Richard Bellavance
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richardbellavance.bsky.social
Richard Bellavance
@richardbellavance.bsky.social
750 followers 350 following 4.8K posts
Posts in french & english. Music, football/soccer (#cpfc #cfmtl #canmnt), bass guitar, politics.
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richardbellavance.bsky.social
Mamdani created shame the same way he created vision: by having standards, and then showing everyone what his standards are, and then proving that he truly held those standards by standing for something without shame. There is a massive power in standing for something that you'll never get by standing for whatever the most recent polls show. It's an attraction. It moves the lines of ought-to-be. It defines what is shameful by showing what is inspiring. It creates someplace else for people who have chosen shameful identities to go, if they so choose.
November 9, 2025 at 9:34 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Tifo made by the fans of Crystal Palace Football Club, showing a portrait of musician Maxi Jazz, with the text "This is our church. This is where we heal our hurts" underneath. The entirety of the grandstands behind are colored in red and blue vertical stripes.
November 8, 2025 at 5:50 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
If you see this, post an album cover with a motor vehicle on it.
Covert art of the album Painkiller, by Judas Priest. It shows an angel-winged silver robot riding a fantasy motorcycle with sawblades for wheels and a dragon's head front fairing, flying over a desolate, hellish landscape.
November 8, 2025 at 2:43 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Cover art of the album Eliminator by ZZ Top.
November 8, 2025 at 2:34 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Do cartoons count? 😉
El Kabong
November 8, 2025 at 2:37 AM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
😳
Mais c'est donc laid!

Rendu là je préfèrerais qu'on revienne à celui-ci (que les hommes n'ont jamais porté, d'ailleurs)
Maillot porté par l'équipe canadienne féminine de soccer à la Coupe du Monde 2023.
November 7, 2025 at 3:49 AM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
But more people should be more ashamed, I think. It seems to me that this death of shame is a big part of how we've arrived here. It's pretty shameful to be OK with Nazism. It's pretty shameful to belong to a Nazi party. It's pretty shameful to live in a Nazi country. It's pretty shameful to lavish yourself with opulence while you're ensuring that millions starve and suffer. Maybe it has occurred to you, as it did to me, that the actual reason Maple Valley Township is divided over this Nazi in their midst not only because some people there are opposed to Nazism, but also, crucially, because a lot of people there are just fine with it. Like their Treasurer, they claim to not know about everything that is happening, and then go tra-la-la down the road, unless you force them to contend with it, in which case they inform you that their support of it is your fault for making them feel so irredeemable and condemned about it that they feel compelled to support it, and having shifted the burden of culpability from themselves to you, once again tra-la-la down the road they go.
November 5, 2025 at 10:56 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
The overall shape reminds me of a B.C. Rich Widow!

But sonically speaking, isn't it a bit counterproductive to make a hollowbody bass smaller?
Photograph of a B.C. Rich Widow bass guitar.
November 5, 2025 at 4:45 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Excellent texte de M. Boisvert. J'aime particulièrement ce passage:
Autrement dit, il n’y a aucune logique à exiger une plus grande performance médicale quand, dans les faits, elle est inatteignable. Soit parce que le système est lui-même inefficace et freine la productivité. Soit parce qu’on rationne le temps de travail. Enfin oui, il y a une logique, mais elle n’est jamais dite en toutes lettres : diminuer le salaire des médecins. Si c’est le but, qu’on le dise.
October 30, 2025 at 1:40 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
1989 was indeed a great year.
Cover of the album "Full Moon Fever" by Tom Petty.
October 30, 2025 at 1:16 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Le passage ci-dessous me sidère.
Un alinéa de l'article 129 précise d'ailleurs que « les obligations exécutées par les parties en vertu » de l'entente de 2019 avant son abrogation « sont réputées constituer les seules obligations qui leur incombaient en vertu [de cette entente] ; ces obligations sont réputées avoir été exécutées entièrement, correctement et sans retard. Le présent alinéa est déclaratoire ».
October 28, 2025 at 11:50 AM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
The actual image accompanying the text was this:
A backyard lawn, half of which is covered with a large amount of dead leaves, with the other half almost completely cleared of said leaves. There is a lawn mower in the foreground.
October 26, 2025 at 8:41 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
"When I say my lawnmower is great at mulching, this is what I mean"

