Too early to say.

The BC Cons started imploding almost right after the election—or, really, throughout the entire campaign. They almost won because PP was popular at the time and polls said lots of people would vote “Conservative” (likely with little understanding of the BC Cons complete lack of experience or sensible platform). This led to BC United dropping out of the election (to not split the right-wing vote).

So… Who knows? What we learned from the last election is that if there’s a unified right-wing party with a charismatic leader, then they could reasonably win, even if they haven’t articulated a platform.

Except when affect is a noun, when referring to someone’s countenance (“she was beyond exhausted, with a flat affect”).

And when effect is a verb, to bring about: “he effected great change in society with his government policies.”

I mis-click Google apps almost daily. It’s the stupidest fucking icon design.

Sure, but OP was specifically running into issues with Bazzite and needed to tinker to get things working. Ironically, CachyOS likely would not have needed any tinkering in OP’s case because updates in CachyOS but absent from Bazzite likely contained the fixes.

OP also mentioned elsewhere wanting to self-host some services—also a task likely to be easier in CachyOS than in Bazzite. Wanting to self-host also implies that OP can likely handle the light configuration that’s needed in CachyOS.

I think “unless they’re happy to reformat every other week” is unnecessarily pessimistic, too. With brtfs (the CachyOS default), recovery is quick and relatively easy. It’s also very unlikely to ever be an issue; CachyOS is very unlikely to break, unless OP really messes things up. Updates almost always “just work” in Arch Linux.

You won’t need to. Students find ways around content blocks and share it out themselves. Super sketchy free VPNs in mass use, tethering to phones, using ISP-based free wifi access points piggybacking on home connections from neighbours to the school—or, in one case, the school itself, logging in with guest accounts/incognito mode, running random executables from a (frequently virus-infested) Flash drive (aforementioned VPNs, web browser, or P2P web tunnel/Tor), torrenting, DNS swapping, and also old school “sneaker net” sharing contraband files directly. I’ve seen it all. The worse part is that they, largely, don’t know enough about computers to understand what they’re doing, so they end up sharing viruses and spyware with each other. Hell, I’ve told students to stop using their sketchy janky tools and taught them how to find safe/reputable ones (like ProtonVPN) or just use a different DNS to bypass the school filter entirely. They’re doing it anyway; at least teach them how to use a condom.

Kids will find a way past the blocks and share it out. Not to access porn—that’ll just be a byproduct—they’ll do it to chat with friends and play games.

This is a fool’s errand. A massive money pit that will inevitably lead to a massive data breach and resulting scandal. And it won’t prevent a single teenager from watching porn.

It’s ridiculous that this is still being talked about in 2025, let alone being implemented by clueless Boomer politicians around the world. Ask any computers teacher in Canada if their school has ever successfully blocked students from playing games on school computers—even without web access, lol. It doesn’t even take a computer expert to know this will never work.

What a pointless waste.

Yes, you can with derivatives: buy out-of-money puts.

Derivatives are financial instruments that pay out based on market movements. A classic example is crops: using derivatives, farmers can, essentially, “lock in” the price they sell their goods at. This allows them more stability, since they know in advance how much they’ll be paid for their crops. (And they’ll separately buy crop Insurance to cover their risk for crops failing, most likely.)

Puts are a derivative that is a contract for the right to sell an asset at a given price (the “strike price”) on a given date. Usually, these are closed out by paying the cash value at the end, not actually selling the stocks.

Out of money means that the strike price is below the current market price. If they are still out of money at the end of the contract term, they are literally worthless. But, if the underlying asset (like NVidea stock) crashes, then you can earn the difference between the strike price and the market price.

What makes this speculation* strategy effective is that the market usually prices in a low probability of a major price decrease, so they’re (relatively) cheap. They also have limited downside risk—at worst, you lose everything you spent buying them. For deeply out-of-money puts, you can make a lot of money with a huge crash, but most of the time you “just” lose all your money.

