"destroying books to digitize them is a necessary evil imposed directly by publishers" is true but I think we are maybe overstating how bad it actually is coming up with a valid use for pallets of damaged/used books, sold by the pound, is recycling. they would've been thrown away otherwise

I think an interesting thing about politics right now is that there are a lot of people who want an emotionally satisfying experience from their politicians. This is very often at odds with pragmatism. You see different versions of this at all points on the political spectrum.

Sneak peek: I implemented a 3 layer MLP that predicts the fashion MNIST dataset using SQL (with my own autograd impl inside the database). Apparently einsum notation is better expressed as a JOIN. github.com/xqlsystems/x...

xarray-sql/benchmarks/nn.py at claude/xarray-sql-mnist-demo · xqlsystems/xarray-sql

An experiment to query Xarray datasets with SQL. Contribute to xqlsystems/xarray-sql development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Al Merose@al.merose.com · last mo.

It turns out SQL is an even simpler for writing NNs than JAX. With this arrays-are-pivoted-tables notion, then vmap completely goes away. You just have `grad’, `jvp` and `vjp` on columns which are Nd arrays. “Hard” tensor math is a dumb JOIN. matmul is a JOIN and GROUP BY and SUM.

This is a great, strategic set of donations. And Damien is right - given how important these races are, what it takes to raise an important amount of money is surprisingly modest. I've matched his first donation and will work on the others.

Damien Moule@damienmoule.bsky.social · last mo.

Since the last municipal election, I saved up $1,200 to donate to candidates this election. Here is a🧵that goes through my decision making process and hopefully serves as a donation guide to you if you're thinking about donating (which I hope you do as you can have a disproportionate impact) 1/

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

This interpretation is wrong and backwards. Good apps were really expensive to make, and were only feasible if they were going to appeal to masses. Reducing the cost means more is produced, _and_ each one can be for a small audience that _really_ wants it vs tonnes of people who _kinda_ want it.

Patrick Galey@patrickgaley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Please enjoy this graph from a FT article explaining that AI hasn’t added any value (no, debt and circular investment isn’t value) It has produced More Stuff, it’s just the Stuff isn’t useable or fixable. Welcome to the age of everyone making apps no one uses

The municipality is hosting a Scan-a-thon event at the Keshen Goodman Library on Saturday, June 6 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Scan-a-thon is an annual event that offers residents an opportunity to contribute personal photos to the municipal archives. Details: www.halifax.ca/home/news/re...

Have to say, "for coders who don't want to code" could be an interesting marketing campaign for (say) the Claude Excel plugin, or other "End user programming" applications.

Anchorage Man@sethpartnow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

So, @edzitron.com ate his Wheatties this morning

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

"We have produced generations of adults who can name the Prime Minister but not their ward councillor. Who follow a federal budget with more attention than a municipal capital plan that will determine whether their water main gets replaced before it fails." Local politics matter. #WRpoli

The Meeting That Decided Your Street (You Weren’t There)

Municipal elections shape your street, your water, your housing costs, and your neighbourhood’s future. Across Canada, the 2026 cycle is already starting. Here is what is being decided, who is decidin

lenispooner.substack.com

We forget how long it took people to learn how to use search engines. People who were good with card catalogs were actually at a disadvantage. Now we’re in the same situation; people familiar with Google just want to type in « write a project management software » and expect a good answer

Generational tweet that might even spawn a school of architecture.

In Canada there's a growing movement to get rid of algorithmic pricing - but a longer-running, more insidious, and more consequential problem has always been algorithmic advertising. It hollows out media, toxifies politics, and entrenches US-based personal-data-collection oligopolies.

Hamilton Nolan@hamiltonnolan.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Why are all the journalists laid off now" this is why. Pretty simple.

I've detailed those process to people and no one believes me. "You have to tell them how to do it right, and what will happen when they don't. Then you have to let them eat it. Just absolutely lose teeth over it"

Crystal Lewis@cghlewis.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I was asked to speak with a graduate class today about research data management. I was asked, "How do people become convinced that beginning data management early on in a project is worth it?" Me: "Suffering. They usual have to suffer first." 😅

I was asked to speak with a graduate class today about research data management. I was asked, "How do people become convinced that beginning data management early on in a project is worth it?" Me: "Suffering. They usual have to suffer first." 😅

I think there's almost a 1:1 skill transfer from mentoring people to skilled LLM use. If you can supervise and train someone skilled & confident but with big blind spots, you can use an LLM well. Patience, clear instructions, expecting things won't be perfect on the first try, build skill over time.

