Whoever it is, this is sickening

saying “swastikas are bad” is extremely low hanging fruit for the mayor of a city that’s home to a million jews

Of course LLMs will get larger token-handling capacities and better code to alleviate context rot. BUT their access to information/truth will DECREASE over time -- as big lawsuits (current and future) succeed, they will be cut off more and more, and creatively write around their lack of key facts

There's another aspect of the AI bubble that isn't being considered: The fees being charged for LLMs are obviously far below cost. Once startup capital is burned through, they'll have to start charging something close to actual cost, which will price most users out of this very limited-value tool

I have a basic one I have been using for a while, asking it to give me all German States containing an R. Last time I didn't get Berlin, Thüringen, Saarland, or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but did get Saxony!

While researching my current column, I had trouble finding something PM Carney said in a speech in either Factiva or Google, so I tried asking ChatGPT-5 to search for it. This was its internal response. It hallucinates in basic searches. It can't write truth. It can't copyedit. What is it good for?

Ok, good to see: 1. Turning hundreds of 1000s of people already here into permanent residents is the right priority — the solution to “illegals” is make them legal 2. Doing some of this on top of PR immigration targets gets us into population growth we need www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/art...

The fact that Berlin to Copenhagen is not a usable train journey today -- eg it meant I had to use flights for my recent year of work in Sweden -- is a pretty absurd hole in the rail system. That it'll take at least until 2040 to fill it is even more absurd www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Also, they just love it when you bring up the subject of kamikaze pilots a propos of nothing in Japan

A simplified US take on the Canadian budget: Carney has decided to be the FDR kind of left-wing (creating economic revival and employing many people through big public-funded works) but opposed to the LBJ kind of left-wing (Carney is paring back fed offices with redistributive functions)

I’d love to hear about the Upper West Side / Upper East Side split

It looks like Mamdani may have won an actual majority, which, given that Trump is sure to spend the next 3 years branding him as the face and identity of the Democratic Party, at least gives him something Trump has never had

A simplified US take on the Canadian budget: Carney has decided to be the FDR kind of left-wing (creating economic revival and employing many people through big public-funded works) but opposed to the LBJ kind of left-wing (Carney is paring back fed offices with redistributive functions)

This is the actual official whitehouse dot gov web site

As Geoffrey York observes, the "persecution of Christians" that has led Trump to threaten war against Nigeria is about as real as the "violence against white farmers" in South Africa -- that is, not real at all, just an easily fact-checked online meme www.theglobeandmail.com/world/articl...

Due to the Chatham House Rule, nobody can report that I’m the one in the back of every meeting who yells “It’s not Chatham House Rules! There’s only one rule!” and causes everyone to groan

“Venezuelans are consistently underrepresented in crime statistics—accounting for only 1.3 percent of detentions in 2024 despite comprising over 2.5 percent of the population” In Ecuador, as in USA, undocumented Venezuelans LOWER the crime rate and make people safer www.cgdev.org/publication/...

If we win, they have to start measuring pitches in km/h. That’s only fair

Obama: "The weird videos of a US president with a crown on his head flying a fighter jet & dumping poop on American citizens - that's not even worth booing about. Because all of that is a distraction from the fact that your situation, your life has not gotten better. They do it so you won't notice"

A film you’ve seen more than seven times with a gif

If Canadian PM Carney manages a “reset” with China, it will be the fifth reset in 20 years under three Prime Ministers. Two of those resets have required their own reset, by the same PM, after they went south. Heavy lies the hand on the China Reset button www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

The Washington Post with a story about how remaking an institution to appeal to the pro-Trump right doesn't help the bottom line.

Spicy!

If Canadian PM Carney manages a “reset” with China, it will be the fifth reset in 20 years under three Prime Ministers. Two of those resets have required their own reset, by the same PM, after they went south. Heavy lies the hand on the China Reset button www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

Thanks to @simonhoupt.bsky.social for reporting on what we’ve all been saying. I’ve found in agencies, creatives never take into account what the media buyers will do to their stuff by forcing 20 views/hour and turning a clever ad into an account killer www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/baseb...

