Astrology and Tarot reading is the real indicator of mass adoption.

The slop, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves

It’s S4E4 of Papers In The Park. Javad Rajabi is here to walk us through his paper on SEGA. arxiv.org/abs/2605.22668 Thanks to @cohereforai.bsky.social for sponsoring, to Anthony and Alvin for organizing, and Javad for walking us.

2. As AI agents do more research tasks, their distinctive affordances will shape how we see the economy, politics, society. Social research systematizes collective discovery about *ourselves*. AI tools are increasingly mediating this self-discovery.

I read “Titan” by Chernow to get a sense of why Standard Oil happened. The distinction between competition capitalism and cooperation capitalism is stark. Canada sure is a cooperative society, isn’t? Markets are fantastic tools and people use them in all sorts of ways.

If there’s no partition between the chairs and an open area, people will always, without exception, talk and network without regard to the presenters. The space is engineered for voting. So they vote. This was a repeated point of friction throughout Toronto Tech Week.

2026

If you get in bed with a cohort that is largely defined by a lack of social trust, you are not going to like the outcome.

“On cloudy days when they could not see the sun, pigeons whose magnetic macrophages had been depleted were unable to navigate home.” So… they have a gut feeling about it?

Next, South of France will freeze as an African heatwave blasts Finland. Egyptian nights in Joensuu.

We invite you to join our Academy of Management PDW, “Chance, Luck, and Serendipity in Management and Strategy,” at this year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting! Looking forward to seeing you there!

Last year, it was revealed that the Tony winner was writing the script for a new stand-alone movie about the legendary Muppets character, which will be co-produced by Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone

To pull from Feldman and March on this: so long as status games persist in org life: there will be measurers. I wish for a post-peacock world. But so long as the median leader is emotionally an 8 year old: there will be status games.

A few things are true at the same time: Folks are scared. People suffer. Risk exists. Markets make winners and losers. It might be good to have a talk about the nature of power law distributions and how we can have both progress, opportunity, security, and positive outcomes.

I think you're onto something. This space would normally (aka in the 20c) have been filled by journalism. But right now, no one thinks journalists are unbiased on the topic. So you get this bizarre phenomenon of tech ppl citing *The Pope* as a more trustworthy source on tech than The Atlantic.

The polite way to put OP would have been "it convinces me there is such deep uncertainty on this topic that people are hungry for sources of moral orientation or affirmation." Which is fine; it's not a crime; I'm just observing.

Big gains. arxiv.org/abs/2605.23904

The SkyDome is open. Finally a beautiful day. I’m at the BDC this evening for the DevTools meetup.

Return of the Gettymander, this time with fatter fingers. www.assembly.ab.ca/docs/default...

Papers In The Park is at New Stadium today. Because of rain. We’re covering: arxiv.org/abs/2604.18519

It’s quite the narrative.

“Put another way: Did maritime insurance in England cover the premeditated killing of Africans?”

50 cent washer youtu.be/r2M-if81zWo?...

State media is a component of LLM training data. A new Nature study says this material is laundered into what presents as objective chatbot text. LLMs also give more pro-regime answers when prompted in the official language of low-press-freedom countries than in English.

Moments ago, NASA's Psyche spacecraft made its closest approach of Mars! The images should be *spectacular* (but we have to wait until next week to see them) 🧪 🔭

Good news, everyone! I have a short piece coming out in The Conversation on Monday that explains the main issues with this study. It's impossible for me to have the same media reach as the original press release. So I'd be extremely grateful if people could help me share it as widely as possible 🙏

“And once shared purpose disappears, it’s gone. A flaw lurked right at the core of the experiment, as flaws so often do in works of ambitious genius.”

“Against the Platonic Representation Hypothesis” from Robert Adragna. Thanks to Trajectory Labs for organizing! These are so good.

Yikes yikes yikes www.agweb.com/news/usda-pr...

Does anybody else hold their LLM in their non dominant hand, and hold a pen in their dominant hand?

I was 18 when I watched Ray Patterson tell the voters they were screwed. And I laughed hard then. I’m not laughing as hard now. Still chuckling a bit. The writers had a great warning. I get it now.

Wait for it .... 11 seconds and BOOM! Some breathtaking footage from Fuego 🇬🇹 and @boisestate.bsky.social scientists in this great science update on infrasound sensors. eos.org/science-upda...

Friend of mine calls it the Vibers High. Sure. I don’t care. I care about awesome software that solves my problems. I care about great stories. I care about material gains in science. If AI can lift the best among us, then bring it on.

“Finally, ablating explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning often reduces the collapse, showing that deliberation paradoxically amplifies the memory curse.” Oh FFS really? arxiv.org/abs/2605.08060

It’s part of it. And it’s in part seeing some of pretty Versailles behaviour out of some tech leaders. And some just some straight up evil shit.

✻ Gallivanting… (3,154,393,470s · ↓ 3.15x10^8k tokens · esc to interrupt)

S2E2 of Papers In The Park! This week: DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding arxiv.org/abs/2602.06036

Land isn’t free. It has an opportunity cost. Plus, it costs carbon to grow and transport carbon.

The world now uses at least 40 million hectares of cropland, an area the size of Paraguay, to produce biofuels that account for only 4% of global transport energy In the US, we use 30-40% of our corn supply and 40-50% of our soybean oil supply to produce…about 6% of our transport fuel

We're releasing EMO, a matched standard-MoE baseline, and training code to help the community study modularity & expert selection. 🧠 Models: buff.ly/Q49VgKB 📝 Blog: buff.ly/pZKHwtK 📄 Tech report: buff.ly/UmJ3uOV 📊 Visualization: buff.ly/td0zsb4

Eh, Canadians - so if we’re going to lean into this trend with the pipelines, if that’s the concensus, okay. Plurality rules. Could we get our insurance game ready then? Let’s go through and plan what we can? Hope for 2.5c and plan for 3.5 by 2100?

“Combined with previous work, our observations suggest that in order to do next-token prediction, LLMs implicitly learn to straighten their internal trajectory over sequences of tokens.”

The idea that bots talking to bots will somehow generate ad revenue is absolutely wild. Speedrunning platform death. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Consumer Confidence Diverging for Low- and High-Income Households www.apollo.com/wealth/the-d...

In which Tim describes middle management.

it’s honestly jarring when AI creates bullshit work and people are happy about that like, now your job is poking agents to get them unstuck. not problem solving, just jiggling the mouse how are you content with this?

Reports in Iran: 'Two American commercial vessels trapped in the rocky part of the Strait of Hormuz 🔹Two American commercial vessels were trapped in the southern waters of the Strait of Hormuz in the southern part'

One of the many gifts of having lived in Alberta: a deeply engrained culture against rats, and an awareness of dehydraded rodent shit.

I’d sooner have the tech be more like diesel (decentralized and levelling) than nuclear (centralized, distorting, likely far more dangerous).

Good stuff. The material is a life fully lived. Raw. That title. You might like it.