Dennis Forbes - Microblog

Forest Fires

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The Forest Fires Return

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 mask[^stockpile] 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 territory[^blame] 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. Years and years of cutting of forest fire budgets -- after multiple years of devastating fires, somehow the province actually cut the budget even more, which is insanity -- and removing hundreds of fire lookout stations, and we're in the situation we now enjoy. The climate is changing, and reducing our ability to respond made a bad problem into a disaster.

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"[^michigan], and the antagonism is growing. There is the very possible scenario that agitators are intentionally setting fires[^agitators], 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. Every impacted party deserves answers on what is going to be done to prevent this in the future.

We need some sort of large-scale strategy to combat this, and cannot simply accept this as a normal. Long range drone surveillance networks with hundreds to thousands of drones constantly scanning for fires, for instance, responding before the situation becomes uncontrollable. Massively expanding resources at the ready to deal with the fires. Cutting more fire breaks. And so on. There has to be a way out of this outside of having Superman turn back time.

[^stockpile]: 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.

[^blame]: 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.

[^agitators]: Traditionally we'd look to Russia[^bots] 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

[^bots]: 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.

[^michigan]: 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 people[^conservatives]. 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.

[^conservatives]: 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.

Synchronicity

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:00:00 GMT

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On A First Name Basis

One of my sons recently started consuming business communications books: The 48 Laws of Power[^controversial], 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 dozen rather 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 one[^leadership], 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.

Synchronicity

Carl Jung (1875-1961), the father of Jungian psychology[^projection], 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 simulation[^paranoid]. 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?

LibJXL and Fable

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 memory[^firefox], 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.

On Bridges

The Gordie Howe bridge debacle is apparently coming to a close. The billionaire did manage to get its opening delayed with some corrupt bribes -- the US runs on corruption and bribery now, and it is no longer deniable -- but it was becoming politically untenable to keep it closed. Political opponents[^democracy] were starting to make hay of it and gaining ground.

"Oh but I heard that the Art of the Deal rapist got a much better deal!"

LOL, no. I mean, yes that is what the American public is told -- do Americans realize that US diplomatic staff are now telling foreign leaders and staff to just ignore the railings of the demented diddler, and that his railings are just for the domestic audience? -- but the new arrangement is that Bridge Inc. will carry a loan, which is the money that Canada paid to build the bridge, and that Bridge Inc. needs to collect tolls, pay the loan and upkeep and staffing, and then the tiny scrapings of "profit" on the top will be split 50/50. Once the loan is fully repaid the "profits" will obviously be much larger, but Canada will get every penny back, as every bit of logic and business sense demands.

[^controversial]: 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.

[^projection]: 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.

[^firefox]: 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.

[^democracy]: Though the idea that there are political opponents in the US is a concept that might be short-lived. The dirty diddler and his crew of Epstein garbage misfits are going to do anything to avoid accountability, and it was utter insanity to give this trash power again. Things are going to get very ugly, in short order

[^paranoid]: Though there is a lot of overlap with mental illness. Paranoid delusions / schizophrenia also imagine these sorts of overlaps.

[^leadership]: It is better still in the leadership realm, where it encourages praise, discourages criticism, own your mistakes, and presents optimal ways of getting alignment.

Canada Day 2026

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:00:00 GMT

🇨🇦 Happy Canada Day 🇨🇦

World Cup Feedback

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 spend[^toronto]. 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 country[^patronize]. I mean this in the kindest way, but I positively do not care what tourists think about Canada or Canadians[^tourists]. 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.

USMCA

Absolutely no one expected the Trump crime spree to reaffirm USMCA at the checkpoint[^countdown], 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 rhetoric[^china].

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.

On Capitalism

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%[^NATO].

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 pensions[^har], 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 cartel[^rules]. 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 capitalism[^pe]. 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.

[^tourists]: 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.

[^toronto]: 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.

[^har]: 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.

[^countdown]: Which puts it on a 10-year expiry clock, with yearly "are you sure?" checkpoints.

[^china]: 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.

[^rules]: 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 exuberance[^aapl] 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](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/vance-watergate-news-cycle-comments/687742/), 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.

[^aapl]: 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!".

[^patronize]: 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?

[^NATO]: 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.

[^pe]: 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.

Problems with macOS 27 beta 2

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:55:00 GMT

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.

iOS Shortcuts and Obsidian - Using AI to bridge the gap

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:09:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

Vaults Aplenty

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.

Propagating Data

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 readings[^perms] 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.

Using AI To Complete the Bridge

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 this^pdf.

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.

Getting To The Point

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 changers[^admin], 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.

[^perms]: There are some permission settings you have to set for this to function. Apple Health is very restrictive of bulk exporting data.

[^admin]: 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.

Misogynists and Incels

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:06:00 GMT

A Tragedy in Montreal

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 whataboutism[^whataboutism] 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 purpose[^church], 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.

The Misogyny Response

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 female[^weird]. 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-

the killer rushed behind a beam just a dozen feet away from two officers.
the killer shot and mortally wounded her partner, she ducked behind another beam.
the killer was reloading or dealing with a jam of some sorts for a brief moment, it seems, while the shot officer struggles to drag himself away.
a civilian suddenly pops up beside the female officer.
the female officer spins towards the civilian, and rightly so because only two seconds later the gunman appears in exactly the same spot.
the civilian falls to the ground.

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]: 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.

[^church]: 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.

[^weird]: 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.

Filler Is Dead / On Evolution

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:05:00 GMT

Random Threefer of thoughts that came to mind this morning.

Old Patterns No Longer Work

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 faltering[^faltering], or why specific well-worn tomes and authors might fade in and out of favour[^groups], 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+ pages[^target]. 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 that[^isit], but if you give readers the choice between mostly filler and little filler, they will often choose the latter.

YouTube And The New Ask Button

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?

On "We Evolved Doing/Alongside X"

Follow any nutrition or lifestyle discussion, and invariably you'll come across those people who will declare that things we did in the past[^arguable] 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 40[^mortality], 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 still[^chicken].

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.

On Obnoxiously Loud Children

Periodically I see online arguments concerning eternally screaming, screeching kids. Invariably it breaks down into the "kids will be kids! Stop being a Karen[^Karen]!" 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.

[^faltering]: Nihilism, defeatism, GLP-1s, changing interests, etc

[^groups]: 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

[^arguable]: 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

[^target]: 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*"

[^chicken]: 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

[^isit]: 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?

[^Karen]: 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

[^mortality]: 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

On AI Criticism

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:05:00 GMT

AI Slop Sucks, But The Idealized Alternative Is Not Honest

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 code[^scotsman].

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.

This Isn't A Defence of AI

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.

On The Explosion In Fantasy Data Centres

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 on[^hq2]. 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.

[^scotsman]: 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

[^hq2]: 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 beggar[^nfl] as a fool

[^nfl]: I mean, if Bezos was bad with that HQ2 trash, sports leagues like the NFL[^olympics] 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

[^olympics]: 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

Bill C-22

Dennis Forbes — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:26:00 GMT

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 lost[^geist] -- 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 exploited[^privacy].

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.

[^geist]: 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

[^privacy]: 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

Memory Prices are Insane

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:49:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

Computer Component Prices

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.

Chairman Trump in China

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.

When Citizenship Means Nothing

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.

Alberta and their Separation Cause

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.

Statin Risks, Part Twelve

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:22:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

Happy Mother's Day!

Statins and Wilfred Brimley

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 statins[^low], those in the statin group saw their HbA1c increase by an average of 0.08%[^additive] 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!

The Things You Don't Know

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 whatsoever[^peptide] (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 consequences[^calcium] 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.

[^peptide]: 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.

[^low]: Low-intensity statin usage saw far less of an effect on insulin resistance

[^additive]: Additive, as HbA1c is already measured in percentages

[^calcium]: 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 E[^mega], 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

[^mega]: 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

Canada's Economy

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:15:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

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 migration[^migration]. 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 in[^jobs]. 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.

[^migration]: 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.

[^jobs]: 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.

Matpakke / Corned Beef

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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.

That Ryan Cohen Guy

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:45:00 GMT

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 routine[^spacex] 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 parts[^socialism] 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.

[^socialism]: Recall when he decried "High taxes, Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Wokeness and DEI included at no additional cost if you buy today," when looking to offload his Canadian and French operations. Amazing nonsense for a shrinking B&M that he has failed to save in any measurable way, so instead it's just serving up pablum for dipshits. That statement alone should have been enough for TD to have nothing to do with this guy and his shell game.

[^spacex]: 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.

Harvard Doctor and Cholesterol / Peter Attia and Science

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:19:00 GMT

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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 presence[^google] 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"[^hilarious]. 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 statins[^weird] 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 silly[^dead].

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 consensus[^contrarian], 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

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]: 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.

[^hilarious]: 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.

[^dead]: 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.

[^contrarian]: 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.

[^weird]: 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.

On Terrible Mobile Apps

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:18:00 GMT

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 stores[^elitism] 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 before[^guest], 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 app[^why], 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 years[^rewrite]. 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.

On AI

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.

[^why]: Like literally the webpage in a WebView[^apps], 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.

[^guest]: 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.

[^apps]: 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.

[^rewrite]: 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.

[^elitism]: 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.

Hilarious American Media

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:18:00 GMT

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 canola[^canola] in return for a tiny number of Chinese cars to be sold in Canada[^mario], 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.

[^canola]: 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 CUSMA[^autopact] 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.

[^mario]: 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.

[^autopact]: 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.

Listening to the Voices in my Head

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:54:00 GMT

This is one of those LinkedIn-style tosser posts where I observe something super obvious to everyone.

Whenever I do things like exercise, I usually fill the air with content[^air].

Podcasts, music, news, programs.

I always saw it as maximizing the time by getting steps or active calories in simultaneous with listening to the latest episodes or tracks.

Recently I've been deeply entrenched in a project and some morning laps around the track saw me instead opt for nothing. I left the earbuds behind because I really needed to think through some implementation issues.

And...wow. It's pretty weird actually being captive to your own thoughts and having no option but to think deeply about things. It was hugely beneficial and in half an hour I made some decisions that I had stewed over for some time. It provided enormous clarity on some projects.

I lost sight of actually thinking somewhere along my journey. The novelty of having content everywhere, effortlessly, became second nature and I would thoughtlessly fill the air with something, anything, at virtually all times.

The last time I used to really have this sort of purposeful quiet time was when I commuted a distance and would drive purposefully in silence. To a lesser extent I also enjoyed it when I would cut the yard on a multi-acre property, back when we made the mistake of moving out to the countryside (which isn't really awesome when you have multiple young children). Regardless, the lawn tractor was loud so I'd wear ear protection and would just contemplate during the entire cut. It was almost meditative.

Regardless, I've rediscovered this, and I am going to strive to purposefully ensure that I actually think about things more during the day.

Did I just invent thinking about things? Maybe!

[^air]: Meaning the air between my earbuds and my eardrums, as I'm not a selfish sociopath that forces whatever I'm listening to on unwanted victims. Well...aside from family members occasionally.

The Zero-Sum Gambit / Kitchens

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:33:00 GMT

On Kitchens

One house want I've developed over the years is a kitchen area that can be closed off from the rest of the house. With actual doors of some sort. Ideally discrete doors like pocket doors that are out of sight most of the time, but are invaluable when needed. Or some solid-core french doors with double-glazed windows to let light pass through (and avoid opening the door into someone carrying a big plate full of spagoolis), but still block most noise and odours.

Kitchens are loud. Not just loud appliances, but the process of cooking is usually a very noisy affair of smashing pots and banging cutlery and rattling equipment. As someone who frequently cooks, I would prefer to impose less of an audio assault on everyone else in the house when I do.

Kitchens are also smelly, which sometimes is good but often isn't. Especially when you have children old enough that they're often making their own creations at random hours, so at 3 in the morning the entire house suddenly smells like nuggets.

