RCMP investigating allegation of money for council votes in Calgary city hall corruption probe: court doc
The RCMP are investigating an allegation that the principal and founder of a local planning consulting firm offered campaign donations in exchange for votes from Calgary city council.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/rcmp-probe-corruption-allegations-at-calgary-city-hall-warrants-cell-phones-9.7230788?cmp=rss
About the whole Android September Situation
--

Howdy folks, as some of y'all are aware, I carry an Android phone - specifically a Oneplus 11 on Lineage.

This whole 'Android dev lockdown / verification' situation irks me. I don't like the play store, I see it as a den of malware and villainy, only meant to peddle corporate spyware, invasive Ai agents, tracking systems and ads into our lives.

So I am faced with a dilemma, but as a millennial, I remember Y2K. The world didn't end just because it suddenly went from 1999 to 2000, and so the world won't end just because September is coming, then August, and so forth.

There will be holdouts, there will be devs who 'dgaf', who continue putting out apks for 'unverified' Android. Hell, you'll likely have two years of boredom and tossing it about in your mind before you actually have to do anything about it to function in society.

So, where do I sit? I'm in the holdout camp in the short term. I have a plan for the bigger picture that will basically treat a post-2026 cellphone like a piece of radioactive material that's only purpose is to beam a tetherable wifi connection, and only be used for calls and ordering pizza whenever it's rarely let out of its Faraday bag or vaccum-sealed lead box.

Thanks to Google, Apple and Microslop, We live in a caustic world that hates and despises us, but that's all well and good.

So do they.

#cellphones #android #google #unverified #verification

The following hashtags are trending across South African Mastodon instances:

#English
#words
#Wordle
#wordle1817
#cellphones
#nostalgia
#bible
#righteousness
#justice
#scams

Based on recent posts made by non-automated accounts. Posts with more boosts, favourites, and replies are weighted higher.

The following hashtags are trending across South African Mastodon instances:

#English
#words
#Wordle
#wordle1817
#cellphones
#nostalgia
#bible
#righteousness
#justice
#scams

Based on recent posts made by non-automated accounts. Posts with more boosts, favourites, and replies are weighted higher.

They don't make them like they used to! #cellphones #nostalgia

@slashdot so basically like Germany does since 07/2017?

  • Not that it matters: It merely paywalls obtaining SIMs and eSIMs to a payment to some dodgy site or asking the right people at the right place the right questions and paying a premium.
    • It's blatant cyberfascism under false pretenses!
    • Only the honest consumers get shafted by this bs with Data Breaches and madatory Self-Doxxing beforehand!

#USpol #FCC #DEpol #BNetzA #Privacy #Prepaid #KYC #PoliceState #SurveillanceState #fascism #Cyberfascism #Anonymity #IfnoSec #OpSec #ComSec #ITsec #GSM #Telephony #SMS #2G #3G #4G #5G #mobile #MobilePhones #Smartphones #Cellphone #Cellphones #Cell #tech #IT #comms #SIM #eSIM #SIMcard #eSIMs #SIMcards #FalsePretense #Germany #USA #DataBreach #Doxxing #DataProtection

Tired pup, but no rest for the wicked. AT&T gateway showed up, so new internet is up and running, and with that comes the porting of the last number.
Vik had his number for a decade or so, and after he passed, I continued to pay for it and let it idle for six months until I decided what to do, and that was port it to Tello. I gotta say, if'n you're trying to save on your phone, give Tello a look, I do gig last mile package deliver (think UPS's job DoorDash style), hence the testing with a spare phone number. Five months later, and zero problems. And ports are fast, like under 5 minutes fast. So, moved the last phone number from Verizon, last step is to cancel internet, but that can't be done yet as they're still processing the port on their end. Yeah, the VMO is faster than Verizon at this stuff, which is ridiculous.
So, now I get to update my phone number with all my gig apps tonight, and that'll be done.
The other thing is a new pair of boots, TimberlandPro this time. Yes, this time, third pair in a year and a half I think? I go through shoes fast, so this is nothing special, and for the price Timberland has held up well. I was thinking about Brunt work wear, but the reviews online are not particularly good, especially as they cost around $50 more than the Timberland, basically good, but not that good. I was wearing a pair of Vik's boots, but they suddenly disintegrated. No, really, the pleather cracking was annoying, but not a big deal, but then the cloth and the pleather separated on the back of the right boot, so time for new boots. This'll be the third type of Timberlands, and we'll see what I think about these, first were great, basically chosen by throwing a dart at the board. Second were picked by price, cheaper than the first pair, but still Timberlands, and they worked well. This time around, I had around 3 or 4 choices within the same $5 range on price, so I decided to try a different style, plus these are TimberlandPro, so I'm curious to see if'n they hold up better.
Beyond that, not much, work actually is sucking this week, and of course things are way too busy between work and home repairs/improvements. And then there'll be estate matters, tax matters and investment matters. That said, the lion's share (why do we say that?) should be done by end of June, heck I might even be able to take a break on my birthday. I guess after that the hunt for where I settle for the rest of my life begins in earnest, we've done some casual looking, but nothing serious as there's too many variables, but those will be wrapping up, and there'll be little left other than cleaning this place out.


#Life #Today #Shoes #Phones #Internet #Cell-Phones #Verizon #Tello #Prepaid-Cellular

@davidgerard if you just need cheap and adequate temporary domestic cellular internet access, I vote for buying a rolling 30d contract, unlimited data sim card, on whichever is the cheapest of the networks that run on the frequencies that your nearest (best line of sight) tower delivers. https://www.cellmapper.net/

https://www.mobilecoverage.co.uk/networks/frequency-bands
https://mastdatabase.co.uk/gb/arfcn-list/

https://www.quidco.com/merchant/uswitch-mobile-comparison/

Good luck!

#cellphones #cellular #radio #mobilePhones

Cellular Tower and Signal Map

CellMapper is a crowd-sourced cellular tower and coverage mapping service.

CellMapper

A teacher asked 7th graders the worst part of the 80s, and their answers have us howling

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/students-answer-questions-ex1/

Software #Developers Say #AI Is Rotting Their Brains

by Emanuel Maiberg, May 13, 2026

Excerpt: "The developers I talked to found AI useful for some tasks. Several developers said that it was good for experimentation, allowing them to quickly prototype an idea or to implement something in a domain they’re unfamiliar with. One developer said it was a good information interface. Specifically, he said, the AI helped him find where on the server a certain request is handled, summarize logs, or find documentation related to code changes.

"The problem all the developers I talked to agreed on is that the more they relied on AI to code, the more the skills they’ve honed for years deteriorated. This is by now a well studied phenomenon sometimes referred to as '#CognitiveDebt' or '#CognitiveAtrophy.' The idea is that people who use AI to automate certain parts of their job lose the ability to do those tasks well, therefore #DeSkilling themselves.

" 'I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code,' the software developer at a small web design firm told me.

" 'It's making me dumber for sure,' the fintech software developer told me. “It's like when we got #cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing ‘thinking’ in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before.'

" 'When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a #MentalModel of the code I was working with,' the software engineer at the FAANG told me. 'Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company’s] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that. '"

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/2vjJm

#AISucks #DumbingUsDown #BrainRot #AIBrainRot #MentalMaps #CriticalThinkingSkills #UseYourBrain #UseItOrLoseIt

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

“It's making me dumber for sure.”

404 Media