Around here we don’t do much grownup gift exchanging, but this past Christmas I did get two new things, yes electronics again. A small scale to weigh my coffee grains properly, and a book light that clips to the cover/some bunch of pages. Yes, mid-life first world right there. They don’t do anything like a smartphone or laptop does, they’re not as advanced as my wireless earbuds. Simple single purpose devices. But! Their batteries last forever! I use the scale every day and the light most days, and I haven’t charged either one since opening the presents.

There are, again, various posts about going analog. There’s been a mini trend for dumb phones, but here’s what I’d like; just a more restrained choice of electronics. Not as smart, not doing as many things, just enough, and that last a while on batteries. I don’t have any big theory, I’d just like to have stuff that doesn’t power off all the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Around that time, Howard Scott — a 6’5” man with broad shoulders and a magnetic personality — began delivering fiery lectures across Western Canada. The New York-based engineer and political visionary was the leader of Technocracy Inc., an organization promoting his plan for an economy run by experts, not politicians.

“Politics is the natural approach of morons,” Scott said during a December 1935 speech, according to the Regina Leader-Post. “Socialist, communist, fascist, liberal, conservative, Republican or Democrat — they all stink alike.”

The movement began in the United States in the 1930s. By 1940, it was sweeping across Western Canada. Technocrats were known for wearing identical grey uniforms and saluting one another in what The Daily Province called “Technocrat fashion — right hand raised smartly to eye-level.”

Over his lifetime, Haldeman would lead two Canadian political parties (one of which he founded), campaign against Canadian prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker, write a book defending South Africa’s system of apartheid and spend years flying and driving across the African wilderness with his family — hunting for the Lost City of the Kalahari.

He wrote that since his departure, the organization had begun pushing for the U.S. to take over Canada and Greenland “either by purchase, negotiation or by force of arms” – a position advocated by Howard Scott, who argued for isolationism and a strong continental defence.

Haldeman warned that Quebec and what is now Mexico were being targeted in particular. He quoted Scott as arguing “that these alien cultures on the continent of North America be annihilated. Assimilation is out of the question.”

Many people, myself included, didn’t try to build a product around a language model because during the time you would work on a business-specific dataset, a larger generalist model will be released that will be as good for your business tasks as your smaller specialized model.

The disappointing releases of both GPT-4.5 and Llama 4 have shown that if you don’t train a model to reason with reinforcement learning, increasing its size no longer provides benefits.

Reinforcement learning is limited only to domains where a reward can be assigned to the generation result. Until recently, these domains were math, logic, and code. Recently, these domains have also included factual question answering, where, to find an answer, the model must learn to execute several searches. This is how these “deep search” models have likely been trained.

If your business idea isn’t in these domains, now is the time to start building your business-specific dataset. The potential increase in generalist models’ skills will no longer be a threat.

Via Simon Willison.

Un article dense et fouillé par Robin Berjon qui permet de donner un cadre de réflexion sur la souveraineté numérique. Mon unique souci est que c’est un cadre de pensée qui est profondément ancrée sur les grands systèmes, qu’ils soient de gouvernement et/ou de compagnies. Je suis plutôt dans la recherche d’une recréation des communs, d’un véritable espace public (comme la bibliothèque, les chemins de randonnée, la place du marché, etc) re/lié par une forme d’indépendence très locale. Je peux donner 200 yens à mon enfant de main à main pour qu’il puisse acheter un daifuku à manger. Pas de traçabilité. Pas d’identifications. Une grande simplicité locale et une multitude de fournisseurs possibles. Je veux pouvoir héberger mon serveur Web, mail, etc pour moi et des amis à la maison, sans avoir à passer par de grosses entreprises et de gros centre de données capturant tout le flux. La naïveté est parfois un bon cadre pour trouver des solutions utiles.

Karl Dubost

• There was “dry smog” over Montréal, caused in good part by all the fireplaces burning wood to have nice holiday fires going for Christmas the day before.
• On the radio, a short report on the popularity of fireplace videos on YouTube and Netflix.

When critiquing technology, we often talk about externalities and second order consequences. Dumping your electronics—or, often, even sending them to be recycled—means they eventually end up in landfills or somewhere in the global south, polluting their own lands and contaminating workers with deadly fumes.

Clothing, toys and much of everything, once made locally to the global north, where at least citizens might want to control working conditions, are made elsewhere, often in conditions we wouldn’t accept for our own citizens. Pollution regulations is nonexistent or vastly insufficient, or easily bypassed.

But all of these externalities are somewhere else, possibly unseen when they were made near you, now completely out of sight.

