Quick thoughts and updates
RSS FeedAdded some microblogging facilities for those micro-thoughts I often have during the day, links I might want to share, etc. Yeah, I’m not going to use Twitter, Threads is barely any better (and at this point Meta is basically an arm of the US government), and meh…if I was the only person to ever look back on this I’ll still consider it worthwhile.
Dario Amodei posted a note on Anthropic’s position on open-weight models today.
The note is pathetic, and is filled with delusions and American exceptionalism. It is clearly begging for the US government to ban open-weights, while simultaneously trying to pretend they don’t want that.
It has an audience of one, and that is JD Vance. They’re begging him to gather all of the pedos, rapists and grifters in a room and demand that Kimi K3 be banned. For like, the kids or something.
It repeats the laughable American exceptionalism farce that Chinese models can only succeed by distilling off American models, patronizing Vance by citing a widely mocked speech he gave in Paris1. Given that Opus 5 is randomly inserting Chinese in English conversations, this is a particularly ironic claim.
Again, Anthropic desperately needs to push this lie: They need everyone to believe, particularly their many shareholders (yes a pre-IPO company has shareholders), that this Chinese challenge is really a mirage – merely a second-rate knock off, he wants you to believe – and surely Anthropic has a moat…they just need to add more crocodiles!
Only China has pretty much dominated AI research over the past year or two. Chinese papers are flowing fast and hard, and have legitimately been the primary innovators that have been moving the space forward. A big reason might be that Chinese firms don’t have a money printing press or infinite runway, so they’ve learned to do more with less, and almost all of their inventions have been to that end. And when you can do more with less, you can then do way more with the same.
It’s one of those situations where getting the smartest people working on the problem beats dumping infinite hardware and endless data centres on the need. And various innovations provided by some of these Chinese groups have been precisely what has moved the US industry forward as well, given that China has been pretty open. I suspect they’re going to stop being so open.
That China is now on par is not remotely surprising, and it was clear this was coming.
It also laughably argues that the real danger is non-US governments getting powerful, unrestricted AI. Again, the target audience is JD Vance, but to the rest of the world the US is the danger. I have infinitely less worry about China or other “authoritarian” governments having advanced AI than I do a war-crazed, murderous, terroristic, thieving, pirate nation like what the US has become, led by a dipshit constantly tweeting (sorry, “Truthing”) random threats to annihilate civilizations, with all checks and balances being utterly abandoned. Maybe when you stop the constant war-mongering and murdering school children and blowing up random boats and gloating about all the resources you stole and “joking” about invading an unending series of countries you’ll be in a position where this doesn’t read like some sort of Pravda 1970s farce. But right now, you are indisputably the bad guys.
If Amodei believed an iota of the tripe he wrote in this joke of a letter, he’d close shop and secure-wipe all the hard drives. But he’s a two-faced, self-serving megalomaniac, and can feel the capitalization eroding around him, so this desperate, unbelievably pathetic note is the result.
But again, it has an audience of one, and Amodei was willing to humiliate himself with this farcical nonsense to do so. I would not be remotely surprised if the US starts banning models like K3, though they’re going to be a bit surprised when every other Western nation tells them to go fuck themselves.
Which is hilarious because Vance was just repeating what Anthropic told him, as they desperately try to pretend they have a moat. It’s like two Wikipedia articles citing each other, each demanding credibility by pointing at the other. ↩
Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup, released Kimi K3 a week ago, with plans to release the weights and runtime of the model on the 27th. It’s a 2.8 trillion parameter model (with 50B active parameters per token, using 16 active experts of the 896 available) that shows excellent results on benchmarks, coming within touching distance of Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol.
Which is incredible. Clearly a model of this size doesn’t run on your consumer GPU1, but it does legitimately democratize access to highly capable models. Further it will prove as the foundation for a lot of distillation2 tasks, improving the state of the art among smaller specialized models.
It’s another Deepseek moment that has Anthropic and OpenAI running to demand daddy prohibit the competition3, while the hardware and data centre makers are arguing otherwise4. AI models are already reaching the “diminishing returns” point for a lot of tasks, where the absolute best of the best model isn’t an enormous jump from much cheaper models for many uses, so it’s to be seen how this impacts the market.
And it’s worth noting that China isn’t oblivious to what they have here, and similarly is suddenly talking about export controls5. Hopefully the K3 weight release does happen, but I suspect we might not see such benevolence from China in the future. And it is absolutely true that China’s domestic “AI” chip production has gotten extremely competitive in every dimension, and this is a realm that the US no longer has any monopoly over. Successive US administrations trying to use GPUs to coerce China only served to massively accelerate its domestic industry.
Shortly after K3 was announced Anthropic removed their time-gating on Fable6 – they originally thought it would be their moneymaker, and they would give out just a little taste before charging per token – and I suspect it made them hasten the release of Opus 5.
And to be fair Opus 5 looks great. It is a deeply impressive model. But it only slightly pips an open-weight model, and that is an extraordinary moment.
This is important because trillions of dollars are being dumped7 into the US AI industry in the belief that it will be such a massive competitive advantage that they’ll have the world by the throat. Repeatedly this narrative has been destroyed, and as the point of diminishing returns is scaled the horizon for this ever happening dissolves.
Canada should begin the 6-month process to exit USMCA. The trade deal is untenable, and now that the US is a bad actor in every respect8, it’s time to decouple. It is effectively a dead agreement already given all the actions the US has taken over the prior year, in absolute violation of the pact. For some reason we like to pretend that Canada and Mexico are close allies in this agreement, but not only is Mexico almost meaningless to Canada from a trade perspective, they’re actually why Canada’s auto industry has collapsed, and have worked against Canada repeatedly in these negotiations.
Canada does send most of its exports to the US as a geographical happenstance, and decoupling will be painful. We should have taken more efforts to prepare in the past year, and there is a recurring tendency of parties to assume at some point the US will return to being a rational country, which is folly. There are plenty of other markets, and in reality the vast bulk of Canada’s economy is internal trade, and what we lose in exports to the US we should satisfy by domestically replacing what we import from them, completely replacing states like Ohio as suppliers of anything.
And of course the US isn’t going to stop buying Canadian oil. While Trump keeps yipping about the trade deficit, somehow he never applies a single restriction or tariff on oil from Canada, and if anything has done everything to increase the flow. Almost like it’s all just bullshit. Canada needs to exert its resource controls and implement an export tax on oil that the US has always enjoyed at a massive discount, taking advantage that Canada didn’t prepare to export to other customers. Only now we can, and the “ally” discount certainly doesn’t apply to a shithole that constantly sees members of government threatening or maligning us.
Bring back the Digital Service Tax. Start enforcement actions against Meta and X and every other cancerous bit of American idiocracy exports, and purge Microsoft, Google, Oracle and others from every bit of government infrastructure. Punt every US corporation exploiting Canada under the framework we gave them in USMCA, and abolish every resource “first taker option” this gave US importers for Canadian resources under the agreement. Giving even an iota to this corrupt group of bullies was always folly, and it’s one criticism I have of the current government: They, like the fallen UK, thought they could pander to the US and limit the chaos and ride it out, not realizing how profound the insanity is in that cluster of simpletons.
And just to understand how we’re here, understand that the foolish orange-faced rug-pull simpleton – the rapist that the US public decided was their best choice of leader, acting as a tell on where US society is at now – has failed so spectacularly in every domestic action that he’s firmly in the “rob the rest of the world” realm now. Hence the endless wars and murdering, piracy, terrorism, and the continual need to look like he’s winning by bullying other countries in a Pyrrhic way that only harms the US.
How disgusting, and what a pariah the US has become. I get that Americans like to just shrug and say that they voted for the other guy, etc, but in the end Trump is the ultimate display of what an American is in 2026, and how profoundly pathetic and sad.
In a recent post I complained about the government’s response to the forest fires, and I just want to be absolutely clear: Unlike the incredibly stupid political class in the US (again, what an abject idiocracy, and how are the people voting for such a cluster of dipshits and murderous garbage grifters? Let’s not forget foolish opportunistic Trump-supplicant shitbirds like Bernie Moreno in this9), I’m not under delusions that they can “thin” or rake or “manage”10 almost a billion acres of forests to prevent the threat global warming and a changed environment has presented (higher heats and drier summer, often with blustery winds == bad news). Endless forest fires are a new reality, and my position was more “how are we going to deal with them more aggressively when they inevitably do occur”. That we should be having hearings and open discussions and brain storming about the way forward.
As we’ve seen across the world, and indeed throughout the US at this very moment, blanketing Western Canada with US smog (for which I guess we’ll have to make a “victim compensation fund”11): forest fires are becoming a profound threat everywhere. And as I conspiratorially noted in my prior post, not just for natural events, but also for bad actors like the likely arsonists Bernie “Forest Firebug” Moreno, along with his Michigan “Sovereignty Comes With Responsibility” Republican friends. Likely arsonists, the lot of them.
My complaint was more that there doesn’t seem to be any haste in how to respond to these fires. That we – society in general, including the non-moronic parts of the US (which excludes any area that votes for human shit like Bernie Moreno) – need to seriously discuss how we’re going to deal with this going forward, because it isn’t sustainable to just hope that they’re exceptions when they’re becoming the norm. It’s not unlike areas where “500 year floods” are happening every other year, at which point you should probably recalculate the risk profile.
There have been a number of polls recent revealing that much of the world has a more favourable opinion of China than the US. This keeps getting reported on in the US press like it’s some crazy stat, betraying how silly and gullible the rest of the world is compared to the imagination of America they hold in their delusions. Doesn’t everyone realize how great the US is compared to those crazy Kommies?
Which country voted an incredibly stupid rapist halfwit, self-dealing grifter to represent them in world affairs? A foolish clown that thinks having tantrums and acting like an emotional toddler12 is leadership? Who has repeatedly threatened nuclear attacks or “wiping out” civilizations, and then brags that being a “wildcard” is some great strategy? A felon whose busted, simpleton brain seems to have stopped absorbing new information in the early 1980s, so every idiotic utterance sounds like some sort of decrepit time-capsule from a grade-school dropout uncle? Railing about windmills and coal and whatever other demented, stupid utterances flow from his vile, hateful lips.
And while Trump is obviously the peak example of the rapid US decline, similar human refuse can be found littering the entire US political class: Just play on some racial grievance and get a foolish, death-cult culture to vote for you (Bernie Moreno, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, that football coach imbecile, and many more).
Which country is currently engaging in wanton piracy and terrorism? Which country is bombing endless countries, deposing governments, and undermining democracies across the world? Which country has been trying to starve out Cuba for decades for the crime of not being a US friend?
Iran is a brutal fundy theocratic pariah, but the US has fallen so far and so fast that for much of the world the current US imperialistic “go and murder lots of people” engagement is one where we’d like it if both sides could lose. Iran didn’t improve their image to make this happen, but instead the US fell so far that it’s now a wash. Having the stunningly incompetent and unqualified Pete “Fox News Dipshit” Kegsbreath coming out and giving his farcical ChatGPT-written tough-guy speeches doesn’t improve this situation.
Brazil recently blocked some US “election monitors”. I mean, does anyone think the US is concerned about democracy, or that they’re really on its side? The US is the world’s biggest threat to democracy, and is trying to impose its ignorance-adulating, hatred-fuelled idiocracy, providing an opening for the kleptocrats to ply their ways. Do Americans really think having a president and his crew of losers only questioning democracy when it doesn’t go their (or their allies in grift) way is pro-democracy? These people hate democracy, and they’ll lever stupid and foolish people against themselves to dismantle it.
These “election monitors” serve the sole purpose of undermining democracy in any case where whatever corrupt, rapist shitbird13 Trump likes best doesn’t win. It’s transparently obvious, but everyone is still playing along.
Which country is currently trying to fracture Canada, and actually has been for decades? That has high-ranking officials openly fomenting the invasion of literal allies?
Which country’s word on treaties and agreements is utterly worthless? Which country now vilifies education and celebrates ignorance? Where a foolish idiot like Nick Shirley or close Trump admin friend Andrew Tate somehow can obtain a platform and a fan base?
Which country is basically lawless, where the president is pardoning rapists and thieves and drug dealers for bribes, and where the plutocrats and special interests utterly own almost all of your politicians, on both sides of the aisle? Recently Michigan Democrats, supplicant servants of their bosses US automakers, came together to propose a bill to ban Chinese cars from Canada from entering the US14 (Mexico has loads of these cars for years, and it never got any concern, but the moment Canada started allowing some of them given the current trade war, the automakers got worried). Weirdly they didn’t have say a peep when Herr Trump, the orange goblin, started his attack on Canada’s auto manufacturing, declaring that we shouldn’t have an auto industry. If that’s the case, then fine we’ll buy from China and Europe you festering cancer on humanity.
Recently the US imposed a new “forced labour” tariff on many countries – this was the replacement for the illegal prior “liberation day” tariffs – and there was an article in the Canadian press by some silly guy complaining that Canada didn’t send reps to fight it in some kangaroo court farcical hearing the US held. I mean, did he think those hearings were serious? Is there some delusion that the administration in the US is anything other than a lawless farce at this point, and where such things are just a comical misuse of prior statutes to impose an idiotic, self-destructive economic policy? Or to desperately try to save face for the felonious rapist and his band of ChatGPT fools?
There are loads of things seriously wrong with China, from its government, to its crushing of dissent, the whole Uyghurs thing, the ridiculous nine- or ten-line claim to sea that clearly isn’t China’s, and the relatively non-violent conflict with neighbours over it, and so on. China has also become a massive greenhouse gas emitter, and while the “per capita” argument carries a bit of weight, and they have been deploying enormous amounts of renewable energy, putting thousands of massive coal-burning plants online long after we knew the consequences isn’t great.
Compared to the US, however? Wow, an absolute panacea. Garbage like Nick Shirley gets no platform there. Education is revered and respected. Transport systems, high speed rail, universal healthcare in a hyper-efficient healthcare system absent the endless layers of rent-seekers that you see in America, from which you get a lifespan that has already left the US in the dust. China correctly kept cancerous US exports like Meta and Twitter away, to their benefit, and when someone is a weird despicable creep like some of the US’ kleptocrats, they don’t do well. The whole “Epstein circle” would come to very unpleasant ends in China, where in America they’re your leadership class.
China isn’t bombing anyone. While they do interfere with other nations, it isn’t in the service of a foolish rapist or his plutocrat friends. It isn’t to forward the interests of bizarre creeps like Peter “AntiChrist” Thiel.
Neither are great world leaders, but on the whole China absolutely nets out better than the US. Which is exactly how almost all the world sees it now.
Which you would think would be worrying for Americans, whose wealth, safety, and way of life has relied upon its allies15, most of whom have people who have a better opinion of China than the fallen United States. Ooops, sounds like time for various “Football Coach” politicians in the US to send invasion threats or warn that you’ll destroy people’s economies because you disagree with them. That should do the trick!
I have a lot of good American friends and business associates. I have been a frequent visitor and fan of great American cities like NYC and Minneapolis, and as I previously discussed most of my ancestry comes through the US. I know the country has a lot of great people and has done enormously good things for humanity. But right now you are a worldwide joke, and by far the most dangerous rogue nation on the planet. Of course we feel better about China.