Kitchens have unique ventilation needs. Not just smells, but literal pollution. Who wants this escaping through the rest of their living area?

So what is with the bizarre tendency of every home to open-plan the kitchen? In my area literally every home is like this, at every price point. Six million dollar mansions have a centrally located kitchen blended into the primary living rooms. In a way that you can't even retrofit in any reasonable way to sequester the kitchen area.

Much older homes had an isolated kitchen if there was enough space to facilitate it, but invariably someone since has knocked out a bunch of walls in the pursuit of "sightlines".

Is this some sort of weird effect of years of cooking shows, and everyone wanting to showcase being a chef as they cook a pot of spaghetti? I know it became the social norm to base social events around the kitchen.

This is a bad trend. Seal off the kitchen. Yes, your stove and fridge are very impressive, but it doesn't justify turning a practical, functional room into a show room.

Does a custom home really have to be built just for this simple need? Does a home need a show kitchen and a "staff" kitchen to satisfy this want? Apparently these are called "scullery" or "spice" kitchens, and even that is remarkably hard to find regardless of price point.

Open concept in general is simply bad, and it's a plan that presumes minimal human activity. It was a silly fad that everyone just followed the leader on.

On Dairy

Howard "Epstein Island" Nutlick, that dirty greaseball scumbag, has been trash-talking Canada for well over a year now[^suck], mirroring his boss, who also happens to be a frequent Epstein associate.

For instance dairy. They're always talking about dairy.

For my American readers force-fed an endless torrent of lies and propaganda from your plutocrat-owned media, here's the deal: Canada has something called supply management covering a tiny percentage of the economy. This means that dairy (along with a couple of other industries: eggs, chicken and turkeys) are "right-sized" for Canada's need by the government through industry trade boards. If you want to produce milk in volume you have to buy a slot of the quota from one of the milk boards, ensuring that there isn't a glut of overproduction.

This means that Canada's dairy industry generates milk production approximately equal to Canada's consumption. It is a market stabilizing technique both to ensure food security, and to make for a viable, consistent industry that isn't a race to the bottom of horribly-treated, steroid-pumped animals. It also ensures farmers aren't constantly killing themselves, as they do in outrageous numbers in the US, and the government isn't constantly doling out massive subsidies (again, as they do in the US, where the agricultural industry is backstopped by the US government to such a degree that it's basically Soviet Russia).

It has benefits and detriments, and is often debated among Canadians if this should be a protected market, but generally the consensus is yes. It arguably makes our dairy more expensive, but it's a robust, healthy, well-managed industry.

It has been this way for many, many decades.

So when we sign trade deals, we exclude dairy beyond some token amount in both directions: We won't allow you to flood us with your dead-farmer generating, massively subsidized, anabolic-laced dairy, but on the flip side, we also don't represent a competitive threat to your industry.

Every single trade deal Canada has signed has started with this basic reality. NAFTA, USMCA, CETA: We entered every one of them with everyone at the table knowing we were largely excluding dairy in both directions[^issues], and it was negotiated on that basis.

This was never, ever a surprise for anyone. When Trump misinforms his cult about Canada's tariffs on dairy above the trade quota (the TRQ), he somehow fails to mention that exactly the same tariff applies in reverse!

But let's be clear: If Canada was somehow coerced into removing supply management on dairy, we would destroy America's dairy farmers. Utterly annihilate your entire industry. Obliterate it.

We have loads of land and perfect conditions to be an unstoppable dairy super power. We have lower input costs across the board.

If you want a teaser for this, look at New Zealand, a tiny country that absolutely curb-stomps America's dairy industry. Do you really want that, Americans? Be careful what you wish for.

Of course not. And even Epstein-buddy Nutlick knows this. America's demand isn't that we abolish supply management, but that we keep it, but also let America's farmer-crushing outputs flood the country.

That isn't going to happen. It just isn't.

On Zero-Sum Thinking

On the eve of my honeymoon a couple of decades ago, my manager called me into his office and asked if I could cancel/defer it.

We had absolutely nothing pressing going on in the office. No major project deadlines coming up. No big new clients to wow.

He just saw a moment where a bit of suffering could be applied, and if suffering was applied, somehow the organization would benefit. That he could tell others how good of a manager he was because he forced such a disruption on an underling.

I said no that isn't going to happen, he understood that I could walk if he really wanted to press this, so life went on.

He is not alone in this incredibly destructive thinking, and many people operate with this busted logic that every negative has an offsetting positive. I've worked in offices where no one cared at all if people were working or achieving, but if they worked overtime, well then that's a big win, right? Get people to come in on the weekends, even if absolutely nothing of value was being produced, and wow what a super achievement[^LinkedIn]!

Busted zero-sum thinking.

JD Vance recently celebrated that America's "allies" were hurting more than the US was on fuel disruptions. This was a win to him and something to celebrate. Similarly, Trump sees groups like the European Union as an "attack" on the United States if the group somehow benefits the members. To a zero-sum thinker, if they benefit, well then you must suffer.

This is the brain-dead thinking of someone who sees the world as zero-sum: That any gain anyone else makes must be at a cost to you, and if you can cost others, well somehow that benefits you. That there is no way both parties can benefit.

You see the same thing in the way the US approaches trade negotiations under this administration. Their primary goal is making partners hurt in some way, and to celebrate every pain they cause as a win. Pathetically backwards, self-destructive, nonsensical thinking.

As an aside, the toady Trump enlisted to make some sort of trade deal with Canada, Jamieson Greer, has been plying every manner of "tough guy" rhetoric, and it's simply pathetic at this point. You don't have the cards, fool. You're played out.

But his latest complaint is the most uproarious of all. After over a year of American attacks on Canada (in capricious trade restrictions, arbitrary tariffs, and endless insults and belittling from the Epstein circle of pedos -- starting with the "fentanyl" nonsense -- by that clown show of mediocrity), this foolish man complained about Canada's "globalization". The US could have worked with Canada on a North American strategy that would empower the continent. Instead it started by assaulting and attacking Canada, thinking every harm it caused -- which it did explicitly and with great gloating and celebration by Trump -- was some win for the US.

Now it's bitching and gnashing that it turns out we have other markets to turn to.

Get bent.

[^issues]: Like every single trade agreement on the planet, occasionally there are disputes. In the rare case where Canada's dairy farmers had excess production, often it is made into milk-based products and powders that occasionally other trading partners feel shouldn't be exported in volume. That is for trade panels to deal with

[^LinkedIn]: You see this nonsense on LinkedIn where the startup industry tries to announce their suffering to the greatest extent possible, trying to cargo-cult their personal sacrifice into some illusion of achievement. Wow you work 168 hours a week and dedicate your existence to your job...which is meaningless if not mock-worthy if the results don't correlate

[^suck]: One of his recent claims is that Canada "sucks", in that it somehow is a leech off of the US economy. Which is comedic, economically-illiterate nonsense. The US has made untold riches processing and selling Canada's resources, and indeed the only reason for the purported trade "deficit" the US has with Canada is enormous amounts of Canadian oil that goes to gulf coast refineries to then be sold internationally. The US is "sucking" enormous profits out of Canada, and this is absolutely something that needs to be remediated. It was utter folly that American energy companies were allowed to rape Canada like this. For that smooth-brained wig-salesman huckster creep to use that to denigrate Canada is cosmic delusion

Random Hits

Dennis Forbes — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:04:00 GMT

Apple's Podcasts App

This thing is a storage trojan horse. It downloads every episode of every show you subscribe to by default, on every one of your Apple devices. Is this a rational norm? The overwhelming bulk of the time I have 1Gbps+ high speed data available, and it can cache a whole two hour episode in memory in less than two seconds. For the infrequent case where I might be so data deprived it can't handle a simple audio program -- say on a flight -- I can plan in advance and download individual episodes, much like Netflix's download facility for such cases.

Maybe it's that podcasts are an "extra" for me, and are not an obligation. I subscribe to podcasts I like to have easier access to them in an interface that really wants to push their recommended bunk otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to dutifully listen to every single episode like a todo list. Instead, I listen to a episodes here and there, depending on if the topic and description draw me in.

So the cache "hit" rate of the app default downloading everything is already low single digits, but once you add that it does it across my Apple devices it falls below 1%.

This doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, but for people who use this app you're eventually going to find that you have 200GB of podcasts clogging up your drive. And while I assume it has some logic for pruning...eventually...it's a bit like SQL Server in that it seems to assume it has the run of the place except in total exhaustion of storage, which is a recipe for trouble when there are multiple apps all plying the same pattern.

Eventually you'll find that it's doing this, unasked, and disable downloading episodes and purge what you have locally. You need to make sure to disable it on every single Apple device you own, as it doesn't sync this behaviour and will just default every new device to download 100s of GBs of patter.

Problem solved, right? I learned my lesson and disabled it, and the space was freed up. Yet I just did a periodic disk usage check on my primary Mac[^ncdu] to find it again consuming 100GB+ deep within the user's Library subfolder structure. This time it was the "Sync library" function. Downloads had long been disabled on every device, and I purged said storage everywhere, but still there's some mysterious sync floating around.

Make Consumers Choose Between Too Little And Too Big

I'm a big fan of Claude Code, and lean on it heavily. It's a fantastic work partner and tool in the toolbelt.

With Claude Pro you're going to always find your quota exhausted, waiting for session timers to expire and logging extra usage charges: It's too little usage for the average developer, and simple activities will leave you maxed out. So like many I upgraded to Claude Max.

Now I have to seriously work to exhaust the usage (to "get my money's worth"), or to get anywhere close. I understand lots of other people have no problem saturating it, but I like to audit its creations, to understand its output, and to be careful in my trust in its choices. I've "caught" it making a number of egregious, critical mistakes over projects, and am constantly correcting the direction back to optimal. That isn't a criticism, and it's exactly what I do when working with other developers as well. But it is a natural rate limiter, and I'm not just typing prompt after prompt.

I really feel like Anthropic monitored developers and set subscription levels such that Pro would be below what the average developer needs, and the next step is a big jump up in capacity and price.

Which would be a trick they learned from Apple (to loop back to Apple and storage sizes). Apple long did this scheme where if the optimal amount of storage on a device was 16GB, they'd offer an 8GB option and a 32GB option. When the norm moved to 32GB, they'd offer 16GB and 64GB. For generations of devices they did this marketing pattern where you had to either underbuy and regret it (and then apps like the podcasts entrant would do their best to clog up the overpriced storage you did get), or overbuy for extra you likely wouldn't need. It's a good tactic for revenue maximization.

Provincial Politics

Since I touched on politics in other areas, I will spend a moment criticizing the politics in my own province, Ontario.

Ontarians don't really pay much attention to provincial politics generally, and it's treated as almost an afterthought. So standards are incredibly low and incredibly weak performances and platforms go with almost no question or attention.

We have political parties spending over a billion taxpayer dollars to cancel needed and underway natural gas power generation station projects purely to try to buy two ridings that looked flippable on the eve of an election.

And then we have the current Ontario government, whose agenda seems to be overwhelmingly alcohol and gambling based. Oh, they also paid hundreds of millions of dollars -- some say over a billion -- to sell alcohol in more locations slightly earlier, in a province with $500B in debt and no end in sight to deficit spending.

At this point I'm actually seriously concerned that my province is full of alcoholic degenerate gamblers, because the government's agenda constantly returns to more places to buy and drink alcohol[^generations], and more ways for degenerates to blow everything up with gambling. It's utterly bizarre.

The gambling problem is hardly limited to Ontario, though. It is perverse how almost all media is sponsored by degenerate gambling ads[^ads] now, which is an extremely bad, dystopian sign.

And to be clear, provincial governments have the enormously important portfolios of healthcare and education, given which you'd think every moment would be improvements and questions about those imperfect systems.

