Maybe someone should tell senior management in some services that DO use performance metrics (translators are not the only ones).

---

The first two recommendations in the report call on Statistics Canada to explore and report on the development of a “productivity measurement program” for the public service, and for agencies to develop productivity metrics for departments and agencies that provide direct services to Canadians.

“Without reliable data, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement,” the report said.

The president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said productivity cannot be improved by productivity measurement alone.

“We don’t build productivity through distrust and surveillance. I think that it’s two things that productivity depends on is having trust and faith in the work everyone does,” Sean O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

He says public servants are already dealing with understaffing, outdated technology and paperwork, and those problems won’t be solved by performance tracking.

...

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat says it is not considering four of the recommendations from the task force, including measuring productivity across the public sector.

#cdnpoli

ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/fede…

Federal government should report on ‘underperforming’ public servants, measure productivity: report

The federal government should measure productivity in the public service and publish annual reports on “underperforming” public servants, according to a new report on public service productivity.

^{Josh Pringle (CTVNews)}

I really regret contributing to this situation. I didn’t anticipate how completely it would dominate the narrative.

"On the first night of #Hanukkah, #Jewish families gathered in #Sydney to celebrate. Instead of #candlelightings and #latkes, they were met with #gunfire from two armed #terrorists. At least a dozen Jewish #Australians, including a #Holocaust survivor, were murdered, and the first candle of Hanukkah was lit in grief.

Almost immediately, however, the focus of the public conversation began to drift.

Rather than centering the #victims or grappling with what it means for #Jews to be targeted at a Jewish #celebration, much of the discourse has fixated on a different element of the attack, one that, while important, should not be the story itself."

jpost.com/opinion/article-8804…

How antisemitism is erased after attacks on Jews | The Jerusalem Post

When antisemitic incidents occur, the world prefers to talk about the feel-good narrative rather than Jewish victims of terror.

^{The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com}

At my childhood home we had a Panasonic microwave that could automatically cook potatoes to perfection and you could program sequences with different power levels, two features that I really loved.

After 30 years of service it stopped working, but turns out you can still get basically the same thing from Panasonic, only slightly modernised on the outside, inverter on the inside.

It wasn’t made “smart” with IoT, it’s not different for the sake of it. It worked then, it works now. More of this.

The new Mozilla CEO says he could block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that it would bring in another $150 million, but he doesn't want to do that. Lmao. This guy has really lost the plot. Is he issuing threats to the users of an open-source project? Boy, what a disaster.

infosec.press/brunomiguel/is-m…

Any apt experts out there? I'm trying to add MSSQL to a Debian-based image. I can do it, but the instructions use apt-key, which is deprecated. The articles I've read about the new way, using [signed-by=/path/keyfile.gpg] in my .list or .sources file, all talk about GPG keys. The problem is that Microsoft supplies a .asc file that contains a PGP key, not a GPG key. What do I do?

Also, the genius that decided the two key types should be GPG and PGP deserves to never sleep on a dry pillow again.

Comparing the early internet with the Sloponet that we are sliding into currently is mind boggling to me.

The early internet gave more people more tools to easier publish and learn and collaborate.

The slopfest centralizes knowledge so that you can only exist when you’re in a symbiotic relationship with an LLM that you pay a lot of money for when the bubble pops.

The internet distributed knowledge, the sloponet centralizes it and gives you only the bits you explicitly ask for.

Danish head of government IT (left) hands over the first "microsoft-free" computer to the head of Danish Traffic control, December 2025. They are testing Linux as the primary OS, with open source alternatives for stuff like office, on peoples work computers in government agencies. Traffic control gets to be our first test subject. This is gonna be put in the hands of somewhat tech-illiterate people.
reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1p…

The EU is slowly becoming tech independent from *big tech* :)

🎁 Help your friends start 2026 with a powerful resolution: deGoogle your life. 🎁

Give them privacy, security & independence - gift them a Tuta Mail gift card.

A fresh start begins with secure email. 🔒 ❤️

Easily available in your Tuta Settings under the 🎁 symbol to the left.

#DeGoogle #PrivacyMatters #TutaMail

Initially misread "Commons Caretakers" as "Common Scaretakers" in this URL and now I cannot unlearn that:

commonscaretakers.com/

People are strange.

I just agreed to speak at a big festival. They invited me by contacting my publicist. I told him I'd do it.

They then sent him (not me) an email with an attached PDF, and asked him to forward it to me, and to instruct me to check page two of the PDF for a link to a Microsoft Form to complete my RSVP.

Surely there is a better way.

So @sovtechfund published the report on their experiment with Fellowships program.

And I love it. I love it because the results are so frigging good and align with the model of open source maintainers I keep pushing forward.

And it gives me a bit of hope. At least we have some support for the model of the problem. And possible solutions.

Let's make it better for everyone!

Thanks you @soverin

sovereign.tech/publications/ev…

Sovereign Tech Fellowship 2025 Evaluation Report | Sovereign Tech…

^{Sovereign Tech Agency}

I know that all words are made up, but why do some words sound more made up than is acceptable? Take "lanyard" for example. What the fuck is a lanyard? Why not go all the way and call it a bippityboop? Lan-bloody-yard.

</rant>

hmmm.... the UK is expected to announce tomorrow that it has rejoined the Erasmus student exchange scheme.

the Q. will be how much the UK will be contributing to the scheme to have closed the deal - anyone thinking that the UK has beaten the EU down much from their original request has not been following the various negotiations with the EU since Brexit.

But no doubt Keir Starmer will trumpet this as part of reset that Britain has 'won'!

#Brexit #ersamus

Weird thing about the kids in this part of the world is that when they're upset or whining, they have a unique thing they do to add emphasis to whatever they're saying.

Some people stamp their foot. Some drop their lip. These kids? They add a very emphatic vowel to the end of the sentence. The more upset, the harder they cough that vowel out, and the longer the micropause between the word and the vowel.

"It's not fair'a!"

"They won't let me play with my toys'a!"

"She said I smell like a dog'a!"

I'm sure the @Vivaldi folks are sick of hearing this feedback, but I'll say it anyway (sorry): the only thing that holds me back from adopting and enthusiastically recommending Vivaldi is that it's not 100% open source.

With Mozilla chasing the AI dragon, now would be a really great time for Vivaldi to take the plunge and go fully FOSS. I don't know that it gains much, if anything, by being just mostly FOSS.

#Firefox #Mozilla #Browsers #Vivaldi