Fix your situation, because it only gets worse from here. Your country has been subjugated by both inbred methville shitholes16, special interests that buy your politicians, along with insane plutocrat garbage like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Your window to correct this mistake is short.
Whether that means dissolution, some sort of new federalism where a crime spree like the Trump administration cannot happen again, “blue” states withholding federal revenue, etc. It is at crisis levels, and after this equities bubble bursts and “tHe DoW iS aT 5o,OoO” can’t distract the foolish rubes, the consequences of this crime spree will be clear.
Whenever Canadians critique America, invariably the reflexive action by Americans is some sort of “you hate us cuz you ain’t us” bit, then boasting about military spending or guns or other such pathetic nonsense, or telling us how if you average out your plutocrat overlord’s wealth, you’re so much richer. I mean, you understand that your peeps keep begging us to join, and when that is grossly unpopular here, transition to threatening to force us to join, right? Do you understand how that annihilates your delusions? It’s the rapist telling his victim how much she wants him (fair analogy given that the US is being led by a literal rapist who surrounded himself with similar Epstein Island trash like Howard Nutlick, who in a country like China would long have been dealt with).
I lament every way that Canada is like the US. Car centric culture sucks. Selfish, greedy culture sucks. “I got mine” culture sucks. Incel, pickup-truck culture sucks. Ignorance heralding sucks.
I have infinitely more interest in Nordic culture and social norms. Even Chinese norms are far more compelling. If American culture is the end game, I’d rather live in China.
And honestly, maybe it’s for that reason we should be thankful for Trump. He laid it out so bare – he is too stupid to cover for it – that the utter endemic corruption of US politics, and the complete dysfunction of the country, is no longer shrouded. It is a thoroughly subjugated country, acting as a servile, foolish supplicant for a few special interests. The lawlessness, war crimes, endless murdering and imperialism no longer gets a pass.
For that, I guess, we should be thankful. The emperor truly has no clothes.
It would require something like 48 H200s to hold the model, KV cache and context window, though the Kimi Delta Attention innovation reduces some of the hardware demands. ↩
The American model vendors have repeatedly claimed that these Chinese models are but an illusion17. That really American exceptionalism is at play, and the only way these models perform so well is by covertly distilling from the American leaders. To support this they’ve released some relatively chickenshit tiny numbers, from which nothing competitive could possibly be created.
No, they didn’t make Kimi K3 by distillation, and the notion is fantastically dumb (not least that they made a Fable-level model before Fable was available). It would take unfathomable levels of spend to try to distill a competitive model through the APIs.
Could they have fine-tuned or done QC by comparing against the SOTA models? Of course they did, just as I guarantee the vendors do against each other.
The core LLM technologies are pretty well known now, everyone has giant archives of every bit of text and code from all of human history, etc, and the bulk of recent model research/innovation has come from China. That China is now deeply competitive isn’t remotely surprising, and this American delusion that it’s all a mirage is some serious cope to try to fool the rubes. ↩
There once was a time when the US could elicit cooperation with allies on actions like this. Yeah, absolutely no one will follow the US down that protectionist road. Okay maybe the sad and fallen UK will, pathetically acting like a US lapdog as they desperately try to hang off US coattails.
Bribe the rapist and you might stop Americans from access to these great Chinese models, but the rest of the world will laugh at your protectionism and evolve without you. ↩
You can be sure loads of bribes are happening behind the scenes, as the US has become a hyper-corrupt shithole that elects grifter pedos to the highest office. ↩
This Reuters report has been refuted by some sources in the know, so it could just be manufactured drama. ↩
GPT-5.6 Sol might have made even more of an impact. Suddenly the mythical secret sauce evaporated. ↩
Oracle’s bonds are now basically at junk level, SpaceX debt is being sold at a discount, and there are untold amounts of borrowing shrouded in SPVs. It is a massive, historic house-of-cards that relies upon eventually being able to turn this into a big moneymaker, in such a way that the riches somehow blanket countless massively indebted corporations.
It is not an overstatement to say that the entire US market entirely relies upon this bet achieving the most fantastically optimistic, and basically impossible, levels of income. ↩
In announcing their latest “50% tariff” – clearly annoyed that Canada was willing to just wait out this garbage Epstein administration, so they pivoted to trying to death-pact a forced agreement through such foolish brinksmanship – the US complained that Canada tariffs US vehicles. Which is hilarious stuff, because it’s exactly the same tariffs the US applies to Canadian vehicles, in complete and utter violation of the “Best Trade Deal” that the same orange pedo clown signed in in his first term. In fact, it’s even more generous given that Canada gave a “tariff-free” quota before they even kick in.
And again they complain about dairy. The same dairy that we gave considerable concessions for in the first agreement, because they can continually pull the wool over the eyes of the ignorant American public. ↩
Moreno represents Ohio, a state entirely reliant upon exports to Canada. Yeah, tariff us you foolish loser. See how that works out. ↩
There are forest management practices in high risk areas right near human settlements (thinning, controlled burns, etc). This has zero relevance to the billion acres of extremely remote, far-flung forests. ↩
I mean, the root cause of all of this is greenhouse gases and global warming, for which the US is by far the largest contributor (China temporarily holds the lead, but the US is undeniably who got us here). I guess it’s time for a victim compensation fund and every country should be fining every American corporation billions. ↩
Three quarters of US foreign affairs are now based on whatever emotional tantrum answer the Orange Goblin gives to a press that easily baits him into saying stupid nonsense. And because he’s a simpleton, he’ll then triple down on whatever catastrophically stupid position he espoused at the moment, using all of his addled, worthless brainpower. ↩
Like that weird Milei creep in Argentina, who has spectacularly failed at turning the country around, despite Trump and Musk doing everything they can to prop up that basket case, and whose boosters will, much like Trump’s pathetic circus, just blame prior governments for time eternal. ↩
Meaning if Canadians buy them, they couldn’t drive them over the border for day trips, vacations, etc. Which…what an empty threat. ↩
NATO18 has only ever been invoked to defend the US. NORAD, where Canada and the US work together for the air defence of North America, is often held by US politicians as some benevolence towards Canada, for which we owe reparations. Are you serious? No one is going to attack Canada – I mean, the sole threat we actually have is the US – and NORAD exists to extend the US’ range of defence for Russian bombers that would be coming for American targets. NORAD exists as Canadian welfare towards the US.
Much of the world hates the US. They don’t hate Canada. We aren’t in these alliances for our own self-defence you silly foolish cretins, just like we entered both of the world wars long before the US did, and before they bombed a single Canadian base or property. ↩
There is some realtor couple from Texas that posts social media videos of them showing homes, and in each they’re carrying assault rifles. The comments are full of smooth-brained Americans doing a “hell ya!” act.
Hell ya? What sort of busted third world shithole thinks this sort of nonsense is tough or good? If your country needs you to walk around your suburb with a rifle, you might just live in a busted dystopia, and maybe you should do something about that. Thinking it is something to brag about is pathetic business. ↩
When models are released invariably people ask the model its identity, and think it’s a big tell when some random model says it is some other model. This is literally meaningless data, and you know someone has no idea what they’re talking about when they cite it. For instance did you know that Anthropic models have often identified themselves as Qwen models if you query them in Chinese? Anthropic isn’t distilling from Qwen, probably, but in Chinese AI discussions the model was referenced a lot so it ends up in the training data. Which is why models are explicitly provided their “identity” via system prompts, and when they aren’t they’ll claim they’re whatever model was mentioned most in the reddit and HN discussions they trained on, etc. ↩
NATO is Schrödinger’s military justification for US simpletons. Not only does it explain the outrageous military spending of the US and its endless “bomb random huts in developing nations” imperialism, withdrawing from the pact nets the savings of…spending $500B more on the military and boosting spending to $1.5T, in a country that objectively is heading to a near term bankruptcy. ↩
Once again the forest fires have started raging across the remote parts of Canada. The smoke hit us hard here in the Toronto area today, yielding the worst pollution levels in a large city worldwide. The header image, visible if you look at this entry individually, is colour accurate, and I’ve intentionally surrounded it with white bands to contrast the difference. That was a nearby park moments ago, and note that the weather right now is “sunny”, with no clouds in the sky. This is from the forest fires over a thousand kilometres away.
The sun has disappeared in a diffuse, orange haze, reminiscent of Blade Runner 2049’s Las Vegas. The air stinks like burning tires, though the smell disappears once an N95 is equipped.
We don’t even have the worst of it. Duluth, Minnesota was hitting 800 on the air quality index, which is horrendous. Here in the West of the GTA we’ve hovered around 185-200 since it rolled in. It could be much worse.
Still, I wore an N95 mask1 when walking to take that picture, earning some concerned looks by other pedestrians. There is zero upside to breathing PM2.5 pollution, and it isn’t something that makes you “stronger” or your lungs more robust. This sort of air pollution enters your bloodstream and causes systemic inflammation as your organs are overwhelmed with a contaminant, and while many are trying to do the “I’m tuff and it’s no biggie to me” act, it is a very big deal. Wear a mask.
The birds are quiet. There is a weird post-apocalyptic feeling to the whole thing. People take worried looks out their door and quickly retreat back to their sealed chamber. A scooter and skateboard day-camp at the park was hurriedly all piling back onto the buses, urged on by concerned-sounding counsellors.
This is bad. This is really bad. And it has happened multiple years in a row and seems to be just a new normal. It is quite literally killing people, as those with compromised lungs have a really terrible time with this level of pollution. And everyone else suffers damaged lungs from this exposure.
“Told you so” railing about pipelines or carbon is basically futile worthless words at this point. The world is firmly in tragedy of the commons territory2 and there is no sign of any real opportunity to turn it back.
Something must be done to respond to this new reality, and there needs to be plans on how we’re going to deal with this. The climate is changing, and we need to be mobilizing and planning for this new reality. After the prior fires this should have become a critical agency and public concern. We should be the first onboard with technological advances like the satellite cluster Google is funding.
Further, it is only a little conspiratorial to note that it would be in some foreign interests for these fires to happen, and it is a trivial thought exercise to imagine how it would be achieved, taking advantage of ripe environmental conditions. Each time these fires kick off the US media goes on a tantrum about “Canadian smoke”3, and the antagonism is growing. There is the very possible scenario that agitators are intentionally setting fires4, adding to the normal amount that nature kicks off yearly. It’s also a massive sink of resources. Such intentional acts are highly improbable, but not remotely impossible.
And honestly, I get if Americans are annoyed. I’m annoyed, as are millions of Canadians impacted by terrible air quality. Every impacted party deserves answers on what is going to be done to prevent this in the future.
This cannot be our normal. Do we need long range drone surveillance networks with hundreds to thousands of drones constantly scanning for fires, for instance, responding before the situation becomes uncontrollable? Do we need to ramp up the resources at the ready to deal with the fires, and to knock them down earlier if that is possible? There has to be a way out of this outside of having Superman turn back time.
I purchased a number of boxes of masks last year when it became clear this wasn’t a one-off and instead was a new norm. ↩
Meta is currently planning a $12 billion dollar data centre in Alberta that is going to be 100% powered by natural gas. Zero renewables or sustainable options like nuclear, and it wasn’t even a concern or consideration for their “fuck the planet, bro” plans. Big oil and their bought politicians are how we got here, but the cold hard truth is that they could get away with it because very foolish people hijacked good causes for their own pet “right the wrongs of the past” projects, making it easy to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, annoyed at another group hijacking efforts like Kyoto to instead be a giant wealth redistribution scheme. It makes it easy to reduce public trust and turn them against efforts we should be behind.
Meta still has a “100% renewable energy” commitment, yet now they’re building data centres generating maximal CO2 – literally couldn’t generate more greenhouse gases – but don’t worry, they’ll buy some credits from Tesla or something in the gigantic circlejerk fraud that is the US equities market. ↩
As predicted, some Michigan Republicans are making noise, using the rather strange line “Sovereignty comes with responsibility”, along with some direct threats from that busted, gun-and-drug flooded, shit-your-pants idiocracy (I like Michigan, but Michigan Republicans are some of the dumbest people5. Just vile, disgusting garbage. You’ll need to send all of that trash packing to Confederate land when you join Canada). Is that a threat? How perfectly on brand, and the Michigan Republican party needs to be investigated. You’ll likely find some matches in their back pockets.
Though it is worth noting that there are massive fires raging in Minnnesota right now, and it is only wind patterns that has saved Michigan from the impact of those fires.
Regardless, worth noting that not a single mention of help was offered up. Just threats. It’s the American, entitled way. And it’s pretty incredible given that the US is the biggest contributor to the world’s stockpile of greenhouse gases, and this is literally a problem they caused. ↩
Traditionally we’d look to Russia6 as the culprit, but in the world of 2026 it is entirely within the realm of the possible that America is a suspect, as that nation is now openly fomenting dissent in all Western nations (things like universal healthcare and functioning governments are annoying for America’s kleptocrats, explaining why that country is now more hostile to traditional allies than enemies). America spends most of its efforts trying to undermine Canada, Europe, South Korea, and so on – hey look, the demented diddler in a criminal administration posted yet another US flag over Canada meme – while its administration looks more like something you’d find in a failed post-Soviet state. So watch as American plutocrat-owned media makes a big deal about the fires, trying to move the needle towards “and this is why we’re righteous in invading and liberating with our heinously corrupt kleptocracy / idiocracy form of government”. EDIT (2026-07-16) - and right on schedule, the gun-crazed murderous Republicans of Michigan are threatening the sovereignty of Canada ↩
It’s important to note that I’m not talking about conservatives, or a political lean. I’m talking about the embarrassing, catastrophically destructive cult of stupidity that the Republican party has descended to. Zero classical conservatives would call themselves Republicans today, as that party has turned into just the worst impulses and greedy, short-term thinking. ↩
Every discussion about these fires features countless idiot-bots posting variations of “Hurrr, if we didn’t send money to Ukraine…” comments (“money sent to Ukraine” is magic money that apparently can be respent countless times, solving every problem or ill. Every single issue Canada has ever or will ever face apparently could be solved if we just didn’t help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression, which is obvious nonsense but it’s the bot go to). Trying to present forest fires as a consequence of helping victims of Russian imperialism/terrorism is completely on brand with the tankie brigade, and should put every suspicion on that nation and the actions of its actors in Canada. ↩
One of my sons recently started consuming business communications books: The 48 Laws of Power1, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and similar works. I had read these same books decades ago and was surprised to see them arrive with an Amazon delivery.
I could have just grabbed them from a box in the garage. Regardless, I pondered any similar books I might recommend.
I read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie far in the past, but I couldn’t recall whether it held up to modern standards or if it was still worthy of a recommendation.
So I reread it. All 320 pages or so. And as I observed in the Filler Is Dead piece, much of the book is just filler. A basic premise – feign show interest in someone’s hobbies or activities, for instance – and then a variety of contrived, sleazy sounding anecdotes to support the contention.
The book is a classic sales bible, and it encourages a lot of behaviours that you encounter repeatedly when dealing with the same. It tries to frame it in authenticity and sincerity – e.g. don’t just pander to people’s egos to make the sale, but do so with genuine interest and authenticity – but then every anecdote is framed as someone trying to extract some win, such as the big woodworking sale. This “get a selfish result” premise undermine the intentions.
