Medha

If you don't live in Alberta, let me explain Alberta politics to you.

1. *long sigh*
2. *incoherent mumbling*
3. *muffled tears*
4. *long sigh*

Thank you for listening.

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy r...

Technology that doesn't work is a desired feature to the surveillance state, not a bug. When everyone is a "maybe" match, then probably cause can be manufactured to justify whatever it is one wanted to do in the first place. www.wired.com/story/cbp-ic...

I am so tired of all the things that we said would happen, and were routinely ignored or dismissed by tech bros and neoliberals for saying would happen, continuing to happen, in exactly the way that we said they would happen.

Nicolás Maduro to join Harvard’s Institute of Politics

Bugs Bunny very exhausted in a white tuxedo drinking a big glass of carrot juice

"wow you study AI regulation? that must be such an exciting field right now!"

more than anything, this should remind you how bad generative has ruined the information ecosystem

Joe Weisenthal @weisenthal.bsky.... • 20m Ongoing demolition in Bitcoin

Ben McKenzie dropping the Seinfeld that’s a shame gif

It remains very fun that the guy from the O.C. and Gotham became one of the biggest and most clearly spoken critics of crypto and is just chilling in the replies dropping the same gifs we would

when the ai bubble bursts it's gonna be a whole Project™ to tease apart neural-nets-the-technology from chatbots-the-product-class in the public consciousness given that these companies have been trying their hardest to confuse everybody about this distinction for the last several years

The undergrads at the Crimson has consistently done a better job at investigating stories--big and small--than some of the legacy papers. Go college journalism.

There are no words for how evil this is

Things are grim but writing this piece forced me to think of a silver lining.

"2026 is a year of honest reckoning of what technologies are needed for government to function properly. It is a chance to revisit all the unglamorous AI already embedded in government. AI without the generative part."

you know, AI/tech policy in city gov, working for Lina Khan, wouldn't be a bad gig

dhoom machale. chef's kiss.

ANALYSIS | Why OpenAI wants to help Canada build homegrown artificial intelligence | CBC News OpenAI wants to help Canada build a sovereign digital infrastructure for artificial intelligence, putting the country in a tough spot as it tries to distance itself from overreliance on U.S. tech comp...

I am once again asking Canadian journalists to ask the most basic-ass question of "on whose land will these be built?" How is it that every other major industry must consider Indigenous rights but with tech it's like "meh".
www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

Excerpt from an article that reads: Lehane met with AI Minister Evan Solomon on Monday. Solomon told The Logic in June that his mission is to “create sovereign AI.” But “sovereignty is not solitude,” Solomon said, noting that Canada still needs technology and capital from other countries. OpenAI is participating in similar initiatives in other advanced economies. In May, the firm launched OpenAI for Countries, a new program that localizes ChatGPT and its underlying models for a nation’s particular customs and the requirements of its public sector. It is also offering to build data centres for countries that help pay for the infrastructure. Countries are turning to OpenAI because of its “cutting-edge technology,” which can be used to build homegrown tools and applications, and because the firm can help stimulate their domestic AI ecosystems by building or buying compute capacity, Lehane said.

Looks like Canada's approach to "sovereign AI" will involve creating structural dependencies on large US tech companies

Working in AI policy rn is like being on a derailed train where the conductor is saying "haha check out this sick trick the train is going so much faster now" and you have to calmly explain to the conductor why actually maybe it is bad that the train has derailed

"OpenAI is Canadian sovereign AI" is astonishing mental gymnastics and it gets worse the more you think about it

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.

Incredible, must-read investigation by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social into how Tea's founder got women to join the app, how its founding story changed, how it spammed Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, how it hired an influencer marketing firm to promote it

www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

Sam Altman spoke at my engineering graduation and basically said degrees are worthless lol 🫠

Say what you want IB but the world could really use some OPVL analysis skills atm

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you”

Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

We got a power crisis on our hands, you get that nuclear power plant started like I asked?

Sure did boss, real far away, just like you asked, true story.

What.

Wesley LePatner, a 44-year-old Blackstone executive who oversaw its $53 billion real-estate investment fund, was killed in Manhattan's mass shooting "We cannot properly express the grief we feel upon the sudden and tragic loss of Wesley," the LePatner family told Fortune, adding she was a "driven and extraordinarily talented professional and colle...

if you use AI to write my obit, I'm going to haunt your ass. you will never get a good night's sleep again. fortune.com/2025/07/29/w...

Kathy Pham and I spoke with @donmoyn.bsky.social about civic tech & reflections on our oral history of USDS.

Thank you to Don for the opportunity, and to Kathy for being such a wonderful partner on all of this work ❤️🙏🏼

And the biggest thanks to our colleagues who trusted us with their stories ❤️

So much research is being done about LLMs that it's hard to stay on top of the literature.

To help with this, I've made a list of all the most important papers from the past 8 years:
rtmccoy.com/pubs/

I hope you enjoy!

it’s worth making this more explicit:
The NYT is suggesting Zohran lied by checking off both “Asian” & “African”, because (in their view) someone of Indian descent born & raised in Africa isn’t “truly” African. Which was also how Idi Amin justified expelling Zohran’s father & thousands of others.

It does suck that "AI" now means both generative AI (boo hiss) and a whole basket of incredibly useful machine learning techniques.

The Deerfoot bloody divide, strikes again. So painful, and so obvious. Harsh, but I'm convinced a lot of this is due to past and present City Councillors in these areas who did the bare minimum to fight for infrastructure and amenities in their wards. Closed mouths don't get fed.

The New York Times and Amazon ink AI licensing deal | TechCrunch Nearly two years after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, The New York Times has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon to train the tech giant’s AI platforms.

The New York Times, after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, has now agreed to license its content to Amazon for training its AI models. This deal includes news, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic, potentially integrating with Alexa. Terms are undisclosed.
#MLSky