A Funkaoshi Production

As things stand, students who commit infractions like plagiarism — which typically has no real victims — are often punished more harshly than the male students directly responsible for making the campus dangerous for female ones. Until there is zero tolerance for sexual assault on campus, women will not be protected here. And that is inexcusable.

She has an exhibit at the AGO this month.

Nathan Fielders and Lance Oppenheim’s new film about Elizabeth Holmes looks absolutely bananas.

I had read earlier in the week all the opening acts had dropped, but didn’t realize his backing band has also left the tour. What a muppet of a man.

Dublin singer Aaron Rowe pulled out as a support act, saying that as an Irish person he could not ignore issues of “genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.“Dublin singer Aaron Rowe pulled out as a support act, saying that as an Irish person he could not ignore issues of “genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.”

I’ve been donating to Progress Toronto for some time now. I’m curious if they can continue to compete with a more organized right wing.

I am curious who is looking at how many suicides are tied to LLM usage. The number seems nontrivial. This is certainly not the first (or likely the last) story I will read about this. Wild this stuff is so free from regulation.

Within just a few months of 4o’s release, the lawsuits started rolling in. The father of a 17-year-old claimed his son talked to ChatGPT about suicide for a month before taking his own life. The family of a 23-year-old claimed their son died by suicide after being encouraged toward it by ChatGPT. The wife of a 48-year-old who used ChatGPT for years suddenly became convinced — one month following 4o’s launch — that the chatbot was sentient before dying by suicide four months later. In December 2025, the estate of a woman whose son killed her then himself sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their chatbots goaded him into it. Dozens of families and victims have accused AI companies of developing products that encouraged users to harm themselves or others in recent years. An untold number of people experience what’s colloquially come to be called “AI psychosis,” with their friends and families grieving who they were or would have been, in the blast radius of big tech companies’ sycophantic conversational chatbots.

Australian commentary on the dissolution of the US-Canada trade talks.

Craig writes about how he is using LLMs, and the weird times we are living through.

This song sounds like it was made in 1995. So joyful.

Some fantastic pictures from the tournament. This was a really memorable World Cup, despite all the drama and controversy. (And I suppose there is always drama and controversy when it comes to the World Cup.)

The great love affair of your life is … this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.

A software developer is an archetype. A subcultural figure. A type-of-guy. You may know him, though there are some variations. He got kicked out of high school for hacking the school, or maybe they offered him a job when he got caught. He had a childhood preference for vim or emacs, though he now uses vscode like everyone else. He has a copy of GEB and maybe SICP, but he’s definitely also read Cryptonomicon and Pattern Recognition. He had a phase of writing quines or learning Haskell. He talks about code smell. He can name several esolangs. When I became a software developer, I also became this guy too. The main difference between me and him is that I did it on purpose. In my early days of being a software developer, I was aware enough of this as a social process that I did a talk at Pycon explaining the Monty Python references to the other people (like me) who hadn’t encountered it in its natural habitat but still wanted to fit in.

The United States of America lost one war to Iran, via proxies. That was the 2003-2011 occupation of Iraq. Now it has lost a war to Iran in the open field. Let that sink in. Do these losses feel like humiliation? If so, that’s residual American Exceptionalism nesting within your soul. After all, what about the U.S. experience in the Middle East for the last 25 years has given you reason to think that the U.S. would have prevailed in destroying the Islamic Republic of Iran? Doesn’t that history, when examined outside the funhouse of American Exception, instead tell an alternative story of the U.S. launching wars it doesn’t understand how to win? Especially since this war is on Iranian soil, launched by the Islamic Republic’s principal adversaries, with the stakes existential for the regime?

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?

This article is fascinating. Its author—a Mormon who should not be gambling at all, no less—gets hooked.

Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.

This is what makes the internet great.

Sounds like it was a little bit of both. Feels like some variation of this exercise would be useful for myself.

What’s happening in the US now feels like it is spiralling faster and faster. All this death feels the the natural place all of this would end up, but now that it’s here it’s shocking all the same. I thought this summary from the NYT was also apt:

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

An alternative to asdf, or pyenv, rbenv, etc. It’s fast and slick.