I didn’t recommend it to my son. While the core message of “don’t be self-involved / self-centred” is a great one2, so many of the anecdotes were not only dated, they had such an ulterior motive that it made the whole thing feel incredibly scummy. It felt like “how to wear a human suit to pretend to be genuine and authentic…to make the sale and get what you want”.
I mention this book as one of its big recommendations is to constantly use your counterparty’s name, which will come up later. People love hearing their own name, the book advises, and the more you do it the better.
Carl Jung (1875-1961), the father of Jungian psychology3, famously described an event called synchronicity. This is an acausal, meaningful coincidence between some external event and some personal psychological state, such as the visualizations in a dream. Basically coincidences that seem too perfectly aligned, and almost like a glitch in the simulation4. Originally he described it almost as quasi-parapsychological, but later he worked with a quantum physicists and described an Unus Mundus: a unified realm where matter and the human psyche are the same, and can interfere with each other outside the normal physical cause/effect world in the same way that quantum entaglement is a thing. Jung hypothesized that there are some archetypes that in a heightened emotional state can manifest as unrelated events.
He was basically proposing the simulation hypothesis ahead of its time.
I mention this because I had done some deep dives on Jung’s essays and lectures on the same day that I re-read Carnegie’s book. These had absolutely nothing to do with each other and it was just coincidence.
The very next morning I went out for a walk. The latest Hidden Brain episode, “Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2”, was queued in my podcast app. Not really my cup of tea, but I hit play to see what it was about.
Synchronicity! It literally starts off talking about Carl Jung and the famous scarab-like beetle hitting his clinic window.
Weird stuff.
Regardless, his guest was a Professor of Psychology and Education, and she was detailing her own synchronicity. I mean, a critic might say it’s more of a frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomena, and she suddenly paid far more attention to something with personal importance, but regardless it had something to do with the spiritual brain.
What I immediately noticed from their exchange, however, is that she used the host’s first name, Shankar, constantly. Like every single reply she would jam his name in there. Needlessly and extraneously.
It was jarring, and immediately made me wonder if she’s a disciple of How to Win Friends and Influence People (synchronicity!). It actually felt scummy, specifically because this is something that manipulative people do as a mechanism of coercion.
Which made me ponder whether the problems I have with Carnegie’s book is specifically that a lot of manipulative people basically wore it out. Like if someone trying to get something from me uses my name repeatedly, shows interest in my interests, etc, I’m naturally skeptical and cynical, and it achieves the opposite result. It immediately puts my guard up. Are there other people who just aren’t aware of this stuff and for whom it actually still works?
If you’ve ever poured over LibJXL – the canonical library for compressing and decompressing JPEGXL files – you know that it’s an incredibly complex piece of C++ code, filled with fairly advanced algorithms that yield a headache-inducing code flow.
It is not a simple project to hack on.
The project started out with performance as a trailing concern, with the slowness of compression being a common criticism of the format used to advise against adoption, but after an enormous amount of work from a number of large orgs and individual contributors it has improved by magnitudes. It is now a refined, efficient library, including hardware optimizations and vectorization for a number of platforms.
Regardless, as Fable became available again I wondered how well it could make sense of it, and had a bit of my weekly quota left with only a few hours left to use it.
I grabbed the latest code and pointed Fable at it, asking it to look for some low-hanging performance optimizations it could perform on the compression path.
In a single pass it proposed a set of logical changes – these were not profile-guided, but were based completely on the code flow – and I said go.
It immediately made an A:B test with the test set of images to ensure that the resulting files were bit-identical with the original, as we weren’t looking to change the compression at all, just the performance in achieving it. It then applied a small number of logical changes in both lossy and lossless paths, including things like extraneous loops that are not necessary in many cases, optimizing preallocation of memory5, and so on.
It built and benchmarked the results, and it yielded an ~14% or so performance improvement, with the compression being bit-identical with the original. Peak memory usage actually declined. This is amazing for such a mature project with so much optimization work having been performed on it.
I did it on a lark with some leftover quota, with no real purpose. Normally I start such a process with profiling and then zeroing in on the largest contributors to cycle usage, but in this case I wanted to see what it could do based upon just the code.
Auditing the code, and it’s stylistically identical to the existing code, and the changes are very contained and logically clear. They’re consistent and perfectly cromulent with the rest of the code.
I have no real point with this section, beyond my continued amazement at how these tools have evolved and become formidable forces. Seeing the “what year is it?” AI-is-only-for-trivial-stuff-and-makes-bad-code nonsense constantly topping the front page of HN at this point is simply pathetic. It is futile raging against the dying of the light, and mostly seems to be a self-delusion and hopeful “say it enough and it will be true!” noise.
This book is apparently controversial now, held as a “psychopath’s bible”. Similar to how Machiavelli’s The Prince ostensibly looks like a how-to guide, but most academics believe he actually wrote it as a satire, intending it as a cynical exposé to warn against tyrants.
These books are useful to identify and guard against these tactics in others, and it is utterly bizarre how comically offended some become. It’s a great book.
And like Jung’s shadow projection, I’m extra wary of people who get hysterical that no one should read this book. It almost seems like they want their secrets kept and feel a bit exposed. ↩
It is better still in the leadership realm, where it encourages praise, discourages criticism, own your mistakes, and presents optimal ways of getting alignment. ↩
A lot of Jung’s observations are considered dated now, but his work on shadow projection is masterful and critical. To recap, that is the tendency of people to project their own flaws and unrealized potential onto others, becoming angry and critical in excess because we haven’t acknowledged or dealt with these things deep in our own psyche. We go through our days looking for ourselves in others, angered at every instance.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” - Carl Jung ↩
Though there is a lot of overlap with mental illness. Paranoid delusions / schizophrenia also imagine these sorts of overlaps. ↩
Way back in the browser wars, there was a period when Firefox was lagging significantly in many of the javascript benchmarks, especially Sunspider. I looked at the code and discovered that it was mostly hung up on string concatenation, and a simple change to over-allocate when concatenating strings would avoid an enormous number of memory copies. Firefox’s Sunspider runtime decreased dramatically, and this benefitted every concatenate-looping behaviour seen across the web. The point is that some very simple memory pattern optimizations can have an outsized benefit. ↩
🇨🇦 Happy Canada Day 🇨🇦
I’m not really into soccer. Billions of people are, obviously, and admittedly there are moments of incredible play that punctuate two incredibly boring hours of people slowly dribbling back and forth down the field. I say stuff like this knowing that many readers will strongly disagree, and that’s okay. I expect people to disagree with me on many things, and would have to reassess my beliefs if I was just pandering to a base or conforming with an expectation.
I mean, the most exciting part of the entire game are the 0-0 penalty kicks at the end. A sort of merciful “get it over with” finale. And yes, my country is still in the tournament (edit- was, now ousted by Morocco), and that’s neat, but there’s no way I can stomach a whole game. If it’s close I’ll turn on the final five minutes, but still need to be engaged with some other activity. This seems to be the case for its biggest fans as well, spending the game as a social event of chants and flags and flares and smoke bombs and so on.
Writing this makes me realize it’s a lot like a sport I do enjoy: Formula 1 racing. The average F1 race is a tiny number of exciting moments punctuating what is often an insanely boring race. I always have other activities like chess available during a race because otherwise it would be intolerable.
I’m sure I’d enjoy soccer more if I understood its internal strategy better, and some of my dislike is probably based in the school days when being forced to play soccer meant I would kick the ball as far as possible whenever it came near me just to avoid being a part of the play for longer than necessary.
I thought it was utter folly when Canada bid to be involved with the World Cup. These sorts of events are always far costlier than promised, and with fewer returns than heralded. They’re always a scam for corrupt organizations like FIFA or the IOC to enrich and celebrate themselves, and cities and nations keep getting baited into this nonsense. In the end taxpayers somehow always end up holding the bag, though at least in this iteration of the World Cup it has mostly just been slight retrofits on existing stadiums, with little novel spend1. Unlike the farcical “desperately try to buy credibility” WCs that preceded it, like the $220B Qatar or $14B Russian world cups.
One of the weirdest things of an event like this are the insecure residents who really desperately need foreigners to talk well about their country2. I mean this in the kindest way, but I positively do not care what tourists think about Canada or Canadians3. That this sort of content does such numbers among the “please affirm us!” crowd has always been baffling. I mean, it’s weird that people travel somewhere and think their brief, incredibly limited exposure to a country puts them in an illustrious position of passing judgment or giving advice.
Though there is something utterly hilarious seeing far-right, isolationist Americans doing the “look how much the Euroscum loves our cities!” about visitors there. You know, the same NYC, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and so on that these people were holding as a post-apocalyptic wasteland a month earlier. Suddenly they’re desperately needing the adulation of their betters, celebrating the diverse, liberal places they held so poorly not long before.
Absolutely no one expected the Trump crime spree to reaffirm USMCA at the checkpoint4, which happens to be Canada Day: They desperately need this trade agreement, but Trump has a tired, US-harming negotiating style that requires endless brinksmanship and theatrics. Which is precisely why the Canadian government has basically been hands-off.
Canada isn’t going to move an iota or to play ball with this nonsense, so I fully expect Chairman Trump to ramp up the rhetoric5.
Nonetheless, the American media’s take on these “negotiations” are amazing. For instance this Reuters article. To quote-
For now, the U.S. is holding formal negotiating rounds with Mexico only, leaving Canada to the side amid a long list of bilateral trade irritants ranging from Canada’s restricted dairy market to Canadian provinces pulling American liquor from store shelves.
Firstly, it’s humorous when these articles desperately try to portray the US as leaving Canada “to the side”, or putting the active voice only on America. Canada clearly has no interest in engaging with this group, and has chosen to go a different direction, while simultaneously waiting for the current regime to be ousted where we’ll see if sanity/competency returns. This is precisely why you constantly see these articles, clearly being issued to the press by the idiot kleptocracy.
“Please pander to us, Canada! Please!” - Greer and his crew of misfits. They’ve been issuing so many of these releases it has reached such transparent pathetic desperation.
Secondly, the “trade irritant” list is oddly one-sided. Did the author forget about the farcical “fentanyl tariffs”, which this regime invented because they clearly presume Americans must be catastrophically stupid and willing to fall for it. These idiots are still trying to foist these same lies on Americans. Seems like a bit of an irritant. How about the tariffs on Canadian autos and parts, steel, aluminum, and lumber? All of this is still in place, and is completely in defiance of USMCA, basically invalidating the entire thing and covering tens of billions of trade. Somehow didn’t make the list. Instead he lists a couple of tiny Canadian things.
When the “trade irritants” from the Canada side are limited to a pretty minor retaliation, and something explicitly negotiated into USMCA, and then you completely miss enormous problems caused by the American side, either your reporter is an imbecile, or they’re basically issued propaganda that they happily reprint.
Canada is in a position of absolute strength, and we will not give in to garbage like Greer or his boss the self-dealing criminal rapist. This administration is pathetically desperate for some sort of extracted win after an endlessly calamity of disaster, now culminated in that pathetic farce “Great American State Fair”. It’s over for this foolish cabal.
Happy Canada Day!
Further, what is even the point of negotiating? Canada paid $6.2B for a bridge, and when it’s complete the US suddenly thinks it’s time to change the terms of the deal. Canada negotiates USMCA, giving up plenty in the process, and now they’re back looking to extract more while in utter defiance of the very trade deal this same predator called the best deal ever. Get fucked.
This is how Trump always operated. He long had a reputation for negotiating with the trades and vendors, and after they deliver on time and budget he suddenly changes the terms or simply refuses to pay. Because he’s an absolute scumbag, and is the sort of bad-faith garbage that everyone knows to avoid. It’s why he was relegated to dealing with Russian banks and managed to run every company in the ground, until somehow this criminal convinced a hundred million people to allow him to openly loot the government. Bizarre.
This way of operating earns some temporary wins as participants are caught out and need a temporary respite, but it is devastating to the long term. Once you’re a bad faith participant, no one has any reason to work you in the future. Which is exactly where the de-banked Donald “Six Time Bankrupt” Trump ended up, until he discovered he could grift millions of Americans that were simply unwilling to believe that someone would lie with every word that comes out of their mouth, shamelessly and unendingly.
If you use any Meta properties in Canada, where the algorithm is basically far-right propaganda no matter how much you try to train it otherwise, it’s kind of hilarious seeing a subset of Americans going on about how great capitalism is compared to “communism”. To these uneducated rubes, the whole world is apparently “communist” except the US and Argentina.
Do these people really think the US is currently a capitalist country? I would argue that China is more capitalist than the US.
The US has become a stunningly corrupt plutocracy, and this is only accelerating now that the oligarchs are unabashedly buying elections. The megarich are buying up every communications platform and media group, turning them into 24/7 propaganda and disinformation venues.
Capitalist? Not even remotely.
Trump right now has a “golden share” in US Steel, and can personally veto anything the company does. The government has demanded ownership stakes in a number of other firms, like Tiktok, Intel, among others. As he has destroyed America’s financial order, his hail mary is demanding that nvidia give the government a cut of GPU sales to China – a protection racket, as that obese senile dipshit has always imagined himself a godfather – among a myriad of other insanely corrupt, half witted bits of nonsense.
A number of tech executives were enlisted in the military. Howard “Epstein Island” Nutlick, that disgusting greaseball creep, is now personally choosing winners and losers in the AI race.
International crossings are shut down at the behest of billionaire donors. The entire US industry operates as a massively subsidized military-industrial grift, where the US is withdrawing from European obligations and becoming isolationist, simultaneously with blowing up the military budget by an extra 50%6.
Trade and tariffs all depend upon what emolument or kickback you give to Trump and his halfwit progeny. Trump has various useless and grossly unqualified family members carrying out negotiations on behalf of the US, well really on behalf of Trump, around the world.
Want tariff relief? Just green-light a tacky resort. All US trade now relies upon the personal enrichment of that dirty diddler and his charity-stealing family. This is one of the reasons Canada and the US haven’t come to terms, because that sort of grotesque, disgusting corruption simply isn’t in our DNA.
That…isn’t capitalism.
Even at the American corporation level, they all lined up to hand over disgusting bribes to earn the favour of the Chairman in trade issues. It is normalized that they all need to pay bribes into various foolish ventures of this clown show to avoid restrictions by this grifter cabal. Disgusting. The sort of stuff that in any functional country leads to people in prison.
The US went to war with Iran because of political contributions, and probably because of some bribery via his crypto scam along with a gift aircraft (one that he gets to take with him when he leaves office, which is why they call it a bridge aircraft…after almost a billion dollars of retrofits). A war that has been catastrophically lost by the US in every possible dimension, all to accomplish a worse outcome than was already in place before this foolish clown and his ChatGPT Department of War weakling drunkard demonstrated to the world how profoundly and completely stupid they are.
Pardons are openly being sold for bribes. No one even bothers refuting or disagreeing anymore. We all know it’s happening. Drug dealers, rapists, child predators…all being pardoned if they just pay a bribe to the grifter in chief.