This contrasts with short selling where you have unlimited downside risk. With short selling, you’re basically borrowing someone else’s share and immediately selling it at the current market price, then you need to buy it back from the market when you close out the position. So if you sold it for $100, and need to buy it back at $1000, you’re royally fucked. (You won’t be allowed to get that far, though; you need to keep assets in your account to cover the cost, so you’d be forced to continually “pony up” more cash as the price rises, until you can’t make a payment and you’re forced to close out the position, losing all your initial money and all the money you were forced to keep adding as it rose.)

But good luck with that strategy; I imagine NVidea puts are pretty expensive right now since a lot of people are making this exact bet. As such, people issuing/selling puts are demanding a lot of money to pay for them taking on risk.

* This is “speculation”, not “investment”. Investment requires, by definition, capital put towards productive assets—in other words, it needs to be expected to return an income stream of some kind, like interest, profits, or dividend payments. Speculation is betting on the direction of price movement on an asset—“gambling”, effectively, but with fancy investment words. Like in the farmer example above, they’re gambling that prices won’t go up, since they won’t gain any of the benefit from rising prices. That type of speculation reduces risk—unlike what you are asking about.

There are other ways that derivatives can reduce risk, but that’s not what you were asking about here.

Probably not a helpful suggestion, but CachyOS might be a better fit for you.

Bazzite is an immutable distribution. This means that most things on the system are static between major Bazzite versions, at which time everything updates at once. This can be great; for someone who doesn’t want to tinker, or for someone who’s worried about breaking things—it’s very hard to break.

On the other hand, it also means that everything is running on an older version, with bugs that have been fixed in newer builds.

CachyOS is Arch-based. You can configure everything in the system, and can update all your packages to the most recent versions as soon as updates are compiled in the CachyOS repo. The CachyOS repos are fairly extensive, but you can also install most other things from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The AUR is a bit of a “Wild West” where packages may not install or work dependably, but in most cases they work great… albeit sometimes with a bit of tinkering required.

Your example of getting a “Deck Verified” game to run is what prompted this for me; CachyOS comes pre-installed with 2 versions of Steam (native and non-native), a bunch of versions of Proton (Valve’s stable/experimental, GE, and I think more?), Heroic launcher, and Lutris launcher. So, you have like 8 different configurations to try just from toggling things that are pre-installed, lol. I haven’t had a game not work for me yet.

You also mention self hosting; in CachyOS you can install Docker or Podman from the CachyOS repos and then run a Docker image. They almost always “just work” without any tinkering needed, so you can jump right into setting up your configuration/settings. Or, if your prefer a more integrated solution, just about everything will be in the CachyOS repos or the AUR (but expect to put more work into it.)

Bazzite might be holding you back a bit, and it sounds like you might not need the “safety” of an immutable distro, while its limitations might be getting in your way.

“The notwithstanding clause is generally reserved for serious disagreements between the provinces and the courts, or whenever Quebec feels like being more xenophobic,” …

So good.

Oh, right. I completely forgot about the Fortnite “concerts”. Thanks for the reminder. They were so obviously doomed to fail right from the beginning, lol.

Fortnite … was one of the main drivers of the tech industry’s obsession with the “metaverse” in the early 2020s.

Citation needed.

Did I completely miss something? What the fuck does Fortnite have to do with Zuck’s stupid metaverse idea stolen from 80s & 90s cyberpunk?

What’s MS? MicroSoft?

If so, I just use Chromium for my “work” browser with M365 web apps for most things, and only spin up my Windows 11 VM when I need to do heavier OneDrive or Excel tasks.

CachyOS has been absolutely fantastic for me. As a quick example: I just installed Minecraft Java edition with the Prism Launcher. It’s in the CachyOS repo, so it was 1 step to install Prism Launcher. Even easier than Windows—I didn’t even need to search for a download page. Come to think of it, I’ll also get automatic updates whenever I do a 1-step full system upgrade, so it’s going to be 0 maintenance.