All of this to say that I thought the fireplaces were a nice, clear, easy to cite example of transferring externalities from your own sky to someone else’s. Burn your own real fireplace, you might have undesired smoke inside and will definitely send the rest outside, contributing to bad air conditions. Switch to Netflix, you get no odour, no smoke inside or out, and no smog. Somewhere else though, are massive servers guzzling water from the local aquifer, generating noise, and in some cases being powered by fossil fuels polluting yet another place, the region where the electricity is generated.

When you look at a holiday fireplace, there is smoke somewhere. Over your own head, or someone else’s.

I don’t really have an “official” list of “personal foundational texts,” especially not books I reread, there are so many things to read, I tend to not reread anything. Except younger, where I reread Tintin and Spirou a few times.

In lieu of specific title, what I always come back to is a kind of healthy obsession for quirky scientists and brainy people in general. I loved the two bandes dessinées above, but my favourite characters weren’t the ones in the titles, they were Professeur Tournesol and the count, Pacôme de Champignac.

A couple of years ago, reading Back To The Victorian Future, I wrote this in Sentiers:

Finally, Morus also mentions Tesla as a variation on virtue, with “the inventor as an outsider who had no interest in the mundane world around him, a dreamer ‘who thinks too much’ and wanted ‘more than anything else to be left alone.’” And made me think of all the quirky and / or mad inventors I’ve loved in fiction, Professeur Tournesol, Pacôme de Champignac (and Zorglub), even Doctor Doom and a number of characters on this list of fictional scientists and engineers. I’ve always assumed I was recognizing fellow nerds, but now I’m wondering how it relates with these other archetypes.

Woven into the fabric of the story were assumptions about the relationship between personal virtue, technology and the road to a better future that were deeply ingrained in Victorian culture. For the Victorians, the future was — or could be — utopia, and individual personal virtue was instrumental in producing a collective virtuous future. […]

But Smiles was adamant that biographies of great men offered “illustrious examples of the power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working and steadfast integrity, issuing in the formation of truly noble and manly character.” […]

They demonstrated “that it is not the man of the greatest natural vigor and capacity who achieves the highest results, but he who employs his powers with the greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill — the skill that comes by labor, application and experience.” […]

“When we subscribe to this paradigm about how — and by whom — the future is made, we’re also relinquishing control over that future.”

I’d also add Sherlock Holmes and the more recent, very heavily inspired by Holmes, Aloysius Pendergast. Both detectives of sorts but with a very scientific mind and acerbic wit.

Curiosity, an eye for science, and a wide array of interests. The books they are featured in might not necessarily be a “personal canon,” but they definitely seem to have influenced me. Or of course, I was drawn to them because we “think the same way.”

The other oeuvre I immediately think of in this context, is all of William Gibson‘s writing. Here are two quotes from him, you’ll easily see the connection.

Some speculative writers are architects: they build orderly worlds. But Gibson has a collagist’s mind. He has depicted himself as “burrowing from surface to previously unconnected surface.” His language connects contemporary jargon, with its tactical-technological inflections, to modern states of anxiety and desire.
—How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real

“Gibson’s writing is, on the most basic level, a testament to this obsession with the bizarre and the disturbing: he takes these random, abandoned fragments of our shattered society and fuses them together into a strange and beautiful mosaic of words,” Wershler-Henry writes. “The resulting gestalt, though, is more just than an artistic curiosity.”
—Conversations with William Gibson

Ce matin un camion avec tuyau articulé mêne un bruit d’enfer en pompant ou injectant quelque chose au fond d’un trou, je n’ai pas investigué. En revenant à la maison tantôt, autre camion au coin de la rue, celui-ci est en train de livrer un conteneur, probablement une génératrice pour alimenter certains équipements ou je ne sais trop.

Un petit moment Lessard/Jancovici s’en suit. Lessard pour Martin, qui informe régulièrement notre groupe d’amis sur les enjeux complexes de l’énergie et des changements climatiques, Jancovici pour Jean-Marc Jancovici dont j’ai tout récemment terminé le superbe, indispensable, et un peu pas mal déprimant Le monde sans fin (brillamment illustré par Christophe Blain).