And of course while the current regime is astonishingly corrupt, the “capitalism” in place has long ensured that the rich have no real risk and can only possibly get richer, and will always be bailed out by taxpayers lest they have to sell the third mega-yacht. How about the bank or auto bailouts. Couldn’t let the rich lose, which is a recurring theme. Billionaires buy pet NFL teams and then get sucker second-tier cities to spend billions building a stadium for them, looting their education and road funds to ensure the ultrarich only get richer.
Privatize the wins and socialize the losses, with endless examples. Everything is enshittified with monopolies and private equity buying up everything and exploiting bankruptcy laws – sell all the property and making the business “rent it back”, loot the pensions7, etc – while coming out massively enriched. Every restaurant is serving up frozen Sysco trash and exploiting workers. And just to be clear, all of this is infecting Canada as well.
The US equities market is just so firmly detached from any semblance of reality, and the bizarre thing is that everyone knows it. No one even bothers trying to rationalize anymore, and now it’s basically just a shell game where everyone just gets away with anything they can get away with, for as long as they can. SPCX is an in the open $2T dollar scam and it’s just another day.
Right now there is a massive profit-taking by a few monopolists in the PC component market, and we’re in the hilarious situation of waiting for some Chinese makers to ramp up and destroy these greedy pigs that are running what normally would be an illegal price fixing cartel8. Just as Chinese open-weight AI models have become fundamentally important. Where we need to restrain the oligarchy via…a communist country. Plutocracy vs communism.
Look at some of the email exchanges between Epstein and his various contacts. These people were/are just incredibly stupid people, on the average, but the system is basically rigged such that even if you’re Trump-level stupid, you’ll still come out ahead in the long run if you are among the “can’t fail” crowd. I mean, Trump was particularly bad and actually managed to fail a number of times, but if society was just that human scum would have been living in an alley waiting for a Patrick Bateman to come along.
The US is far removed from capitalism, and has become a blatantly corrupt banana republic, absent any real laws or governance for your ruling class oligarchs. It pretends it’s capitalism, sure, but it is a grotesque abomination that only looks like capitalism if you squint and are fully willing to delude yourself.
When it’s held up by poorly informed fools to denigrate much better run countries, it’s just bizarre. And remarkably it’s usually the desperately poor – the US delusion of the temporarily embarrassed billionaire living off of credit in some wasteland methville backwater – who are doing this “hurrr communism!” screed, brainwashed into the simpleton belief that a country doing anything for its citizens is something they must fight. They’re loud idiots dutifully plying the script for the super-rich. It is unbelievably pathetic.
Capitalism is fantastic. It is the best economic structure for an economy. The US has shockingly little to do with capitalism9. It has long been a plutocracy, but now it’s just a full on kleptocracy. Hopefully at some point it pulls back from the brink. But probably not, as the oligarchs are so firmly in control they easily amass armies of foolish dumbshits to parrot their idiotic “everything is communism!” spiels and to vote for corrupt, destructive garbage like Trump.
While Toronto built some temporary expansions on BMO Field, it was kind of hilarious seeing all of social media filled with armchair engineers declaring how unsafe the structure was because it was a scaffold-based structure. And then they covered the scaffolding with cladding and suddenly the entire structure was safe, demonstrating that people only care about what they can see. This is not unlike Europeans yipping about North American wood framed homes: Do they really think our homes are falling down around us? Pretty much the only danger to a wood framed home is a tornado, hurricane, or explosive event, and I guarantee your homes would not do better. ↩
Social media whores have caught onto this, knowing that doing the “I’m a tourist and I love Toronto/Houston/Kansas City/some truck stop/fent-fold people” bit is an instant guarantee of a bazillion likes, retweets, and so on. Some crowds are desperate to be pandered to, and eat that up. I mean…just as similarly there was some Ecuadorian clown declaring Canada a “3rd world country”, again pandering directly to a specific audience. People actually buy this nonsense? Why is everything so completely stupid? ↩
Okay, that overstates it a bit. But my primary concern are the people that live here, and “perspectives of a foreigner” falls far behind. Like I don’t like drug users all zonked out at city hall, and while I might incant tourists to justify why they should be removed and such activity prohibited, really my primary concern are Canadians and Torontonians that have to endure that. ↩
Which puts it on a 10-year expiry clock, with yearly “are you sure?” checkpoints. ↩
Theoretically the US could leave the agreement with 6 months notice, but that require congress’s authority. Congress, despite being filled with Trump-lickspittle human faeces like Randy Fine, is starting to realize they are doomed with that bag of shit and simply would never go along with it. And just to be fully clear, everything the US has done, including relative to USMCA, has basically cemented China’s dominance. The US’ only hope was basically an alliance of like-minded nations, or at least who were like-minded nations, but instead these dumpster-tier idiots decided to attack every close ally instead. ↩
Trump keeps doing this pander-to-imbeciles act where he claims all the US’ military spending – powering its endless procession of wars and military imperialism – is “NATO” spending, despite the overwhelming majority having nothing to do with NATO. Yet he also wants to withdraw from NATO and increase the military budget by $500B, while his incompetent underling Kegsbreath is openly declaring that military spending runs the US economy. ↩
Corporate raiders buying a firm and looting its pensions is almost “the good old days” now, given that almost no one actually even has such a benefit anymore. ↩
Capitalism is not a free for all, and a fundamental requirement for capitalism to properly function is that there is strict oversight and governance of the market to avoid price fixing, monopolies, fraudulent behaviour, irrational exuberance10 that can precipitate calamitous collapse, and so on. Over many administrations this has been weakened, but this decline has massively accelerated under the current criminal cabal. The only governance now is that corporations need to suckle on Trump’s rotten balls, and if they do that they can get away with anything.
What an absolute disgrace for everyone that so many spent so much time building the US into the leader in governance, where now it’s Noriega Panama-level corrupt. JD Vance is openly boasting that what once took down the presidency is now a nothing-burger, the grotesque levels of blatant corruption so overwhelming and in the open. Trump’s bribery rug-pull crypto fraud and billion dollar windfall barely even makes waves things have gotten so bad. ↩
The role of private equity in the economy is illustrative. In a functioning economy, if private equity buys up, for instance, veterinary offices, market pressure means that it will be close to impossible for them to actually profit from this venture: Adding a rent-seeker extracting their pound of flesh should make their offerings utterly uncompetitive against the non-PE offices, and they should quickly be squeezed out of the market. Only it isn’t capitalism and when they do this the PE simply removes all non-rent-paying options from a given market.
Extraneous rent-seekers get squeezed out of markets in functioning capitalism – an efficient market demands it – and it is only in busted forms where they can thrive. ↩
When Apple crossed the $1T mark, they pulled in an enormous $56B in profits. They have since doubled their profit (faster than their revenue growth), to $112B, and yet their market cap has grown 4.5x, to $4.5T. This sort of detached inflationary spiral is accelerating, because USD are basically imaginary now, with enormous unending debt spending and the money printer going brrrrr, and we’re all just waiting to see what happens when the music stops. Something something “Alabama richer than Ontario!”. ↩
EDIT 2026-07-06- beta 3 resolved the appstoreagent issue.
macOS 27 beta 2 is a decent release from a user perspective, just don’t look under the covers too much, or you’ll be endlessly irritated by some runaway processes that will peg a CPU core and churn out enormous volumes of error logs, sitting in a loop endlessly cycling on a condition that isn’t going to fix itself.
appstoreagent and dasd are two of the most common, and you’ll regularly find them saturating a CPU core.
The problem with appstoreagent looks like a bad upgrade script, and if you ask for its log for the past minute –
log show --predicate 'process == "appstoreagent"' --last 1m You’ll probably see loads of errors like-
2026-06-28 08:01:38.931944-0400 0x37f4f Error 0x0 1006 0 appstoreagent: (libsqlite3.dylib) [com.apple.libsqlite3:logging] no such column: active_launch_events.recent_launch_times in "SELECT active_launch_events.ROWID, active_launch_events.bundle_id, active_launch_events.containing_bundle_id, active_launch_events.event_source, active_launch_events.is_extension, active_launch_events.launch_end_time, active_launch_events.launch_start_time, active_launch_events.recent_launch_times, active_launch_events.timestamp, active_launch_events.payload FROM active_launch_events"
I spent as much time as I’m willing to spend trying to find the SQLite database it didn’t properly upgrade, so I moved to plan b-
while true; do
killall appstoreagent 2>/dev/null
sleep 10
done I have SIP enabled, so I can’t just disable the agent, and the system tries to keep it alive so if you kill it, it will restart it eventually, hence the loop.
There are a large number of people talking about this problem online, with a variety of fixes (e.g. deleting cache files, disabling stats reporting, etc.). None of them work, though killing the agent makes it temporarily look like a win so a lot of people are quickly celebrating the problem is gone. And then it returns.
Processes like this should be built with exponential backoff: Instead of sitting in a tight loop hammering a problem that isn’t going to magically resolve itself, it should wait longer and longer between tries to some capped max. But it doesn’t and instead sits spinning on an issue. Lame.
After brute-force dealing with appstoreagent, dasd seems to have been resolved incidentally, presumably having been collateral damage of the other process’s issues, likely being hammered in its futile loop.
Is this a good fix? No, it’s terrible, and this still gives a window for that shitty, busted process to go in its stupid loop for a few seconds. But the scale of the issue is dramatically reduced.
I have a variety of Obsidian MD vaults. An R&D vault. A family vault (recipes, family info to remember, etc). Vaults for specific projects. A Daily Activities vault.
In the era of AI tools, Obsidian’s markdown/frontmatter file architecture instantly propels it a mile ahead of any tool that bundle up notes into proprietary data formats or opaque containers. You don’t need overweight MCP servers or to fumble with APIs to integrate AI tools with your Obsidian notes, but instead a vault is folders of Markdown files with metadata accessibly stored as YAML frontmatter, alongside a few basic config files.
While most of my usage is for R&D / project tracking, this entry is about my “Daily Activities” vault.
That vault is a diary of sorts.
I track my activities, daily motivations and todo lists, some basic health info, outings, and even the broad strokes of my diet. I use the Daily Notes core plugin, starting each note with a template that has sections according to my needs: Motivations, notes, breakfast lunch and dinner, daily tasks and activities, and then a few health metrics for when I bother entering them, such as blood pressure, steps and active calories. The vault has default properties for things that I want to enter that way, for instance whether I meditated, how many push-ups I performed, and similar things.
My template also has the current weather, along with the forecast for the day. That was a simple “on new note” script that Gemini created for me, pulling from an online source and applying it to a placeholder in my template. e.g. Weather @ 6/26/2026, 7:01:10 AM: Fog. 15°C 99% humidity (High: 23°C, Low: 15°C). Sunrise 05:41 AM Sunset 09:04 PM. It gives an environmental context to the day.
My interaction with the daily notes in the aggregate is a couple of minutes at most. It’s a fantastic tool for sharpening intentions and for noticing trends. It also is a useful memory bank. “When did we make the lasagna?”
I recently was logging a blood pressure reading in it when I pondered whether there is a pipeline from the Omron to Obsidian. It’s a Don’t Repeat Yourself (D.R.Y.) kind of thing where it bothered me that I was manually copying readings that should be automatically propagated.
And of course there is.
Omron connect already downloads all the readings from my device to my iPhone, where it’s then pushed to Apple Health
I created a Shortcut that gathers the last n days of blood pressure readings1 into a file. Apple Health stores diastolic and systolic separately, so they each get their own line. I say n days as on the first run I ran it for the year to date, and then on subsequent runs reduced this to 7 days.
While I was in there I added various fitness measures, including steps, active calories, and plan to add others, summing by day and restricting only to Apple Watch sourcing. You could also export activities as discrete items, though I didn’t do that.
The aggregate file gets saved to an iCloud location that is automatically pulled by my Mac.
I create a separate automation shortcut that does a scheduled run of the other shortcut. With a seven-day window, it can be run as infrequently as once every seven days without expanding the time window. And of course I can still trigger it manually, as I did right before writing this entry.
Shortcuts are surprisingly powerful. It’s clunky stringing a set of discrete steps together with this visual builder – I would infinitely prefer to be able to script it – but it’s much more capable and useful than I imagined it to be.
The file ends up looking something like this once limited to the last 7 days. There are a lot of blood pressure readings as I was testing some dietary modifications and their impact, and seeing them charted courtesy of the subsequent steps made the feedback so interesting I went a little overboard.
Regardless, this file was saved under my Daily Activities vault. I shortsightedly named it latest_bp.txt, but realistically it should be latest_health.txt. Instantly it participated in my vault source control system.
Now it was time to do something with it, and this is precisely the realm where AI coding tools shine: Discrete, compartmentalized needs where the problem and solution are very focused. Traditionally I would get sidetracked by doing a project for two months – endlessly generalizing and refactoring for what-ifs that will never happen, and so on – but in this case I just created a new folder named .dataProcess under the vault, which immediately makes it invisible to Obsidian, and opened a Claude Code session on my vault.
This is an Obsidian vault that is basically a personal life diary. Each day I create a new YYYY-MM-DD file from the _Daily_Note_Template and enter various attributes. Today I setup a shortcut on iOS to push various health metrics -- systolic, diastolic, steps, and active calories, to a file called latest_bp.txt under "Daily Notes"\Health, and this will cover the last NN days and will run probably daily or on demand. I would like to create a new app under .dataProcess to process this file on demand, to collate the systolic and diastolic by date, and then to process through the obsidian notes to add/update the measures under the related notes (which may mean editing in place as measures change -- for instance if I run the shortcut multiple times today, today's data may change multiple times as more measures and activity occur). I pluralize as while I would like the daily summary data in the daily note, if a monthly summary is available, I would like updated graphs under that summary for each item. Choose a tooling for building this process -- Go, Rust, or whatever else you think is ideal -- and create the application under the .dataProcess folder. Be sure to .gitignore binaries and build detritus
The very first creation of Opus 4.8 xhigh was superlative and inferred exactly what it needed to do from the loosely structured template and the data file, generating a single-file, zero-dependency Go 1.25 app that processed the history of data in moments. Though we went back and forth a few times as originally it used the Mermaid charting that was very limited, so it adjusted to generating and embedding SVGs in the monthly summaries.
Later I had it combine sliding-window time proximal blood pressure readings into a single averaged result, and also it had to start storing a local combined database to structurally catch differences as new data came in. Some minor fine-tuning happened like changing it to always ensure day files were under the proper month (Daily Notes/2026-06/2026-06-07), and that every month folder had a monthly summary.
In a tiny number of back and forth prompts and responses I had a fully functioning, cross-platform Go application that I could run on my Mac, on Linux, or on Windows. I added calling this Go binary to my nightly git encrypt push of the vaults (as mentioned in the launchd piece), and voilà, an end to end integration.
Now every month has a monthly summary that looks like thispdf.
Almost immediately I felt that feedback loop where I was better incentivized to hit goals. I put this system in place on the 15th, and the impact on my daily step goals is obvious. It still misses other elements of my daily fitness activities, but that comes next.
And of course this data was available in Apple Health, and blood pressure was in Omron. While I mentioned DRY – don’t repeat yourself – earlier, ironically I am intentionally repeating data, but it is being propagated accurately and comprehensively, and now it’s in my primary source for this sort of daily activity. My human dashboard.