(It was in french, but yes, really😅)
A thoroughly blood drenched room with the text "caption this with the 2nd to last text you sent"
October 26, 2025 at 8:34 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Does the modder include the following sure-to-be-handy accessory with his services?
A roll of electrical tape. Useful to put back together a pair of glasses after receiving a punch in the face.
October 23, 2025 at 3:43 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
La description du New York Times omet certains détails... Les médias sont complices. 😡
Mr. Trump's political team trolled protesters on social media with Al-generated images of the president wearing a crown. When asked if the president had a comment on the demonstrations, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, gave a brief response in an email. "Who cares?" she said.
October 19, 2025 at 1:51 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Dear Scientific American:
FUCK OFF. THEN KEEP FUCKING OFF. KEEP FUCKING OFF UNTIL YOU GET TO A GATE WITH A SIGN SAYING "YOU CANT FUCK OFF PAST HERE" CLIMB OVER THE GATE, DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM, AND KEEP FUCKING OFF FOREVER.
October 14, 2025 at 10:21 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Hey OpenAI:
FUCK OFF. THEN KEEP FUCKING OFF. KEEP FUCKING OFF UNTIL YOU GET TO A GATE WITH A SIGN SAYING "YOU CAN'T FUCK OFF PAST HERE" CLIMB OVER THE GATE, DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM, AND KEEP FUCKING OFF FOREVER.
October 13, 2025 at 1:47 AM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Moi ça serait plus ça:
A cartoon of a Nobel Peace Price Committee meeting, with the caption "Just for fun, let's give it to Obama again"
October 9, 2025 at 10:58 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
The police escorting the fascist march through the anti-fascist protesters... 🤬🤮

Interesting tidbit: this band and this song are mentioned in one of my favorite Tragically Hip songs, Bobcaygeon:

youtu.be/o6QDjDPRF5c?...
A secondary theme of the song addresses racism and anti-Semitism; Downie has sometimes introduced the song with "This one asks the question: evil in the open or evil just below the surface?", and Rob Baker's guitar has "This machine kills fascists" written on it in the song's video. In the song's bridge, the British rock band The Men They Couldn't Hang are performing a concert at Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern ("with its checkerboard floors"); when they begin to perform their song "Ghosts of Cable Street", which is about the Battle of Cable Street riot in London in 1936, in an "Aryan twang", a similar brawl or riot appears to erupt between fascist and anti-fascist activists in the audience, which then weighs heavily on the officer's mind as he drives back to Bobcaygeon in the final verse.
October 4, 2025 at 1:29 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
In the words of Kaleb Horton (kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/):

« …being online is a drug and so is news. They are both addictions that rewire your brain to be miserable and, maybe worse, to anticipate being miserable. »
I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.
October 3, 2025 at 8:35 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
This sums up the insanity of the AI economics neatly.
Sora 2 is legally-questionable, financially-reckless, and a terrifying act of desperation by a company that already spent at least $2.60 to make $1 in the first half of this year.
October 3, 2025 at 2:57 AM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
La valeur de l'action de ces compagnies est gonflée artificiellenent avec de la "comptabilité créative"... il n'y a rien derrière, le crash va être horrible.

Un exemple:
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue. That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
October 1, 2025 at 10:56 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, was formally trained as a linguist and it shows in the design of the language. It remains my favorite programming language to use, by quite a margin, in large part because of that.
Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs, so instead of traditional terms such as "variable", "function", and "accessor" he sometimes says "noun", "verb", and "topicalizer". Wall was trained as a linguist, and the design of Perl is very much informed by linguistic principles. Examples include Huffman coding (common constructions should be short), good end-weighting (the important information should come first), and a large collection of language primitives. Perl favors language constructs that are concise and natural for humans to write, even where they complicate the Perl interpreter.
September 29, 2025 at 1:19 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Fantastic write-up here. It deserves to be read it its entirety, but here are a couple of paragraphs to give you a taste.
It is possible to throw our hands in the air and proclaim that we’ve opened Pandora’s Box, and that now we can only hunker down and accept the consequences. And there may be an element of truth to that. But we need to accept a more troubling fact: The companies marketing these LLMs know full well they are addictive, exacerbating to mental illness, and capable of entrenching deeply anti-social behavior. They are, in fact, banking on it. That’s how they’ll become profitable. The LLM companies are on a quest for money and power and they will break as many brains as they have to along the way. I am, fundamentally, a futurist. I think AI has the power to improve just about everything: It’ll make our computers faster and our trains more reliable, it’ll make diagnostic imaging better and space travel more possible, it’ll solve tough math problems and find old shipwrecks. It will help us understand our own history and make the tools of creativity more available. I’ve heard the gospel of those who say AI has radically changed, improved, and simplified how they do their jobs every day: And to them I say godspeed. But it seems increasingly clear to me that LLMs, as the consumer-facing part of AI — the thing that is, ostensibly, financing AI development in other fields, but which also seems to be taking up disproportionate attention and investment — are wildly over-hyped. My real fear is not around the technology, which I’ve tried to lay out here, it’s around the oligarchs controlling it. LLMs are replicating the same ills foisted on us by social media and the online advertising economy. And how could they not? It’s the social media giants and advertising oligopolists who are leading the LLM charge.
September 25, 2025 at 2:59 PM
richardbellavance.bsky.social
Great piece. This paragraph is 🎯
Dubai presents the hard-right vision of utopia: a place stripped of workers' protections or the right to protest, a place of pure environmental dereliction, a place where everyone drives everywhere, a place where the queer and the gender-fluid are told from birth that they simply do not exist, a place where citizenship is defined along narrow ethnic lines and everyone else is there on sufferance, where the super-rich and well-connected can simply do and consume as they please. A place where the poor are simply cleared out of sight.
September 24, 2025 at 1:29 AM