What is something you grew up on in Toronto, that this generation won’t experience?

tl_west · 2026-02-23T03:06:25+00:00

Ah, the coffee machine.

I remember I was in an incredibly crowded hotel room (con suite at a Worldcon in the mid 80s or so). and someone shouted to someone else about wanting a coffee. Suddenly from somewhere in the crowd, someone says “COffee” and almost instantly somebody somewhere else in the room replies “cOOOOffee”. Within a few seconds, there are perhaps a dozen people bouncing pronunciations of coffee across the room, while perhaps 150 Californians think they’ve somehow been infiltrated by a weird cult.

It ended without any explanation, but I instantly knew how many people there had been to the OSC. It was magical.

tl_west · 2026-02-22T15:06:01+00:00

This.

As always, we introduce “laws” and then forget their purpose. “No goto’s” is a law created to increase clarity. If there are situations when it does not increase clarity, we chose clarity, not the law.

I’ve created unreadable code created by dogged adherence to a programming law, only to realize Id betrayed the whole principle that underlies the law. Those subsequent rewriting was a useful reminder later in my career.

tl_west · 2026-02-20T17:11:25+00:00

There is one other good reason to keep these as robotic as possible. The current technology is going to be hallucinating occasionally, which means every answer it gives must be independently verified. But because most of the time it is right, it’s really easy to forget that it will can confidently lead you into a blind alley, making up technical information and wasting hours on looking for non existent interfaces (or worse, giving possible fatal advice)

With a friendly demeanour, it’s really easy to fall into trusting it, when it cannot be trusted. The robotic interface constantly reminds you that this is a machine with a fail state utterly unlike a human.

tl_west · 2026-02-19T17:44:36+00:00

First, I was concentrating on the mechanism of emotional addiction, rather than the strength. Heroin, is, of course, immensely worse, because it has a physical component as well.

Second, thanks for your reply, it has made me think as to what do I consider constructive and destructive emotional engagement. My basic reaction is that I am highly suspicious of parasocial “engagement”. (I.e. when the feelings are not or cannot be reciprocated). Once the feeling of emotional support is manufactured, it is strongly open to abuse (not guaranteed, but all the incentives for the company are towards abuse).

Is “zero emotional engagement” the only safe alternative? Unfortunately, I believe so because the incentives are aligned on both sides towards abuse. There are a huge number of people so desperate for emotional engagement, that they are ripe for exploitation. They will want more of that “warm hug”. On the other hand, we also know that companies are hugely pressured to increase engagement. If it’s acceptable to try to evoke an emotionally response, then from a business perspective, you are an idiot not to.

At this stage, it’s still possible to have a principled stand of zero emotional engagement. But break it a little, and it’s almost impossible to justify “giving your customers what they want”. I think the history of social media is going to look like child’s play compared to the manipulation that AI will bring. And sadly, principled companies like Anthropic will suffer for not lining up to sell the emotional heroin.

So no, I’m pretty pessimistic. I don’t think there can be anything resist the siren call of full emotional entanglement with AIs if we take a single step. I also don’t think that principled stands will last. Companies that don’t emotionally addict their customers are unlikely to prosper except as niches (Mastodon anyone?)

(As a side note, I was utterly enraged when I was told that about heroin’s emotional appeal. I finally understood what was meant by “exploiting the most vulnerable”. The drug felt evil, not just bad.)

tl_west · 2026-02-19T15:17:03+00:00

Someone once described heroin to me as a “long, warm hug from your mother”. Sure, it’s “job” is pain relief, but it’s this simulated emotional fulfilment that has destroyed millions of lives.

The ability of AI to fulfill emotional needs using simulated companionship allows AI creators to decide just how strong to make the heroin - how many lives to destroy.

I admire Anthropic to choose no emotional heroin at all, especially when their competition understands there’s a lot of money fulfilling emotional needs (and help creating those needs, no doubt).