None of this is revolutionary. I moved data between islands, and pushed it into a daily tool.
But this is the sort of domain where LLM coding tools have really shown to be absolute game changers2, especially with open systems like Obsidian. I’ve had wonderful luck with the newer models and tooling, but it still surprised me how comprehensively it comprehended the need with little guidance, and competently supplied a solution on the very first prompt. Only minor modifications necessary.
Questions? Email me at the address linked below.
There are some permission settings you have to set for this to function. Apple Health is very restrictive of bulk exporting data. ↩
And it’s important to note that big systems, when properly managed, are the combined effort of a lot of small systems. When people declare that AI coding tools can’t handle the complexity of their project, they are announcing that they are doing something very wrong. ↩
Two days ago there was a shooting in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. The culprit was a 25-year-old incel philosophy student from Alberta who travelled to Montreal concurrent with sending a 104-page manifesto to a number of media outlets. Early indications are that he was targeting the office of a well-known porn purveyor.
It seems that the shooter had much higher ambitions for his spree. And while it’s still a tragedy that a police officer and a civilian died in the mêlée, it is one of those situations that could have been much worse.
The manifesto can be found online, and as always people race to glean some sort of slant that allows them to bunch this murderer with the “other side”. I’ve seen the shooter described as “left wing”, “far-left” and so on by right wing outlets (such as the cesspool that is RebelNews), desperately trying to vilify and simplify. Other outlets have rightly declared the shooter an incel, and there is something perverse and telling about how offended this makes some communities.
I think the weirdest are those who keep trying to frame this as antisemitism, when the isolated bit about Zionism/Israel occupies approximately 0.05% of the text and almost seems incidental.
This is one of those situations where the horseshoe theory applies. The manifesto heralds communism as a solution to what it declares as the corruption of “high capitalism” – which he calls a bastardized form of socialism – yet simultaneously it espouses many views that you predominately find among the far right: destroying liberalism, that women should fulfill trad-wife roles, that there are only two sexes and gender is a myth, that porn and other vices need to be crushed, that all drug dealers and criminals need to be removed from the living, and so on.
If I had to categorize the politics of the shooter, it would be Nazbol. Economically far-left, but socially extremely far right. Trying to categorize this into contemporary notions of left and right is foolish nonsense. And to go further, “MAGA” is shockingly similar to Nazbol in almost all meaningful ways, and have been fully onboard as Trump has declared himself Chairman Trump and as the US has pushed capitalism aside to instead favour whatever bizarre economic abomination they currently have in place.
Regardless, about 99% of his manifesto consists of rationalizations and ruminations on why the world conspired to stop him from finding a girlfriend, and everything circles that basic nucleus. Porn, crypto, the rich, the few men who are apparently getting all the girls, and so on: All of it was rationalized as why this guy was lonely, and they all were his targets.
And let me be clear that I absolutely believe there is a male loneliness crisis and there is a tinderbox of social disorder that threatens peaceful society if it isn’t confronted. Male loneliness awareness has been a campaign of Scott Galloway, and bizarrely many leftists attack him for this, usually by grossly misrepresenting what that means, or by doing the whataboutism1 bullshit that signifies that someone has nothing. Many “progressives” are revealed to be vile, hateful creeps when it comes to dismissing issues facing males.
Solving male loneliness doesn’t mean enlisting women in forced companionship. It means men engaging in clubs and friendship groups, finding true meaning and purpose2, stopping the desperate cycle as outsiders spiral into a world where pathetic losers like Andrew Tate become their heroes and their lot becomes infinitely worse. The moment some lonely man fills that vacuum with pick-up artists and other misogynistic garbage, they cement that their situation is going to get worse. Rinse and repeat.
But this guy seemed to seek comfort in all the wrong places, and some of the perversely ridiculous narratives in his screed betrays this deluded view that comes from the incel space. For instance “their prevails in the average western high school itself a sinister and brutish sexual culture, in which many girls – even those of the younger grades – are brought quickly into the hypergamous social practice, especially so at the hideously vile events known as ‘parties’, where favoured males, who are often out of high school, in their twenties, and very socially dominant, violate countless girls, commonly many young girls in one single night”.
This is pathetic business.
I first came across this incident via a Reddit video of a part of the event. The misogyny within the comments were staggering, and they overwhelm every venue I’ve seen it discussed.
One of the officers happened to be female3. She responded to an active shooter, had her partner killed right beside her, and was inches from being killed, but instantly almost all the comments were denigrating and mocking her performance.
“DEI!”
This is the rhetoric they picked up from a political movement, where anyone not a white male must have unfairly earned their position, and for whom the standards are nothing short of absolute perfection.
What irony. An incel goes on a shooting rampage and kills a cop and directly or indirectly a civilian, and in the tragic aftermath most of the comments make jokes or slurs about a cop doing something they would never have the bravery to do, because she is a woman.
Christ, what are we doing? Something has gone seriously awry.
During the event, and over just a few seconds, the following happened-
Many immediately assumed that she shot the civilian. And unfortunate shootings precisely like this happen frequently in such high intensity situations, overwhelmingly with men doing the wrongful shooting. Sometimes it’s over a falling acorn.
But this time it was a woman, and with that suddenly nothing short of perfection is allowed. Instant awareness of everything was absolute and expected. Never for male officers, but this is different, you see.
So if this was an errant police shooting during a tense event, it would be terribly tragic, but not unprecedented by a long shot, and it certainly won’t be the last. It would legitimately be an understandable tragedy in the heat of the moment, and a deeply unfortunate accident.
But here’s the wildest part: I don’t think the female officer shot the civilian.
When the civilian is shot it is decidedly the sound of an SKS long rifle firing. Secondly the civilian’s head moves perpendicular to the shooter who is now moving in on the officer. The civilian falls away from the officer because of how they were standing when their body went limp, not because of some enormous momentum of a 9mm bullet. A 9mm carries less than 3kg of momentum, and it isn’t going to throw someone backwards, though someone falling limp will often fall backwards.
The misogynists just couldn’t stop themselves from immediately attacking the officer – they’re pro-police so long as they’re male police – and from my analysis they’re probably wrong. And their attacks were unmerited and disgusting even if they were right.
That officer is a hero who just saw her partner killed. She is infinitely better of a person than any of those critics will ever be.
Whataboutism is a cancer in discourse, and needs to always be recognized as such and dismissed on sight. The purveyors of whataboutism are almost always insincere garbage tossers that are just throwing whatever they can into the ring.
Whataboutism isn’t always a deflection, but often it’s to dismiss the good will or efforts of others, or to pretend that an organization or government is only capable of one initiative at a time. Oh the police stopped a speeder? Well what about car theft! Oh some group provided homes for the poor? Whatabout veterans! Someone worries about males? What about females! And on and on.
It’s just bottom-tier idiot rhetoric. ↩
Organized religion often filled this need in people’s lives, giving events, groups, and purpose. I’m agnostic and certainly don’t believe you should play along with mythology just to have a group – though let’s be real and observe that a heady percentage of church adherents clearly don’t believe the teachings of their religion – but we would benefit from basically having churches minus the religion. ↩
There are some groups that cluck and point whenever someone uses the word female, reacting like poorly trained bots. It’s weird and incredibly stupid. If the gender were reversed and the adjective male was appropriate, then female is the correct word. ↩
Random Threefer of thoughts that came to mind this morning.
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek among other bestsellers, recently observed a rapid falloff in sales of his self-help books. He makes the reasonable hypothesis that AI is the cause, prospective readers instead using LLMs as their source of lifestyle and productivity hacks.
There are many other reasons why self-improvement books might be faltering1, or why specific well-worn tomes and authors might fade in and out of favour2, however AI is certainly impacting the industry.
The reason, I suspect, is that LLMs get to the point. If you’re looking for concrete, direct answers, tricks, tips, whatever, an LLM is usually an efficient mechanism. And while it’s often simply wrong, little of the self-help industry has any scientific basis for their recommendations, so it isn’t really a change in the accuracy department. Try things out and see if they work for you.
Filler is an antipattern in 2026, yet the self-help realm is addicted to it. The reliance on filler is why a lot of traditional media venues are facing attention losses.
What do I mean by filler?
The average self-help/how-to book – and I’ve read loads of them – can be condensed by 90% and absolutely nothing will be lost. Some can be reduced to a single page. Some to a single paragraph. Often even a single sentence.
But you can’t sell a page or a paragraph – basically a tweet – for $40. You can’t build an influencer career or celebrate your best seller around a blog post or a tweet, however many hits you get.
So instead you take a simple premise and fluff it up with narrative filler until it hits 300+ pages3. And every reader knows that is what’s happening, but it was just something you had to slog through because everyone does it. Filler also can imply a complexity that isn’t actually there, allowing one to easily dismiss doubters as people who just must have missed some of the nuance in the parable of the Turtle and the Pie.
A good example that I recently read is the “Glucose Revolution” by Jessie Inchauspé. The entire book (all 304 pages) is taking a tiny number of bullet points and repeating and rephrasing them endlessly. The author has made a whole career from this book, re-iterating and pounding on this incredibly simple foundation in endless ways, all while pitching hilariously overpriced protein powders and vitamins.
Ask a decent LLM to give you the book in bullet points, and it will basically give you 100% of the worthwhile content of the book in a quick four-minute read, saving you the time that slogging through a few simple thoughts padded to 300+ pages.
It’s unfair that an LLM can do that4, but if you give readers the choice between mostly filler and little filler, they will often choose the latter.
YouTube recently added Gemini AI to YouTube via the Ask button. Increasingly I’ve found myself jumping to it and requesting a summary of the video at the outset before committing time. Doubly so for videos with shocked face thumbnails combined with the classic Betteridge law of headlines, or that teases some big reveal.
“A common ingredient might kill you?” [Pikachu Face]
Click on Ask / summarize and in seconds you see that it’s just restating old nonsense, and so on.
As more people discover this tool I suspect the classic teasers and then filler padded to maximize engagement minutes and thus advertisement potential are going to see the same results as the self-help industry is seeing.
Years back there was an Apple-sphere influencer who posted a video discussing whether you should get 8GB or 16GB in your Mac (maybe it was the M1 Mac release?). He yapped for just over 10 minutes – much like 300+ pages is the self-help target, 10-minutes has some sort of monetization importance for YouTube – to finally just say “get 16GB if you can afford it, and if you can’t, don’t”. Zero metrics. Zero tests. Zero benchmarks. Zero effort. Just a lot of meandering, worthless filler, finally to get to a worthless completely subjective “eh” finale. What a waste of time. I remember this video appearing across a number of social media venues.
The “Ask” button will not be kind to videos that resort to this sort of nonsense. If the entirety of the content could be a one sentence tweet, just do that?
Follow any nutrition or lifestyle discussion, and invariably you’ll come across those people who will declare that things we did in the past5 are beneficial and optimal at any level of exposure because we “evolved” alongside it (saturated fats, sun exposure, etc). Alternately that anything we didn’t evolve with must be harmful (seed oils, artificial sweeteners, sunscreen, modern medicine, etc).
Which might superficially seem like a rational argument, at least if you are content with dying at 406, which is around the point where evolution is basically done with you. Even if living to 40 is your ideal, evolution is also fine with short, brutal lives filled with deaths so long as propagation happens faster still7.
Evolution is not the magical optimization people often perceive it to be, and ultimately the goal of evolution is to get enough of its members old enough to spawn some kids and provide for them until they can provide for themselves / each other. From that point on your survival, from an evolutionary perspective, is meaningless if not even suboptimal. Your continued existence is nothing more than left over inertia.
Evolution is ready and willing to toss you in the dumpster, so if it’s your key to longevity you have chosen a bad ally.
There is something called the “Grandmother Hypothesis” that imagines a tiny evolutionary pressure to continue providing past the reproductive age, however this a minuscule selection pressure compared to simply living long enough to spawn children.
Not only does evolution not really care about you past 40, it actively conspires against you. Things like the mTOR pathway are geared to get us growing and reproducing as quickly as possible in youth, but as you age it turns into a mechanism of self-destruction. We carry loads of genes that optimize youth and sabotage us later in life.
So sure, load up on saturated fats and sun exposure – we “evolved” with them – but understand that evolution has never selected to defend against the melanoma and CVD you’re going to suffer in your 40s, though it will fight against these outcomes in younger years. Your early death is arguably evolution’s natural plan.
Periodically I see online arguments concerning eternally screaming, screeching kids. Invariably it breaks down into the “kids will be kids! Stop being a Karen8!” camp facing off against the “control your sprogs” critics.
The former usually leans upon the proven “look who has never had kids” parental privilege / perspective thing, believing this trumps all other positions. Some sort of heroic sacrifice, enlightened higher-calling.
I have four children. None of them were ever the eternally screaming, screeching kids that people revile. Somehow we managed to raise kids that are considerate and thoughtful of others, via simple reminders that other people do exist, that there isn’t a need to constantly be so loud, to be mindful of others, and so on.
Most kids actually don’t have to yell and scream constantly, but the ones who do have been taught this careless selfishness by equally selfish parents, and are likely to be equally dysfunctional in society.
They’re doomed to become the universally hated people who obnoxiously play music on a Bluetooth speaker on transit. Who hold loud speakerphone conversations in crowded places.
Their parents were thoughtless, inconsiderate assholes, and they’ll follow in the tradition.
Nihilism, defeatism, GLP-1s, changing interests, etc ↩
Or groups of them. There are cliques of self-help gurus who all glaze and endorse each other in a big circle-jerk. It can be off-putting and makes the whole thing feel like a coordinated grift ↩
Around 300 pages is by far the most common length in this field. It’s so common that I suspect this is what publishers demand of their authors.
“I want to write a book telling people to exercise more and eat less!” “Okay make it 300+ pages.”
“Chapter 1 - My Childhood Cat and What She Taught Me About Calories” ↩
I mean…is it? If I say that her book tells you that you should avoid blood glucose spikes by layering proteins, fats and complex carbs, eating your meals in a way that puts simple carbs last, slowing absorption and digestion, and by taking short walks after meals so your muscles absorb some of the blood glucose…have I stolen her content? ↩
Often these are disproven or spurious claims. Keto fanatics, for instance, often contrive a past where we ate meat as our primary diet. Archeological evidence does not support this at all ↩
Even that is a lie. Evolution is perfectly served with outrageous mortality levels and brutal, pain-filled lives if just enough of its members live long enough to swell the ranks ↩
The billions of broiler house chickens, living brutal short lives, are a massive evolutionary success. Evolution is not the ally to the individual it is usually imagined to be ↩
There are people who are overly harsh on kids just having fun and living life / existing. I’m not sympathizing with those people, but instead for the people who have to endure the forever-96db only-volume-is-super-loud sort of kid that no one wants in their proximity ↩
A submission sarcastically titled Please Use AI front-paged on Hacker News a week ago.
It’s an interesting bit of poetry. I don’t want to make too much of the specific examples it presents, but use it as a kicking-off point because most anti-AI rhetoric uses these sorts of high-contrast dichotomies as their narrative foundation.
