I understand the sovereignty push of Canada’s tech industry (and other industries), but we need to grapple with a more fundamental question: What kind of tech do we want, sovereign or otherwise? As Bianca Wylie noted, sovereign bad tech is still bad tech. www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

#LunarEclipse FAQ: Q: Is it safe to look at? A: Absolutely! Unlike a solar eclipse, there's no UNsafe time to look at a lunar eclipse. Q: Do I need a telescope? A: Nope! Best view is with naked eye. Just look up! Q: Does the eclipse portend terror & doom? A: Not at all! The news has that covered.

Rock climbers Lucy Smith and Pauline Rankin of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club, 1908, Salisbury Crags, Scotland #WomensArt Welcome to #WomensHistoryMonth

It's been a long time coming. Canadian independent bookstores have banded together to create an online book buying source so you can avoid the behemoth in the room. (Here are the titles published by CMU Press, which I run.) Spread the word #booksky! www.booksellers.ca/publisher/cmu-press-18021

"Our product kills kids" makes for a hell of an advert.

“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”

This is one of the key reasons that I have a no generative AI policy in each of my classes. I do not want students, many of whom are already stressed and vulnerable, slipping into this predicament. It is also why I design my classes for students to talk to & work with each other to reduce isolation.

Well, it wasn't only that the administration was demanding that they be able to use the AI models to autonomously kill people; they also want to use AI to assemble and deploy a comprehensive surveillance database on the behavior of all Americans. What's to worry about?

you think you've seen the whole movie, and then the alt text reveals you haven't even finished act two

this is extremely dangerous.

ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE My home department at Uppsala University is advertising an endowed professorship in the history of science. This is the best position in the field in Sweden, and probably in all of Scandinavia. Apply before 30 April 2026. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

🎉🎉🎉

here’s my latest on how Minister Solomon can’t just be the Minister for AI Ribbon Cuttings, he needs to work with Minister Miller to ensure consumer facing AI products like chat bots are folded into online harms & subject to a duty to act responsibly www.nationalobserver.com/2026/02/25/o...

when people talk about AI used in moderation of social media posts, you must remember there is always the human-in-the-loop, often a woman, often in the Global South, always dehumanised and forgotten 1/n www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I often find myself wanting to explain to students how things like floppy disks work. Great series of explainers with really helpful illustrations. Just gotta remember where this is next time I need it! www.makingsoftware.com

I've shared similar thoughts with reporters this week. The "reporting to police" question overshadows other tightly woven, vital issues here. Focusing on OpenAI also conveniently redirects attention *away* from Canadian govts (fed and prov) when they have many creative regulatory options at hand.

I was asked for thoughts on Open AI / Tumbler Ridge and sent 4-5 paragraphs of comment. I think the current discourse around whether they should have reported to the police, even though I agree 100% w/ negative sentiment twds AI cos, puts us on a dangerous precipice in terms of human rights. 🧵 1/??

“Insisting on technical precision when it matters can help us resist the easy idea that AI is a helper, ready to assist. Instead we must keep our focus on the uncomfortable thought that these systems partly and covertly structure what we say, think and learn.”

The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”

It is really amazing to see something that you helped create and put out into the world, take on a life of its own. There are at least four independently organized upcoming micro-consultations for the #PCAI! Linking them below, if you're in the area, want to join, or as examples to follow:

>they're going to vibecode cobol so, who's stocking up on canned food and shotguns?

What's old is new again: My jaw dropped when I saw that Curam, the system that wreaked havoc in Ontario's social assistance program *in 2014* is now doing the same in Canada's old age security program. 85 000 benefits requests delayed as of late Jan! ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/223...

This is a good thread & I hope people reflect on how it relates to what happened in 2020-2022, and the ongoing pandemic—how most people, at the Democrats’ urging, decided to throw anyone who might need airborne virus mitigations in the trash🚮. And in doing so helped our slide into more brutality:

This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

The book is a "compendium of... the unfinished + abandoned projects that have languished in notebooks, memories + email drafts—presented with unsentimental retrospection. It’s perhaps fitting that the only formal catalogue raisonné of Calle’s work documents this negative space..."

Evening

"By failing to create a National Data Center, the government opened space for corporations to aggregate data for their own use and profit. Preventing a nationalized data center enabled a new market for privatized data banks and data integration solutions to take hold and thrive."

“we train our own death now”

If you missed the news about Elsevier and Wiley (and doubtless the rest to follow) remaking themselves as AI companies with plans to profit from selling AI summaries of academic work back to the institutions that produced the original work: bsky.app/profile/benp...

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland. And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

L'hiver au Québec, je t'aime. And especially with so many stories like this one that highlight how recreating in the cold is a community pastime. 🎉 William Dandjinou! www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Writing is thinking. It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

The fact that these sentences always end with "... which we will cram with more work for them" and not "... so we moved to a four-day workweek" really illustrate the hollowness of some AI evangelists' promises that AI will deliver us to some kind of post-work utopia.

Today in digital government. These reports often focus on exponential $$ costs. But the SAAQclic fiasco viscerally impacted everyday people trying to access and update vital government documents and the front-line staff left to manage the resulting conflicts and chaos.

Les peuples autochtones ne sont pas des groupes culturels à protéger. Ce sont des peuples titulaires d’un droit à l’autodétermination reconnu par le droit international. ici.radio-canada.ca/espaces-auto...

What could go wrong using AI to help stage a few listing photos?

🧡❄️🐎

Ah, the "being anti-AI is ableist!" crowd has found this. Just so we're clear! Telling disabled and neurodivergent students that they have to get their education from the Lie Machine bc we can't bother to invest in real assistance is what is *actually* ableist.

In honor of THIS particular take, here are a few of my favorite recent articles about the various perils we face from LLMs. 🧵 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

Who among us might solve the mystery of these tangled up shopping carts? How did they arrive at the top of this fifteen foot snowpile? Must we wait for spring to free them from their icey home? #fnomtl

413$ x 400 familles, ça représente environ 165 000$. Enlever le peu de dignités aux familles de demandeur•euses d'asile et leurs enfants handis pour économiser ça. Sur un budget de 130 milliards.

If your (Canadian) university is buying subscriptions to gen AI like Copilot etc, can you send me a link (or the email you’ve gotten) about this? Collecting for a reflection… Example: it.ucalgary.ca/it-security/...

If your study is framed as asking whether "AI" does X as well as humans do, it's fundamentally misguided and I'd argue not scientifically sound. A short 🧵>>

The Wall Street Journal just illustrated the core argument of my book: a system rigged to reward capital over labor is one in which even full-time work no longer secures the most basic material needs. This is the economic order that produces the "working homeless." www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

oh to be that one monk at the monastery with 50 anatomically accurate native bird species on lock....