffisamment noir pour obscurcir le soleil floridien.

Le deuil est particulièrement long lorsque la mort arrive à petit feu, mais il ne demeure pas moins important. Désormais, ce qui reste du monde démocratique devra se soucier encore davantage de sa sécurité et de sa souveraineté. Au premier lieu au niveau de l'armée, mais aussi en technologies s'il veut éviter d'être englouti par ce nuage monstrueux.