Justin Cohen

@CTVNews Water is wet?

High blood pressure, heart attacks linked to common preservatives in food ctvnews.ca/health/article…

Hot take: AI doesn't hallucinate. It confabulates. Just like humans do when their ground truth is wrong. And we're building a world where nobody stops to check. New post on the AI series — critical thinking, fake court cases, broken plagiarism detection, coding agents that spiral into rat holes, and why your high school bibliography assignment was more important than you thought. cantechit.com/2026/05/21/the… Is anyone even reading this? Either way I'm still blabbering.

@ambermac quoting @MKBHD "Never buy a product based on future promises"

"Apple has reached a $250 million settlement in a lawsuit that accused the company of exaggerating Apple Intelligence's intelligence. The suit claimed that Apple misled iPhone users about Apple Intelligence, the company's suite of AI tools, before and after the launch of the iPhone 16 in Sep. 2024." mashable.com/article/apple-…

More in my AI Series on the blog. AI makes me 10-20x more productive. By that math I should work 2 days a week. I work 7. Henry Ford figured this out in 1926. We didn't listen then. We're not listening now. And honestly? I'm part of the problem. cantechit.com/2026/05/14/ai-…

@ambermac @jeffmacarthur That's brutal, I would argue -- possibly actionable...

😱 Instagram deleted a PEI artist's business account...and almost 40,000 followers with it. 8 years of her work on the platform...gone! Emily Howard can't reach a human for help. Unacceptable. Full chat on new The AmberMac Show podcast. cc @jeffmacarthur

I hacked a Pen today. Yes. A pen. Like a writing pen. My day is now complete

@TracketPacer You are totally right…. My 20 year old @FlukeCorp NetTool is STILL getting 90% of the job done for me.. It’s got so much power in a tiny little box and solves most problems really quick

not everybody needs to go out & buy the biggest most $$$ piece of test equipment out there! there are many options. for most network admins & the like, a cable qualifier should do just fine

Running local LLMs at full tilt: GPU fans roaring, VRMs & capacitors buzzing/vibrating the whole desk like the machine is alive. My brain started doing the exact same thing — constant mental static, insomnia, skipped meals. Loving the acceleration but paying with “AI brain fry.” New post! cantechit.com/2026/05/08/the… Who else feels the buzz? ⚡🧠 #AI #BrainFry #LocalLLM #DeveloperLife

Develop sustainability. Keeping my coffee hot with a Raspberry Pi 5.

@ambermac @taylor_owen Hot take. You can’t stop kids from using social media any more than you can stop them from smoking, vaping or having s-x. The solution is education. Banning it makes it taboo that just makes them wanting to do it more.

Anyone who understands how social media works also understands that a social media ban for kids is tougher than it looks. Also, as @taylor_owen shared in a recent post, "governments should treat any restriction as a temporary moratorium tied to platform reform, not a permanent ban. A moratorium signals that access will be restored once platforms meet specific, measurable design standards as outlined in the Duty to Protect Children component of the Online Harms Act." This design standard point is especially important. Not only are our kids suffering at the hands of social media giants, but so are many others. These harmful design choices, which put profits over people, are chipping away at public trust. Anecdotally, these two stories come to mind. 1. My mom's Facebook feed is mostly AI slop, fake news, and scammy ads. It's a toxic minefield that preys on anyone who still assumes good faith online. She can't find posts from her friends, just a non-stop firehose of exploitative garbage. This makes sense since recently "Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show." It is a design choice to take advantage of less tech-savvy users. 2. An online friend's Instagram business account disappeared. Just a few days ago, she had almost 40,000 followers after 8 years of investing time and energy in selling her artwork on IG, but her account was shut down without explanation. To date, she has not been able to reach a human or get help getting her account back online. She was cut off overnight for no reason other than what is likely an automated error. It is a design choice to block users from adequate customer support. Also, I don't have enough space in this post to consider the harmful effects of autoplay and infinite scroll on short-form video platforms, which are designed to addict users to radical content and rampant misinformation. This isn't just me saying this. Just two months ago, Big Tech companies were held responsible for intentionally building harmful, addictive platforms (March 2026 landmark social media trials). Canada needs a plan. This shouldn't be a plan that sets us up for failure (which, I think, is the path we're heading down if we believe that a narrow ban will solve so many of our problems). And I say all of this as an early adopter of all emerging tech, including social media and AI. However, I've never been as worried as I am right now that our country is getting so many of these things wrong. In my keynotes to tens of thousands over the years, I know Canadians are stressed about the state of the world and the technology shaping it. It's time that we get sensible and practical about what these tech companies can and can't do, not only for our kids but for all of us. Finally, remember, it is possible to embrace an innovation agenda while also establishing smart regulation. It's not easy or simple, but it's possible, and it's the only way forward.

I'm going to have lunch now - because 4 swarms of agents have been giving a ton of work to do, and i'll review more actual work in 1 hour, than I used to review in weeks.. Innovate at the speed of light.

@TracketPacer If nothing else, the amount of content and tools that are free with @CiscoNetAcad is absolutely outstanding, pair that with free access to dCloud resources....

anybody have any tips for this pal in kenya looking for hardware to practice on?

AI companies aren’t tool vendors. They’re drug dealers. Generous free samples → get you hooked on god-mode productivity → then price hikes + token shrinkflation. I just did 2 days cold turkey. Withdrawal was real. Worse: this should stay cheap. The broke 20yo with the killer idea and devs in emerging markets need this too. Gatekeep it and we kill the next wave of innovation. Full post: cantechit.com/2026/05/05/ai-… Who else is feeling the squeeze? #AI

@hiarun02 I am…. For one workflow, but I may switch for another

Is anyone still using VSCode instead of switching fully to Claude Code, Cursor IDE, or OpenAI Codex? Or am I the only one?

@TracketPacer People just don't understand how hot PHYs can get and how much power they suck up. I once did a calculation for a customer with 15,000 AP's about how much power they would save if they just set the ports to 100Mb instead of 5GB at night. It was significant.

so im learning about embedded design lately

Sorry for the shameless self promotion on this topic, but I wrote about this one back in December... With data to back it up. My personal savings were nearly 50% over gas give or take over a 5 year period, an extraoplated savings over 10 years could have been $ 30K + cantechit.com/2025/12/24/5-y…

💰Between $23,000-$32,000: This is the amount Canadians can potentially save over 10 years by switching to an electric vehicle. Get our full 30-minute conversation on EVs on this week's The AmberMac Show podcast, now available here: bio.site/ambermac

@ambermac Are the tech companies using drug dealer strategy? cantechit.com/2026/04/28/git…

I agree that this is inevitable.

Hate to say I called it… @github Copilot just went full usage-based billing. Claude Opus now 27x credits. The $39/mo “1-2 full-time devs in my pocket” era is officially over. I predicted this two weeks ago. This is only the beginning. New post with full breakdown + best VS Code / IDE alternatives (Cursor, continue, etc.) dropping now. cantechit.com/2026/04/28/git… Who’s already switching? What’s your new setup? 👇

@ambermac Without question. We are getting 2-3X more stuff done in the Innovation Labs now thanks to efficient and VERY inexpensive coding agents. IMO, this stuff is way under valued, i'm expecting the costs to skyrocket.

"The transition from AI as a chatbot to AI as a workforce is no longer a theoretical projection… Anthropic signaled this shift with a dual release: a complete redesign of the Claude Code desktop app (for Mac and Windows) and the launch of Routines in research preview." venturebeat.com/orchestration/…

Prompt Engineering is the new development language. The difference between great output from coding models, and meh output - is all in the prompt....