Floyd Mann

Summing things up: what it means to be a democracy insider the EU versus being a satellite state of Putin's Russia. This explains why Ukrainians have no equivocation about whether they want to be in Europe and NATO or part of Russia.

We live in the greatest country.

If U.S. states have any degree of sovereignty, if there’s any states’ rights at all, it is the right not to be invaded by the armed forces of another U.S. state.

Decarbonization at a distance A post-American century that runs on sunshine.

Exceptional Doctorow piece on the solar rollout, why it's unstoppable, & why many old downsides of solar aren't factors anymore. The entire material mining needed 4 a global solar transition = only 17% of the fossil fuel mining we do every year! & then we're done! doctorow.medium.com/https-plural...

'Social collapse is the kind of thing that you can convince yourself sounds fun so long as you're confident that your privilege will isolate you from all of the bad parts.'

Housing is a housing problem – Mountain Doodles The main housing problem in Canada is that there is not enough of it. A call for elevating household formation and doubling up to a primary metric to monitor housing.

New post where @lausterna.bsky.social and I (again) tie our housing problems to a shortage of housing, with doubling up being the link. And we call for tracking doubling up directly as a measure of housing hardship to avoid some of the pitfalls with our standard affordability metrics.

Glad this passed.
Your regular reminder that housing is good, actually. People derive tremendous value from living in housing. We should allow more of it in more places. And make sure everyone has access to it.

Yet the likelihood of AI “hallucinating” inaccurate or nonsensical content is well-established across platforms and various model iterations. Even sycophancy itself has been a problem in AI for “a long time,” says Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, since the human feedback used to fine-tune AI’s responses can encourage answers that prioritize matching a user’s beliefs instead of facts. What’s likely happening with those experiencing ecstatic visions through ChatGPT and other models, he speculates, “is that people with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues,” including what might be recognized as grandiose delusions in clinical sense, “now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions.”

Yup

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

"Foucault's Pendulum" becoming a reality.

The Pick Operating System, also known as the Pick System or simply Pick,[1] is a demand-paged, multi-user, virtual memory, time-sharing computer operating system based around a MultiValue database. Pick is used primarily for business data processing. It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick.

I am 10 years old because I laughed out loud at this today.

Every Canadian Election I approach all the different party leaders and see if they will do an interview / Hip Flip. Here's a clip of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Check out the *FULL* interview at youtu.be/TZmh_PNMImE Doot doo !

me this morning www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/o...

Quite a few Conservative party signs around Point Grey. I've yet to see a Liberal yard sign.

The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account Welcome to the 4chan administration.

“The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

when you don't give a shit about the consequences of breaking a promise then sure go for it. people need to understand: it's not the technology, it's not the software, it's _people making decisions_

you can totally "do a rewrite" in 3 mo if you don't care if it doesn't work for a bunch of people

it's not necessarily the cobol, it's the decades of accretion of bureaucratic rules without enough careful maintenance and documentation, decades of learning edge cases and where reality doesn't fit your assumed model

but sure you can do it in 3 months gfi

This is very good.

Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin | Rebecca Solnit Like all abusive men, dictators seek to control who can speak and which narratives are believed. The only difference is scale, says the US writer Rebecca Solnit

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trump's Threat To Take Over Canada Is a Scandal Trump keeps threatening to annex Canada. Americans would never accept such talk from another country.

Got mad, did another thing www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Trump's cutting of Ukraine's access to intelligence feeds is already inflcting a catastrophic loss of life at the front.

And today, North Koreans are pouring over the border for the first time.

Americans will never be forgiven for this.

eutoday.net/us-intellige...

Opinion | Trump’s Revenge Tour Finds Its True Target (Gift Article) It is hard to describe the president’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.

tired of people treating trump like he is anything other than an ego-driven simpleton (i wrote this, this is a piece about why he is nothing more than an ego driven simpleton.)

Another #earthquake felt in Vancouver and Victoria. 4.4 apparently.

Screenshot from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World 2 of the Park Royal Theatre with a superfluous AIDS joke on the marquee. Ouch.

We recently watched "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 2", which is an HK film set partially in Vancouver. It was neat to see Vancouver from that time and perspective but a lot of the humor was so painful. Like AIDS jokes! Something I'd genuinely forgotten had ever been a thing.

Was it Mr Vampire? Sammo Hung produced and did the choreography for that one, though I don't recall him performing in it.

What a fucking disgrace

I was just in Petaluma and was remembering going to the record store there to buy this.

I'm at UBC too. Felt it (slightly) and heard it (quite well).

The End of the Postwar World Trump and Vance are sending a dark message to America’s allies.

“Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change unfolding, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create”

www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

We just had an earthquake. 4.8, enough to rattle the windows and shake a little bit not too bad. The pickleball in the gym next door was not interrupted.

The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug A series of mistakes by DOGE shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.

When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?

This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s the certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.