english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

This interpretation is wrong and backwards. Good apps were really expensive to make, and were only feasible if they were going to appeal to masses. Reducing the cost means more is produced, _and_ each one can be for a small audience that _really_ wants it vs tonnes of people who _kinda_ want it.

The municipality is hosting a Scan-a-thon event at the Keshen Goodman Library on Saturday, June 6 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Scan-a-thon is an annual event that offers residents an opportunity to contribute personal photos to the municipal archives. Details: www.halifax.ca/home/news/re...

Have to say, "for coders who don't want to code" could be an interesting marketing campaign for (say) the Claude Excel plugin, or other "End user programming" applications.

Ok, that does it, we're banning headlines. Links to articles will have link text like "Article #372: Concerning a recent Anthropic Blog Post". You'll have to read the damn article if you want to react to it.

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

"We have produced generations of adults who can name the Prime Minister but not their ward councillor. Who follow a federal budget with more attention than a municipal capital plan that will determine whether their water main gets replaced before it fails." Local politics matter. #WRpoli

We forget how long it took people to learn how to use search engines. People who were good with card catalogs were actually at a disadvantage. Now we’re in the same situation; people familiar with Google just want to type in « write a project management software » and expect a good answer

Generational tweet that might even spawn a school of architecture.

In Canada there's a growing movement to get rid of algorithmic pricing - but a longer-running, more insidious, and more consequential problem has always been algorithmic advertising. It hollows out media, toxifies politics, and entrenches US-based personal-data-collection oligopolies.

I've detailed those process to people and no one believes me. "You have to tell them how to do it right, and what will happen when they don't. Then you have to let them eat it. Just absolutely lose teeth over it"

I was asked to speak with a graduate class today about research data management. I was asked, "How do people become convinced that beginning data management early on in a project is worth it?" Me: "Suffering. They usual have to suffer first." 😅

I think there's almost a 1:1 skill transfer from mentoring people to skilled LLM use. If you can supervise and train someone skilled & confident but with big blind spots, you can use an LLM well. Patience, clear instructions, expecting things won't be perfect on the first try, build skill over time.

I knew it intellectually, but getting an e-bike showed me _viscerally_ how wildly battery technology has advanced. My (pretty heavy!) pedal-assist bike and I (pretty heavy!) have tooled around a few hours up hills that were otherwise daunting and this battery that I can easily hold is still ~100%.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

I think it's really an underrated moral issue (let along a political economy one) that we've sort of let scams and scam adjacent activities (sports betting, car dealerships, most retail interactions with skilled trades, crypto, etc) pervade the economy from top to bottom.

It’s very simple, everyone. By setting up 50 public-run grocery stores (fine, whatever), one for every 800,000 Canadians, at a cost of $7M each to set up (??) and $6M/yr to run (???) this will cut $60B (???) a year off of Canadian’s grocery bills. Elementary arithmetic.

Hey Matt Gurney, I’ve got a great new personal finance/banking app - it’s awesome, just finishing coding it up just for you. Dare you to reject it!

This is why progressives win in Toronto but never Really Win. Instead of saying "Bradford's support proves we should have moved on platform doors sooner," you leave the issue out there for him to own, and in six months you'll complain that a transit safety and efficiency issue is 'right-coded.'

I want a 100-car funereal motorcade of city vehicles for Peter Clark's procession the way we do for cops. I want the roads closed, the City flag flown at half-mast, and it to be covered on the radio the way we do when a police officer dies.

So $175 for ~18 months is interesting from an Alberta politics point of view, yes? Windfall profits and AB gov’t flush with cash, but huge consumer pain; too short a timeframe and too much uncertainty to justify investment/jobs other than some debottlenecking/optimisation? Does that sound right?

Half joking: This is what it's like to be a senior technical leader.

“Effectively, when we approve neighbourhoods that we know operate at a net loss, we are approving future tax increases.” edmontonjournal.com/news/local-n... TLDR: If you're against allowing established neighbourhoods to densify faster and with more intensity, here's an alternative way to grow.