Best we can do is now you can chug keggers in the park while online sports betting. Deal?

[^ncdu]: Using the excellent NCDU

[^generations]: Which is pissing in the wind, as younger generations have moved away from alcohol, and good for them

[^ads]: I love how gambling ads always highlight rapid payouts, as if getting those loads of winnings out were the real problem users were having

Venezuela was a Coup Assisted by the US

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:27:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

This entry is apropos of nothing[^4X], but was inspired by commentary regarding the current insanity with Iran[^Iran]. I keep seeing people saying "they thought this would be like Venezuela: drop a few bombs and take over the country".

That isn't what happened in Venezuela.

Venezuela was a coup, carried out with the US as the tip of the spear in cooperation with participants in the Venezuelan government and military[^russia]. The moment CH-47s were filmed flying over predictable travel paths this was the only possible explanation.

Maduro was garbage[^VeneTrump], and clearly some insiders in the Venezuela government, likely including the entire military chain of command, wanted him gone. So they all stood down and left him and his Cuban guards to be removed by a foreign element where they could claim no involvement and avoid blowback.

The US could strike a couple of vacant anti-air installations. MANPADS were locked away in bunkers. Some pawns had to be vaporized to make it all legitimate looking. What's a little murder?

There were no magic weapons that discombobulated everyone. No super covert operation. Everyone looked the other way while a US team removed their nuisance. Everyone got their show and a story to tell of overwhelming military might achieving the goals with ease.

Some Venezuelan generals are probably living in the US now with a paycheck.

Which is why the new government plays ball with the Trump admin. They aren't some cowering supplicant, but are partners in the action.

Hopefully it turns out well for Venezuela (which went from one group of despots to another). But it isn't the precedent it has been held as.

Aside about Politics

After I wrote that "Dear America" piece, I received a dozen+ emails that were some variation of "I like your stuff, but please leave politics out of it". Man, I wish I could just ignore politics, but every morning it's some new thing from that freak show of depravity and attention-seeking trash.

The entire world would like if they would lay off the brinksmanship, theatrics, and war crimes for just a day or two. But they just can't. Every single day it's something new.

But ultimately I'm not too worried about losing "fans". There are only two groups that are still team-Trump-

a) The impossibly stupid[^dumb]. Look, it's okay to be dumb. Live and let live, and genetics and environment rolls the dice and we all cover the gamut in our capabilities and aptitudes. But historically if someone were incredibly dumb, they'd focus on pursuits with their hands, contribute to society in meaningful ways, and so on. Now they're dogshit MAGA loudmouths who think having opinions -- the stronger held the better! -- is the great equalizer.

The impossibly stupid are the vast bulk of the "still all in on Trump" group, and these idiots can barely read, so they're not a concern.

b) The ultrarich who are profiting off of the catastrophic mismanagement of the United States. These people despise Trump and his halfwit cadre -- they see him for the garish classless clown he is -- but they like that he's ensuring they can easily skirt tax, can operate lawlessly, and have an easy get out of jail card for any misdeeds[^jail]. The ultra-rich don't care if people criticize the orange goblin, and they know he's running on borrowed time. So hello to my ultra-rich readers, and you understand why I'm writing this.

Canadian Politics

While I was authoring this, an online firestorm erupted about a member of parliament from Winnipeg using the acronym MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. The speaker is an aboriginal opposition MP from a minority party, and the context is that she was criticizing the government for reducing indigenous funding, lamenting how that would affect some subgroup of that acronym. Specifically the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women part of it.

Indigenous women in Canada have dire statistical outcomes, for multi-faceted reasons and with no easy answers, and are grossly overrepresented in victim statistics. It's a serious problem and a horrible tragedy.

Does the gigantic acronym help in any way? Absolutely not. It's a ridiculous acronym that only a very tiny fringe of Canada takes seriously, treating it as some sort of weird oppression olympics where everyone is jockeying to get their own set of letters in the forever growing letter salad.

Eventually it will settle on being the "No Homers" club: Just call it the "No Straight, Conventional Males" and get it over with.

I don't mean to be dismissive to a wide range of groups that suffer real harms and problems, but farcical nonsense like that acronym help absolutely no one, and it rightly rings of parody. The NDP[^NDP] repeatedly is the source of such nonsense, including another recent video where, in yet another display of oppression olympics, various speakers were all declaring that they were more aggrieved and entitled than other speakers, each adding more qualifiers to declare why they are out-oppressed.

They aren't helping themselves. And they aren't helping Canada's image as time after time a far-left party, far into the weeds, is presented as all of Canada.

Of course the clowns of the internet[^americans], including head jester himself ketamine-rot Elon Musk (and some of his brainless dipshit cling-ons like Rob Schneider, reminding everyone he pathetically is still alive), had to weigh in on this. Despite this woman lamenting the government of Canada, somehow this isolated case is the downfall of all of Canada, and merits its dissolution. It, these addled fools surmise, justifies Alberta separatism.

Which is...ironic. Alberta is 100% subject to aboriginal treaties that make separation quite literally impossible, and the foolish traitors who think they get to walk off with it ply a funny route when they make fun of...aboriginals or aboriginal issues. They are exactly as smart as we would expect (their leader literally defrauded vulnerable relatives, so they have exactly the morals you would expect as well).

It's time for Canada to start deporting these people. I'm not remotely joking. Send them to the MAGA cesspool that they so desperately want to recreate.

[^VeneTrump]: Think of Maduro as Venezuela's Trump: A criminal grifter stealing from the people and ruining everything for his own enrichment and adulation. Pretty bad, right?

[^4X]: My free time has been filled with work on my RTS/4X hybrid game that I mentioned previously, so apologies for the lack of content

[^Iran]: I made my feelings known about this administration's shocking gap of competence in my "Dear America" piece. Trump openly gloats that he surrounds himself with "losers"[^losers] -- he is quite proud of this -- and the fact that this clown-show of depravity, grifting and idiocy fails at everything is utterly inevitable. The worst possible people in every position.

Successful large entities, whether it's the USA or Microsoft or Tesla, have a surprising amount of inertia, and can seem immune from the consequences of poor decisions for years on end, rolling forward on the success of the past. Until reality is no longer something they can hide from and the costs all come due at once. The illusion of invincibility disappears and the many faults are laid bare.

The *staggering* level of damage that has been done to the United States by this circus in barely over a year cannot be overstated. I'd like to say that there's an easy way out of this -- "just vote blue in the midterms and voila, problem solved and everything is fixed!"[^election] -- but the sad truth is that the damage is severe enough that decline is essentially guaranteed now. I say this with no glee, as not only do I not want to see the good Americans hurt, the fall of the US will invariably drag Canada along with it.

Canada has been rapidly diversifying away from the US, not only because it's an utterly unreliable circus (with [shocking levels of in-the-open corruption](https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/ambassador-bridge-matthew-moroun-donation-maga-inc/) just tolerated as a normal way things work, when in any functioning democracy with actual laws this stuff would see scumbags rotting in prison), but also because it's a rapidly declining empire.

The USD is done as the international currency of exchange. There is no going back. US payment networks are doomed everywhere they exist outside the US. US military suppliers are going to find extremely rough waters ahead. US organizations that always lean on the government to make threats to avoid accountability in foreign nations are not going to like what's coming. US debt sales are going to find a cold market in the years ahead, and it's unlikely those multi-trillion dollar deficits are going to be a thing of the future.

Any agreements with US governments are *worthless*. Trump keeps flapping his idiot mouth about NATO, but the truth is that every NATO country is moving to a post-America reality, and absolutely no one expects the US to lift a finger if it were needed. Several NATO countries are going to come out of this as new nuclear powers (joining France and the UK, both of whom are going to expand their arsenal), and indeed we're going to see unimaginable nuclear proliferation in the next few years.

Endless words can be written about the generational, deadly destruction this crime spree has meted out to US institutions. All to then post a two *trillion* dollar deficit. Just shocking, stunning failure in every single dimension, which is precisely why they're inventing some new distraction with every passing day.

There are good odds that in the near future Taiwan simply joins China in a "two-state" solution (or I guess three-state?). Many alliances are going to shift in a way that Americans are going to be unpleasantly surprised by. Elections, it turns out, have serious consequences.

Pax Americana is over, and everyone is going to suffer the consequences. Most especially Americans who have lived in ignorance of the systems that made them the richest large country on Earth.

Even American media domination...I don't think it continues. The lustre and illusion of America is pretty much tarnished worldwide. In a way that can't be rehabilitated. The mythology has been undone, and every time that flabbering clown starts saying his vile, impossibly stupid nonsense and lies it suffers further blows.

So everything is going to keep seeming to be normal for a while, but it isn't. The collapse is well underway[^denial]

[^russia]: Likely coordinated through Russia who was willing to give up Venezuela in return for some concessions on Ukraine. Ukraine and European allies are rightly treating the US as an untrustworthy partner. As an aside, Trump keeps talking about weapons to Ukraine, but just to be clear, the US is giving nothing. Everything is being bought by Europe, Canada and others

[^denial]: The most bizarre cope for the obvious decline are those so deep in the cult that they try to make lemonade out of these lemons. Apparently being a collapsed once-empire led by oligarchs is some achievement. Because you'll, like, make your own gravel or something

[^election]: Everyone realizes that there will be no fair and open elections with this administration, right? Surely people aren't walking blind. Trump's various illegal voting proclamations are purely to muddy the waters such that he/they (his criminal garbage conspirators like Mike "Fanatical Evangelical Nutbag" Johnson) can dismiss results they don't like. That's how criminal liars work, and it was utter folly to give this malignant narcissist the reigns again.

Trump is openly promising pardons to everyone in his circle, overtly and directly encouraging criminal acts. This is so astonishingly outrageous that it should lead to a military ouster of his whole administration. It is *perverse*. But the US has fallen so far and so fast that it's just another day in the crime-spree that is Trump, a foolish clown that American voters decided to give another shot at looting the country. Astonishingly sad stuff.

[^jail]: The moment someone is exposed for fraud, sexual assault, or worse is the day they make the magical transition to being hardcore MAGA, probably claiming to be born again evangelicals to complete the scam. This act has become so transparently laughable, but somehow it still works on the ultra-dumb contingent

[^losers]: As pathetic as this administration is, nothing tops the pathos that are JD Vance and Marco Rubio. These clowns aren't as stupid as the rest of Trump's criminal administration -- both are fairly smart guys, which is why they both have a long history of warning about the dangers of Donald Trump -- but they thought they could wallow around in the sewage and then redeem themselves at the end. There isn't going to be a redemption arc. These foolish opportunists cooked themselves, and their future is burned. To ensure this, Trump periodically has both of them go in front of the cameras and eat dog turds, figuratively, in displays of shocking humiliation

[^americans]: Having Americans giving their takes on the "problems" of Canada -- usually fringe nonsense -- given the current situation there, is pretty bizarre stuff. It is a stunning lack of introspection when people in an unbelievably corrupt, failing empire/plutocracy have to desperately scramble to find fringe examples in other countries to feel better about their own lot.

I think having a pants-shitting, dementia-addled self-dealing rapist criminal dismantling democracy, while plying *by far* the most corrupt administration in US history (tinpot dictator levels of corruption, in the open), might be a bigger concern than some fringe politician in Canada saying an acronym you don't like. What a pathetic situation

[^NDP]: The NDP was once the "worker's party", advocating for worker rights and social programs for Canadians. Somehow they have evolved into the mass immigration party (perversely, as this is the greatest assault on workers and worker rights), coupled with making their core positions fringe issues and identities, devolving more and more away from rational positions. The NDP largely continues as a going concern via protest votes by people who are angry at the other two parties

[^dumb]: I should clarify that I'm not talking about the intellectually disabled, most of whom are actually wonderful people and have nothing to do with this. I'm talking about the mediocre 90 IQ dumbshits that absolutely dominate political discourse. They're intelligent enough to realize that they aren't exactly intellectual giants, but insecure enough that they think that they can rewrite the rules by just being as loud and as obnoxious as possible. This is MAGA.