I’ve been watching it, and it does what all good works about fascists should do: shows them to be pathetic, insecure pieces of shit underneath it all.

The treaty properly known as the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. Why Latvia is the only EU country with significant parliamentary opposition to this treaty, including from its governing coalition, is mystifying. Putin opposes it

Those who think the Reagan ads were a bad idea for having irrationally annoyed the president for reasons having nothing to do with their merits are, I assume, writing urgent letters to the Toronto Blue Jays organization urging them to lose the World Series for the same reason

i do think vance is mostly just regurgitating the half remembered ideas of dead slaveholder extremists but also this gives off the unmistakable scent of “i’ll say whatever you hogs want me to say,” which is fitting coming from america’s premier hogman

Here I explain why PM Carney is fortunate to have offended Trump away from negotiating a big tariff-cutting deal right now www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

To get buy-in from all 10 provinces (which it didn't), Canada's constitution has a clause allowing provinces to override its fundamental rights and freedoms. The framers -- I've spoken to some -- imagined it used in existential-crisis cases. Well, a province just used it to break a teachers' strike

Those who think the Reagan ads were a bad idea for having irrationally annoyed the president for reasons having nothing to do with their merits are, I assume, writing urgent letters to the Toronto Blue Jays organization urging them to lose the World Series for the same reason

We’re all assuming it actually is a ballroom.

It's all in @dougsaunders.bsky.social's Maximum Canada. IMHO, this crisis is showing why we should be opening our doors wider to high skilled immigrants and more trade, instead of turning inward. We need a larger population and consumer market to offset lost access to the US market.

Oh my God they're actually going to build something that they designed with ChatGPT, aren't they

It's long been my contention that ideology and aesthetics are two manifestations of the same thing. Witness Hitler's very kitsch paintings. Witness the gobsmacking tackiness of this structure www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Reporting this story, the same details kept appearing in police investigations around Europe: the perpetrators turned out to have been recruited and offered cash over Telegram. European authorities are increasingly open in saying who is responsible: Russia. www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

Unspeakably horrible Americans named Curtis: ☑️LeMay ☑️Sliwa ☑️Yarvin Unspeakably excellent Americans named Curtis: ✅Mayfield They’re losing the Battle of the Curtises to the berks!

it's dizzying to me that stories like this -- a corrupt grift built on democracy-wrecking lies that culminated in a coup attempt -- barely breakthrough anymore. they're just daily background noise now.

Important historical point: the United States of the 1700s had far more cultural diversity, divergent values and “viewpoint” diversity between disharmonious ethnic groups than today; the idea of a common cultural heritage is a latter-day myth www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/o...

Good year to beat them at their national game

A hypothetical I never would have considered was “Imagine if the American with the very worst record of managing construction projects were singularly responsible for the building most symbolic of democracy and decided to do his thing with both it and what it symbolizes”

Online hate isn’t just virtual. Posts with Hindu nationalist hashtags on India’s Koo platform precede real-world attacks on Muslims & Christians. When the internet shuts down, so does the violence. Fresh research from colleague @sschutte.bsky.social et al Read more 👉 www.prio.org/news/3644

Finally, a use for nimbyism To Fight ICE, Portland’s Leaders Turn to What They Know Best: Zoning www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/u...

…schmeasefire

Would be nice to have a rather more literal No Kings protest up here

I’m glad the I Paper editors chose to leave this tangential detail in my post-mortem of yesterday’s Trump-Zelenskyy meeting, just in case there was any lingering doubt over the infantilism of the current US administration. inews.co.uk/news/world/t...

Given that Wayne Gretzky’s wines should be infra dig for any self-respecting Canadian on both political and oenological grounds, it’s refreshing to see this development (from the usually excellent Tawse winery)

I guessed, watching the ceasefire celebrations, that the very best person make sense of it all is Mohammad Darawshe, an Israeli whose family have been devastated by both Hamas and Netanyahu and knows both IS and PAL political realities fluently. I was so right www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

One of the smartest people on Canadian immigration, this @dougsaunders.bsky.social post with four major reforms to immigration, should be a template for other countries too www.dougsaunders.net/2025/09/four...