In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the rich protagonist whose wealth allowed him such a life of leisure that he orchestrated a robbery simply out of idle boredom had a personal wealth of $4 million (~$35 million today)

"Way more people should be in charge of something mundane they’re held accountable for" is one of my hobby horses. Viscerally understanding how hard it is to get and keep five people coordinated well enough to get the weekly inventory counts done right cuts down on a lot of magical thinking.

the whole point of technology is to subvert "the natural order," because the natural order is disease and decay and suffering and famine

Get the Canadian government off of X. www.ditchx.ca will give you a letter for Treasury Board (which sets communication policy across GoC) or individual ministries for mailing (no stamp!), emailing, and even quick talking points for phoning. Letters now updated to include the raid in Paris.

"Maybe the city's full" says the man living in a 2.7 million dollar house on Palmerston, while sipping $170 scotch after defeating a multiplex proposal across the street. www.pressreader.com/canada/toron...

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

I hope that folks in European democracies understand that there are no longer friendly nations, but friendly political movements. It's our job to support liberal democracy around the world, especially when they're under assault from anti-democratic movements at home.

Cars simply don't work in our climate.

“..Hello? .. yes, I would like to pause my subscription to Snow™️…. Yes, but you see we already have quite a lot… ”

As with the rest of the disinformation crisis, important to understand this as a demand-side problem as well as a supply-side one. On some level people *know* these are lies and choose them freely anyway.

Most of the moral messaging in children's television programming when I was a kid was utterly uncontroversial at the time, and would be attacked as woke indoctrination today.

Alright folks, it's live. Get the Canadian government off of X. www.ditchx.ca will give you a template letter for Treasury Board (which sets communication policy across GoC) or individual ministries for mailing (no stamp!), emailing, or quick talking points for phoning.

Alright folks, it's live. Get the Canadian government off of X. www.ditchx.ca will give you a template letter for Treasury Board (which sets communication policy across GoC) or individual ministries for mailing (no stamp!), emailing, or quick talking points for phoning.

Visiting my parents in their late 70s; power station for charging stuff in power outages was on fritz. Kept resetting every few seconds. Spent 2 hrs trial-and-erroring settings via a downloaded app & Bluetooth so I could keep it up long enough to get it on WiFi and install an OTA firmware update.

If you want to push the government of Canada to get off X, mail Treasury Board rather than the minister leading the AI charge: (QTing to add context I forgot to include)

If you want to push the government of Canada to get off X, mail Treasury Board rather than the minister leading the AI charge: (QTing to add context I forgot to include)

Hey Canadian folks - keep mailing Evan Solomon about Grok. But the Treasury Board Secretariat, led by Shafqat Ali, that sets government policy on communications through their « Policy on Communications and Federal Identity » including social media. My draft letter (suggestions welcome) follows:

Just gonna say yeah I think it's antisemitic to protest outside of a synagogue and chant "we support Hamas here," like that is in fact a threat of murderous violence.

banning X is a national security issue for every country, plain and simple its explicit goal is to amplify and empower the largest Nazi-adjacent party in every country in which it operates it is also the largest deepfake porn generator in the world this is not a difficult call to make

if personnel is policy, then the most fundamental questions about an institution is not "what are the policy directives" but rather "what will get you promoted" vs. "what will get you fired"

The assumptions that "it's unrealistic to expect all students in Y to learn to code" and that "even if they knew how, bespoke solutions would be too labor-intensive" are absolutely load-bearing walls in academic and professional social structures.

10. We can only protect ourselves against threats we acknowledge.

So here’s the thing, folks - not everything is for you. The world is full of interesting people solving hard problems you don’t even know about yet! Isn’t that terrific? Every “What does that mean” thought you have is an opportunity to learn about a whole new world you didn’t realize existed!

Actually, Pagliacci is the clown; the creature is only referred to as « Pagliacci’s doctor »

People who want to get morally superior about how they hand-wash everything really gotta reckon with the fact that machine dish-washing uses considerably LESS water and emits considerably fewer greenhouse emissions than standard handwashing practices do. (And you save a lot of time...)