Radon and Becquerels

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:15:00 GMT

Recently monitored my basement for radon levels, discovering it was approaching 200 Bq/m³. That's at the edge of recommended corrective action, according to Health Canada.

Canada has significant uranium deposits across the country, and radon is frequently cited as something to be aware of. And we're big fans of basements, exacerbating the issue.

As a bit of background, radon is a noble gas that is a decay product of uranium (through a long and complex decay chain with many other elements in between). Once the decay chain makes it to radon, it can permeate through rocks and soil where it finds its way into our homes, usually via the basement.

Amazingly radon only has a half-life of 3.8 days, then decaying to polonium-218 and then lead-214, then to a more stable lead-210 (still radioactive, but with a half-life in the decades). The transition from radon to lead-210 happens in just a couple of hours, but in between there are radioactive solid particles that attach to dust and the like and can be breathed in. Those particles throw off DNA-damaging alpha-radiation when they decay, so they're best avoided where possible.

Alpha particles only travel a few cm, and can be blocked by something as simple as paper. They can't even make it through skin. But if you breathe in those transition elements and it then decays internally, the alpha particles can cause DNA mutations in the lungs that could lead to cancer. For the same reason you don't want to eat sources of alpha particles.

Anyway, being just under the remediation limit wasn't comforting, so I researched things I could do quickly. One easy recommendation was to seal off the sump pump, if one is in place. And indeed there is the classic Canadian home sump-pump in this basement, with a pit with an installed pump to ensure that groundwater doesn't rise too much around the base of the home. It is the one area of the foundation where there isn't a thick cement layer blocking gases from getting in.

Sealing it off was nothing more than some plastic wrap taped to the discharge pipe and then tented securely around the base, preventing the circulation of air around the sump pump from mixing with the general basement air. There are a number of third party plastic covers that achieve the same goal.

Almost immediately the radon level dropped to below 50 Bq/m³. Over time an imperceptibly thin layer of Pb-210 will cover the inside of this enclosure as the radon is forced to complete its decay chain in this plastic prison, throwing off a minute number of alpha particles that fall harmlessly off in a remote corner of the basement.

Side Projects and LLMs

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:59:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate: 4 eX*) and RTS strategy games, my experience starting with Empire on the Atari ST[^friends].

I played every Civilization (4X) game, every Command & Conquer (RTS) and Warcraft (before it became an RPG it was an RTS). Every Age of Empires (RTS).

A 4X game, as background, is usually turn based and slow-paced, where an RTS is generally more fast-paced. Some RTS games have a significant overlap in philosophy with 4X games -- the goal is still the same 4Xs -- just at an accelerated pace.

But I always wanted more. There were always features that I wished these games supported. A sphere-based map, for instance, is missing in most of these games. A basic, customizable logic system ("AI") for units so the game doesn't end up being mired in bureaucratic hand-holding and micromanagement in the later stages, as it does in most Civ games for instance.

I've had various abandoned mini-projects to scratch my own itch and create a multiplayer 4X RTS game that would satisfy all of my wants and learnings from years of playing these games, but it was always a side project that I didn't want to spend too much time on. It couldn't interfere with normal professional pursuits, and it required that I stay motivated enough for the side-project to proceed. If the meat of the project -- the rewarding part -- was behind a lot of preparation work, it was easy to get waylaid. And the moment you're talking about a multiplayer game on the internet, there is a lot of preparation work.

So it ends up being a chicken/egg thing where there are a lot of things I know that are necessary for a v1 end up being things I just don't want to work on, so I just put it off.

I recently restarted this initiative, starting with Claude Code/Opus 4.6 as my assistant.

What a revolution in side projects!

Suddenly I'm blazing through the unpleasant-but-necessary structural work that makes the meat of the project possible. In three days I've accomplished more than I have in years of starts-and-stops on this venture. I'm still overseeing every line of code, the entire design and every interaction between services, but the structure that builds out around these is close to effortless, comparatively.

Magical. My motivation has stayed sky-high.

At every stage I've had to leverage decades of knowledge and experience in guiding the LLM -- this isn't anywhere near the state where a layman can "vibe code" something like this, and I've had to pull it back from making a few terrible choices along the way that would have utterly doomed the project -- but it's like having a team of very competent senior devs doing the most time-consuming parts with oversight.

Fascinating stuff.

Rust

I've never developed a real project in Rust in my professional career[^fungible]. I've done some brief tutorials, know the philosophy and trade-offs of the language and tooling, and respect what they've accomplished, but it never came into my sphere on the projects I've worked on.

Nonetheless, for the gateway, api and game server, Rust[^future] is being used[^client]. It is the proper choice for a variety of reasons.

Security. Efficiency and performance. The ecosystem of tooling. Rust is perfect for this use.

It turns out that Claude is actually a pretty great Rust developer, so it enabled me to use the right choice despite some temporary discomfort. And while of course most modern languages are largely fungible in a way, auditing the code has given me an insanely rapid deep dive into Rust. It was a very rapid acclimation, and I've rapidly achieved a pretty high degree of Rust competency.

[^friends]: Friends would stay over during summer break and we'd spend sweltering summer nights taking turns at the keyboard completing our Empire rounds. Eventually the sun would come up, and then we'd bike ride to a beach 16km away. Great times.

[^fungible]: My professional life has been filled with Python, Go, C(++), Java, Swift, (Object) Pascal, C# / .NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, among others. To some degree all modern languages are variations on a theme, and it is usually fairly easy for an expert in one to become competent at another. Rust is, I think, the least like the others and the one with the highest learning curve to transition to.

[^future]: Rust has every indication of being the future of compiled code, for a wide variety of reasons.

[^client]: The game runs via a web client, using WebGPU or WebGL as available on the client, so that side is being developed using Typescript, Three.js, Vite and node.

Do You Eat Enough Protein?

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:43:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

This entry was inspired by an email I received about my prior entry concerning whey-producing fungus, so apologies for harping on this subject.

The food world has been in a bit of a protein hype cycle for the past few years[^poptarts], with seemingly every category of food offering protein-enhanced alternatives, usually at a significant price premium.

Tortillas, Breads. Drinks. Cereals. Everything comes in +protein variations[^protein].

So there is a bit of fatigue on the topic. Whenever discussions arise about protein options on sites like Reddit -- say discussing a new protein drink, for instance -- invariably the top ranked replies will be some variation of "I'm so sick of all this protein stuff. You are all getting enough protein already[^glp1] so cut it out with this silly fad. Care about fibre instead[^fibre]!". Like clockwork.

I think most people would be shocked at how little protein they actually get in an ordinary Western diet[^personal]. While many people might hit the 0.8g/kg RDA minimum (largely via low quality proteins), few hit the optimal 1.0 - 1.2g/kg RDA (1.2 - 2.2g/kg for athletes). And this is a heightened concern for older adults where 1.2 - 1.5g/kg is necessary to avoid sarcopenia. Ideally high in glycine and leucine.

I'm about 78kg, and auditing my own diet -- a reasonably healthy diet by most standards -- I was nowhere near 78g of protein per day on average, much less the optimal 93g[^elder]. And note that I eat lots of meat, eggs, cheese, milk, and so on.

I started paying more attention to protein in my diet, and increasingly supplemented protein drinks and bars when I find I'm falling short of targets. I more conscientiously considered protein as a macro in meals.

Your body can create carbs (e.g. glucose) from fats or some proteins, but your body can't create proteins from oils or carbs. It is essential.

If you aren't actively targeting a level, you're probably falling short as a result of incentives in our food supply chains.

Protein is the expensive macronutrient, while carbs and fats are incredibly cheap. This yields supermarkets that have the bulk of their floor space occupied by negligible protein products: There are an endless number of ways to remix flour, sugar, oil and flavourings into an unending array of products, and these are what many people end up filling their daily caloric intake with. When products cut costs, invariably it is the protein that is downsized, the space filled in with carbs and fats.

Many people would benefit from increasing their protein intake, ideally without increasing their saturated fat consumption.

[^protein]: I can't broach this topic without noting RFK Jr. and his MAHA movement, where they claim they're going to "end the war on protein". Which is a weird claim to make in the middle of a protein craze. I suspect their original slogan was that they were going to "end the war on saturated fat", but cooler heads prevailed.

[^personal]: I mean, supposedly the average person eats their minimum RDA of protein, but monitoring my own macros that certainly wasn't true for me. Are people eating multiple burgers every day and having 3500 calorie diets? I guess like everything your mileage may vary.

[^fibre]: Why not both? Most people are also painfully deficient in fibre-intake. A lot of protein-enriched options often crank up the fibre as well, so two birds one feeder kind of thing. It was never a choice between one or the other.

[^elder]: Now that I'm in my 50s I should probably start categorizing myself with the "older adults". Hard to believe, I know. But that would push my ideal intake up to 117 grams a day. About 19 large eggs a day. Easy.

[^glp1]: Narratives tend to be viral -- people just repeat what they hear other people saying -- and a common refrain now is that the protein craze was induced by GLP-1s, and it's just all those Ozempic users desperately trying to stave off muscle wastage. Which is odd because a protein-heavy diet is a natural GLP-1 generator, courtesy of L-Cells and CCK hormones. Further protein slows gastric emptying just mechanically as it takes longer to digest, leading to long satiety and less of a food drive.

[^poptarts]: One of the silliest examples has to be Protein Pop-Tarts. An absolute garbage food -- both nutritionally and from a "Why did I just eat that?" food remorse perspective -- but to be fair ... the protein does legitimately improve it. Not just that it provides a bit more protein in one's diet, it slows the digestion of the overload of simple carbs that this terrible food item provides. Still hilarious, though, and if someone cares about nutrition they should probably move on from Pop-Tarts.

Vegan Whey

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:47:00 GMT

To get it out of the whey (lol), I'm not a vegan. Nor a vegetarian. Though I respect the conviction and choices of people who choose those paths.

I drink milk. I use protein powder that was extracted from milk, as whey happens to be the perfect protein. It is complete, fast-absorbing and highly bioavailable. It's the gold standard of protein sources.

Most people don't get enough protein, particularly high quality proteins like leucine. Carbs and fats are our fuel sources, while protein is the essential building blocks.

Meats are extremely resource intensive and have some attached moral issues, and you can't supplement some meats in your drinks or processed foods. I mean, I guess you could, but that probably wouldn't taste very good. It would probably be weird if your high protein sliced bread has chunks of chicken in it.

Milk is similarly resource intensive, requiring a whole process that most people would rather not think about.

Occasionally I take a look to see if there has been any progress in synthetic or engineered whey. Turns out there actually has been progress.

Some groups (for instance Verley) have used the genes responsible for whey production in cows and encoded them in fungi (e.g. aspergillus oryzae). They let the fungus loose in a vat, feeding it a supply of sugars, and the fungi ferments that into whey proteins. When extracted and purified it is indistinguishable from milk-sourced whey proteins.

Fascinating stuff. I doubt it is economically competitive, but once perfected and scaled up who knows. One day we might have Fungi Farms keeping society healthy and nourished. I guess we already have mushroom farms, of course, but expanding on that.

Found this all very interesting.

Spring Is In The Air

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:52:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

There is something magical and motivating about March. After the sparse sunlight and extreme cold of the winter, feeling the sun's warmth during the lengthening days is liberating. We're in that transitional period where it's -12C this morning, but it will be 17C in just a couple of days, veering back and forth as the seasons battle.

I love winter, and all the seasons we enjoy here in Ontario. But there is a point where the cold and glum has overstayed its welcome, and by the end of February we're done with it.

Time to do some big things.

