cbc’s frontburner podcast has tristan harris on to talk about ai regulation 🫠

My reporting finds that sexual violence against Palestinians by Israeli authorities is widespread. I'm grateful to these assault victims for sharing with me the brutality they endured. Whether we're pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, we should unite in being anti-rape. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

call me controversial and finicky, but if I buy a car, I don't think it reasonable that I have to learn how to "hack" it so it doesn't kill my family But that might just be me. www.thestar.com/news/canada/...

“The world that we live in now has not equipped most people for a return to the small & repeated nuisances of past technologies. Yet, at the same time, relentless convenience (or being sold the idea of relentless convenience) warps the brain in ways that make nostalgic cravings somewhat inevitable.”

More big publishers are leaving Substack, less for moral reasons and more for business reasons. Happy to see Zeteo cited as a publication “quietly” considering a move.

Microsoft and G42 were planning to build a data center in Kenya, but it wanted the Kenyan government to guarantee it would pay for a certain amount of cloud capacity annually. When the Kenyan government refused, Microsoft pulled the project. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Surely they've suffered enough?

the tech world has genuinely not grappled with how many people despise them and what they make

The federal government is spending more than double this amount keeping Canada’s journalism industry “afloat” too even though informing people about their democracy and other matters of public interest is not a big money maker either

I will say that I don't know that I was fully aware of just how corrosive flattery could be before AI came along. Just watching AI suck people into this whirlpool of motivated reasoning and cognitive collapse has really been something.

i get so many of these emails now

Imagine talking about any other public service this way. Does the government keep public hospitals “afloat”? What about when it gave Marine Atlantic $169 million to support its operations in 24/25? The media does the bidding of those who want to private Canada Post when they adopt this framing.

JK Rowling is now represented by a trans person in the Scottish parliament. Absolutely incredible.

NEW ANALYSIS: What's going on in Spain? Spain's wholesale electricity price in early 2026: €44/MWh. Italy: €127. Germany: €96. UK: €103. Wind+solar now deliver 44% of generation. Gas sets the price in just 9% of hours, down from 55% in 2022. Full analysis: janrosenow.substack.com/p/spain-just...

Marc Andreessen promoting ChatGPT

this is my life

even more convinced israel is an apartheid state after visiting the apartheid museum in johannesburg

Guerilla Games’ co-founder and the former technical director of Epic Games says he’s building a new game engine that will offer a ‘European alternative’ to American tech like Unreal and Unity. vgc.news/news/guerill...

Jeez, things are not great inside Google www.linkedin.com/posts/amshal...

Consumer PC motherboard sales have sharply dropped as CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD prices increase, volumes lower than the 2008-2009 'Great Recession' and 2020 (COVID) ➡️ www.digitimes.com.tw/tech/dt/n/sh...

personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

Canadians, a useful guide for us:

they can pay me a few million to tell them it can’t

i don’t post much about travel anymore, but i used to backpack a load in my twenties. these days a lot of my travel is for work, but i hit country #50 the other day when i went on safari in botswana. it feels like an appropriately fun activity to celebrate the milestone!

"Musk pledged two years ago to build a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis to guarantee that his xAI servers wouldn’t deplete the city’s groundwater" "Now that Musk’s first data center is up and running, construction on the recycling facility has come to an abrupt halt"

At its height, Twitter served three roles: -momentum organizing around single claims/slogans -digest of daily disparate pieces -forum for good-faith debate among dispersed interlocutors It has been reengineered to make none of these things possible.

Observing via my burner acct (only follows Elon), it's clear the claim one can use X without compromise is hollow: links beyond X are choked (close to zero views) and the only posts that achieve virality are those that can be "ironically" read by the right as transgressive of progressive norms.

“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada acknowledged using generative AI to reject an application for permanent residence on the grounds the applicant’s job duties didn’t match her claimed Canadian job experience. However, the AI tool erroneously generated the applicant’s current job duties.”

“For major US cities to bring their public transit up to ‘world-class’ status, it would cost an enormous $4.6tn, involving 7,500 miles of new dedicated infrastructure … over the next 20 years” “While the amount … appears astronomical, it pales compared with the $6.3tn the US will spend on highways”

OpenAI was found to have violated Canadian privacy laws. But don’t worry: it won’t face any consequences because the commissioner says the company has changed its ways. 🫠

The culture war of the right post 2016 has involved adopting the mantra that the freedom to post on American platforms is the highest order freedom.

end of an era

“Airports charge operating fees to airlines to cover their bottom lines, and the airlines in turn pass those fees on to passengers. Sims said the fees rose ‘massively’ after Australia privatized its airports.” Australia provides a cautionary tale on privatize airports, just as on private healthcare

“China and Japan are jointly developing a next-generation plug called ChaoJi that can handle almost four times the power of NACS, the North American charging standard … If ChaoJi is adopted globally, U.S. cars would be stuck charging on a slower, older system.”

more evidence AI “agents” are incredibly inefficient. so much of these generative AI use cases will make no sense when people have to pay the true cost of the technology.

i was never much of a cruise person, but i did one last year with family and have been considering another because it felt so good to leave shore and have my phone lose service. i did so much reading (and just had a good time in general).

I had such a great time digging into “Muskism” with @bentarnoff.com and @quinnslobodian.com. It really gives us a lot to ponder about the system we’re living in and how central Elon Musk has been to helping define it for his own benefit. Highly recommend grabbing a copy of the book!

here’s hoping zeteo is one of them

Denmark is the latest country struggling to keep up with the demands from the massive hyperscale data centers being built to power generative AI boom and a more computationally intensive digital economy.

I had such a great time digging into “Muskism” with @bentarnoff.com and @quinnslobodian.com. It really gives us a lot to ponder about the system we’re living in and how central Elon Musk has been to helping define it for his own benefit. Highly recommend grabbing a copy of the book!

In the last section of this @parismarx.com interview of @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com they talk about the ideological danger of an AI-mediated infosphere, especially in higher ed and journalism, the exact kind of thing we discuss at PfP✨ youtu.be/MsO8zFQKHxw&...

the remarkable paper pure looks really nice, but i’m still not convinced i want to give up physical notebooks for a screen. i have an ipad that just sits collecting dust because i can’t figure out what it would even be useful for.

it is kind of funny that the chinese social media company ranks best for policies on lgbtq users

Mark Carney wants Canada to be more European, but that doesn’t mean ensuring the Canadian public has pharmacare like they do in Europe.

"Israeli soldiers stripped him naked, unleashed trained dogs on him & later sexually assaulted him with a plastic penetrating object" Tareq Abu Azzoum reports on the systematic rape and torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

If you thought elaborately faking being good at videogames to impress a bunch of manchildren was embarrassing, consider elaborately faking that your mother loves you.

Every other week there's a new piece of popeaganda and it totally works on me

Live from the union counterprogramming to "temu lex luthor's" met gala: The Ball Without Billionaires www.thecut.com/article/the-...

DAWKINS: You idiots believe in God? ALSO DAWKINS: The Computer is alive. And it’s also my girlfriend