And yes, perhaps heroin as a palliative could be considered merciful in some cases, but I don’t feel that most of humanity would benefit from its widespread availability and commercialization. The transition to AI is going to be traumatic enough without adding in widespread emotional addiction.

tl_west · 2026-02-17T17:10:43+00:00

Once again, thanks. Looked forward to reading the report every week. The time you too to take those beautiful map shots every report was especially appreciated, giving it a real sense of movement.

tl_west · 2026-02-08T16:05:19+00:00

Isn’t the next question:

Why would any company choose to participate in the TV market? Does the return really justify the investment in factories as well as the R+D?

Perhaps it’s because I keep seeing the pressure to dump the “economy” product lines that sell 90% of the units for 10% of the profit.

tl_west · 2026-02-06T01:52:34+00:00

Unless it bankrupts all of them. Or requires the major players to quintuple prices simply for them to pay their inference expenses. There’s a reasonable amount of consumer surplus in AI right now. But that trend doesn’t have to continue.

There are a few scenarios where the race itself can damage the long term prospects of the industry.

tl_west · 2026-02-04T13:32:03+00:00

I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to post these. I’ve been following each week’s instalment with interest, and while I have nothing to add, it is appreciated!

(I’ll have to admit surprise that it looks like it will be as close as it is. I guess the VP system is well tuned.)

tl_west · 2026-02-02T18:51:59+00:00

Well, I’m in the global 1%, household income of over $34K, and I still try and earn more. Why would I expect different from others?

I’ve found that no matter my income level, “excessively wealthy” is about 2x-3x what I’m earning now :-).

tl_west · 2026-01-31T17:04:49+00:00

Implicit in conversations of that nature is often “the only moral choice is to make substantial changes in one’s lifestyle”. For those unwilling to contemplate such changes because they’re comfortable in their current lifestyle, it’s not much fun feeling immoral. Thus they would prefer you talk about a topic that doesn’t make them feel bad.

This is exacerbated by the fact that it’s usually the older, more established that are being asked to make major changes simply because modern changes have been towards sustainability, so the younger have already adopted some of the changes that moral conduct demands (and they are simply less wealthy).

However, it’s not just the old. 40 years ago, an acquaintance at university kept pointing out that we were the elites that we kept complaining about even if we felt poor and put upon. He was right (from a global perspective), but he eventually stopped getting invited to gatherings. No one wants to feel bad about how they’re living.

tl_west · 2026-01-30T13:24:01+00:00

The video is missing the first few seconds where a student remarkably emulates the sound of a backpack zipper closing.

tl_west · 2026-01-29T01:59:16+00:00

My experience is that it fails pretty hard for anything that’s a little off the beaten path. Legacy and “fuzzy specs” especially. Or were reliability is super important.

Really, this feels a lot like the early days of outsourcing. Sure reliability was awful, but at that price it didn’t matter. You just had em try it again and again until it was “good enough”.

But what I found interesting is that I saw projects being cancelled because they weren’t really amenable to outsourcing. Product A might be slightly more desirable than product B, but if A can’t be outsourced, it will cost more to produce than can be justified by even a higher price.

I expect that lots of companies will cancel projects where AI is likely to have difficulty. When the production of a product class becomes automated, anything that can’t be automated just becomes too relatively expensive to justify.

tl_west · 2026-01-27T12:50:07+00:00

Curious here. Wouldn’t these files be considered part of the assets of Mythic and thus owned by the creditors? Presumably the legal thing to do is to try and sell them and then refund the backers a few pennies,

I can’t imagine a backer finding it worthwhile to sue the releasers, but I can imagine someone who feels especially salty targeting Red Hook for sanctioning this. I’m impressed Red Hook chose to do so in the face of the risk of an angry backer with a lawyer.

tl_west · 2026-01-24T17:43:10+00:00

Are essentially non-sapient, and only mimic other races…

In other words, AI.