Apple Neural Engine

I wrote previously about the Apple Neural Engine. Came across a fun entry this morning where a skillful practitioner delves into the hardware. I am a little skeptical of their INT8 conclusion -- the industry standard of FP16 x 2 = INT8 only holds where one FP16 op translates into two INT8 operations, and it would be nonsensical if you just wasted half of each operation -- but for a reverse-engineered effort it is fantastic.

Building FlashAttention-2

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:29:00 GMT

FlashAttention-2 is a Python package that can significantly improve the performance of attention mechanisms in transformer-based models when running on nvidia hardware[^ports]. A 7-10x speedup. It does it by some clever memory optimizations, leading to more of the attention operations running within SRAM instead of constantly having to communicate back to GPU RAM (e.g. HBM).

Installing it is often a beast. While there are prebuilt wheels (those are from the official source, but there are community wheel builds as well, offering a more comprehensive collection), builds need to be targeted to a specific combination of flash-attn version, GPU hardware generation (e.g. Blackwell), CUDA version, Torch version, and platform (e.g. x86-64, ARM64, etc.). The community builds has some 384 different variations, and even then it often isn't sufficient.

So most of the time you end up building the wheel on your hardware. This is the point where a lot of people have issues and abandon the effort and just go flash-attn-less.

It's a resource intensive build. The ninja build system will use all available cores, each build thread consuming enormous resources, which you might restrain by setting MAX_JOBS to some low number, maybe even 1. Still you're going to find the build consuming enormous amounts of memory, grinding into paging hell, because while ninja only uses one thread, it calls out to NVCC which then has its own horizontal scaling tendencies, spawning out many copies of CICC (CUDA Internal C/C++ Compiler). CICC makes heavy use of nvidia's CUTLASS templating engine, and every instance is going to consume 5 to 8GB, even when doing marginal processing.

You reign CICC's insanity in with NVCC_THREADS, which will restrain NVCC from going wild with its own process spawning tendencies.

# 1. Restrict the build system to 1 file at a time
export MAX_JOBS=1

# 2. Restrict the CUDA compiler to 1 frontend process at a time
export NVCC_THREADS=1

# 3. Target Blackwell (change for your target arch)
export TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST="12.0"

# 4. Build without isolation
pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation --force-reinstall

With both thread-scale optionals set to 1 a build will take hours and hours, but it isn't going to churn through your flash storage endurance endlessly paging and will actually succeed. Higher numbers are viable on decently equipped systems.

Just an FYI. I've encountered this on just about every new install and finally thought I'd comment on it. It's the NVCC_THREADS that seldom gets mentioned, when it is by far the most effective way of reigning in outrageous memory needs to install a package.

[^ports]: there are ports for AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon variants, but the main use is against nvidia

Ode to the Winter Olympics

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:54:00 GMT

Another Winter Olympics has come and gone. It had some moments.

I'm not a huge Olympics watcher -- not even for the big nationalistic showdowns -- and honestly many of the events are positively ridiculous.

Like, how many people on the planet are doing luge or bobsled? There should be some minimum accessibility/participation floors for sports to be included, and events that require enormous facilities yet only have a tiny handful of involved athletes worldwide probably shouldn't make the cut.

Kudos to Norway and the Netherlands on just completely dominating again. These countries absolutely owned cross-country skiing and speed skating, respectively, and should be proud of such a stunning overachievement. And to be fair, cross-country skiing and speed skating are both fairly accessible, or at least the base competencies are.

And congrats to the US on winning gold in both gender divisions of hockey. Great performances, and the US dominated opponents in seeding rounds so thoroughly they looked unbeatable. Did not think those games would make it to overtime.

Though the aftermath of that win, particularly the men's hockey team, has been...well, unfortunate. From the most unathletic FBI director ever trying to steal some of that glory on the taxpayer's dime, in just a grotesquely inappropriate "me too!" bit of selfishness, to Trump pushing AI fantasies about how he'd win the gold himself and beat up Canadian players, all while dismissing the women's hockey team's accomplishment...good god. Just world-level sore-winner cringe.

Unbelievably pathetic, third-world despot type behaviour. North Korea-level stuff. Teams turned into political pawns to try to scrabble for some win among a year of chaos and losing.

Congrats on the win. It's too bad a political movement tarnished it for their own gain. These vile goblins try to drag everyone down with them, and anyone foolish enough to help normalize their deplorable, childish behaviour has to be considered a willing participant.

Push-up Challenge: Conquered ✅

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:49:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

Early this month I mentioned that I was taking on the CMHA push-up challenge. Proud to say that I just hit 2000 moments ago. Three days early! Every one of those two thousand push-ups has been full range and of excellent form, as I'm a stickler for stuff like that.

Is this impressive? No. Am I proud that I stuck with it? Yup. Actually incorporated more of a daily target for a variety of similar exercises and will maintain this as an ongoing thing.

Conditioning is a fascinating thing. Three days in my chest and triceps absolutely killed, and carried from day to day, and eking out 10 reps was unpleasant. I had to go to the well frequently through the day to try not to fall behind. Now on day twenty, there is zero residual pain or fatigue day to day, and banging out 25 reps on demand is easy.

To try to spin this as broadly wise, we all have an enormous number of ways of staying fit without needing expensive equipment, memberships, and so on. The basics are all that most people need. For almost all of my adult life I've carried one or more gym memberships, taking advantage of it sparingly. I've probably accomplished more just doing a random challenge this month.

The Corrupt Social Media Reviewer

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:45:00 GMT

A few days ago I noted that I use a lot of Apple devices because of their hardware excellence. CPUs, top-quality screens and speakers and batteries, even storage systems are just class leaders. And performance on Apple devices is seemingly effortless, where my entire history with competitors is that it was basically just a boast, especially in mobile form where if you actually use the capabilities you'll have blasting fans and a 30-minute battery life.

I'm looking forward to competitors legitimately catching up and giving us options. So when I saw a huge wave of hype-pieces for Intel's new Panther Lake class of processor, it caught my attention. Pieces with titles like "Intel's M1 Moment is Finally Here".

What almost none of these reviewers disclosed, however, is that Intel did a whole press junket where they flew all of these guys out to Intel's Arizona fab for a whole dog and pony show, wined and dined them, and basically ensured that they would write fawning pieces. Whatever claims any of these people make about how this doesn't coerce them is delusional nonsense. It instantly puts a shroud over any sense of credibility.

This junket thing is a very old strategy that is massively corrupting, and it is done specifically because it's an easy way to buy off foolish people who will declare how it totally doesn't influence them at all and their words are all their own and...

Anyway, it's an interesting processor. Still uncompetitive single-core speeds, but it makes it up in cores while still being surprisingly power efficient, and it features a very decent GPU.

Some of the makers of laptops with this chip have stepped back from the dodgy "stick a bunch of stickers all over the laptop" garbage they've traditionally done as they target the Apple market. Most reviews comment on this (remember the junket, where they were fed narratives), vendors amazingly realizing that sticking of a bunch of ridiculous looking stickers all over a device is not wanted. Probably still going to stuff a bunch of crapware in the OS, though.

I will check it out. Give me a durable, robust laptop featuring this processor at a price that reflects that it still isn't Apple Silicon tier and it'll do numbers.

Push-up Challenge Update

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:07:00 GMT

Over halfway into the push-up challenge and it's going well. I currently have a few days of rest banked, several hundred reps ahead of schedule.

Honestly thought I'd drop out three or four days in, when the wall of fatigue and pain hit. The residual muscle recovery and pain seemed like it would get worse by day, and I'd fall further behind. Instead, it just disappeared, and many push-up sets became effortless.

And let me be incredibly clear that none of this is boasting. 90 push-ups a day is not a great achievement. I like fun "better yourself" challenges and this one caught my eye as a fun exercise. But the conditioning happened far quicker and much more absolutely than I expected.

Moving To Linux

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:48:00 GMT

After writing that short-form piece about Windows yesterday, where I observed that nothing really ties me to Windows, I realized I should take action.

So I moved my Windows/CUDA machine to Linux last evening.

There was a period of wasted time when somehow nvidia drivers got installed from two sources and broke the package manager while it panicked about overlapped files.

Got that sorted and got everything setup. A super-modern stack where I can use the latest FlashAttention and Triton without a concern.

I always keep machines replaceable, such that every project is always up to current on repos, every document is in some sort of cryptographically protected cloud source, and so on -- machines and drives can fail at any moment, and I always operate as if they will -- so it wasn't some big thing. Barely an inconvenience.

And it just works. This piece is being authored in WebStorm on linuxmint. All of my primary apps and toolings are all here. I'm hardly early to using Linux on the Desktop, and have made attempts at mainlining this before, but never has everything I use had first-class support. A number of Steam games even have ports (Valve has been hugely influential in making that happen), and where they don't Proton can often emulate Windows sufficiently. Gaming on this machine isn't a big need for me, and I usually just use Geforce Now for that.

The one thing I was concerned about was VNC versus RDP. VNC is trash, and is just a horrendous experience to have to endure, while RDP is almost like being at the machine if your connection is decent. Figured I'd just deal with it and largely lean on SSH terminal connections.

Then I discovered NoMachine. Delightful. The remote experience is significantly superior to RDP (and infinitely better than VNC), and a client was available for my Mac. It has some serious limitations unless you subscribe to their increasingly expensive tiers -- for instance limited to the foreground desktop, and thus a single connection, and limited to the resolution of the host machine -- but it's such a step up from the horror that is VNC.

Time To Dump Windows?

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:01:00 GMT

I primarily use Apple Macs -- while Tahoe was a regression and Apple is an extremely greedy company, the hardware is superb and the chips remain simply the best all around -- but a lot of my work entails CUDA-related activities. For that I RDP and ssh to a Windows desktop and a respective WSL2 session on a very beefy Windows machine.

Deployment-wise 100% of what I deploy to are Linux boxes on the business and commercial side, like pretty much all the industry.

I realized today that nothing ties me to Windows, and that it benefits me in no ways. Almost all of my work on that platform has to happen in WSL2 because of FlashAttention / Triton. The former is partly supported in Windows, but it's a mess. It's just way better to just eschew it and use Linux.

So for years I've used WSL (then WSL2) to achieve this when doing CUDA work.

Along the way there was always some Windows-specific tie-in thing that coupled me with that platform. Some app or communications platform that was best on Windows. Today I reevaluated and this just isn't the case anymore.

I basically use a fat Windows layer to host a Linux machine. Irony.

Recently saw someone declare it the year Linux takes over the desktop, to yield the cynical reply "We've been hearing that for years". And it's true, it has been prophesized for well over a decade. But at the same time, change happens gradually, then suddenly. I imagine a lot of people would find that absolutely nothing ties them to Windows anymore, even gamers with things like Steam Proton often find their needs met.

Interesting times. There was a time when Windows was the centre of my professional and personal life. Even obtained my MCSE, MCSD, along with a number of other Microsoft certs. I subscribed to MSDN (and even wrote for their magazine), Technet, and every beta program I could get my hands on. I watched for every move of that company as invariably the industry shifted in whatever direction they moved.

Now? Eh. Microsoft just doesn't matter to my life. I subscribe to zero Microsoft products. My Xboxes sit unplugged. Azure is the one cloud provider that I have zero deployments on, versus lots on OCI, GCE, AWS, and so on. My once beloved Hotmail account is basically a spam collection vehicle.

EDIT: Realized after writing this that I do use one Microsoft product: Github. It is completely fungible to me, however, and the slightest nuisance and I would just move elsewhere.

None of this is like some angry spiel about Microsoft, and I think they brought a lot to tech world over the years and given that they're a $3T company they're doing okay. It was just a shocking realization when I noticed that it just doesn't have relevance to me anymore.

Obviously other people's experiences differ.

And honestly if Apple didn't have excellent hardware I would be probably making a switch there as well.

The Great Way To Lunch

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:56:00 GMT

A Great Lunch is easy for those who have no preferences.