✧⁺⋆🌘 Dream Rotator NPC Alex 🌒⋆.˚₊✩@lastnpcalex.agency · 4mo ago

im not exactly convinced you can reskill into AI. what does that even mean? the "skills issues" points to things like curiosity, epistemology, domain expertise, good judgement, taste, etc which were all things we largely failed to systematically skill over the last two decades

I knew it intellectually, but getting an e-bike showed me _viscerally_ how wildly battery technology has advanced. My (pretty heavy!) pedal-assist bike and I (pretty heavy!) have tooled around a few hours up hills that were otherwise daunting and this battery that I can easily hold is still ~100%.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

Emperor Abby (the first pope)@arobertswrites.com · 4mo ago

L to the M to the A to the O

I think it's really an underrated moral issue (let along a political economy one) that we've sort of let scams and scam adjacent activities (sports betting, car dealerships, most retail interactions with skilled trades, crypto, etc) pervade the economy from top to bottom.

It’s very simple, everyone. By setting up 50 public-run grocery stores (fine, whatever), one for every 800,000 Canadians, at a cost of $7M each to set up (??) and $6M/yr to run (???) this will cut $60B (???) a year off of Canadian’s grocery bills. Elementary arithmetic.

Scott Robertson@sarobertson.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Avi Lewis: "We have a very clear plan to cut grocery prices by 30-40% for Canadians at a cost to the federal government ... We'd subsidize it. It costs $350m to launch and $300m a year, which is one-half of 1% of the current defence budget."

Hey Matt Gurney, I’ve got a great new personal finance/banking app - it’s awesome, just finishing coding it up just for you. Dare you to reject it!

Bernie Michalik@berniemichalik.ca · 4mo ago

This quote: "We need more of that in Canada. A lot more. Someone should code a better payroll system for the feds and offer it up free. Dare them to reject it." If you even think this is remotely possible, you've just proven you don't know what you are talking about.

This is why progressives win in Toronto but never Really Win. Instead of saying "Bradford's support proves we should have moved on platform doors sooner," you leave the issue out there for him to own, and in six months you'll complain that a transit safety and efficiency issue is 'right-coded.'

I want a 100-car funereal motorcade of city vehicles for Peter Clark's procession the way we do for cops. I want the roads closed, the City flag flown at half-mast, and it to be covered on the radio the way we do when a police officer dies.

Occasional Transpo@occtranspo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Now it's a fatality. 55 year old cut short. And what are we going to do about it? What changes will we see? Every year we have our statistical death count. Every year we have thoughts and prayers. Let's get solutions and get lethal drivers off the road.

So $175 for ~18 months is interesting from an Alberta politics point of view, yes? Windfall profits and AB gov’t flush with cash, but huge consumer pain; too short a timeframe and too much uncertainty to justify investment/jobs other than some debottlenecking/optimisation? Does that sound right?

George Pearkes@peark.es · 5mo ago

$UAL *would* drop this on a Friday night wouldn’t they.

Half joking: This is what it's like to be a senior technical leader.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 6mo ago

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

“Effectively, when we approve neighbourhoods that we know operate at a net loss, we are approving future tax increases.” edmontonjournal.com/news/local-n... TLDR: If you're against allowing established neighbourhoods to densify faster and with more intensity, here's an alternative way to grow.

Net-loss new neighbourhoods mean higher taxes, warns Edmonton councillor

New Kettle Lakes neighbourhood structure plan will need tweaking just to be revenue neutral, says O-Day'min coun. Anne Stevenson.

edmontonjournal.com

In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the rich protagonist whose wealth allowed him such a life of leisure that he orchestrated a robbery simply out of idle boredom had a personal wealth of $4 million (~$35 million today)

Charlotte Clymer@charlotteclymer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Jeff Bezos' wedding last summer cost somewhere around $50M. That, alone, could have saved all 300 positions cut today at The Washington Post for a year. Of course, he wouldn't have to choose. He could do both because he's worth $250B, which is nearly the GDP of New Zealand.

"Way more people should be in charge of something mundane they’re held accountable for" is one of my hobby horses. Viscerally understanding how hard it is to get and keep five people coordinated well enough to get the weekly inventory counts done right cuts down on a lot of magical thinking.