A sort of “someone utilizing AI slop would have instead performed the most heartfelt, involved, considered, thoughtful work, with full care, concern and attention if AI wasn’t available”.
Is that really the experience of anyone, anywhere?
Coding, for instance, given that’s where I’ve spent my career: I can unequivocally say that Claude Code / Opus 4.8 generates solutions better than 99%+ of the code I’ve come across over my career, including important, lauded projects. Dramatically better code1.
More secure code. More “considered” code. Better commented code. Higher performance code. With a better separation of concerns facilitating future extensibility and maintainability.
Current AI coding tools are deeply imperfect and prone to faults, but so are most coders and coding teams. Assign programmers the output of other programmers, and almost to a `T’ they will declare it unmaintainable, unintelligible, and that the best course of action is rewriting from scratch. Yet suddenly when you introduce AI into the equation, an imaginary panacea arises about traditional humanoid coding teams.
Could good developers make code at the same level or better with the proper effort and consideration? Of course! But often we’re throwing together something as quickly as possible to solve an immediate problem or under tight deadlines (//TODO - fix this hack later!), don’t want to bother “premature optimizing” design or performance considerations until it reaches a critical problem level, or we’re putting in minimal effort while we browse Indeed on the other monitor.
The real world conditions most developers generate code in does not promote top quality code. From which most code out there is not top quality code.
The vast bulk of code on this planet is terrible, and it’s important that people are honest about this. It is sub-slop. It is insecure, poorly considered trash, and this is why enterprises having a large code footprint is very seldom an asset, and often is instead just a massive debt that grows with every line added.
This same observation holds across almost every field. Massive industries of people generating thoughtless, lazy trash, just as they have for decades.
The zero-creativity, copy-paste advertisement world, for instance, where the same ads are regurgitated countless times, just mixing up the product and demographics for what you’re targeting. For instance the classic silly, stupid husband does something dumb, and his rational, intelligent wife makes an “oh gosh” look at the camera and saves the day. I instantly despise any product that has this sort of trash ad, which means that I carry a lot of emotions for a lot of product given that it’s by far the most common advertisement template.
A large percentage of television and movies now are just remixed updates of stuff that was successful in decades past, albeit maybe with the creative direction to “put a chick in it and make her gay”. An entire field where the vast majority of content is worthless slop long before AI, armies of shameless “creatives” just doing the laziest possible thing.
This same thing can be seen everywhere. Wedding speeches are just a cliché. The whole idea of “genres” in art and music is an admission of follow-the-leader remix and repeat behaviour, sometimes taken to such hilarious extremes it seems like parody. And if people really think most kids wrote creative, thoughtful essays before LLMs came and corrupted the youth … were these same people born yesterday?
Sure, a small, tiny subset of students did, but the dominant, average behaviour was just cliché, maximum-lazy slop. The dictionary defines cliché as “1 : a trite phrase or expression”…
Large volumes of creative and intellectual output has been slop for decades.
Is someone individual if they put on the “goth uniform”, looking precisely like the genre of “goth” is supposed to look? Is it rebellious and tough to jack up your Dodge Ram and hang truck nuts from it and roll coal, just like the countless other “rebellious” guys pursuing exactly the same image and following an identical template? Or to buy a Harley, grow a beard and apply the “tough biker” template?
It goes on and on. There is perilously little that isn’t already lazy “slop”. There are entire industries where almost all of the participants are just slop purveyors, long before they asked ChatGPT to slop it up for them.
Most of us are just following a script and playing a role. Much of humanity has long been robotically stumbling through the motions with minimal effort.
I linked a video from someone who put it much better than I can previously, and that video is worth a purposeful, attentive watch from beginning to end. Don’t ask Gemini to summarize it, or just jump around because you want to get back to Reels. Just play it through and actually listen. It’s spot on.
There were a series of terrible Apple ads back when they were trying to pretend to be adept at AI. Guy gets AI to lengthen and aggrandize a message to his boss. Boss summarizes that message with AI, and then writes a response that he again lengthens and aggrandizes with AI. Someone else feigns familiarity with someone in a social situation by using AI to supplant actual familiarity.
This ad was so horrendous I have to think the Apple executives that okayed it got punted from the company, because anyone using AI like that is a fool wasting everyone’s time.
Similarly, evaluating resumes with AI, where the resumes have been created with AI, and then a response is sent with AI, and your openclaw reads the response, and… What are we even doing? What is the point of all of this nonsense?
Vibe coding on the whole is largely fantasy, and making real solutions still requires an enormous depth of technical mastery and knowledge, particularly when you encounter the edges. AI tools are a fantastic multiplier for skillful practitioner, but the former still requires the latter.
There are enormous, dystopian dangers with AI that we need to seriously confront, for which we need strong governments rather than relying upon the benevolence of plutocrats. These dangers are incredibly pressing, and risk upsetting the power balance so completely we’ll quickly find ourselves at the point of no return.
But head-in-the-sand denialism or false dichotomies are so easily and obviously nonsense that they don’t delay the onslaught for even a microsecond. They’re just pablum that denialists use to assuage each other.
Trillions of imaginary dollars are flooding into the AI space, and everyone is trying to get a cut of the action. This has given rise to an enormous industry of fantasy data centres, many with preposterous proportions and imaginary attributes. Many of them are by developers having no credibility in the tech industry, no known users of said data centres lined up, but they’re just proposing galaxy-sized developments and hoping that proposing big square buildings is enough to cash in on some of that AI valuation pop.
Many if not most of these data centres will never be built. And of those that do get built, many will end up abandoned.
The epicentre of fantasy data centre grifts has to be Alberta, where a whole array of pretend projects have been proposed, grifters lining up with hands out hoping they can loot investment funds, governments, and so on2. Alberta, you should know, has a derelict, obsolete power grid, and some of the highest electricity prices in Canada. It has no geographical benefit either from a population proximity or geological perspective.
This is where someone attempts to elevate themselves, declaring that only bad programmers think current AI makes good code. These people are idiots, and their noisy nonsense – basically a head-stuck-in-sand hope that you can invent a reality and make it real if you just say it enough – can be seen in every discussion about AI. It’s obnoxious, boorish nonsense, and their noise has been tolerated for too long ↩
Remember when Jeff “Hands Out for Welfare” Bezos made a bunch of cities do a pathetic campaign to petition for “HQ2”, promising some megopolis if only the taxpayers of those cities give his outrageously profitable company tax benefits? NYC has been demonstrated to be absolutely correct in telling him to get stuffed, and the pathetic “HQ-little-2” in Virginia, now stunted and sad, just betrays everyone that danced for that beggar3 as a fool ↩
I mean, if Bezos was bad with that HQ2 trash, sports leagues like the NFL4 are a million times worse. It’s simply incredible that cities are still dumb enough to give hundreds of millions to billions to beg the NFL to please build a stadium and keep all the profits. That this scam still works to loot taxpayers is amazing. Los Angeles was such an exception with SoFi, happily watching beggar teams leave when they couldn’t get their handouts, then come crawling back and magically find the ability to pay for their own stadium. LA gave $0 for SoFi stadium, unlike the many other pathetic D-tier cities that loot the working class for the billionaires ↩
The Olympics and FIFA and other leagues are also guilty of this scam. This nonsense is always pitched with super-sized claimed benefits that never come to fruition, and with undersized-costs that end up massively exploding, again for taxpayers to foot ↩
There has been a firestorm over Bill C-22, and it has rightly included objections by a number of significant tech firms like Signal, Apple, NordVPN, and others.
Of course the noisy worthless contenders also need to pipe up, including Meta – Meta is an anti-democracy cancer on society and should be ejected from Canada, and absolutely nothing will be lost1 – along with various partisan voices who just want to start howling like monkeys about corrupt governments and tax rates in a hysteria that obliterates any credibility.
Part I is fine and mostly just modernizes and centralizes some activities of government when investigating crimes. Part II is the problem, and it isn’t that it directly prescribes specific actions, but that it broadly provides the umbrella for some terrible regulations to be enacted if this bill achieves royal assent. Which is even worse because it’s easy to wave away concerns by noting that this bill doesn’t prescribe them, it merely allows future regulations to do that so save your objections until then…when it’s too late and they are basically rubber-stamped.
Ostensibly the major items only apply to a thus-far-undefined schedule of “core providers”, but elsewhere in the act it also broadly allows the same broad regulations to enlist any electronic service provider into these same requirements whenever demanded.
Who is an electronic service provider? By the definition of this bill, every business and service. The criteria are so broad that simply having an electronic record of an interaction makes you subject to it.
This bill, if it passes all guards and becomes an act of parliament, allows the government to make regulations that can possibly require a backdoor into encryption products via Part II 5(2)(a), along with potential regulations for the retention of up to a year of all metadata and its transmission data (which isn’t the actual contents of the data, but rather the routing, addressing, etc). Importantly they are not saying up to a year of metadata for someone subject to a lawful order, but the bill is saying it allows regulations to be passed that require the retention for up to a year of metadata for everyone.
The bill includes language that these requirements cannot impose a “systemic vulnerability”, but this is left undefined, and functionally at odds with 5(2)(a) which cannot be implemented without, for instance, allowing for the injection of secondary keys into encryption products. And the retention of all metadata itself is defacto a vulnerability that will be exploited2.
Governments over the world have been trying to enact these sorts of laws for years – many successfully – and invariably it requires some sort of backdoor or circumvention.
It’s a bill that needs a lot of changes, and is rightly seeing concerns. This bill doesn’t even directly create the vulnerabilities, but instead it paves the way for them to be introduced in the future which might even be worse.
Michael Geist has a piece on this bill, and he notes that after bill C-18 – the Online News Act – Meta blocked news links in Canada, punching themselves in the face and beginning the rapid decline of Meta’s relevance in Canada. Personally I’d consider that a win, really, so odd to include it like a counterpoint.
Absolutely no one should be looking for information or news on any of Meta’s disinformation, democracy-hostile shithole properties. Google actually folded, by the way, and pays into the news fund. Strangely Geist doesn’t mention that.
“Oh but what about WhatsApp?” Firstly, Meta should never have been allowed to buy that product, and really does anyone actually trust that product under that firm’s tutelage? Insanity. Meta is the least trustworthy firm in tech and if it blinked out of existence the world would be a better place ↩
Though in fairness, most tech firms already hoard every bit of metadata they can about every user, selling it and abusing it in every way possible. But the act can force this condition on those that don’t want the burden of doing so, along with products like VPNs that explicitly don’t log such metadata ↩
My youngest has been looking to buy himself a computer more capable than his current Mac Mini, and it’s an effort that I have purposefully tried to stall a number of times.
CPUs, motherboards, cases, power supplies, and other parts are all completely decent, and you’re getting better, more capable options for your money than a few years ago, but storage, memory and GPUs are irrationally expensive. It’s like we’ve lost a decade of progress.
$600 CAD for 32GB of DDR5 RAM is stupid. I’ve been equipping various PCs in the house with 32GB for well over a decade, and it was always chump change so just throw in extra because why not. Go VM wild! A decade ago I was buying 32GB kits for less than $200, and there has been a lot of density and manufacturing improvements in the subsequent time.
To be fair it was DDR4 then, but the benefits of DDR5 aren’t that significant.
And of course the GPU landscape has gotten absurd, and PC gaming is largely millions of people desperately hoping their current card holds on for another year.
My stalling has been some hope that the component bubble will collapse (it is a bubble, just as there is a ridiculous bubble of data centres being built that is going to lead to a lot of vacant properly in five years). At some point we have to return to progress again.
Trump dragged along various American plutocrats with him to China, and what an absolutely pathetic display. It cannot be overstated how utterly diminished and weak the US looks under Trump’s presidency, in this case essentially begging China for attention and looking like a busted middle power. That China privately leaked “nah, this ain’t it bro” to media at the outset is just…chef’s kiss.
The “great dealmaker” has been humiliated by China time and time again, and this is just the ultimate diminishing. I cannot even begin to fathom how they thought dragging along this cadre of CEOs and plutocrats would look strong, aside from boosting Trump’s ego.
I guess China is now going to cancel the Superbowl or something? Probably the World Series too.
Trump is going to leave empty-handed – the US has nothing to offer China at this stage, and China holds “all the cards” – but will invariably say how much Xi likes him and then detail a lot of pretend deals that exist only in his head. Or he’ll restate existing deals, like the way he keeps celebrating every CHIPS act win as some personal achievement.
What a shocking speed-run to collapse. This self-dealing imbecile should be polling at 0%, but somehow 30%+ of Americans still think this foolish demented clown and his Epstein administration full of criminals and greaseballs is achieving something. All telling him how smart and brilliant and strong and tough he is for his foolish schemes.
Pathetic. The US is reduced to making nuclear threats like a failed Russian state, while Chairman Trump gloats about being an unhinged wildcard like this is something to celebrate. I knew a second Trump presidency would be bad, but I never could have predicted just how shockingly disastrous it would be.
It’s actually interesting how China has been fully freed from any illusion of an American yoke (courtesy of Trump’s grotesque mismanagement of literally everything), which is something that Americans and the disinformation press of the US still fails to understand. China is openly supporting whoever they want, chuckling at American delusions that they set the rules, and laughing at American sanctions. And while China has been freed, much of the rest of the world is rapidly heading down the same path given how this foolish administration has levered every US integration for garbage causes. For instance defending war criminals.
Not only is Trump seemingly acting as a plant for Xi and Putin and removing America from any semblance of power, his destruction is so complete and overwhelming that he’s just too obvious, and even a plant wouldn’t be so blatant. In reality he’s just an incredibly stupid man that has had a lifetime of people telling him how great he is, and now he has an administration stuffed with bootlicking trash that will go along with the delusion.
In my Dear America piece I detailed some of the legitimate issues that a subset Canadians have with the state of the country, one being that citizenship has repeatedly been devalued to almost worthlessness by members of the bleeding heart class who feel that we need to endlessly flagellate ourselves for the crime of being citizens of a decent country.
Yet again a judge has handed down a light sentence – or in this case an outright discharge, fully pissing in the face of Canadians – to a non-Canadian found guilty of a criminal offence so severe it led to death. Someone who had barely been in country for three years when their actions led to the death of an innocent person.
This is outrageous, and is the result of a long conditioning that citizenship is worthless if not even something that we should somehow feel guilty about. That it is owed to any and all comers, and there is no need to demonstrate worth or belonging – nor even to refrain from being criminal garbage – and instead we should feel guilty for withholding it from any who demand it.
Judges like this need to be removed from the bench. We need strict guidelines that immigration status can play absolutely no part in sentencing, as there are an unending series of these situations happening in this country right now where the very people who diminish and worsen this country are coddled and protected from consequences. It is intolerable, and does a massive disservice to Canadians, and to migrants in particular who do not need to be lumped in with the tiny subset of criminals that some pearl clutchers prevent from rightly being punted from this country.
The vast majority of migrants do not commit crime. They do not ply negligence that leads to death. They are model residents and hopeful citizens, and that is something of value and worth that they work towards. When it is rendered worthless, as this judge is trying to do, almost as something owed, it is a grotesque miscarriage of justice and a vile attack on the very notion of citizenship. It cannot continue.