That last entry on the lines from the poem Xinxin Ming (which can be found in many varying translations, but with a common meaning), oddly made me think about group eating, specifically the choices leading up to the same.

I can enjoy just about every cuisine or category. I have preferences and favourites, though these shift over years and even by time of year or time of day, but I can greatly enjoy a meal from almost any of the options that anyone might throw in the ring.

Ever deal with people who have made polarized opinions their way of trying to make their choices override others? They do this by "hating" anything but their preferred choice at the moment. Everyone else's opinions gets invalidated because one person declares that all other suggestions are invalid because they fall in the hated category.

"Burgers? Hate em. Steaks? Hate em. Pizza, hot pot, sushi? Hate em."

This all or nothing thing has corrupted society generally. It's the people who think every movie is either 10 or 1, when a vanishingly small number should qualify for such a ranking. Every political party or figure is all good or all bad. Every Uber driver is five stars or one star.

Like....shouldn't the average Uber driver be 2.5 stars? Isn't that how the system should work? Isn't it a massive failure of the system if drivers are kicked from the platform for falling below 4.6? What is even the point of the rest of the range? It's illusory nonsense that can be found across most customer feedback system.

If you want to know the truth, surrender your opinions

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:48:00 GMT

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.”

Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

-- Jianzhi Sengcan in Xinxin Ming

Is VLC Dying?

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:57:00 GMT

VLC on the Apple TV has a couple of serious issues.

If you access a uPNP network device, it will work the very first time. After that you will have to restart your Apple TV for VLC to again see the device. Decide to watch something on the network? Time to hit system / restart for VLC to have awareness that the network exists.

No other app on the system has this problem. Other network media players see the devices fine.
If you are playing 10-bit HDR content, and your Apple is in HDR mode like Dolby Vision, VLC will completely screw up the tone maps and yield a disastrous posterized mess. You have to switch your Apple TV to SDR mode to get anything tolerable with such HDR files, as the SDR will all least force it within a range where the posterized nonsense is tolerable.

Again, neither of these happen with other players. Infuse, for instance, can support HDR fine and has no problem playing files on the network, no device restart necessary.

On the HDR issue, a while back I figured I'd just solve it myself, to find that building that project for Apple devices is an absolute disaster. Cocoapods have always been an absolute garbage dependency manager -- hello circular dependency conflict hell -- and despite an incredibly vanilla stack it was just impossible to get a build functioning.

I then asked a member of the VLC team to be told "oh yeah, VLC 4 fixes the HDR issue!". VLC 4? Where is that? The most recent version on iOS or AppleTV is 3.0.x. Apparently 4.x has been coming real soon now for half a decade.

There are a number of similar VLC issues on macOS. For instance to view in folders on a network device you have to navigate "into" it, where VLC will start playing the first item at that level. You then stop, and now can see the folders and files at that level, so rinse and repeat.

It's a free product, and is a killer on Linux or Windows. But if the support for Apple devices has such basic bugs, just drop them as targets. These devs owe me and other Apple users nothing, and I am grateful that they considered the platforms, but on the flip side, don't waste people's time with a subpar product.

And Cocoapods is thankfully going to put to a merciful end this year. If I never again see a project that uses that trash troublemaker, I will sing a little song of delight.

America's Billionaire Problem

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:49:00 GMT

Trump posted a lie-filled spiel of nonsense about a new bridge connecting the countries 🇨🇦🇺🇸 yesterday. Yet another demonstration why the 25th needs to be enacted, where again literally everything the foolish demented diddler said was ignorant, factless trash.

Just lying endlessly, as is his nature. What a clown show idiocracy right now. A worldwide embarrassment as such a great country has become a pathetic farce, headed by a cabal of the worst possible people. The crime-spree is so in the open that I hope Americans realize that these people believe they can never be held accountable.

The moment it was posted everyone immediately suspected it was the scumbag Moroun family from Michigan pulling the strings of the Big Diddler, likely paying a big bribe if the diddler beclowns the US and slows competition. The rent-seeking Moroun family have been profiteering off the Ambassador Bridge for decades, and have done everything they can to block alternatives.

A family privately owning an international crossing is crazy, but that's how the situation was.

They bought off every politician they could to keep the status quo -- that is just the norm in the profoundly corrupt US of A, and it was a corrupt cesspool long before Trump came along and turned every dial to 11 -- earning insane profits off of their poorly managed, derelict bridge. Until eventually a governor (Rick Snyder) bucked their influence and let a bridge be built. But only if Canada paid for 100% of it.

Well, it turns out that those people were right. The scumbag Moroun family got the ear of Epstein pal and perennial greaseball Howard "Wig-Salesman" Nutlick and mere hours later Trump was pushing out his nonsense. As an aside, is like everyone in that administration a paedophile and criminal, beyond just being vile, reprehensible people? Is it a requirement to be close to Trump? The political movement dedicated to finding the sex traffickers literally voted them into power.

What an absolute disgrace. Canada needs to shut down the Ambassador Bridge. Having these foolish clowns lying endlessly about this country...it's done.

This is not short-term damage these foolish self-dealing incompetent grifters are doing. It is going to be a legacy that endures long after this garbage is dead. The US plutocracy/kleptocracy is going to come out of this criminal administration with zero friends (well, maybe El Salvador, Argentina, and the hilarious rag-tag group of pathetic despots that make up the "Board of Peace"), a spiralling economy with no one to fund the largess, and a more and more certain civil war. All while this admin is trying to foment separatism in Alberta...far more likely, clowns, is that Canada absorbs some of the better parts of the US after what is coming.

It has been pretty quiet news, but the US sanctioning ICC judges (on behalf of Israel, as the US will endlessly self-immolate in the service of that foreign nation. However one feels about Israel's standing on world affairs, it is bewildering how the US has been reduced to a pitiful Israeli client state, where members of congress will literally say Israel first, or actually wear Israeli military gear in the House. Utterly bizarre behaviour, and the US is quite clearly Israel's El Salvador, where desperate simps try to pony good words from the boss), forcing all America-based companies to cease business with those people, basically put a death clock on US businesses from operating internationally: Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and even the tech companies...their days are numbered outside the US. This is a completely grotesque and untenable situation.

Everyone is rapidly pursuing replacements. Everyone should be decoupling from that rogue cabal that repeatedly elects absolute garbage to positions of power. The US has long abused sanctions for political ends and everyone just looked the other way, but sanctioning judges and prosecutors in an international criminal court, to which every civilized country belongs (the US and Israel do not, for obvious war criming reasons, and that doesn't change my set-criteria at all), unveils the whole mirage as the farce it has always been.

Good job, chimps. You got your momentary big tough guy wins, while flushing the future of America down the toilet.

As an aside, every middle power needs to start fining any foreign company operating in country that observes sanctions that aren't locally recognized. If an American company is making profits in Canada, and they refuse to do business with a Canadian woman because she judged against Netanyahu in the ICC, they should face massive daily fines. If they don't like it, see ya. Just as they should do in France, Germany, Japan, and basically all the West.

They can all retreat to their gilded land and lick their wounds and write angry tweets CCing JD Vance and other members of the criminal cabal decrying how mean everyone is. It was clearly a massive mistake to ever let corporations from that corrupt state gain a foothold. Any country considering leveraging Palantir, Oracle, Salesforce, Flock, or any other American firm for infrastructure or security business...if you aren't the US of A, you are insane to even consider such a ridiculous notion. They are all agents of a hostile, rogue nation.

Or they can spin off fully separate divisions having zero accountability, legally or financially, to the original. Whatever they need to do. If Google, Microsoft, nvidia, or any other company is enforcing grotesque war-criminal-serving sanctions in a sovereign nation besides the US and Israel, they should be sent packing. The short term harm will be tough, but long term it will be great for everyone.

Everyone can just cluck and imagine that the fetid bag of shit will just die soon enough and it will blow over and things will go back to normal -- this is literally how many Americans are treating it, like some funny troll that, you know, only has four years to cause chaos -- but it won't. This trash exists top to bottom in American politics, and it is not a trustworthy partner in any matter. How a country could elect such a depraved criminal is...good god. It's a symptom of a problem much deeper than one malignant narcissist diddler creep.

As an aside, I would be remiss to point out how hilarious it is to see the Big Diddler constantly railing about Canada making a relatively small trade deal with China. China has dick-slapped this foolish simpleton in the face repeatedly, and have come out of Trump's pathetic threats stronger than ever, but Trump has announced a dozen or so "deals" with China so far, often just making up details for his smooth-brained base to celebrate. Chairman Trump is desperate for any iota of attention he can get from Xi, even if China basically shrugged and moved on, knowing America is an empire doing a historic speed-run decline.

Chairman Trump is desperately offering up all the latest tech and China is saying "Nah, bruh." How pathetic.

Canada makes a small deal and suddenly we're cancelling the Stanley Cup? Someone take grandpa's phone away, he's sundowning. It will be great for the world when that vile creep dies, but Americans are fooling themselves if they think that's the end of it.

In other news, right on target for the 2000 push-up challenge. It was looking grim over the first couple of days as muscle fatigue and pain made it seem unsustainable, but the conditioning started happening much quicker than I expected.

Hacker News Makes It To Depression

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:14:00 GMT

Hacker News is a community of many disparate voices and opinions, at every level of skill and coming from many perspectives, demographics and corners of the globe. In this entry I'm talking about the average HN user, which I will label Joe HackerNews. The aggregation that decides what comments and submissions rise to the top, and ensure that others are pummelled to transparent or flagged away.

Use the site enough and you can clearly see trends and group-think come and go. It has been interesting watching the evolution of AI discussions on the site.

There are the oft cited five stages of grief that people move through when confronted with a shock or loss. It's a controversial simplification device, and like a Barnum effect we make reality fit the stages when often it's much more nuanced and non-linear.

Whatever. This is a football 🏈🦉 Sunday before-first-coffee post, so I'm running with it. Lots of pushups left to do.

Denial: "AI will never understand the code I work with, or the complex domain I work in. That's only a tool for shitty web apps and juniors that don't know what they're doing!"

Anger: "AI stole all of our comments, blog posts and github repos. Do you think we can sue and shut them down?"

Bargaining: "Okay I installed CoPilot and read a tutorial on how backpropagation works. Pretty much up to date. I'm AI augmented and ready for the next century. Should I vibe code the next $10B SaaS unicorn?"

Depression: "It's over. The field is ruined. Our educations and experience are worthless. The end is nigh." ⬅️ WE ARE HERE

Acceptance: To be seen how this unfolds.

The denial phase was intolerable, people desperately trying to convince everyone that they are a unique snowflake and work in an advanced unique domain with unique needs, where there's no way the thinking machine has relevance for them. You still see this sort of person occasionally -- "only bad developers get value out of AI, but not me because I'm a great developer" -- and generally it's just delusion with a side of denial.

Just as weird are the "AI has peaked" sorts. At every stage they've announced that this is it, AI can't get any better and now we just wait until the big ponzi-scheme that is the AI market collapses and the ruse will be over. And then it keeps getting better again, and again, and again, even with unknown outsiders on a tight budget popping in with crazy models that make last year's SOTA look like garbage.

Anger was a conflicted one where the same people who celebrate that information should be free, everything should be open source, every API public, and so on, lamented that algorithmic use was made of that. It's especially weird when developers complain about other developers looking to automate their jobs away, because this is literally what most software development is: In some way we're making a machine do something a human could do. Our entire profession is allowing people to do more with less.

Even if you just make a library and post it on github...aren't you taking away the jobs of every business that would have had to employ developers to make that functionality from scratch, you monster?

Bargaining saw about a thousand "Introduction to tokens" submissions being voted to the top, followed by waves of basic neural network explanations. And to be clear, I'm not being patronizing in noting this, but you could see the collective move to the "if you can't beat 'em, join em" stage, perhaps not realizing how outrageously high the entry stakes are now.

