Not calling shenanigans yet, but: My partner and I have lived at the same Montreal address since 2018, and voted while living here. I got no voting card; she got a vote-by-mail card she didn’t request. The elections website couldn’t tell us where to vote based on our postal code. Anyone else?

Shouldn’t Max Headroom be an actual show by now?

Were medieval swordsmen really so clumsy that they kept cutting themselves with their own swords? I mean, “double-edged sword” is a pretty common metaphor, but how bad do you need to be at swordplay for that to matter. “Sharp pointy jewel-encrusted pommel” maybe.

That’s a nice book neighbor! Thanks for sharing a pic of it in the wild!

Yay! Can’t wait to hear what you think. And as they say, all good things…

In Canada, apparently the salt box outside the door doubles as a package delivery area. Lovely photo to receive from the shipper. As we know all too well from justevilenough.com, last-mile logistics are hard.

Books in hands!

Some elevator rides just hit different.

I can’t remember a podcast that has been as much fun—or as thought-provoking—as this wide-ranging chat about subversiveness, norms, behavior, and political influence with @farrahbostic.bsky.social and the excellent Emily Ross. I suspect you’ll like it too. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/c...

Small brag: We just hit a thousand direct-from-author orders for Just Evil Enough. That’s 100 people who get extra content, videos, worksheets, event invites, and a Signal channel. In bookstores/Amazon as audio, hardcover, and audiobook March 7. But you should buy it from justevilenough.com instead.

Somebody Like I Used To Know is on the airport radio and I can’t not hear “now you’re just a smelly Peter Ustinov”.

This was a really fun, sprawling conversation about subversiveness, competition, and the norms that hold Canada back. Plus basketball, AI, Startupfest, and lots more. Thanks, @trondizzle.bsky.social!

Really feels like everyone who cares about democracy should watch this. Ostensibly about bots, it’s far more. youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y

The torrent of bot accounts on the platform is huge. It’s a hard problem to fix. It also makes me think about online warfare. If you didn’t like a competing/open platform, flooding it with fake accounts would be a logical attack that harms it without being easily traced.

The thing I can’t shake after recording my voice reading my words* for 16 hours straight is that nobody can ever trust that it’s really me on the phone ever again. Literally just made the data for a training set. * and my co-author’s.

Wrapped day 5 of recording the audiobook for @evilenough.bsky.social. Just a few pages left. The best part is the studio tech telling me in between chapters how he’s going to apply all the ideas to his own business. Did not expect.

Around 30% of the folks following me here look like bots (generic posts, stuffed bio, photo straight out of central casting.) Started a week ago. Anyone else?

Well this blew up a bit. Astonishing that English contains two languages; tand that you probably judge someone’s politics based on which one they use.

Every American is bilingual. EVERY American. Just Evil Enough is a book about subverting systems. When we wrote it, we came across a system we're all part of, and never notice. It sort of blew my mind because it's so obvious, and yet completely unnoticed. Time for a thread.

Some big news. I’ve been working on Just Evil Enough with Emily Ross over 7 years, a pandemic, and an ocean. It’s finally headed to print. You can preorder it straight from us, at justevilenough.com. When you do, we’ll sign you up for all sorts of content, events, and shenanigans.

My "the stars are not where they should be, but don't worry" headline has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the headline

Plenty of calls for AI watermarking but few practical ideas about how to implement it. Turns out the answer may be hiding in plain sight. Use Unicode to mark AI-generated text in a way that persists across apps, devices, and users. I wrote a thing, but @alasdairallan.com beat me to sharing it.

How might a benevolent AGI save humans without crushing our free will? I wrote some speculative fiction. https://acroll.substack.com/p/i-woke-up-tomorrow

The gap between a human and the Internet has been getting shorter every year. We’ve gone from a “last mile” to a “last millimetre” problem. We might even get below zero latency, into the weird world of anticipatory computing: https://open.substack.com/pub/acroll/p/the-last-millimetre-problem

Just finished Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues. Great read, based on actual tech, with smart protagonists and familiar settings. Enjoyed it in a can’t-put-down way that happens less and less with fiction.

It’s like someone found a slider for creature design marked “teeth” and slid it way farther to the right than the developers intended.

Cabbage for dinner means science for breakfast.

So... we're excited to launch: Moderator Mayhem (which we've spent the last few months building, in partnership with Engine). A browser-based mobile content moderation simulator game: https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

This photo is making the rounds. Pythagoras’ outrage is unwarranted. Careful readers will note that a feef is 1.414 feet, letting the diagonals be 6 feet and the bottom line 8.485 feet. It’s not to scale. I like to believe the graphic designer, outraged at the bad math, did this on purpose.

Chicago deep dish is the love child of a baker and a lasagne. Now I need Lipitor and an insulin pump.

ChatGPT and a writer’s strike. Imagine negotiating against what GPT5 *might* be.

Have a long post on generative AI artwork, hedonic treadmills, dopamine thirst trap feedback loops, the demise of traditional social media, and how I learned to stop hating influencers. It’s a bit NSFW. And on hold. Could burn some bridges. Also feels like I need to publish it. Thoughts?

BRB, scouting cars for eighties dictators.

Early-stage startups: Your target customer is not people who will use your product. It is people who will do what your business model expects them to.

Why does Bluesky launch with a picture of clouds. This feels like a valid first post.