Danielle Smith is a traitor and a separatist, and works on behalf of the nutbag evangelical base in the US. She is a MAGA sympathist. This is plainly evident in every word that spills from her mouth and every action she takes, however much she tries to camouflage her obvious intentions.
Her government has been trying to engineer every point of antagonism they can with the federal government. On immigration (after years of demanding more, suddenly she realizes her base wants her to pretend that she was against it), health care, judges (which is why I segued to this), pension plans, police forces, book bans and mirroring every crazy, ignorant far-right American culture war bit of nonsense, and so on. It is so laughably transparent, and is in the cause of fomenting separatism beliefs. She’s running the MAGA playbook.
But let’s be clear – separatism has very limited support in Alberta. It is a minority cause, and you can find more Americans that want their state to join Canada than you can find separatists in Alberta.
Yet they keep electing traitors like Danielle Smith, because their options are always “the traitors” vs “a bunch of left-wingers supported by urbanites”.
Alberta needs a federalist conservative party, and Albertans that aren’t red-hat wearing clowns – the good Albertans that aren’t the roll-coal simpleton loudmouths – need to work to make this happen. Send the UCP to the dustbin of history.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Really don’t want to return to the topic of statins again, but my tosser entry about a wellness influencer from a week ago yielded an email that rhetorically asked-
Don’t you think diabetes is a pretty concerning side effect of statins?
That was in relation to statins being flagged as a contributor to insulin resistance via interference in the mevalonate pathway and possibly in altering the microbiome.
Sounds pretty scary.
In large-scale trials for high-intensity statins1, those in the statin group saw their HbA1c increase by an average of 0.08%2 over the control group.
So if their HbA1c was 6.0%, at the end of the trial their HbA1c rose to 6.08%. I’m simplifying because this was above and beyond the control group, and in the JUPITER trial the control group went from 5.7 to 5.8, and the statin group went from 5.7 to just under 5.9.
They didn’t suddenly have diabetes, but instead had a relatively small increase in their A1c, and if you have a metabolically unhealthy group – as those who need statins usually are – many will likely already be edging the arbitrary thresholds that we call pre-diabetes or diabetes proper. That ~0.08% increase can be a nudge effect on the group that sees more people hit that diagnostic threshold than among the control.
In the JUPITER trial, over the duration of the study 27% more statin users hit this arbitrary threshold than in the control group. Both groups were getting older and less healthy on the average with the passing of time, but the statin group had a tiny increase that was just enough to nudge them over that line in greater numbers.
The JUPITER trial actually ended early because the benefit of the statin was so overwhelming that it was considered unethical to require the control group to stay off statins, regardless of the minor insulin sensitivity benefit. And here’s the craziest part of all: The participants didn’t even have high LDL, but instead had high inflammation markers, and still statins were of enormous benefit!
One strategy that wellness influencers use to push anti-science, anti-vax, pro-quackery positions is almost always to try to use medical science against itself. To take the enormously comprehensive, large-scale studies that were done on things like statins or vaccines and cherry-pick every side effect or downside, contrasting it usually with quackery that has marginal if any study whatsoever3 (or where, with something like high-fat keto guys, they always no true scotsman every study, all of which overwhelmingly refute their claims).
Because everything has multivariate effects on your body. Every single dietary choice you make alters your microbiome. Every spice you add to your dish has an enormous array of chemicals, many of which have little to no study at all.
Every vitamin or powder you consume, including that grifter longevity overpriced vitamin, has consequences4 that have never been broadly studied. The vast majority of the things we consume basically just got grandfathered in.
Maybe they increase your insulin resistance. Maybe they supercharge some types of cancer. Maybe they interfere with a pathway that protects the brain, leading to dementia.
We just don’t know, and the truth is that the coverage area of study is absolutely minuscule, which is precisely why we keep having studies that refute prior studies, and guidance constantly sees change.
Does this mean to avoid everything? Of course not. But if someone fearmongers about something that has an enormous amount of research behind it, thoroughly detailing the highs and the lows, but then they segue to pitching some unstudied bullshit, understand that they are a grifter and they do not have your best interest at heart. They just want your attention and your dollars.
Low-intensity statin usage saw far less of an effect on insulin resistance ↩
Additive, as HbA1c is already measured in percentages ↩
The most illustrative example of this is how many of the same people who fearmonger about consensus medical science are first in line for crazy peptides cooked up in some black-market Hell’s Kitchen basement by some Facebook scammers. Peptides are a real thing, and revolutionary GLP-1 agonists are peptides, but it’s amazing scrolling Instagram and getting ads for all of these dodgy vendors mixing up random brews with zero oversight. And people are injecting this stuff. ↩
Calcium supplementation, for instance, is probably not great unless you have bone brittleness or the like. Your body can’t process a massive intake of calcium but needs to clear it from the blood quickly, so it can end up calcifying your artery walls as a last resort quick removal. Which is bad. Calcium supplementation is associated with heightened risk for heart attacks and strokes.
This is cross-cutting. When vitamins are actually studied in depth, supplementing often turns out to be double-edged or all downside. Vitamin E5, for instance, in supplemental form actually decreases health and longevity, and increases rates of some types of cancers. And it’s worth noting that very few things we consume have seen that depth of controlled study ↩
A big part of the problem is the massive doses of supplements. The daily RDA for vitamin E, as an example, is 22-33 IU per day, ingested slowly from multiple complex meals with many components, providing a mix of the four natural tocopherols. Instead, we consume a 400 IU gel cap in isolation that is mega blasted into our system and has to be processed as an avalanche, usually providing only the alpha-tocopherol variant. This is the same problem with calcium and other supplements: Natural forms are metered and gradual over an entire waking day, versus a singular megadose. This might contribute to why supplementation almost always fails to show any benefit, and instead is often detrimental.
The best action, it seems, is trying to get your necessary vitamins and minerals in your diet, but if you can’t or just want to be sure, don’t buy the MEGA MAX variants of supplements ↩
While all attention is on the Trump-induced global economic (military, environmental, biological, etc) chaos, Canada was in perilous straights for entirely different reasons. It was a perfect storm that could have been calamitous.
Since the late 2010s and through to 2024, we had a real-estate based economy that was juiced by outrageous levels of migration1. Housing prices spiralled upwards and many of us were “rich” on paper. Everyone was a real-estate agent, and the few who weren’t would “invest” by buying pre-con condos in the expectation that you’d just flip it for a big profit when complete.
Housing sales were super hot as everyone had a FOMO and newspapers would (and still do) breathlessly report on whatever “it only ever goes up” nonsense real estate groups would feed them. Various levels of government netted big on land transfer taxes, service taxes for fees, and so on.
The government would herald every GDP gain fuelled entirely by a massive influx of people, while most Canadians got poorer in real terms. And as housing got completely out of hand and irrational, at every natural limit the government would announce new programs that would juice the markets even more: Expanding credits and lending programs, buying up mortgage risks from the banks, relaxing taxes, and an unending series of mass migration programs. Throwing gasoline on the fire, and doing quite literally the opposite of what would be responsible.
This has collapsed, and always had an expiry date. Housing prices were utterly detached from any semblance of reality and could only be rationalized by stuffing a dozen international “students” in your basement. They remain irrational compared to real Canadian incomes, but everyone knows the delusion is over.
So it’s impressive that the hard landing has been softened from this disastrous setup that Canada was in2. That is what I was most concerned about – not the frantic chaos from the clown show South of the border – and ultimately Canada seems to have slowly started returning to the rational and became a country that makes stuff and innovates and invents, and doesn’t just go on insanely boring conversations about real estate constantly, which was where we were at as a nation.
There is still a lot of correction that needs to happen for the health and wellbeing of the country, and things are going to be pretty flat for a few years.
Various endless immigration advocates would always wave-away the outrageous destruction caused by this ridiculous influx by declaring that it was just illusory, and these people are “temporary”. These are exactly the same people who are now demanding that the government give everyone who came here under one of these temporary visas some sort of permanent status. ↩
This isn’t saying that things are great, and the correction from this economic and social self-destruction will be painful, though it’s uproarious when detractors compare Canada’s real job numbers with the absolutely fictional numbers coming out of the “make numbers up” US Department of Labor. Anyone who really thinks the US is doing well right now betrays they have zero functioning grey matter. And just to be clear, US jobs reports have always been inaccurate, endlessly seeing adjustments downwards as the nature of how they are collected, but under the current communist administration of Chairman “Sharpie-the-Hurricane” Trump they are North Korean level fantasy.
Canada is going to have a period of seemingly poor economic performance and likely even a contraction in GDP. This is necessary if not even good for the long term health of the nation. Per capita GDP and wealth will start moving upwards, which is the metric that actually matters. Fake growth that was fed only through absolutely unsustainable mass migration and a ridiculous real-estate bubble did this country no good. ↩
I prefer lunch to be merely adequate. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to ponder options or suffer the paradox of choice. I don’t want the “what do I feel like?” pondering.
This is the theory of the Norwegian matpakke. While it ultimately just means bagged lunch, the philosophy of the exercise is to purposefully not make too much of it. To make it satisfyingly adequate, and not strive for “delight me” goals we often sabotage ourselves with.
So often I just want a basic, unadorned sandwich. Some Dempster’s 12-grain toothsome bread. A slice of cheese. Some meat. Maybe some mustard.
For this reason I previously purchased a variety of “adequate” toppings to consider as mediocre candidates, and today is the first time I’ve tried corned beef from a can.
It tasted fine. The bread offers up copious amounts of fibre and nutrients, and the corned beef tasted better than I expected.
The part that surprised me was the macros. I honestly thought corned beef would be terrible from a nutrition perspective, but it’s actually a pretty heavy hitter. This sandwich brought 26g of protein from just the corned beef, another 10g from the bread (+6g fibre) and 7g from the cheese.
It’s the not insane saturated fat that surprised me the most. For that 26g of protein the corned beef brought just 8g of saturated fat. That’s still a lot, but it’s a much better ratio than I would have expected for what I assume is garbage-tier products. If I had four large eggs instead that would have been 24g of protein, but a slightly better 6.4g of saturated fat. Better, but I didn’t think corned beef would even be remotely competitive.
Random Extra Note: This video for GENER8ION - STORM by Yung Lean, is an absolute masterpiece. I enjoy the whole video, but this segment is just ridiculous. Every time YouTube recommends it I play it, each time simply amazed. Extraordinary by all of the participants.
100% serious question: Has the entire US equities market turned into a gigantic shell game where everyone is playing chicken? A scam market? Is there any oversight at all? Are there no concern for fundamentals?
I’m not blaming Trump or his clown-car cabinet for this, and they’re merely a symptom of the end-game free for all that has been happening for some time.
Just look at Tesla, a company whose revenue has started declining in an extremely competitive, low-margin industry where they’re a small potato and who are certain to keep fading away, and whose earnings are barely treading water and giving clear indicators they’re going to plummet into the red.
360 P/E. ~$1.3 trillion dollar capitalization.
Those one million robotaxies super-robots (a field in which Tesla has absolutely zero credibility, and at best has demonstrated some hilariously obvious scams) will surely save the day. Elon – Texas-man with a Canadian citizenship – can keep doing his Matryoshka doll routine1 where he keeps bundling his losers with his losers and then hide them in his winners, much like the subprime mortgage debacle. Surely nothing to be concerned about.
Ryan Cohen – Florida-man that holds a Canadian citizenship – CEO of failing retailer GameStop, made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay the other day.
And yes, GameStop is a failing retailer. Revenue is falling quarter after quarter despite all the grand ambitions to turn it around, and the operation is “profitable” only via-
Selling off parts2 and constantly shrinking to only the most profitable components left
A gigantic $9B cash reserve that it acquired by baiting a bunch of meme investors and issuing yet more shares of a failing B&M, along with issuing convertible debt backed by that massive cash reserve from meme-investors.
GameStop has a market cap of less than $11B, while it holds >$9B in cash and cash equivalents. It’s basically a t-bill with a guy who makes memelord statements to the press occasionally. He keeps successfully raising money somehow for this failing brick and mortar, because that’s where the US is at now.
Anyway, CNBC tried to make sense of his crazy bid and the interview was an enormous red flag. Cohen later went on Fox – a disinformation shithole that has absolutely no qualms spouting horseshit 24/7 – and he and the host yucked it up.
There is a certain irony that TD Bank – you know, the Canadian bank, named after the city of Toronto and the Dominion of Canada – is who this guy leaned to as the financier of his ebay bid. What in the world is TD doing getting involved with nonsense like this? If that guy believed the shit he serves up for his followers, he’d engage with a big, strong, capitalist American bank. They’d probably have tears in their eyes telling him how great he is.
Seriously though, it’s pretty tough to call what is happening in the US today “capitalism”. It’s just a bizarre shell/confidence game at this point. This sort of nonsense always happened among penny stocks and spam-email blasts/boiler rooms, but now it is mainstream and normalized.
The massive scam that is the SpaceX IPO will likely be followed by it being folded into Tesla, providing suitable cover as Tesla hits the wall and falls into the red. This stuff is c̶̛̝̤͛̀̅̑̏̽̈́̽̇r̸͙̣̣̲̼͚̗͋͂̂͗̓̎͝a̷̧̲͕̗͈̝̪͒͌̑́͗̅̌̕̚͠z̵̧̯̟̲̼̟̈́̅̒̃̈́͗́͊̒y̸̡̱̳̩̰̖̭̹̽͗́̀͋̅̆̿̚͠, and while it feels like free-money and lots of wealth today, there is an enormous, cataclysmic downside that may just come due. ↩
I wrote about statins on here before, with the caveat that I am a layman with limited knowledge of the space. That piece just details the consensus and the current state of cholesterol/statin knowledge, and the disinformation around it that grifters use to try to eke out some attention space to monetize.
I’m certainly not a Harvard/Oxford trained doctor, like Dr. Nick Norwitz who was featured by The Telegraph today in an article titled “This Harvard doctor believes we’ve been getting cholesterol all wrong”. This popped up on my Apple News+ feed while drinking my morning coffee.
Dr. Norwitz’ social media presence1 seems to be fuelled by cholesterol denialism and anti-statin positions. Clickbait YouTube videos like “I Changed My Mind on Cholesterol Medications (After 7 Years)” and “The Oldest Woman Had ‘High’ Cholesterol — Here’s What That Really Means”2. The comments are filled with exactly the sorts of commentary that you would expect because he is aiming for exactly the audience he wants. Or at least he leaned into his audience and is giving them what they demand.
And of course he’s pitching magic longevity vitamins with his own special discount code.
His whole gimmick is that he had high cholesterol so he tried statins3 but found he’s one of the people who have bad muscle pains – statins aren’t a good option for everyone, and lifestyle changes should be attempted for many – so he did a 180 and decided his new angle was to be yay-cholesterol man, leaning far into a ketogenic, ultra-high cholesterol causing diet, courtesy of saturated fats, while casting FUD about medical science and statins. And now he holds himself as the anecdote that proves the consensus wrong, which isn’t how anything works but whatever.
It’s the attention through contrarianism thing, and this is a common, lucrative tactic on social media. Always monetizing this into some magical powder or vitamin sale.