Joe HackerNews is now at depression. Posts like this one lamenting the loss of the craft are topping the front page. The comments across almost all AI discussions are veering to positively grim, and have a very "end game" feel to them.

This isn't the first time the community felt such a threat. Around the turn of the century every board was sure that all software jobs were going to India. The release of GUI builders like Visual Basic were going to put software devs out of work, making building apps into simple work, and even apps like Microsoft Access had forms and flows and could run as an application built by a layman.

Before that CASE tools were going to automate it into some middle-management drag and drop.

I very much have skin in this game. Aside from my own professional operations, one of my sons is in the middle of computer science program, just starting some coop placements. Another is still in high school and makes good money developing for the Roblox community. A daughter does creative works, including 3D modelling for games, and obviously she can feel the pressure on her field. My other son is still selecting his career, considering the medical field, and even there, like almost everywhere, AI is ominous.

It is something I think about constantly, and it can feel overwhelming and like there is no clear path to prepare for the future.

I have notes that I'll use for a much longer piece on AI that I'll get to at some point, and this microblog piece was not meant to be particularly illuminating or useful. Just some lazy morning thoughts.

If there is one take away that I would offer up: You can't argue reality away. Posting comments saying AI is trash, slop, can't write good code, etc, doesn't change the path that we are on the tiniest iota. You can't argue a different reality into existence, and it's just wasted words trying to do so, even if you find a community that will start chanting in unison to manifest their hopes.

AI is already surprisingly good, and it's rapidly getting better.

That Push-up Challenge Not As Easy As Imagined

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:40:00 GMT

On just day two of the 2000 push-up challenge, and it's looking more daunting than I originally imagined.

Push-ups are in isolation easy. I've done countless over my life, though never in large numbers over a short period.

Getting 110 finished on day 1 was easy, trying to get a little ahead of the daily 87 or so to hit the target. It made it seem like this would be the easiest thing in the world.

The part I forgot about is the muscle recovery / fatigue / pain on the next day. I'm clearly out of shape, making this doubly worthwhile of a goal, but also doubly difficult.

Still got ahead of the quota today, thankful I made today easier by doing extra yesterday, but interested to see how this plays out. Will I condition up quickly enough that I can start taking gap/recovery days and make it up on the fill days? Will the pain and fatigue gain quicker still?

I track this in my Obsidian daily notes. I added a numeric property to the template for the trial period, and on each new daily now it pulls the accumulated pushup_total from the day before forward, adding it with the push-ups done the day before. A convenient way to track it with my normal tracking without yet another spreadsheet.

2,000 Push-Up Challenge

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:55:00 GMT

The Canadian Mental Health Association is running a challenge from February 5th to the 27th, participants challenged to complete 2000 total push-ups over the period. It is a fund-raising effort to support CMHA, but also to raise awareness of the 2000 lives lost each day to suicide.

Lots of people will get fitter in the process.

I've taken on this challenge, and we'll see. Around 90 push-ups a day is easy enough, right?

These sorts of challenges, finding a reason to do these little self-improvements and to give something to think about at the same time, are always worth consideration.

A Microblog Disclaimer

Dennis Forbes — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:04:00 GMT

I added this "microblog" section for quick thoughts I have before I start my day, or when I take a random break from the tasks at hand. The things I write in here will have been created in five or so minutes, ten minutes at the high end, and are meant as "passing thoughts" kinds of things.

I'm not going to great lengths to verify every statement comprehensively encapsulates all perspectives on the subject-matter. Nor do I optimize wordings or grammatical structures. If I happen across an entry at a later point I often see things I could improve and do a quick edit, but apologies if these entries may seem lazy at times.

This is my release-valve, per se, to stop me from feeling the itch to engage with social media. It's my way of adding my noise to the global cacophony, however drown out and meaningless it ultimately is.

And I mean, really this section isn't a µBlog, but instead is the purest form of blog. Yet I have ambitions that the main listing of the entries in the macro-blog part of this site are more considered, thoughtful pieces, rather than a reaction to some passing comment someone made elsewhere. So I quarantine those smaller thoughts here.

I hope you have a fantastic day ahead.

Defending the Apple Neural Engine (ANE)

Dennis Forbes — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:25:00 GMT

import BlogLink from '@components/BlogLink.astro';

In a discussion about Apple Research's open-source MLX machine learning framework on Hacker News yesterday, a comment proclaims-

ANE is probably the biggest scam "feature" Apple has ever sold.

This is a recurring observation, with many inferring that because Apple's very own MLX doesn't use ANE, therefore, the logic goes, ANE is useless. An "if they don't eat their own dogfood" sort of deal.

As some background, Apple added the ANE subsystem in 2017 with the iPhone X. It is silicon dedicated to running quantized, forward-pass neural networks for inference. Apple's intention with the circuitry was to enable enhanced OS capabilities, and the immediate use of the chip was to power Face ID. That first silicon offered up some 0.6 TOPS (trillion operations per second), and was built with power efficiency as a driving requirement.

The next year Apple released a variant with 5 TOPS, an 8x speed improvement. Then 6, 11, 16, 17, and then 35 TOPS (though that last jump is likely just switching the measure from FP16 to INT8). In all cases the ANE is limited to specific types of models that fit within its limitations. It was never intended to power NN training tasks, massive models, and so on.

It was some NN-dedicated hardware to enable low power but high (enough) performance assistance for OS features and functions. Other chipmakers started adding similar neural engines into their chips to address the same need: Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Huawei, Samsung ... everyone got in on NPUs for the same reasons. You aren't going to run ChatGPT on it, but it stills hold loads of utility for the platform.

And the system heavily uses the ANE now. Every bit of text and subject-matter is extracted from images, both in your freshly-taken photos and even just browsing the web, courtesy of the ANE (many don't even realize this, and it's a barely heralded feature. You can search your photo library for a random snippet of text, even heavily distorted text. You can highlight and copy text off of your photos and even on images found on random websites in Safari when using Apple Silicon, at virtually zero power cost. ANE). After you've triggered Siri with Hey Siri, voice processing and TTS is handled by the ANE. Some of the rather useless genAI stuff is powered by the ANE. Computational photography, and even just things like subject detection for choosing what to focus on, is powered by the ANE hardware.

All of this happens with a marginal impact on battery life and without impeding the CPU or GPU cores in performing other tasks.

It's pretty clear that Apple intended the ANE as hardware for the OS to use, and third party apps just weren't a consideration or priority, nor did they make it a part of their messaging. In 2018 they did enable CoreML to leverage the ANE for some limited cases, and even then the OS throttles the capacity you can use to ensure that the OS is never left waiting when it demands it.

So why doesn't MLX use ANE at all? The authors specifically stated why. The only public way of using the ANE subsystem is by creating and running models through CoreML, which is entirely orthogonal to the purpose and mandate of MLX. Obviously Apple Research could just reach into the innards and use it if they wanted, but MLX is an open-source project so that simply isn't viable.

Apple added some tensor cores to the GPU in their most recent chips (M5 and A19 Pro), calling them "neural accelerators". These are fantastic for training and complex models (including BF16), at the cost of magnitudes more power usage. It also gives Apple a path to start massively scaling up their general-purpose AI bona fides, adding more and more NA cores per GPU core, and GPU cores per device -- copy/paste scaling -- especially on the desktop path where they can achieve enormous levels of performance where power isn't as much of a concern and active cooling is available.

Apple is unlikely to move existing OS NNs to these new tensor cores. Their purposes and driving philosophies are very different, and they serve different roles and purposes.

Nor is there any indication that Apple is abandoning CoreML (another parallel claim made in MLX-related discussions). Apple Research put out MLX to rightfully try to get some of the attention of the Pytorch et al. community, and it has been wildly successful, but it doesn't supplant or replace CoreML.

If you have a consumer app for Apple devices, and you run NNs for inference to enable features, odds are high that your best bet is CoreML (which will use the GPU, GPU NA, ANE, and CPU as appropriate and available).

People seem prone to all-or-nothing stuff like this, thinking it's all losers and winners and everything is binary. It's reminiscent of Google unveiling Fuchsia, where every tech board like HN had the prognosticator of all prognosticators declaring that the day of Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and so on was over. It's a Fuchsia world now, baby.

Years later and Fuchsia powers a Nest device, and largely seems to be a dead project. So...maybe not?

Conflating The Message and the Messenger

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:08:00 GMT

I've casually listened to Peter Attia's podcast The Drive for years. I'm not the sort of podcast listener that has a queue that I vigilantly keep on top of, but instead it's more of a periodic picking and choosing when I'm in the mood. Sometimes when I take a walk I open the podcast app and see if there are episodes that sound like a good listen from the ones I subscribe to: The Drive, 99% Invisible, Decoder with Nilay Patel, This American Life, Freakonomics, NPR's Fresh Air, CBC's Ideas, Sam Harris' Making Sense, among a number of others. If nothing looks good I listen to great music playlists like the algorithmic 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔏𝔢𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔰 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔰.

Peter Attia is a fantastic science communicator, with a unique approach. In the current blowback to his appearance in the Epstein files, one critic talked about how she enjoyed an episode he hosted with a female researcher she respects, but then complained that he spent much of the episode "mansplaining". Which is a pretty silly complaint because Peter's entire method of repeating, recapping, and guiding the conversation forward is something he does with every guest. It's what makes his podcast good, and he really seems to do a ton of homework preparing for each episode. The information/time ratio is much denser than comparable podcasts for this reason.

Attia isn't just a Joe Rogan grunting along and saying stupid stuff occasionally.

Regardless, his emails to Epstein were vile. Thankfully I've never taken advice from Attia on how to be a good person, husband, father, or so on, and I imagine few others have either. His involvement with Epstein doesn't indict his science communications. I don't suddenly think statins are bad because Attia believes in them, and now that he's unveiled as a bad guy therefore anything he has ever said is bad. That would be bizarre and unproductive, but it's precisely what is happening across the space. People are literally doing an "Aha! I told you he was wrong about everything because look he wrote some gross emails to that terrible guy Epstein".

It just demonstrates that people are more interested in going all in on cult of personality things and it becomes some weird personality thing where it's 100% onboard or 100% against. There can't be "this guy is a creep and I disagree with him on many things, but this is actually interesting and informative".

Separate the art and the artist, the science from the science communicator.

I still think Kevin Spacey was fantastic in almost everything he was ever in, and his personal issues are a matter for the courts and the people involved, not the court of public opinion. Spacey was great in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance, which I still think is a tremendous story and screenplay even if David Mamet became a weird, unhinged Trumper.

I'm a fan of loads of Tom Cruise movies, and simply do not care what cult or whatever he is engaged with, who he dates, what his sexuality is, or anything else not directly and immediately relevant to his acting in a movie. He acts real good like, so good enough for me.

None of these people are my heroes. I don't idolize any of them. When they fail personally it just doesn't change any prior response I've had to their work because it was never based upon my adoration of these people generally.

Weird anti-bike hostility

Dennis Forbes — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:48:00 GMT

I drive lots of places. I've had my licence for decades, have countless kilometres under my belt, and see cars as liberating. I'm an "Ontario speeder" which means I generally drive around 20 over, yet have zero infractions over all my years driving. Zero accidents either, aside from a minor thing where I went a bit off-road a bit and hit a mailbox: A bee or wasp somehow crawled into my summer shoes and like most I have an irrational overreaction to such things. Only yielded a scratch on a passenger door and a country mailbox that needed to be put back in place on its stand.

Oh, I also once scratched the bumper of someone in the parking at Awenda Provincial Park as I pulled a 26-foot travel trailer and the combined turning radius wasn't quite what I calculated.

But I also love biking. I love walking. I love transit. I love being in areas that facilitate and encourage all of the above, where I never need to think about parking or other car-related nonsense. We go on vacations to better-planned cities where everyone is walking and biking and it's just wonderful, and then we come home to our "designed for cars" cities and just accept this as normal or the best we can do? It isn't.

