We Mustn’t Let Them See The Facts

Forward! Media 7 Comments

On attempts by Flemish state TV to hide unsavoury migrant attitudes:

The seemingly routine attempt to deceive does rather invalidate the ostensible core function of this publicly funded organisation. It throws everything they do into question. How could one possibly trust them? It quite literally wipes out their credibility as a broadcaster. And by extension, any claim to public funding or favoured status.

In a saner world, it would be the end of them.

I say ostensible function because it’s not altogether obvious – to say the least – how one could reconcile some supposed broadcaster’s mission to convey the facts, and to bring into being an informed citizenry, with doing everything possible to prevent precisely that.

But remember, dear citizen, we must pretend even harder.

 

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 6 Comments

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@BrianRoemmele

The amazing @DavidSacks warned us a long time ago about Anthropic’s AI Safety Theater and regulatory capture.

He saw this early and took arrows for it.

So Anthropic got its way…

And now the check is being cashed on Anthropic.

Update: David Sacks explains.

Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

The Libranos: Gravy Train

New Governor The Libranos 11 Comments

Via Blacklocks (paywalled);

Last July 2025 the Alto regional highspeed rail corporation hired [ Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s] wife as a vice-president. Salary for the role is not publicized but is anywhere between $300-$600k yearly.

Alto managers subsequently obtained concessions on funding and expropriation powers in a High Speed Rail Network Act written into Champagne’s 2025 omnibus budget bill C-15.

The Conflict Of Interest Act states no cabinet member shall use inside information to further the private interests of “relatives or friends,” or “participate in making a decision related to the exercise of an official power, duty or function if the public office holder knows or reasonably should know that, in the making of a decision, he or she would be in a conflict of interest.”

Champagne has maintained he recused himself from all cabinet discussions, votes and other matters relating to Alto.

Critics challenged the claim. “That is simply not true,” said MP Cooper. “You voted at least 13 times on matters related to Alto.” 134 Alto staff received bonuses that totalled $2,758,968.

“Executives at Alto received bonuses,” MP Hardy said. “I am asking whether or not your wife is an Alto executive. That’s the question, because if Canadians know that’s the case, they know your household will benefit.”

“Is your wife an executive at Alto?” asked MP Hardy.

“These are allegations,” replied Champagne.

Small World: How an Alto Executive helped write Champagne’s budget speech.

Saturday On Turtle Island

Turtle Island 6 Comments

The Democratic Party’s America:    Victor Davis Hanson – The midterm strategy.

Stories You Won’t Find At Carney’s CBC:    Sneering style.    Green jobs.    The colour of conflict.    Moderate Muslims in France.    Paul Joseph Watson – Didn’t expect this and not allowed to.

Conman Carney’s Canada:    Protecting terrorists.    The bought and paid for media.    Free stuff.    Terrorists.

Your morning cartoon.      And at the Bee.

Gain Of Function

47 Gain of Function 13 Comments

From the documents about Ukrainian biolabs;

The new documents reveal two dozen biological labs in Ukraine. The map reveals that a lab in Odessa, a city with a population of more than one million people, has a lab with stored biological weapons from the defunct Soviet Union biological weapons program. Viruses in storage include anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, New Castles Disease, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, the Plague, and Rickettsia, the documents show. […]

[T]he newly declassified documents reveal that some of the labs conduct gain-of-function research, research that makes pathogens more infectious or deadly in the lab. Most biodefense experts consider gain-of-function research to be “dual use.” It has civilian applications, but could it could also be weaponized for more nefarious applications in the wrong hands. Many of the labs have permits for handing “especially dangerous pathogens.” One project involved highly pathogenic avian influenza, a virus with a 50% fatality rate.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Alternative Subsidy Little Known Facts 11 Comments

Doomberg: The media can’t seem to explain the collapse in China’s domestic solar installations.

We often quip that the best proof that something was predictable is having predicted it. While not totally accurate—dumb luck and broken clocks are still things—nailing a complex call in the face of cocksure counter-commentary is anything but unsatisfying. It also confirms that our mental model is still operative in the way that matters most: it remains useful for further predictions.

In August of 2025, we produced a bonus presentation for paying subscribers titled Cocktail Party Trivia: Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends and Family (available here). In it, we elaborated extensively on our current mental model in which a working understanding of electric grids became a tool for predicting when the forced introduction of intermittent renewables would cause things to break. Some 31 minutes in, we warned that China’s solar miracle was reaching the limits of feasibility, and that the breakneck pace of new construction would soon have to slow.

At the time, China was on pace to smash global records for new solar installations, and legacy media outlets were falling over themselves to heap praise on Beijing’s bold climate leadership. On social media, the Silicon Valley crowd was lamenting how the US was desperately falling behind its main competitor in the artificial intelligence race, hooked on “yesterday’s fuels” like natural gas. US President Donald Trump came under withering criticism and was pounded for his efforts to save the domestic coal industry. That China still relies on coal for the vast majority of its electricity was rarely mentioned.

Imagine our lack of surprise, then, when we opened our weekend edition of the Financial Times to find Adam Tooze’s latest lament, “Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness”…

Cocktail Party Trivia (35 minutes): Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends & Family

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 19 Comments

@heynavtoor

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the “tails of the distribution.” The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that.

Indeed.

You Don’t Hate The Media Nearly Enough

Media Rocket Man 15 Comments

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