C Barrington-Leigh

@AMAZlNGNATURE please spell it correctly

Opening your balcony while on a cruise to Antartica

--dangerously-skip-permissions (especially before 8am and after 2pm!)

World Happiness Report 2026 is out tomorrow! Here’s what to expect.👇

@DJSnM It's not a meteor when it's human-made. Technically speaking.

Daylight meteor seen over the US

@TeslaCharging Temporarily lowering the price may make sense in some circumstances. Probably not in the present case. It's pure PR.

@TeslaCharging The classic example in game theory classes is that the mayor, in a bid for popularity, announces that meter parking is free for two days around a major holiday. What happens? Zero available parking. The price goes to infinity for (almost) everyone.

Free Supercharging temporarily enabled at Dammam, Saudi Arabia tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Jeddah, Saudi Arabia tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Jeddah, Saudi Arabia - Al Ajawad Street tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Jeddah, Saudi Arabia - Al Amir Sultan tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Riyadh, Saudi Arabia tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Taif, Saudi Arabia tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Doha, QA - Doha Festival City tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Al Dhanna tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Al Maryah tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Al Mirfa tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Masdar Central Park tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Masdar City Centre tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Yas Mall Hypermarket LG tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Abu Dhabi, UAE - Yas Mall Main Entrance tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Ajman, UAE - City Centre tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Al Ain, UAE tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Al Ain, UAE - Hazza Bin Zayed Stadium tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Abu Hail tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Al Habtoor City tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Dubai Hills Grand Atrium tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Dubai Hills Storm Coaster tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Dubai Mall Za’abeel tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Mall of Emirates tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Mall of Emirates tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Meadows Village tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Wadi Al Safa tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Dubai, UAE - Wafi City tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Fujairah, UAE tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Hatta, UAE tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Jebel Ali, UAE - Abu Dhabi bound tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Jebel Ali, UAE - Dubai bound tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Ras Al Khaimah, UAE – Al Naeem Mall tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Sharjah, UAE - City Centre tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Sharjah, UAE - Rahmania Mall tesla.com/findus?bounds=… Sharjah, UAE - Suyoh Mall tesla.com/findus?bounds=…

A propos of my day: The appointment for my first shingles shot is in 15 minutes.

At 11.40pm last night, a monster positive lightning bolt lit up the sky just East of Norman, Oklahoma. And I was in Texas with my camera pointed above that storm, and captured the giant red sprite it produced.

Dr Michael Prinzing @M_Prinzing presented our latest seminar in the McGill - UofT Wellbeing Research Seminar series (2026 March 4): "The Ordinary Concept of a Good Life". youtube.com/watch?v=ZUzkLe… For our full series, see wellbeing.research.mcgill.ca/seminar

We could not be more thrilled to announce our DEEP 2026 Annual Conference happening May 12th! Governing for Wellbeing: Five Years of Canada's Quality of Life Agenda Save the Date! mcgill.ca/equity-ethics-…

Don’t miss the #WHR2026 launch events, where you can explore key findings with the authors and editors themselves, as well as regional experts and commentators. 👉 Find out more and register now: ow.ly/am4Q50YrIfL

About AI, many economists say "we've seen technological breakthroughs in the past met with fear of job loss, and the long-run outcome has always been new jobs and higher wages". This always astonishes me. Things can happen for the first time!! And they surely are.

Be honest, is this relatable??

This month we're releasing the 14th edition of the World Happiness Report. But, before we turn the page on #WHR2025, we’ve revisited its key findings. Read more 👉 mailchi.mp/worldhappiness… Subscribe 👉 worldhappiness.report/subscribe/

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

Our next CHERN McGill-UofT seminar will be by Prof Michael Prinzing @M_Prinzing, on "The Ordinary Concept of a Good Life". Past seminars, and link to registration: wellbeing.research.mcgill.ca/seminar Due to my poor calendaring, CWKN is hosting a webinar at the same time!

📢 New Issue Alert — Applied Research in Quality of Life; Volume 21, Issue 1 is now online, featuring the special theme:🌍 Geography of Happiness and Well-being. Read it here: tinyurl.com/bddr7a58 #GeographyOfHappiness #QualityOfLife #WellBeingResearch #ISQOLS

Hey @McGillU students! Want a summer fellowship to work with a government partner to catalogue and synthesize Wellbeing indicators in Quebec? See this and other projects: mcgill.ca/equity-ethics-… and here for the programme details: mcgill.ca/equity-ethics-… THREE DAYS LEFT!

Hey @McGillU students! Want a summer fellowship to work with a government partner to catalogue and synthesize Wellbeing indicators in Quebec? See this and other projects: mcgill.ca/equity-ethics-… and here for the programme details: mcgill.ca/equity-ethics-… THREE DAYS LEFT!