Scott Baker

@levelsio Hard to argue this if you don’t apply it to any entitlement. Not to mention any beneficiary group from any policy. Pork barrel politics is a major issue but if you try to rid it through disenfranchisement you don’t have a functional democracy

You see this actively happening in Brazil and others parts of South America where 1) part of the voter populace is less educated 2) politicans figured out if they promise to continue or expand free money to those people, they will 3) all vote for them to get into power, resulting in 4) the country slowly going bankrupt and its currency continually getting devalued, and long term 5) the country as a whole becoming poorer compared to the rest of the world So yes people receiving free money should not be able to vote It bankrupts countries once politicans discover this cheat code to get elected, it's literally a cheat code!

@libsoftiktok that is a remarkably disingenuous interpretation of that clip.

OMG Newsom just accidentally admitted that illegals vote in elections But Democrats insisted for months that this isn’t happening…

@pitdesi @Detour I've longed for this app!

One app I really miss: @Detour It was an immersive podcast experience that blended storytelling with location- you’d walk through a city while an amazing narrator (like Ken Burns) guided you, syncing their voice to your exact position... you could do them at your own speed, the audio would work even if you walked faster. It felt like being inside a documentary, with local voices, hidden histories, and personal anecdotes unfolding as you moved. It was founded by @andrewmason (post-Groupon)... at the time (10 yrs ago) it was one of the best demos I’d ever gotten. Intimate, place-based audio. I think it probably struggled as a business (not sure how you acquire customers for a travel app like this), was acquired and shut down by Bose in 2018. No replacement has captured that magic for me since. They spun out the tech that they used to build it, and it became @descript (audio & video editor) You could make a better version today with AI, personalized to the user. Imagine: NYC, by Lin-Manuel Miranda Mumbai, by Suketu Mehta the sounds of Reykjavík, by Bjork A foodie tour of Rome, by Massimo Bottura Mexico City Taco Truck Tour, by Rick Bayless

@acoyne democracy is the worst system, except for all the other ones.

This is just wretched: a bunch of costly, bureaucratic, ineffective programs that as an economist he knows won't work, at a time when the economy is already struggling. But that's where we are. Bipartisan consensus to do the stupidest possible thing — not just instead of carbon pricing, but in place of a pricing regime that was *already up and running.* Utter madness. Mark Carney says he would immediately scrap Justin Trudeau’s consumer carbon price. Here’s what he’d replace it with instapaper.com/text?u=https%3…

@henrythe9ths AI Guide

There's a shocking fact about AI that nobody tells you: You can catch up to the public AI research frontier in just 2 weeks. Yes, really. I've built a $150M annual revenue startup over the last 8 years and If I were to start a company today, I’d drop everything and go all-in on AI. But like many busy software builders, I felt lost—overwhelmed by the noisy, crowded and fast-moving modern AI landscape. And I wasn’t alone. So I spent my entire holiday diving deep into AI research—reading 30+ papers, watching hours of lectures, analyzing trends, and catching up to the research frontier. ✨ Here’s what I learned: - You don’t need months (or years) to catch up. - You don’t need a PhD or decades of ML experience. - You need fewer than 20 papers and 2 weeks to understand the major breakthroughs shaping AI today. It's because the technology is extremely nascent and most techniques that came before are no longer relevant: - ChatGPT is barely 2 years old and Transformers are only 7 years old. - Most game-changing discoveries happened within the last 4 years, driven by a few breakthrough ideas, scaling laws, and efficient matrix multiplication. The biggest secret? Many groundbreaking AI papers with thousands of citations are surprisingly simple and applied, like adding "let's think step by step" to the prompt, or simply asking the LLM over and over again to improve its answer (Self-Refine). I realized there are tons of founders and builders in the same boat—wanting to dive deeper into AI but unsure where to start. I've created an essential AI Guide that helped me catch up, in just 2 weeks, to the frontier of public AI research to figure out where the next opportunities and gaps were: - Curated list of only the most important papers - Simple explanations of key concepts - Clear pathway to understanding the frontier of modern AI It’s perfect for: - Founders expanding into AI - Builders wanting to innovate at the frontier of AI - Investors looking to separate the signal from the noise 👇 Want the full guide? - Like and Share this post - Comment "AI Guide" - I'll send you the complete guide (ps, I’m also teaming up with @VishalVasishth, co-founder of @obviousvc with @ev (focused on large-scale societal impact companies like Twitter, Medium, Beyond Meat), to host a small meetup to discuss what's working and needs to be solved in the AI stack in SF. Message me if you're interested)

Fascinating research

@mattyglesias #2 is pretty hard to defend

Give the Onion more tech! Incredible

@drvolts And then, there are of course the elites who support him, and I think that is largely just a selfish evaluation of who will enact their interests.

@drvolts ...this explains why elites find him so horrible. Elites are closer to institutions of power, and so they understand that not all politicians are craven and corrupt, they haven't dismissed the whole institution and therefore evaluate trump within this moral universe.

@drvolts Also I think cognitive dissonance is remarkably powerful. But I think its mostly that first thing.

@drvolts ...they believe all politicians are craven and corrupt and have written off the whole enterprise. So Trump's conduct operates in a parallel moral universe where they (conveniently) don't feel morally obligated to judge...

@sama Getting this warning. Any idea why?

searching for a chrome extension is not easy, so here is the link: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt…

@TalktoARYZE Agreed. Pizza garden is both incredible and unpretentious. I was obsessed when I lived in Vancouver a decade ago

New to Victoria Pizza Garden just might be better then Prima Strada 🤯 The king remains, Standard Pizza 👑 Happy to have another pizza place in downtown Victoria!!

@Locati0ns The oil patch in north Dakota is really something to behold for light pollution!

On a light pollution map of the US, what's with the well-defined line down the middle of the country?

@tonydc1961 @donnelly_b I bike commuted in Toronto year round without any problem for ten years. There are 2-3 days where it’s hard.

@donnelly_b Toronto, Canada. November 1st to April 31st. Not fit for man nor beast. I’m guessing you wear your shorts with your partner’s leggings to stay warm on your bike in January.

This is me being a capitalist. Time is money. #BikeTO

casualties vs media mentions in gaza and ukaine for first 100 days of the wars

@TalktoARYZE Awesome

Here is a bike lane, fall trees, e-bike, and turkey dinner for 18 people. What’s not here is a 6,000lb SUV to pickup 25lbs of food supplies. I’m thankful for the leadership of ppl before me that helped build the foundations of a compact, bikeable city that we all get to enjoy 🙏🏽

@bobmackin Incredible value. He should charge more.

Uytae Lee invoiced Vancouver taxpayers $12,600 for a video about the Vancouver Plan. He is an NDP-appointee to the BC Housing board. #bcpoli