I’m old enough that I remember voting in the Seventies. I never miss a chance to vote so that’s a lot of elections. In all but one or two my vote has gone to the NDP, Canada’s social democrats. There’s a provincial election Saturday, and I’ll be voting Green, against the current NDP government.

It’s not complicated: I’ve become a nearly-single-issue voter. The fangs of the climate monster are closing on us, and drastic immediate action is called for by all responsible governments to stave them off.

The BC NDP has followed its unlamented right-wing predecessor in making a huge energy bet on fossil fuels, “natural” gas in particular, and especially LNG, optimized for export. “Natural” gas, remember, is basically methane. The fossil-fuels mafia has greenwashed it for years as a “better alternative”, and a “bridge to the renewable future”. Which is a big fat lie; it’s been known for years to be a potent greenhouse gas, and recent research suggests it’s more damaging than coal.

Tilbury

That was the LNG project that made me snap. Here is coverage that tries to be neutral. Tilbury was sold as being a good thing because LNG is said to have a lighter carbon load than the heavy bunker fuel freighters usually burn. Supposing that to be true, well so what: The terminal mostly exists to pump locally-extracted methane to the rest of the world. Check out Tilbury’s first contract, for 53,000 tons of LNG a year off to China, with no indication of what it will be used for and plenty of reason to believe it will end up heating buildings, which should instead should be moving to renewable options.

Tilbury is just the latest chapter of the successful march of LNG infrastructure through the minds of successive BC governments; I’ll spare you the long, dispiriting story (but I won’t forget it in the polling booth).

I don’t believe it’s oversimplifying to say that essentially everything the fossil-fuel industry says is a pack of self-serving planet-destroying lies. Why would I vote for a party that apparently believes those lies?

The Carbon Tax

Post-Tilbury, I was probably 60% of the way to splitting with the NDP when they announced they were ready to drop the carbon tax. It is hard to find an economist who does not believe that a carbon tax is one of our sanest and most powerful anti-GHG policy tools. BC has been a North-American leader in instituting and maintaining a carbon tax. So, that sealed the deal. Bye bye, NDP.

What’s happening is simple enough: Canada’s right-wing troglodytes have united around an anti-Carbon-tax platform, chanting “axe the tax”. And our NDP has waved the chickenshit-colored tag of surrender. You can pander to reactionary hypocrites, or you can help us do our bit for the world my children will inherit, but you can’t do both. Bye.

The Greens

Their platform is the kind of sensible social-democratic stuff that I’ve always liked, plus environmentalist to the core. Leader Sofia Furstenau is impressive. It wasn’t a hard choice.

But tactical voting!

It’s been a weird election, with the official opposition party, center-rightists who long formed the government, changing their name (from “Liberals” to “United”) midstream, then collapsing. This led to the emergence of the BC Conservative Party, a long-derided fringe organization famous for laughable candidates, thick with anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, anti-wokesters, anti-LGBTQ ranters, and multiple other flavors of conspiracy connoisseur.

Guess what: That’s what they still are! But much to everyone’s surprise, they’re running pretty close to neck and neck with the NDP.

So people like me can expect to be told that by abandoning the NDP, we’re in effect aiding and abetting the barbarians at the gate. (To be fair, nobody has actually said that to me. The strongest I’ve heard is “it’s your privilege to waste your vote.”)

But what I see is two parties neither of which have any concern for my children’s future, and one which does. If it’s wrong to vote on that basis, I don’t want to be right.

The B.C. Coroners Service says it has no record of any recent drug toxicity death at a Vancouver intersection where B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad said he saw a man die — a story Rustad would later change completely.

‘Unless you’re a die-hard Trump supporter, a journalist, or an obsessive political hobbyist, you’re likely not getting that regular glimpse into the Republican candidate’s brain. But … maybe you should be?

Last Friday, I received an email with a link to a website created by a Washington, D.C.–based web developer named Chris Herbert. The site, Trump’s Truth, is a searchable database collecting all of Trump’s Truth Social posts, even those that have been deleted. Herbert has also helpfully transcribed every speech and video Trump has posted on the platform, in part so that they can be indexed more easily by search engines such as Google. Thus, Trump’s ravings are more visible….’ (Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic )

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI's official ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to all users for the first time, provided they're running macOS Sonoma or later.

It was previously being rolled out gradually to paid subscribers to ChatGPT's Plus premium plan.

The ChatGPT Mac app mostly acts as a desktop window version of the web app, allowing you to carry on back-and-forth prompt-and-response conversations. You can select between the GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models. It also supports the more specialized GPTs available in the web version, including the DALL-E image generator and custom GPTs.

There is one important omission in this desktop app: It doesn't support using the API. For that, those wanting a desktop app will still need to use a third-party one like Jordi Bruin's MacGPT.

OpenAI's app lets you enable a system-wide keyboard shortcut (option + space by default) to type in a prompt any time; it works a bit like opening a Spotlight search in macOS.

