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Cake day: February 24th, 2024

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  • That’s a very simple view. Most of western Europe and Asia have higher fire safety than Canada and have plenty of single-staircase buildings. These kinds of decisions are not made based off a single YouTube video. It may be a source of public awareness about other approaches, but that’s only the springboard to get feasibilty studies and expert consultations underway. There are external fire escapes, mandated sprinkler systems and other ways to improve fire safety which alone will likely prove far more effective than double staircases.

    There are many valid downsides to our outdated fire standards in Canada—many that introduce their own health impacts in other ways. And I wouldn’t quite consider a fire chief to be the ultimate expert here. Sure their input is important to have, but I also want to hear from architects, standards bodies and academics that study building design and safety.








  • akakunaitoCool GuidesA cool guide software alternative
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    4 months ago

    To be fair, this is a better comparison than I expected. There’s some good info here but it’s combined with the typical non-commital AI answer of “idrk both are good.”

    It says GIMP is for basic to intermediate photo editing. I think this downplays the power of GIMP. If you’re proficient enough with GIMP, you can definitely do advanced editing (esp. with plugins). It also is written to imply that Photoshop is for the pros and people who need to do advanced things, which would probably mislead people new to editing and needing only “basic to intermediate photo editing” towards GIMP when Photoshop is suited well for them too and probably easier to learn. It doesn’t even mention options that would be better for newbies like Adobe Elements.

    For another example of what I mean when I say AI is probably not a great source for info like this, I asked GPT-3.5-Turbo “Which is better, MS Word 2003 or MS Word 2021?” It gave some decent info on the features that 2021 has that 2003 doesn’t, but then concludes:

    “Ultimately, the choice between the two versions depends on your specific requirements. If you need advanced features and collaboration tools, Word 2021 is the way to go.”

    Another BS non-answer that a layman will read as “Word 2003 is best for me because I don’t need ‘advanced features and collaboration tools.’” Of course Word 2021 is better.



  • akakunaitoCool GuidesA cool guide software alternative
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    4 months ago

    I’ve always heard good things about Darktable as an alternative to Lightroom, but I do not have experience using it so irdk.

    Alternatively there is always the high-seas version of Adobe CC. I wouldn’t be too concerned with the ethics of it seeing as this is Adobe we’re talking about 🤮.


  • akakunaitoCool GuidesA cool guide software alternative
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    4 months ago

    I’m no through-and-through AI hater (I use AI in certain situations where it is helpful), but I feel like this is not going to be an area where an AI is going to give much insight that’s reflective of reality.

    It’ll likely moreso compare feature-sets for each, which will make GIMP look far better than it probably should to Photoshop. GIMP is robust and has plenty of features. It is in its user experience, UI, and the quality of each feature where it fares much worse.

    Mind you, this is coming from someone who likes GIMP, grew up using it, and feels more at home with it than Photoshop. It’s just all-around not as good.


  • akakunaitoCool GuidesA cool guide software alternative
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    4 months ago

    I’m sure for anyone who has real work to do, GIMP will hold them back compared to Photoshop.

    But I grew up using GIMP and got some pretty impressive results with it. Now that I have Adobe CC access and have been using Photoshop through that, I am perpetually confused on how to do x, which I know how to do in a couple clicks in GIMP.

    To be fair, I’m sure that’d go doubly so for someone who started with Photoshop since it does have an objectively cleaner UI.




  • The biggest hastle was that any persistent tunnel I would make over any protocol (I tried OpenVPN, WireGuard, SSH, Shadowsocks, etc) to any IP address would be blocked after (I think) 3 hours. This let them basically block any VPN that wasn’t already explicitly blacklisted outright.

    My solution was to make a simple API on the server that got a new IPv6 address for the server and returned it.

    There was a WireGuard server running on port 53 and listening from any incoming IP. On my devices I would call the API every hour when idle and change the IP in the WireGuard config. On Android I had a Tasker automation to do this and on my laptop a shell script on a cronjob.