Le premier moment c’est d’entendre ces engins et se demander comment on peut produire des machines si bruyantes pour travailler, entre autre, dans des lieux habités et se demander pourquoi le tout n’est pas électrique. Le moment L/J, c’est quand le moteur devient une machine à carburant fossile qui génère X nombre de kW pour X nombre de kWh, remplacent ainsi X nombre d’humains ou d’esclaves. Le moment c’est le vertige de l’efficacité des carburants fossiles vs les autres formes d’énergie vs la faible puissance d’un humain. À lire.

via GIPHY

Depending how you count, my blog started January 17th 2003 (it was actually just a link in a “linklog” but now appears as a normal post) or January 26th 2003. I’d be tempted to put the actual birth on the date of my first appearance at Yulblog which was, if memory serves, in March. Sadly, the site is down, the Wikipedia entry is no more, and I didn’t post about it, so it’s just old school human memory.

Back then backlinks and link lists were the way you learned about new blogs and/or people writing about you, or you attended a local in person meeting like Yulblog (the oldest and longest running up until 2011, btw). I don’t have the stats but I’m assuming I only started having any kind of remotely significant “profile” when I started going every month. Most of my Montréal friendships and business partnerships emerged, directly or indirectly, from those first years of blogging and Yulblogging.

So yeah, contrary to the vast majority of people I was linking to back then, this site is still up, the somewhat broken archives are still all up, and I’m still blogging once in a while.

For the umpteenth time, I’ll try to get back into regular(ish) blogging and I encourage you to do the same or even start one. Long live blogs!

—

Écrit en anglais parce que je “linkais” à des anglophones mais oui, longue vie aux blogues aussi!

For today though, I wanted to share and note for myself the video below, because it puts into words something I’d never (or not much) thought of in this way but definitely feel every day, whether it’s with the world, the climate crisis, my work, or even family. How do you balance and manage to see, feel, and properly grasp both the good and the bad? How do you make sure you see the good so you keep going, without having to hide the bad?

I still see the scars made by hate and ignorance but I also see a lot that are just made by living by love by trying by pushing maybe too hard too fast because of hubris or maybe just because of excitement and joy and hope and community and mutual thriving and fun.

We are surrounded by aid we are surrounded by joy and surrounded by sorrow …  nothing gets done if there is no room for joy. I know that. Nothing gets done if we only see the harm and nothing gets done if we don’t see the harm so I don’t know which thing to see more.

[I know] that I have to see both and there is a way of doing this where I see one and then the other and then the one and then the other the horror then the beauty then the grief then the joy but that way of doing it doesn’t seem to be helping me get anything done so. Maybe there’s a way to look at the world and see both at the same time.

(I pasted from Youtube’s efficient but horribly formatted transcript, forget the missing punctuation!)

Via Jason.

Below I’m not going to expand on all the issues, just a quick list off the top of my head, and a couple of posts I’ve written elsewhere. Imagine you’re coming from another planet, you look at what ‘we’re’ doing, compare that to what this planet can sustain, and tell me we don’t look completely barking mad.

• We’re still divided in hundreds of countries with immensely unequal living conditions and access to food, shelter, etc. Even within countries, huge inequalities remain between people, often along gender and racial lines.
• Our cities are built around cars that spew out a gas causing health problems and causing the planet to warm beyond the best (only) living conditions the species has ever thrived under.
• The vast majority of the materials we use to build roads and shelters also produce the same gas, pollute in myriad other ways, and we’ve created so much that it has now exceeded the weight of all global living biomass.
• Plastic is produced, and disposed off, at a rate choking our rivers and oceans. Micro-plastics are now in our bodies from birth, because they are so prevalent around everything we accumulate around us.
• As mentioned at the start, three quarters of the land we use for agriculture is spent on raising animals in factories and kill to eat (minus the part we torture for the mothers’ milk). In the process we decimate ecosystems, pollute rivers, and destroy arable land.
• Not only that, but we then go on and waste a full third of the food we produce (40% in the US).
• Most societies on the planet are addicted to consumerism, buying and replacing ‘stuff’ at historically unprecedented rates, destroying and polluting evermore ecosystems.
• Planet-wide, we have been struggling with a virus that we might be able to stop but some individuals keep thinking only of themselves and, more importantly, we are letting companies make billions of dollars in profit instead of spreading the vaccines far and wide around the globe.
• ‘We’ are addicted to ‘productivity,’ convenience, too often blind to what’s going on, barely lifting a finger, by and large making little effort to change things. Those who have the privilege of voting often don’t, too many of those who do choose a short-term feeling of security over long-term viability and equality.

The list could go on, and yes, I could also come up with a list of positives, Future Crunch share a lot of good news, it’s there. But that doesn’t make any of the above less true. We might get out of the current predicament, we can do better, we are doing better in some cases and places, but really, can you honestly tell me that looking at us right now as a species, we don’t look absolutely insane?

* Obviously, ‘our’ and ‘we’ are not great here, considering inequalities at various levels, but let’s use them to mean the human race, in general.