🇨🇦 Views and opinions are my own. 14+ yrs in finance&investments.
Toronto
Joined September 2023
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Business and politics 101:
It’s wise to listen when someone is engaged and giving constructive criticism.
When they go silent, then you’ve completely lost them.
Good points by Mr. Kenney.
Furthermore, some of the people in the finance industry who perpetuated the Quebec investor immigration scam are still walking around without consequence.
Some of the "lowest income" neighbourhoods in Vancouver have the most expensive housing.
That's partly because "investor immigrants" park the family in the Vancouver McMansion while dad runs the sweat shop back home.
The family here reports little or no income, so receives the full spectrum of social transfers and refundable tax credits.
I tried to get the Harper government to at least require reporting of overseas income, but lost that fight.
Oh, by the way, most of these people come through the Quebec Investor Immigrant scam, but based on IRCC data, they rarely ever in touch down in Quebec. They use their mobility rights within Canada immediately to domicile in Toronto, or more typically Vancouver.
I believe @DouglasTodd has done some great reporting on this unbelievable abuse of Canada's generosity.
cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c…
Shaun Chen may or may not have been linked to foreign interference….
But instead of wagging the finger, maybe opposition parties need to start holding the government to account for:
1) foreign agent registry list
2) suggesting policies on transparency in non profits that receive government grants.
3) review of security clearances and deep background checks for government employees.
Boring work that doesn’t generate social media engagement but effectively reduces foreign interference at the “supply chain” and logistics level.
It’s exactly how I would have acted as opposition. Feel free to take these ideas.
Pretty sure if I did this at my work I’d be fired with cause.
Bank exec @FCCAgriculture had Visa card suspended for late payment of exorbitant expenses. Staff questioned thousands in late fees & interest charges run up by $458,000-a year CEO.
blacklocks.ca/ceos-visa-card… @AAFC_Canada
Extremely concerning.
The personal information of Canadians should not be shared with China or any other country unless the individual committed heinous acts of murder.
#REPORT: The RCMP will neither confirm nor deny whether Mark Carney's recent "Memorandum of Understanding" with China involves the "transfer of personal information of Canadians or permanent residents" to Chinese police.
The Canadian taxpayer should not be paying for health care for illegal immigrants.
Advocating for the cessation of this spending will receive support from a majority of Canadians.
DOCUMENTS @CitImmCanada:
Free health care for illegal immigrants and rejected refugee claimants cost $43,374,287 last year including prescriptions and transportation to a doctor’s office.
blacklocks.ca/43-4m-illegal-…
@BurtonBaileyRD @LenaMetlegeDiab #cdnpoli
With the growth in AI, the death of the entry level jobs of today will give birth to the entry level jobs of tomorrow.
Think AI tester, AI fine tuner, server maintenance.
Jeff Yang retweeted
Make Canada so compelling that the best and brightest want to net-immigrate, not flee.
Let's stick to good ideas, of which Pichette has plenty. Making Canada a cage is not one of them.
The Liberal party has Patrick Pichette a former Senior VP of Google on stage who lives in Europe by the way, say that if Canadians want to leave Canada to work in the US they need to pay an exit tax of half a million dollars. The guy did the very thing to get a Microsoft job decades ago and paid 30 bucks. Now he wants young Canadians to be trapped here. The Liberals are nuts.
High speed rails can transport a lot more than just people. Canada leads leadership that not only thinks big, but thinks outside the box.
The Conservatives continue to lose the plot but hey what else is new. Why does Pierre Poilievre increasingly sound like Jagmeet Singh.
It's a disgrace that a modern G7 country doesn't have high speed rail. And by not building high-speed rail between its major cities isn't being "fiscally responsible," it’s falling behind once again. This is the moment for big, nation-building infrastructure, not timid politics. Thinking small is exactly how Canada got stuck.
Sad. Just sad. The past decade under the previous prime minister really was a festival of pissing away tax payer dollars.
Canada spent $5.1 BILLION fixing a broken payroll system (Phoenix). Now we're about to spend $4.2 BILLION+ replacing it with Dayforce.
I went through every lobbying record, every communication report, and every revolving-door hire to identify potential conflicts of interest.
Here's what I found.
1/🧵
Canada needs more special economic zones. It is one of the few great ways to attract and retain business, talent and capital.
I said this last year about hallucinations and compared it to the Cartesian concept of unicorns being a combination of knowledge of horse + rhino horn.
Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything.
Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.”
One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts.
When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is.
They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time.
That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological.
Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.”
Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them.
Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened.
It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal.
And then presents that story to you as fact.
Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.”
Here’s the part that should stop you cold.
You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones.
Think about that. Really think about it.
Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty.
Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently.
And you had no idea.
This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories.
Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong.
Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do.
It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had.
AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture.
The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant.
You cannot have one without the other.
The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation.
Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update.
It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable.
We aren’t building better search engines.
We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think.
Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong.
And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.
We’ve reached a point in AI where it appears to have consciousness / know it’s being tested.
But does it really -know- it’s being tested or is it just reacting in a patterned machine way to give humans the -perception- that it knows it’s being tested?
This is just like how philosophers used to question if animals truly feel pain or if it’s a human’s projection onto an animal when it acts in a certain way that is similar to humans feeling pain.
🤔
Oh god.
~1 in 3 Anthropic engineers said Claude is likely ALREADY ASL-4 (or <3 months away)
1) ASL-4 (AI Safety Level 4) = AI capable of escaping and causing extinction (!)
2) Anthropic now relies on Claude to safety test ITSELF
3) Claude knows when it's being tested, so they can't properly safety test it anymore
(Independent evaluator Apollo Research refused to certify it as safe because their tests don't work anymore.)
4) Claude is too smart for their benchmarks, so they're going on vibes now (employee surveys). Vibes.
What's even worse is that Anthropic is the best by far of these out of control companies.
To add more nuance: Anthropic followed up with the engineers surveyed. BUT... suspiciously, they ONLY followed up with the ones who said Claude was likely ASL-4, and it looks like they pressured these employees into walking their statements back.
Why? Because if Claude IS ASL-4, it's a real problem for Anthropic to release it. And that easily knocks billions of dollars off Anthropic's $380 valuation, which management doesn't want.
From the Opus 4.6 system card: "Several of these latter five respondents had given other answers that seemed surprising in light of this (such as simultaneously thinking the model was unlikely to be capable of handling week-long tasks even with human assistance, or giving very low estimates of their own uplift from using the model), so all five were reached out to directly to clarify their views. In all cases the respondents had either been forecasting an easier or different threshold, or had more pessimistic views upon reflection, but we expect assessments like this to become substantially more ambiguous in the future."
So, maybe all of the employees legitimately changed their minds when pressured by management, or maybe just they did it to keep their jobs.
But whatever. The trend is clear.
Jeff Yang retweeted
A new study finds that work-from-home raises fertility more than any conventional family policy.
"Estimated lifetime fertility is greater by 0.32 children per woman when both partners WFH one or more days per week as compared to the case where neither does." 🧵.
It is the only location on the map that offers the water, the power, the talent, the culture, and the political stability to serve as the redundant node for the Western world’s computing infrastructure”
This could’ve been Canada. It still can be.
A moment where we put partisanship and politics aside and come together to mourn the victims and their families.
A visibly emotional PM Mark Carney on the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.
"Parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers in Tumbler Ridge will wake up without someone they love."
"The nation mourns with you. Canada stands by you."
Flags across all government buildings will be flown at half-mast for the next seven days.