Jeff Yang

The Liberal party has Patrick Pichette a former Senior VP of Google on stage who lives in Europe by the way, say that if Canadians want to leave Canada to work in the US they need to pay an exit tax of half a million dollars. The guy did the very thing to get a Microsoft job decades ago and paid 30 bucks. Now he wants young Canadians to be trapped here. The Liberals are nuts.

The Conservatives continue to lose the plot but hey what else is new. Why does Pierre Poilievre increasingly sound like Jagmeet Singh. It's a disgrace that a modern G7 country doesn't have high speed rail. And by not building high-speed rail between its major cities isn't being "fiscally responsible," it’s falling behind once again. This is the moment for big, nation-building infrastructure, not timid politics. Thinking small is exactly how Canada got stuck.

Canada spent $5.1 BILLION fixing a broken payroll system (Phoenix). Now we're about to spend $4.2 BILLION+ replacing it with Dayforce. I went through every lobbying record, every communication report, and every revolving-door hire to identify potential conflicts of interest. Here's what I found. 1/🧵

Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything. Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.” One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts. When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is. They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time. That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological. Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.” Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them. Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened. It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal. And then presents that story to you as fact. Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.” Here’s the part that should stop you cold. You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones. Think about that. Really think about it. Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty. Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently. And you had no idea. This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories. Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong. Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do. It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had. AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture. The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant. You cannot have one without the other. The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation. Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update. It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable. We aren’t building better search engines. We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think. Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong. And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.

How to finally become the 10x engineer: Add WarCraft 3 sounds to Claude hooks to get alerts when it finishes a task or needs permission.

Oh god. ~1 in 3 Anthropic engineers said Claude is likely ALREADY ASL-4 (or <3 months away) 1) ASL-4 (AI Safety Level 4) = AI capable of escaping and causing extinction (!) 2) Anthropic now relies on Claude to safety test ITSELF 3) Claude knows when it's being tested, so they can't properly safety test it anymore (Independent evaluator Apollo Research refused to certify it as safe because their tests don't work anymore.) 4) Claude is too smart for their benchmarks, so they're going on vibes now (employee surveys). Vibes. What's even worse is that Anthropic is the best by far of these out of control companies. To add more nuance: Anthropic followed up with the engineers surveyed. BUT... suspiciously, they ONLY followed up with the ones who said Claude was likely ASL-4, and it looks like they pressured these employees into walking their statements back. Why? Because if Claude IS ASL-4, it's a real problem for Anthropic to release it. And that easily knocks billions of dollars off Anthropic's $380 valuation, which management doesn't want. From the Opus 4.6 system card: "Several of these latter five respondents had given other answers that seemed surprising in light of this (such as simultaneously thinking the model was unlikely to be capable of handling week-long tasks even with human assistance, or giving very low estimates of their own uplift from using the model), so all five were reached out to directly to clarify their views. In all cases the respondents had either been forecasting an easier or different threshold, or had more pessimistic views upon reflection, but we expect assessments like this to become substantially more ambiguous in the future." So, maybe all of the employees legitimately changed their minds when pressured by management, or maybe just they did it to keep their jobs. But whatever. The trend is clear.

BREAKING: US job numbers were revised down by -1,029,000 jobs in 2025, the largest annual revision in at least 20 years. This follows downward revisions of -818,000 in 2024 and -306,000 in 2023. In total, -2,153,000 jobs have been revised out of initially reported data over the last 3 years. Since 2019, -2,500,000 jobs have been erased from official data, with negative revisions occurring in 6 of the last 7 years. By comparison, 2009-2010 combined downward revisions were roughly -1,200,000. What is happening with US labor market data?

turns out asians are by far the safest drivers

A visibly emotional PM Mark Carney on the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. "Parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers in Tumbler Ridge will wake up without someone they love." "The nation mourns with you. Canada stands by you." Flags across all government buildings will be flown at half-mast for the next seven days.

BREAKING: President Trump is privately considering exiting USMCA, the North American trade pact, per Bloomberg.