Here’s the thing, though: He’s 30 years old (and has been doing this through his 20s). Having plaque measurable on a CAC or more invasive CCTA at 30 years old would be devastatingly bad. Like, some sort of genetic condition bad. A you’ll-be-dead-before-50 bad. Arterial plaque is a long-developing condition that takes decades to form (most of the early stages being unmeasurable by current tools, not to mention that when you’re young the body is more capable of clearing the issue), with high cholesterol being an extremely well proven influencing factor for most people.
Even the most sensitive CCTA doesn’t detect plaque until the 40s-50s for most. Having a clean scan is very close to meaningless at younger ages, and similarly statins are seldom prescribed at such ages.
That this guy constantly returns to the fact that his arteries are clear (“My arteries are perfectly clean: why should I subject myself to both the known and lesser-understood side-effects of statins?”, an ironic comment given the well known and lesser-understood effects of high cholesterol, including dementia, erectile dysfunction, CVD, and so on), at least via the normal diagnostic tools, is just silly4.
This is the three-pack-of-cigarettes a day guy telling you that they don’t currently have measurable lung cancer, ergo smoking is safe. All the while the area under the curve builds.
His position on insulin resistance via high carb diets is the overwhelming scientific consensus5, just as it is true that arterial plaque is multi-factorial with a lot of influences including inflammation and genetics, and that LMHR are a thing that are worth study. Just as it’s true that LDL is a hugely imperfect measure and ApoB is a better measure that is less commonly used because the test is more expensive, and that statins are not the best choice for everyone.
But Dr. Norwitz purposefully leans into his audience to pad his pockets, and that’s just morally reprehensible. He does the contrarian act for his own enrichment, while trying to ride the fence and hedge just enough to avoid censure from medical peers.
Gross stuff. And this is precisely the sort of guy who’ll be posting a “Why I was wrong about being wrong about” video in ten years once the consequences of his terrible advice – if he actually follows it – comes due.
Peter Attia’s podcast returned to airing new episodes rather unceremonially after the whole Epstein thing. I wrote about my feelings on Attia’s rather pathetic messages to Epstein – he was clearly being a slovenly bootlicker trying to get in the good graces of the ultrarich by shamelessly pandering – and while it’s pretty gross, it doesn’t change my opinion that Attia is a great science communicator.
A recent episode of his – Thinking scientifically: why it’s hard, why it matters, and a practical toolkit – is fantastic. A+ episode from start to end.
I already abide by many of the recommendations made in the podcast. For instance, I’m fully engaged to incorporate new knowledge on cholesterol and statins, but people like Norwitz have so many grifter red flags and logical fallacy tells that it just demolishes any influence they have on my knowledge.
Google categorizes him as an “internet personality”, which is interesting.
If Google reduces your many impressive degrees down to “internet personality”, that’s probably a sign that you’re a grifter. ↩
In the report on an 116-year-old woman, in one of many tests her total cholesterol and LDL was slightly above the recommended range at the moment they tested her. Dr. Norwitz added a conspiratorial note like this was suppressed information – he does this conspiratorial “I’m revealing the information they’re hiding from you!” nonsense in many of his videos – that only his deep investigative work revealed…by looking at test results they included as a figure with the study. LOL. Gottem!
And the funny thing is that her LDL was 122 mg/dL, which is below even what is considered “borderline elevated”, which is why he scare-quoted “high” in his title, because he knew he was misleading his rubes. And her HDL was excellent, from which her “total cholesterol” was slightly above normal, but for a good reason. Her VLDL and triglyceries were fantastic. This woman had what most would consider very good bloodwork.
The best part of all? The woman’s diet was described by researchers as a “Mediterranean diet - made up of lots of vegetables, fruits, legumes and olive oil”. This is who a keto guy is using to reveal the conspiracy to his followers. ↩
Which is a bit odd as cholesterol often isn’t even checked, much less controlled, in one’s 20s, unless there is some familial issue demanding it like a parent that died of CVD at 40 or something. Seems like a convenient “choosing my grifter niche?” decision point. ↩
He frequently returns to the claim that he’s a medical marvel that defies all the textbooks. At one point he claims that his heart should be “clogged up” given his cholesterol levels. In another that he should be “dead”. Again, this guy is 30 years old. Zero medical textbooks predict what this guy keeps claiming they do, and he knows it. But they do predict what he’ll probably be like at 50, so I guess wait and see? And even then that would be evidence of nothing as some small subset of people really are somehow less susceptible to cholesterol-linked plaque, so he could go either way as a single case, though odds lean one way quite heavily.
He does another sleight of hand when he refers to “cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of mortality”, implying that this outcome disproves the consensus as a failure, providing an opening for fanciful contrarianism. Quite aside from the fact that circulatory system deaths are down dramatically in just about every nation per capita (Canada has dropped CVD deaths by over 75% over the past several decades), the more progress is made by medical science the longer people live. The longer people live the more the old causes of death are waiting for their opportunity to shine. People are still going to die of something.
This is similar to rates of some cancers and dementia “rising”, which social media grifters use to fear-monger about whatever current thing they’re targeting (vaccines, 5G, seed oils, etc). Only these are largely a result of a lot more people living long enough that they can suffer such results. ↩
The article twice points to a “growing number of experts” in a rather comical fashion. The first are the statin nay-sayers, which sure whatever you can find contrarians for quite literally anything, and the truth is that many people can control their cholesterol through simple diet choices. But the second, “Norwitz has joined the growing number of experts who believe that a high-carb Western diet leads to insulin resistance”, reads like a joke. It is an overwhelming consensus that a high-carb diet is a problem, particlarly one filled with simple carbs that are unfortunately common in our menus, which is why the prevailing advice is for a well-rounded, balanced diet with lots of proteins and healthy fats, and ideally complex carbs.
Pretending that the only alternative to a bad diet is another bad diet is misleading framing, but this fake dichotomy is a go to among the grifter crowd. ↩
During some nice spring weather on the weekend I decided to take an early morning walk to one of the nicer grocery stores in the area. I needed to grab a bag of lemons for “greek food night” in the household, enjoy taking walks, and it helps achieve daily activity targets.
I have several upscale grocery stores1 within a short walk, and this location is on the wrong corner of an intersection so it usually isn’t my chosen option, but it was my random target that day so off I went.
This grocery store has a thing they do where loads of stuff has better “member pricing” alongside regular pricing, inducing you to leverage their free rewards program. I’ve long been a member – why would I pay $5.99 for the lemons if I can pay $3.99 just by showing a barcode, and it collects points towards rewards – but often the only thing I carry with me is my phone.
I’m not carrying physical cards, keytags, or any other nonsense just to display a barcode. My phone should be sufficient. It isn’t the 1980s.
I re-installed their app to have it at the ready when a barcode was necessary. I remembered having poor experiences with this app before2, but the industry has progressed a lot and there are loads of great frameworks for creating speedy apps even when your development competency and stack is primarily web tech, with tools like Claude Code to accelerate the effort.
And I mean the version number jumped from the 7.1.69 that I last tried all the way up to 800.0.113, so surely amazing progress has been made. That’s like, 114x better of an app.
Alas, the app is still incredibly bad. It’s an extremely slow webpage wrapped into an app3, decorated with loads of functional failures. And the “display a barcode” functionality is currently broken, so the one thing I was forced to install this app for wasn’t even achieved!
And it currently rocks a 1.3 on the AppStore, 1.5 on Google Play. Read the reviews and you realize those scores are generous, and they’re lucky 0 wasn’t an option that people could pick. This situation has gone on for years.
Bizarre.
This is a ~$1.5B revenue company, and its majority owner is a $7B+ company. Not huge, but big enough that this should be embarrassing.
And who knows. Maybe it’s a single guy responsible for the entire tech stack in addition to stocking the fruits and vegetables section. Maybe they’re working under outrageous requirements. Maybe they’ve had a stuttering rewrite underway for years4. Maybe they have layers of middle-managers all arguing over the colour of the shed, or have a busted corporate culture where everything stratifies as change draws blame.
I have no idea who is to blame here and have no insight into how they have failed so spectacularly, but good god, fix your situation.
And this is where I’m going to say that tools like AI coding assistants can make the largest impact. Where it can be a game changer for low-hanging fruit like this. It is an equalizer that allows small or dubious-competency teams to compete with the bigs and deliver polished, top-tier apps for relatively simple domains like this.
There is no reason why their app should be so bad in 2026. None.
Point Claude Code at your website and iterate over creating the framework for a fresh new React Native or other cross-target option app. Hook it into your APIs. Boom, a one-week project for a single person and you’ve got a foundation that can generate full desktop web apps, mobile web apps, SPAs, and even fully native mobile experiences.
There are a lot of places where the AI coding tools fail to move the meter on the progress or capabilities of a team, but it was absolutely made for this, and I say this with growing experience demonstrating exactly this pattern.
Wrapping a webpage in WebView was always stupid. Doing it in 2026 is just incompetence.
I mention upscale in that they’re more enjoyable to visit in a “touristy” sense: enjoying the ambiance, checking out the weird cheeses and prepared foods, etc. I have no compunction shopping at discount grocers as well (NoFrills, Food Basics, Walmart, etc), and yes I’m a man that grocery shops and I love it and absolutely enjoy doing so. ↩
Their release notes solicit user feedback, so I constructively emailed them feedback in December of 2024. Their app is not only still as bad, it might actually be worse. ↩
Like literally the webpage in a WebView5, now made worse because things like the password manager no longer integrate properly and various web affordances are no longer available. This isn’t even ostensibly allowed by appstore rules, but loads of apps ply this worthless pattern. ↩
I link to that quarter-century old JoS piece for historical record. He was absolutely right at the time, given the tooling, libraries and constraints of the era. Today a total rewrite is often the best path for many projects that are languishing under the weight of obsolete code, frameworks, libraries and technologies, and progress we’ve made in tooling has completely upended the calculation. ↩
Why does their site even advertise the platform apps? Just tell the user that you have a mobile-capable website and call it a day, and skip the fake-app farce. ↩
Caught this article from Axios. Axios, you should know, is yet another American billionaire family propaganda rag, where the Cox family serves up slop for the piggies (that’s how they view the reader).
Several of the quotes are outright hilarious nonsense.
One core dispute: Washington wants to prevent China from using Mexico or Canada as a back door into the North American market — a particular flashpoint for Canada, which recently struck a limited tariff truce with Beijing.
Canada made an agreement with China to sell them our canola1 in return for a tiny number of Chinese cars to be sold in Canada2, to Canadians. You know, the very Chinese cars that are massively popular in Mexico already. In no universe is Canada trying to be a “backdoor” for Chinese goods – whereas Mexico long has, where those goods don’t just go directly to the US – and saying this is a “flashpoint” for Canada is amazing propaganda targeting the ignorant.
Various members of Trump’s administration have warned that Canadians who buy these cars won’t be able to drive them into the US, and the response of Canadians has been a collective yawn.
Saying this is a “flashpoint” is propaganda nonsense. Canada has always been onboard with source of origin tracking and declarations, and has never tried to “backdoor” Chinese goods to the other CUSMA partners.
In reality, they simply want Canada subjugated and reliant upon the US in all ways, and if we’re going off and making our own trade deals, well that works against the goal. In this case they are trying to doublespeak backdoor – which would mean that we secretly buy Chinese stuff, slap a maple leaf on it and ship it to the US under CUSMA – into meaning Canada simply trading with other parties.
“We have issues with Mexico we’re still working through, but Mexico intends on coming to an agreement with us,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rick Switzer said last week at an event organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mexico is literally everything Trump complained about. They long funnelled massive amounts of Chinese goods into NAFTA cum CUSMA, relabelling and hiding the origin. They entirely rely upon the US economy, and the US sells very little to Mexico, and instead its economy exists by undercutting US labour.
The US has 4x the trade deficit with Mexico than Canada, and even that is massively misleading because the bulk of exports the US sends to Mexico are unfinished parts that will end up coming back for the US domestic market.
The only reason the US has a trade deficit with Canada is unprocessed oil that the US imports and sends to the gulf coast refineries to then sell at a massive markup, largely internationally. If you don’t include oil which the US literally makes billions from, the US has (had?) a trade surplus with Canada.
Of course Mexico will play along with the US’ cabal. It is an infinitely more motivated supplicant in that negotiation. When the US is so pathetically desperate for Canada to please bend that they have to prop up Mexico as the good guys…lol. And I’m not blaming Mexico, and they should look out for their own country and treat Mexico as #1, but it’s telling that the US keeps trying to portray Canada as bad relative to Mexico, betraying how poor of a negotiating situation they are in.
“The grown-ups are in the room talking because there’s a grown-up in leadership there. And I would argue there’s not a grown-up in Canada in charge,” Switzer said, referring to Mark Carney, a widely respected former central banker who became the nation’s prime minister last year.
Parody. The US is being run by a clown show of foolish idiots who think they get to throw barbs like this consequence free. Quotes like the above are just an astonishing inability to read the room. Having that idiocracy, with an administration full of unbelievable levels of incompetence and corruption, talk about the “grown-ups in the room” is…well, it’s simply amazing stuff.
They really thought could force Canada to do whatever they wanted. They don’t begin to understand our resolve on this as we pepper-spray these vile people in the face repeatedly in return for their hubris of thinking they just get to have their way.
There will be zero progress on trade until these foolish simps shut their idiot mouths and stop thinking they are some sort of mafia operation that gets to push people around. This article was clearly issued to Axios, desperately trying to coerce Canada to somehow give them a “win” for their failing president. Pathetic.
Want a trade agreement? It’s called CUSMA and was renegotiated from NAFTA by this very same president, and currently the US is in absolute violation of a number of terms of it (steel, aluminum, vehicles and parts, softwood, among others).
When they can’t abide by the very trade agreement they already signed – the very one Trump declared the “best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA” – signing additional agreements with that same group would be the definition of insanity.
Canada had previously imposed a 100% Chinese EV tariff in lockstep with the US to protect what we saw as North America’s automakers (Mexico, you’ll note, never did), to which China retaliated by tariffing Canadian canola. Then Trump declared that actually it’s US auto companies and he should destroy Canada’s integration in the CUSMA3 auto industry – completely in defiance of the very trade agreement this same dipshit signed just a few years earlier (but also, please sign new trade agreements!) – so…get wrecked boyees. We’re willing to see Ford, GM and Chrysler destroyed if they are willing to go along with this. ↩
There’s a social media guy named “Mario of the North” who long lambasted the government for the tariffs on Chinese EVs and the subsequent canola retaliation. He complained that the government was choosing Ontario autoworkers over Western farmers. Then, after the government came to a truce with China, he did an instant 180 and now Chinese spy cars are going to steal all of our secrets and this is insane, etc. He, like so many others in the space, is just a partisan noisemaker, and these people are an absolute cancer on democracies.
When someone demonstrates that they don’t have values they have teams, their rhetoric is betrayed to be worthless noise. ↩
Canada has had a vibrant auto manufacturing industry for about as long as the US has. Indeed, NAFTA replaced the Autopact, and then CUSMA replaced NAFTA, but the basis of all was that Canada would proportionally be involved in manufacturing, or “American” automakers will be shut out of Canada. ↩