The ChatGPT app was announced alongside the GPT-4o model, which is faster and cheaper to use than GPT-4 with similar (albeit not exactly the same) accuracy and quality; GPT-4o also has an expanded ability to interact with images and videos.

At the same time that OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o and the Mac app, it demonstrated a new, conversational approach to voice chatting with ChatGPT. That's not yet widely available, but it's said to be coming soon. For now, the Mac app supports the old style of back-and-forth voice chats with the chatbot.

The Mac app is unavailable in the Mac App Store, but you can download it directly from OpenAI's website.

Note that, like the iPhone or Android ChatGPT app, this is distinct from the ChatGPT integration coming to Apple's operating systems this fall. That integration will see Siri referring users to ChatGPT (and possibly alternative models in the future) to answer queries that are outside Siri's usual scope, and it will be baked into the operating system.

There's still no Windows app. Why not? At least one report claimed that OpenAI prioritized a Mac app over a Windows app "because that's where most of its users are." Of course, Windows users aren't hurting for AI chatbot options, as Microsoft has been throwing ChatGPT-powered Copilot into everything it can of late.

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John Davidson, writing for the Australian Financial Review on Phil Schiller’s testimony in Australia, where Apple is once again facing off against Epic Games (archive link in case FR’s web server goes down):

The casual approach to its meetings, instituted by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs when he returned to the company in 1997 after having been fired in 1985, explained why Epic’s lawyers could find precious few contemporaneous records of Apple’s decision-making processes since the App Store was first launched in 2007, Mr Schiller suggested.

“When Mr Jobs came back in 1997, in one of the earliest meetings someone was taking notes, writing down what [Mr Jobs] was saying about what we’re doing. He stopped and said ‘Why are you writing this down? You should be smart enough to remember this. If you’re not smart enough to remember this you shouldn’t be in this meeting’. We all stopped taking notes and learnt to just listen and be part of the conversation and remember what we were supposed to do. And that became how we worked.” Mr Schiller testified.

“It was very action-oriented. It was built to be like a small start-up where we all are working together on the same things, and we all know what our plans are and what we’re doing.”

And:

Nor is there much talk in meetings of how profitable the Apple App Store is, despite the fact it would be the 63rd biggest company on the Fortune 500 if it were hived off as a separate entity.

“Are you telling His Honour that you have no idea whether ... the App Store has been profitable?” asked an incredulous Neil Young, KC, leading the cross-examination on behalf of Epic Games.

“I believe it is [profitable],” replied Mr Schiller, who has been in charge of the App Store since the beginning. “I’m simply saying ‘profit’ as a specific financial metric is not a report I get and spend time on. It’s not how we measure our performance as a team,” he said.

Sounds like Epic is getting its hat handed to it once again.

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Kneeling pads

When I work in the garden, or fiddle with bike tires, or work on something that requires I kneel, I grab an inexpensive foam kneeling pad, like this one, from a pack of Gardzen (3 for $16). No knee discomfort. A small thing that makes a big difference. — KK

15 Methods to Master Your Time 

This graphic illustrates 15 popular time management tactics. The methods I use the are the Pomodoro Technique, which involves working in 25-minute cycles with breaks in between, and Time Blocking/Task Batching. This is my first time hearing of the “Pickle Jar Method,” but it does seem like I could cross a lot of things of my list working this way: 1. Do major tasks first. 2. Slot in minor tasks around the major ones. 3. Continuously assess and reprioritize tasks. — CD

Movie trigger warnings

Do you find certain subjects too stressful to bear in a movie? If so, Does the Dog Die? is for you. Here, you can input a movie title and it provides a list of content warnings. For example, Marathon Man includes a warning for “damaged teeth,” which makes my skin crawl. You can also search in reverse — a search for “Are any teeth damaged?” results in a scarily long list of movies that depict teeth being broken. — MF

Chinese sci-fi series

The biggest cultural export from China this century is the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem. A ten-part Chinese version of it was made a few years ago, which was okay, but Netflix has just remade 3 Body Problem into an 8-part series produced by the guys behind Game of Thrones megahit series. I’m enjoying this version even more than the book. The story has been globalized, ramped up, and supercharged with appropriate effects, to make it clear, compelling, great science fiction. — KK

The Library of Consciousness 

The Library of Consciousness is a growing collection of writings, lectures and media about the human experience and all its mysteries. You don’t have to know what you’re looking for, just click around or search for keywords to navigate. It’s a source of inspiration. Right now, there are 200 authors in the library, and the curator says that they are actively seeking female and POC perspectives and welcomes recommendations. — CD

Cheap AI transcription

I need to transcribe a large number of recorded interviews every month.. I used to be a subscriber to Otter.ai, but it has a limit of 10 uploads per month. I have found a superior replacement, notta.ai, which is cheaper ($8.25 per month) and offers 1,800 minutes (30 hours) of transcription per month, which is more than enough for my needs. Notta’s free plan provides 120 minutes, which should be sufficient for most people. I’ve also noticed that Notta is faster and just as accurate as Otter. — MF