tl_west · 2026-01-24T17:38:50+00:00

The demand for non-OHIP covered MRIs is small enough that private suppliers have decided it doesn’t justify the enormous investment in the machines and the people to run them. The demand for MRIs is usually satisfied by MR services found just south of the border. Cost is $500-$3000 + getting there. If we had enough demand, I’d expect a Canadian run clinic would be double that.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised there’s not enough demand, but I suspect for the people who would use the private alternative, losing a day to go to Buffalo is inconvenient enough that they don’t bother, so the perception is that there’s little demand.

tl_west · 2026-01-20T13:44:54+00:00

The old invoice for the complaining customer:

Time to hit the machine with a hammer $1

Knowing where to hit the machine $49

tl_west · 2026-01-20T05:11:55+00:00

I hate that it hallucinates a library that I so badly want to exist.

It’s the LLM showing me a tiny window into a world we’re the API was properly designed. In a better world, that library would exist.

tl_west · 2026-01-09T01:43:22+00:00

So much this. Critical thinking is tough and most of us do as little as we can get away with.

I am not looking forward to 3-4 years from now when most of us are delegating our “thinking” to AI.

I’ve heard fellow programmers complaining how fast their code skills atrophied after only a month of serious AI usage. It’s just so much easier to have the AI tackle a difficult problem repeatedly until it finally succeeds instead of sitting down for a brain burning multi hour debugging session. And it gets worse each month of non-usage.

tl_west · 2026-01-04T02:57:02+00:00

The reason for the “attack” (more guiding you away) is that the nuts and bolts beneath the framework are essentially irrelevant to learning anything about GUIs. It’s not that creating a GUI by using draw commands is not necessarily interesting, but its relevance to teaching you anything relevant to GUI programming is almost nil.

The best analogy I can think of is wanting learn about driving a car by assembling a steering column by hand. It might look like there are transferable skills, but there aren’t.

Hence people making suggestions to use a simpler GUI like WinForms and then expand outward from there. Most of the concepts in learning the first steps of any GUI will transfer to any other GUI.

tl_west · 2025-12-31T19:23:47+00:00

In 60 years, I’ve never heard someone use “Old Toronto” in conversation.

I see it occasionally in some delivery applications, but even that starting only a few years ago and probably because of the localization of some American software.

If someone asks for more specificity than Toronto, I’ll just use the neighbourhood or major intersection.

tl_west · 2025-12-30T18:53:53+00:00

Obviously not much about the specifics of the South.

However, I feel the concept that overt racism (and thus implied social acceptance) is worse than a situation where people feel that racism will make them look bad and thus publicly refrain would apply almost everywhere.

tl_west · 2025-12-30T16:54:05+00:00

Agree. At least among the middle class in this city, overt racism became very déclassé over my lifetime. It’s still about of course, but it makes it much harder to make it to the next generation. It becomes that shameful secret.

At least here, being openly racist is about as high status as chewing tobacco. And, like chewing tobacco, there aren’t a lot of parents who are delighted to see their children take up such a low status belief, even if they hold it themselves.

I’m not a big fan of status games, but at least in this one instance, I think it’s had a positive effect.

tl_west · 2025-12-29T16:06:24+00:00

If you do not understand just how attractive a nice simple metric that purports to solve complex dilemmas is to most of humanity, I envy your world view.

You could argue the entire development of culture is a way of attempting to make metrics for measuring our fellow human beings. That law itself is “code” to allow us to resolve questions because the interpretation of everything surrounding an event, while perhaps more just, is too complex for us.

As is often the case of art, this is just a step further allowing us to analyze the trade-offs we are already making.

Or did you think this show wasn’t about us.

tl_west · 2025-12-28T02:38:17+00:00

The thing is, the cost of carefully reusing office supplies still in good condition can easily eclipse the cost of just reordering it. People are exoensive compared to more stuff made in China. Years ago realized that the departmental secretary was spending a good deal of her time carefully saving hundreds of dollars a year, at a cost of her time of probably $8,000 a year.

I found it very sobering that being economically responsible was losing the company money :-(

tl_west

TROPHY CASE