I would love it if we all took note of (and remembered) the following: the guy everyone knows is a sociopathic, purely self-interested, unrepentantly gleeful liar who is also visibly going through serious mental decline makes a long and incoherent speech without any indication that much of what he said is true in even the most cursory sense and traders say "yeah, good enough." Entrusting society's material future to the stock market is rational, ennit?
I have basically mildly positive feelings about Gemini Nano being available in Chrome. I don't use Chrome, but lots of stuff should be done on-device, not off. That's a win.
If "software shouldn't have features i don't like" is the argument you're actually making, that's not really a good argument. Even when the feature is an LLM model.
"Chrome is getting big and bloated and we can do better” is absolutely a good argument you can make.
And then the real kicker: Google pushing the web platform around through dominance is just the real ick here. It's the same sort of thing monopoly power enables. Companies that own verticals in the economy or a product market can dictate rather than negotiate. This is, in general, bad. Google does this, not because the ideas its employees put forward are good, but because they work out to be in Google's interests. And those interests can run counter to the rest of the world.
That's what we have to push back on.
“Perhaps, nothing is abnormal about Operation Epic Fury. It’s what ‘forever wars’ America does; especially when led by a psychologically impaired president. Perhaps, however, something more disturbing is at issue. America is in decline … What is ‘epic’ about American ‘fury’ is that [it] is the murderous folly of a flailing, failing empire.”
I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.
Filing: Broadcom agrees to produce future versions of Google's TPUs and expands its Anthropic deal to give the startup access to ~3.5 GW of computing capacity (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/06/broadcom-agrees-to-expanded…
I spend a lot of time being worried or angry or annoyed at the way that generative ai fervor is undermining our ecosystems (environmental, cultural, epistemic, digital, etc).
But right now I'm just feeling mournful. Seeing project after project, institution after institution run enthusiastically into a future where we boil our oceans to better insulate ourselves from one another is ... tragic. We're losing a lot right now, and we're going to have to come to terms with that.…
Mullin’s appointment to lead DHS raises questions about future of CISA
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2026/03/mullins-appointment-lead-dhs-raises-questions-about-future-cisa/411943/
So the new #Kreutz #comet #MAPS is *still* following the constant rapid rise in brightness it has shown since discovery: a dumb extrapolation - https://cobs.si/analysis/?comet=2688&from_date=2026-01-15 00:00&to_date=2026-04-30 00:00&observation_type=V&observation_type=C&plot_x_value=1&plot_y_value=1&fit_option=1&exclude_faint=on&exclude_issue=on&observer=&association=&country=&compare_values=compare - has it get 10,000-times brighter than the Sun at its extremely close perihelion which makes so sense at all, of course, physically.
"It must therefore be assumed that this increase in activity will level off significantly in the near future," writes https://fg-kometen.vdsastro.de/koj_2026/c2026a1/26a1eaus.htm: "More likely are parameters m m0=12.0 mag / n=4 (or even lower), which would still result in a (very short-term) maximum brightness of about –9 mag (but this would probably still be significantly too bright) – always assuming that the comet survives its perihelion passage unscathed."
For other views see http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/iau/cbet/005600/CBET005663.txt and https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17626 and https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10236580364221799 and https://cometografia.es/cometa-kreutz-2026-a1-maps-analisis/ - and the actual brightness is tracked at https://cobs.si/obs_list?id=2688 where it has reached ~11.5 mag. now.
Very proud and excited to vote in the NDP leadership race today!!
This is not the first time I've voted in a Federal leadership race... more on that later but first, my choices! I considered only voting for two people, but I ended up filling in all 5 choices.
#1: Tanille Johnston @…
#2: Avi Lewis @…
#3: Heather McPherson
#4: Tony McQuail
#5: Rob Ashton
Why?
You might ask why I would publicize my choices. I don’t expect others to of course. It is a privilege and a right in Canada to exercise your democratic choice freely and privately, but I also think there is value in knowing how others voted.
#1 why Tanille? #electoralReform and proportional representation myself, I didn't just want to pick my top two. I wanted to make a statement on each of these candidates an influence each one.
To be blunt, Heather is #3 because she is the middle-of-the-road candidate. She is an excellent representative as MP and has gathered the support of other MPs including my own, but while I would be OK with her leadership, I would see her as a continuation of the status quo, and that is not what the NDP needs as a party, nor is it what Canada needs as a country.
We desperately need a vigorous and clear alternative to the Centre-but-mostly-Right Liberals, and the MAGA-wannabe Conservatives. The only way to do that is to catch the attention of Canadians and inspire them. I am not sure that Heather has the ability to do that, and if we continue with the same leadership crew in the NDP, I am not confident that the policy choices will be strong enough to inspire and attract Canadians.
That is why Tanille and Avi are far better options.
#4 Why Tony:
Tony is the real deal. Honestly, I would have loved to rank him higher. He represents the true life blood of rural, socially progressive, environmentally aware, Canadians. You should go check out his platform. I am so glad that he was able to participate fully in the race and we need his voice in the NDP.
#5 Why not Rob?
I have been an active member in my Union for more than 10 years. Unionism is The Way. Rob is representing a division within the union movement that claims that working people can't have jobs if the environment is put first. This is a lie.
We need union leaders that look to the future and speak honestly to people. We need union leaders who are genuinely progressive, not ready to do the bidding of corporate masters to the benefit of a few.
Working people need honesty, and when an industry is on decline, a clear path to new, excellent, union, jobs!
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Liberal #CPC #Canada #Democracy #NDP
Future says Google traffic fell 20% in the six months to March 31, a sharp acceleration on the year to September 2025; FUTR falls 25% to its lowest since 2017 (Dominic Ponsford/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/magazines/why-future-share-…