Here in Ontario, a leans-on-populism premier recently did a big dictum where he forced his way on a lower level of government and ordered them to remove some already built and paid for bike lanes. This was idiotic, and is the sort of self-destructive nonsense that make us look backwards and clownish, and thankfully the courts have thus far blocked it. A number of propagandist figures posted videos to support the premier's overreach, lamenting the "low number of cyclists" using the bike lanes, not noticing that in their own cherry-picked video there were more cyclists seen than personal vehicle occupants.

Brian Lilley, for instance, who pretends he's a reporter but shares a bed with Ford's media relations manager, and is the sort of guy that just puts out completely worthless, thoughtless partisan noise.

The weird thing, and the only way this car-centric nonsense continues, is the significant percentage of the public that makes being anti-bike their personality. It's like the obnoxious people who want to start incredibly boring spiels about how much they hate pineapple on pizza. If there is a discussion or media story about bikes, these sorts (likely heart-attack in waiting sedentary lazy-bones) always crowd the discussion, making the cliché bot-like noise. It's bizarre.

Cities should not be designed around single-occupant vehicles. Indeed, those uses should be massively discouraged, tolled, impeded, and so on. The outcome would be better for literally everyone, even if so many can't see how self-sabotaging the pro-car prioritization we currently endure is.

Every single-occupant vehicle is a massive failure in basic civic sense and city planning.

Obsidian scripting

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:41:00 GMT

Obsidian is Electron based, and thus it is an eminently scriptable platform. This is evident in the broad range of core plugins that come with the platform, along with a massive community of plugins from third-parties.

I trust the core plugins. I do not trust community plugins. While there's a superficial vetting on first inclusion, the potential for supply chain attacks or malicious intentions is enormous.

Thankfully adding your own scripted functionality for novel needs is trivial, and the major LLMs are fully versed in creating simple plugins for the system. For my daily notes I start with a template and on file creation a simple, easily audited script, mostly built with Gemini, grabs the current and forecast weather for the day through a web API, and then grabs my current chess.com ELO, and drops it into placeholders in the template. And yes I used Gemini because I have approximately zero interest in becoming an Obsidian scripting expert. But the result is a tiny plug-in script, kicked off on file creation, that I can audit in seconds, versus massive and overwrought community plugins that I can't reasonably verify in any rational amount of time.

The chess ELO thing is an odd, temporary inclusion as I realized my chess game had stagnated and I'd become mentally lazy about the game, so it's just a personal motivation to make it a metric I pay more attention to and stop making the silly mistakes and blunders.

launchd scripts and perms

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:26:00 GMT

I'm a heavy user of Obsidian MD. I use the app across macOS, iOS and Windows, but instead of using the inbuilt sync service I store my vaults on a cloud drive. I use multiple vaults (Research, Daily Notes, General / Family, and then one for each major project) all subs in a shared root directory.

Why not the Obsidian sync service? Because one of my reasons for choosing this product is decoupling from a specific platform and treating it as a file-system structure of markdown files that some editors lubricate the use of. Using the built-in facilities for sync is orthogonal to that goal. Everyone should still support Obsidian with a Catalyst license.

I manage history by storing a git repo of all the Vaults and pushing it to a remote repo, accomplished periodically via launchd on the Mac. But given that I store the git work tree on an external drive this causes just endless pain as the security system interjects itself and normal simple perms do not suffice. Macs really encourage you to use the undersized, overpriced internal drive, and make using external drives a nuisance. Add that eliciting the removable device perm request seems to be a roll of the dice, and other times it just auto-denies.

Running the zsh script from launchd fails because it doesn't have the environment or perms my user account does, and I refuse to just grant zsh universal perms for this one-off need.

Solution: Create a simple Automator app that just calls the script. Run the Automator app, e.g.

/usr/bin/open -W "/Users/.../UpdateObsidianGit.app" `

Grant it the removable device perms. Now schedule that app to run periodically via launchd. Problem solved. Automator is a pretty neat tool, and I had never touched it before but will leverage it heavily henceforth.

Oh and for the git remote I push encrypted files courtesy of git-crypt. Filenames and metadata is still visible, but contents are not if the remote were compromised. Originally used git-remote-gcrypt but having one or two mega files that have to be fully pushed on every tiny incremental change wasn't quite what I was looking for. For more secure projects and vaults I store them in Cryptomator volumes on the cloud drive. Cryptomator also uses granular change management, similar to git, so changing a file or two in a large project doesn't yield a massive transfer.

macos storage bloat

Dennis Forbes — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:21:00 GMT

I evaluate the storage usage on my primary Mac Mini occasionally, always to be surprised by some storage bomb that is consuming far more than expected. Today's lucky winner is Windows App -- this is the RDC client I use to connect to my primary Windows CUDA machine -- which was consuming almost 200GB in the user Caches folder, accumulated junk going back about a year.

How does a simple VNC app amass such a volume of junk files? Very good question. Each time I do this exercise I find some culprit that subscribes to the add forever but never manage or delete philosophy of file management. And note that the Caches folder isn't some system service where things are truncated as needed, but instead it's up to the apps using this facility to delete their junk as they go, which lots of apps never do. Add that on modern flash storage you shouldn't treat it like RAM where "empty space is wasted space". For a variety of reasons you should strive to have 20%+ of an SSD unused, yielding the benefits of pSLC/dynamic caching. Lower usage/TRIMming makes wear-levelling more capable as well.

This entry reminded me why I've always leveraged external storage on my Macs.

Neilson 26g Protein Chocolate Milk

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:30:00 GMT

A number of local stores were retailing a Neilson protein chocolate milk product over the past month or so. Featuring 26g of very high quality whey protein per 325ml bottle and minimal sugar (only natural milk sugars), this product is an absolute banger, and while a lot of people don't like the light sweetening -- only a small amount of stevia -- with an added sucralose sweetener it is an amazing way to start the day.

$9.99 CAD for a 12 pack, which is an astonishing value. I bought some at $19.99 a few weeks earlier and was a big fan at that price too. You can't make a protein drink yourself this cheap with the dodgiest protein powder.

If you're listening, Neilson, please continue with this product. Not sure if you just had an excess of powdered milk that you needed to get rid of or something, but this is a great product in a space that is dominated by American brands like Fairlife.

A place for micro-thoughts

Dennis Forbes — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Added 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.

Fragile Devices: Precious electronics in a hostile world

Dennis Forbes — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When Our Devices Crash Into The Real World

Apple Devices Last...Sometimes

I'm a big fan of Apple hardware. They make excellent smartphones, laptops and desktop computers, whether all-in-ones like the iMac or small form factor like the Mac Mini. The performance is generally excellent and the energy efficiency is top tier. And while some Apple software has regressions -- Tahoe should probably have gone through more of a QA cycle, for instance -- generally I think Apple has excellent software quality as well.

It's a great combo.

Their offerings are generally secure and reliable. Their pricing is entirely competitive.

Treated carefully these things generally last forever. I've never had an Apple device fail on me, and instead they only go out of service due to extreme obsolescence[^XR], or because of misfortune yielding a physically destroyed device.

I've decommissioned some iPhones, iMacs and an iPod due to obsolescence. We lost a couple of iPads and an iPhone due to physically being destroyed. Lost an Intel-era Macbook Pro because my son lightly dented in a corner of the screen, and courtesy of the tiny bezel made of soft aluminum, it destroyed the screen.

If Treated Extremely Carefully

Some Apple devices are built for aesthetics, however, with form clearly prioritized over function. At least in how they can survive the perils and risks of the real world.

iPhones look and feel amazing from the factory, but I don't even take one out of the box until I have a heavy duty case and screen protector ready to be installed within seconds of its consumer birth[^catching_the_bus].

"Just buy AppleCare+ and don't sweat it"

I have zero interest in spending my time at an Apple store, or without my device. Going without my device and then getting some refurbished device is not a valid solution for me. There is literally zero upside to getting a phone repaired or replaced in this fashion, and I'll avoid it wherever possible[^roadrage]. And to be clear, I usually do buy AppleCare+ regardless and for worst case scenarios, but I still don't want the hassle.

And clearly I'm not alone. Only maniacs use their iPhone without a case[^maniacs], and all of Apple's boasting about making slightly thinner or lighter devices just doesn't matter to most people who just want a better battery, performance, screen, camera, etc.

See the flop that the iPhone Air has been. Seriously, almost no one thinks smartphones need to be thinner, yet for some reason Apple particularly seems to really care about this. Every release goes on about tiny savings on thickness or weight that no one outside Apple cares about at all. It's institutional pathology at this point.

An uncased iPhone is an attractive, impressive device. But it isn't practical for most people. We all occasionally fumble our device, knock it off shelves and chairs, or put it in a pocket with scratchy companions.

The Counterpoint

This whole thought came about while moving my youngest son's Lenovo laptop[^lenovo]. It offered an example that it doesn't have to be this way.

The thing is built like a tank. He tosses it in his backpack with little concern. The shell is strong, and the screen is well protected by beefy, strong bezels. It's still a speedy, impressive device, but somehow it also can survive normal use without babying.

I contrast this with the MBPs I've had. All are outrageously fragile devices that I carefully extract from their massively-padded laptop cocoon and carefully place on the desk. MBPs often feature tiny bezels and beautifully curved aluminum shells, so you need to be extremely vigilant that are never hit around these perimeters.

I treat Macbooks more carefully than any other electronic in my life. It is a device I actually don't like using out and about. Whoa, does that table I put it down on have tiny bits of material that are going to scratch the bottom? Is someone going to bump the edge while moving by?

Give Us Rugged Apple Devices

I know this angers some people who really prioritize looks above all, but we need rugged Apple variants.

I want to use Apple Silicon (especially now that they added "tensor" functionality in the GPU) on the road. I want to use Apple's software. The outrageous, unacceptable fragility of the devices is the part that I find hard to rationalize, and always reach for alternatives.

Give us rugged options. No, I do not care that everyone knows I have the latest Macbook or iPhone. No I don't want people marvelling over bezels or soft-metal shells. I absolutely do not care if it weighs a bit more or is thicker or has larger bezels.

Give me some sort of beefy, robust options that I don't have to fret over and baby. Make it ugly if need be. Make the form fit the actual function. Let those of us who don't prioritize the aesthetics of a tool the option to have more durable, robust options out of the gate. There is a medium somewhere between "fragile, precious work of art" and "gaudy plastic covered with stickers", and I think it's a medium many customers would prefer.

[^roadrage]: While maybe it's just bluster, often in discussions about driving -- whether in the real world or online -- people will boast about how people had better not "cut them off" or the like, because they don't care they'll smash right into them.

This attitude fascinates me. I've avoided a number of accidents through careful defensive driving because even if the other guy is fully at fault and my dashcams back me up, it's still an **enormous** hassle with only downside. I think of this when people use AppleCare+ as their fallback.

[^XR]: We're in the process of replacing a couple of XRs in the family. They still operate perfectly, performance is still satisfactory and the screens still look fantastic, but they're being replaced purely as these seven-year-old devices are no longer getting major OS updates. While they're still getting security updates, it won't be long before major apps start gatekeeping on iOS 26.

[^maniacs]: Seriously though, I am truly fascinated by people who use fragile smartphones without cases. I mean, often they have multiple cracks on their screen, a dented in enclosure, and so on, and I guess they're willing to live with that.

[^catching_the_bus]: This isn't always enough, however. A few years back one of my sons was late going out for the bus to school and had to run down the icy drive to get there in time. An unfortunate fall on an inconveniently situated rock yielded a situation that even Spigen armour couldn't help with. The iPhone was soundly destroyed.

[^lenovo]: He bought this laptop with his own earnings from his various initiatives in the virtual world. At times this teenage Roblox developer/business man in training is out-earning me, which is humbling.