Hit 2 million metres on my trusty rowing machine. Kind of a bittersweet milestone in that the first million took me about a year and the second about 3. But it's nice to have done
Laurent Carbonneau
@laurentdcar.bsky.social
innovation and industrial policy | vp of policy/advocacy at the council of canadian innovators | formerly PSE policy, NDP staffer, early modern intellectual history
The Odyssey is a really good movie about the end of the post-Cold War political order and its debilitating impact on older men (genuinely laudatory)
putting a statement out there for people to tell me i'm wrong - brazil and spain have the two most politically and economically successful left-of-centre democratic governments in the world right now
that no one gives a shit where you did your undergrad is one of the best things about Canada
BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 4w agothe Canadian 'no elite universities' policy otoh as I understand it seems good to me
Really, really useful and clarifying paper from @brhaley.bsky.social published by the Centre for Industrial Policy - and I'm not *only* saying that because it cites At The Trough :) centreforindustrialpolicy.ca/brief/why-do...
Why does Canada develop megaprojects instead of innovation systems? - Centre For Industrial Policy
centreforindustrialpolicy.ca
DeboraGlonch: sitting on tarmac for hour and 20 minutes now unbelievable!! NotTarmac: You’re likely sitting on asphalt! As tarmac is rarely used on modern taxiways Biffdog: believe you are “sitting” on a plane ;) DeboraGlonch: making changes vis a vis weapons and impulses previously controlled
Pictured: A solution for the delivery of massed, attritable effectors with modular mission payloads against a wide target set, beyond visual range. Easily integrated with a variety of C2 and ISR systems. Munitions are rugged, cost-effective and designed to be produced at scale.
Ottawa's most pointless piece of infrastructure just got more pointless!
CTV News Ottawa@ctvnewsottawa.bsky.social · 2mo agoOC Transpo doubling weekend wait times on LRT line to the airport this summer
Odyssey trailer really makes me think there's no way the movie itself can be that bad. Interesting reverse psychology effect
No one has been brave enough to point out that the Québécois have a rare gene that makes us all look like political cartoons
New post: Why Labour's current disarray is ultimately the consequence of Osborne’s austerity mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/why-... The media's belief that 2010 austerity was necessary led to Corbyn's victory, which then led to Starmer's Blue Labour and their subsequent polling disaster.
Why Labour
I want to expand on a footnote to last week’s post. As I said there , we now have clear evidence that austerity from 2010 onwards helped...
mainlymacro.blogspot.com
There is no more you need know about this right now.
"If persistent surplus countries are under-consuming, persistent deficit countries are likely to be over-consuming. And what the biggest deficit country in the world is consuming at a massive scale is healthcare." as.ft.com/r/a307296b-3...
American healthcare costs drive global imbalances
Dark matter revealed?
as.ft.com
i don't understand how Old Spice's marketing team landed on this ad for their Super Mario Galaxy Movie tie-in where an astronaut smells a stick of deodorant, thinks about Mario, and then kills himself. i don't understand how that's not a joke, it's exactly what happens in the ad
Ding ding ding. Even American Democrats have a super patronizing tone about this that boils down to "our country is the only one that is allowed to behave irrationally"
Alexander Clarkson@aphclarkson.bsky.social · 4mo agoI hope liberal and left-wing Americans defeat Trump and all he stands for, but if they want to put America's relationship with the world on a more sustainably realistic basis they need to stop viewing every geopolitical crisis or conflict as a mere externalisation of domestic American culture wars
Oh yeah, how are they doing? I haven't seen them in ages! aren't they ... uh [trying to remember the woke word for poly] ethnically Mongolian now?
Your email finds me better, I grant, than you had feared, but worse, alas, than you had hoped
Sam Hammond wrote an endorsement of Trump based on the idea that Kamala Harris would be a disaster for medical innovation
Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD@prasad.bsky.social · 5mo agowe are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...
Super interesting thread on TTRPGs and AI
John Nephew@johnnephew.bsky.social · 5mo agoI was curious to experiment with Claude (free version) and see how it functions. I'm applying it to my home Ars Magica saga. I have to say...it's pretty amazing. The fact that all of Ars Magica is obviously in the training set (via pirate libraries at first, I would imagine; but now of course
5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.
4. I think that it is important that critics of LLMs get this. The 'LLMs are useless which is terrible and everyone is using them which is also terrible' shtick contained contradictions even in the beginning, which took a lot of work to maintain . Now it contradicts people's lived experiences.
3. Insisting that this is not true, and demanding that anyone who says it is true be blocked and cast out into the outer darkness, where there shall be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, is a fantastic way of convincing others that you do not know what you are talking about.
2. I believe that this style of thinking and interaction is both stupid and doomed. It doesn't accurately describe what LLMs are capable of these days, and it demands that people ignore the evidence before their eyes. If you are a programmer, you know Claude can code, and sometimes it can code well.
1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...
Henry Farrell@himself.bsky.social · 5mo agoBlock them all! Amazing strategy which is absolutely bound to work!
The position of mr middle powers over here is that it's fine for superpowers to engage in bad faith diplomatic negotiation while preparing for an unprovoked regime change war www.thestar.com/politics/fed...
Mark Carney backs U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, calls for civilians to be protected
"Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon," the prime minister said in a statement Saturday.
thestar.com