This has been making the rounds the last week or so and I finally watched it last night. What a great little snapshot. I love AHDN so much. youtu.be/r8RmOHXi63g?...

This is EXCELLENT. 1) this is spot-on analysis of the problem & a great immediate 1st thing a city can do to improve outcome. 2) as a 2 min clip? He's giving history, hope & change. Speaking to women, to Jewish & Black NYers, saying "abortion." & also naming eugenics in feminism. 100/10 no notes.

This will kill people. Doug Ford is going to kill people. So we’re clear. www.thestar.com/politics/pro...

Workers are calling it "quiet doing what my boss insisted against my advice."

What a king. May all the people in ford-voting areas w pathetic “slow down” signs on their lawns make no connections between what they see & voting preferences. www.thestar.com/politics/pro...

There are a bunch of mayors, police chiefs and a good majority of non-speeding, non-vigilante, Ontarians who are just fine w speed cameras. At some point Ford has to push his luck too much w his meddling, but Ontario continues to give him rope.

I really think that your day will be improved by reading Holly on the World Tramdriver Championships.

Okay I wrote up my trip to the WORLD TRAMDRIVER CHAMPIONSHIPS buttondown.com/holly/archiv... cannot stress enough how much this newsletter issue is just a list of things that happened at the world tramdriver championships, please use your own judgement regarding whether that is of interest to you

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

This, from @shawnmicallef.bsky.social is an absolute scorcher. I feel and share the rage. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

This is a monumentally awesome thread re the utter vacuity of John Tory the politician. Brian should get some sort of medal for it.

Toronto, ON mayoral. I'll try to be polite, and put it this way: I've seen stories like this about John making political decisions *for most of my career, and I'm old.* Example: in the 2010 race John was in and out and in and out. 58 sources were granted anonymity - www.thestar.com/news/gta/if-...

1. Here's a short story of a group of ham radio enthusiasts whose hobby turned lethal when they ended up in an accidental naval battle at sea.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with: “What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

I keep taking things from stores, just small things, reasonable, and they keep arresting me for shop lifting. Cars make even smart people stupid.

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

genuinely gobsmacked, not at the boos (sad but expected) but that the organisers CUT THE MIC(!) and shooed the Progressive Judaism co-leaders offstage, for this extraordinarily middle-of-the-road speech(!!). Significant parts of British Jewry have completely lost the plot. Incredibly embarrassing

Reminder that despite what the roads feel like for the author, much of the benefit to the vision zero speed limit decreases have been to stop drivers from killing and hospitalizing *themselves*.

Just realized I haven’t seen anyone post the Tom Lehrer-2 Chainz letter yet today.

yo dawg, I herd you like the third reich, so I put a nazi AI in your exploding taxi so you can heil while you hail

Two years ago I interviewed a 31-year-old NY state assemblymember about a 7-year-old girl killed by an SUV driver in his district. I hung up the phone, astonished that I'd talked to a legislator who so thoughtfully articulated what actually needs to change on our streets. He'll make a great mayor

fun aspect of Toronto politics is that good policy is getting torpedoed by suburban Liberals and Conservatives but YIMBYs on here are getting angry at Olivia Chow and Gord Perks

Everybody had a new face Everybody had a smartphone Everybody had a tik-tok Everybody had a substack Oh yeah

Yiddishists for Mamdani:

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

A tale of two Bill 5s

By far, one of the most powerful reads I have come across over the years. Short, deeply personal, and profoundly succinct, this is a personal account of being a kid, following orders at Kent State. Still processing it myself. open.substack.com/pub/joadt/p/...

CATCH OF THE YEAR - Denzel Clarke goes wayyyyy over the fence to rob a HR from the Angels' Nolan Shanuel

ICE is a criminal organization willfully carrying out illegal orders and the people of California are right to resist this. respect to the fighters and power to the people

At the ICE raid and subsequent community resistance in Paramount, California this morning, this skater kid ate dozens of munitions from Border Patrol agents, walked away slowly and flipped them off.

a friend of mine shared this ai-generated "emotion wheel" and unfortunately i have been laughing my ass off at it for like 15 minutes now. today i am feeling Fnliinneon

Happy Pride everybody, I made a Bisexshawl.

Devastating: the upper echelons of southern Ontario can't sell their second homes after building and perpetuating a society where young people can't afford their first.

So: the “Protect Bathurst / Dufferin” astroturf campaign run by Summerhill Market had videos of a guy talking about the neighborhood & RapidTO proposal. Real grassroots feel. Took a screenshot & put it into google image search. Guess what?

Because without AI it would taste like P

The final confirmation that the Ford Government are a bunch of lying liars who were hell bent on closing the Science Centre for the MegaSpa! Engineers studying the Science Centre roof did not recommend closing it. t.co/6JJ48kcveR #topoli #onpoli

This is intereresting, but it misses one big mark for me. "Cab LLMs competently do a particular job?" and "Are LLMs a threat to humans doing that job?" are two very different questions that only glancingly intersect with one another. The fear is not LLM authors becoming too good.

*crab-walked

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

turns out he has used “dei” in a number of prayers

Essentially *all* research and expert assessments show that this does not work. It will not counter Farage, but literally push votes towards Reform. It genuinely is impossible to overstate how profoundly stupid and strategically illiterate this decision is. You cannot out-Reform Reform.

Feast your eyes on this FPTP monstrosity. Mind-boggling that the UK used to have Supplementary Vote (kinda like Ranked Ballot) for such elections & *actively* got rid of it! Nice of the parties to arrange a neat stepped pattern. Though I see Ian Scott not holding up his end of the bargain. Prick.

With CBC now having called all ridings it's time for the land-vs-people-vote animation.

If you need any sources on AI being shitty, I've been collecting and compiling them: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Jagmeet Singh, for his political faults, is a real human. Respect for that.

To this point: We heard a lot in the first 2 hours of the night about how the Conservatives were surprisingly strong in Atlantic Canada. Now that the count is nearly almost over, & the early voting was added... that has turned out to not be true.

CBC's election night is this bizarre situation where most anchors & journalists talk up these returns & trends at length, then the same 2 people keep jumping in to say "wait wait, we don't have the early voting numbers that break Liberals!" And then they go on as if nothing was said.

“Just look at the sheer girth of this thing…” Things I did NOT expect to hear on the CBC tonight! Congratulations to the Longest Ballot Committee (@longestballot.bsky.social) on hitting the big time!

Please note that if you use "prime minister elect" to refer to Mark Carney, a Canadian constitutional scholar will come to your home and smash your windows.