The year of Linux has arrived. I used to make fun of all the Linux evangelists, but they’re right this time. Linux offers a better experience than Windows, for most common use cases.

Despite Google’s efforts to challenge the dominance of Windows and macOS, ChromeOS remains a distant third.

Umm… What?

Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide - October 2025

Desktop Operating Systems Percentage Market Share
Windows 66.14%
OS X 14.27%
Unknown 11.15%
macOS 4.15%
Linux 2.94%
Chrome OS 1.34%

Distant "fourth*.

Or we could focus on the core of teaching, which is building relationships with students. Then, with that rapport, students will trust their teachers when they explain why getting AI to do the work for them is hurting their own education. We can also change our assessment practices, so that students don’t feel the pressure to write a “perfect” essay.

And, yes; occasionally require students to do a bit of writing with invigilation.

Can easily be faked with AI. You can just prompt AI to make outlines, drafts, mistakes, fix the mistakes, etc.

I’ve presented on this at teacher conferences, for what it’s worth. There’s no effective way to detect AI usage accurately when the text-writing process isn’t supervised. The solutions need to accept that reality.

CS

Comma splice. –1 mark

/s — For contrast. Feedback I got in the 00s on my writing.

Okay, sure. But how can you identify its use? You’d better be absolutely confident or there are likely to be professional consequences.

Not to mention completely destroy your relationship with the student (maybe not so relevant to professors, but relationship building is the main job of effective primary and secondary educators.)

My math undergrad classes were largely like that, too, and that was before there were smartphone solver apps, let alone “AI”. A typical grade breakdown was 10% assignments, 30% midterm, 60% final in first and second year. Then in third and fourth year, it was entirely midterm + final.

They gave a few marks for assignments in lower years since high schoolers often come to them thinking the only things that are important are grades, so won’t practice unless it’s for marks. If you haven’t figured out that practice is important by third year…

And agreed re: changing the focus of our assessment, just like memorizing facts for history “trivia-style” assessment should no longer be used by anyone in a post-search Web 2.0 world. (Although it was never good assessment, regardless.)

it should not be used to seek out factual information that the prompter doesn’t already know.

Eh… Depends on the importance and purpose of the information.

If you’re just trying to generate ideas for fiction from historical precedents, it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate. Or if you’re using it as a starting point, then following the links to check the original source (like I do all the time for Linux terminal commands).

Hell, I often use Linux terminal commands from Google’s search results AI box—I know enough to be able to parse what AI is suggesting (and identify when the proposed commands don’t make sense), and enough to undo what I’m doing if it doesn’t work. Saves a lot of time.

Copilot fixed some SQL syntax issues I had yesterday, too. 100% accuracy on that, despite it being a massive query with about a dozen nested subqueries. (Granted, I gave a very detailed prompt…) But, again, this was low stakes–who cares if a SELECT query fails to execute.

Except it’s not so simple. Research consistently shows that even people who believe themselves not to be prejudiced act differently based on prejudice. Having a “black” name, BIPOC, a woman, disabled, or any other “minority” affects actions and attitudes subliminally.

Who do you ask a question to (the person pushing the wheelchair, or the person in the wheelchair?), sit next to on public transit (the black guy or the white woman?), friend’s teenager you ask to babysit/house-sit (the white girl or the black guy?), hire to do your gardening (the Hispanic man or the black woman?), question do you take first after your work presentation (white man or Indigenous woman?), smile at politely as you pass on the street (the unhoused?), etc.

For someone who acknowledges they are racist, these biases run deep, and I imagine it must be mentally taxing to constantly run a filter on your actions you notice, let alone all your unconscious/automatic reactions.

As someone who’s a “woke” anti-racist, I find it challenging to even notice my biases, let alone change my actions. (When’s the last time you made eye contact and smiled at an unhoused person automatically, without noticing you’re doing it? I do so, but it’s a conscious action for me, not automatic.)