finds are back

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Please ignore last month’s post ;)

“The [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] is not just a law, it is an expression of Canada’s most basic and deepest values. ‘Notwithstanding’ the Charter means ‘I don’t share these values’. Any and every politician or government that proposes its use should face such an extreme backlash that no one would dare consider it.” —@DavidMitchell

“It is WILD that we now live in a time where my job as an astrophysics professor has gone from ‘learn cool things about space’ to ‘try to get someone to hold billionaires accountable for dropping shit on us from orbit'” —Prof Sam Lawler

Twentieth-century water treatment programs transformed public health by virtually eliminating waterborne diseases. Ventilation, filtration and disinfection provide us with the opportunity to dramatically reduce the burden of airborne illnesses. Tuberculosis and coronaviruses would join typhoid and cholera as tragedies of the past, and seasonal flu and common colds would become rare rather than routine if clean air were as universal and expected as clean water.” —Seeing the light

«Lydia thinks that as a former anti-vaxxer, she’s in a unique position to help worried parents. “The only way you can talk to them about it is if you hear them out first. It kind of opens up that conversation,” she said. “But if you shut a person down … they’re not gonna hear anything you have to say.”» —CBC 2025-09-22 or — Never bring a fact to a narrative fight

CBC did a sit down with Pierre Poilievre and CTV sat down with Andrew Scheer, who was the one who put the target on my [Rachel Gilmore] back. Tons of Canadians are speaking about this and were outraged by it. I’m just surprised that this didn’t seem to come up, unless I missed it. But when Pierre Poilievre said that he’s scared for his family’s safety, his wife [Anaida Poilievre] had just reposted Andrew Sheer’s post that had put that target on my back.

It just feels like there’s a very obvious hypocrisy there. I just feel like it’s almost an abdication of journalistic responsibility to not pursue that. All of the answers that I can speculate about just make me really sad, honestly. —Halifax Examiner 2025-09-19

“Propaganda, good propaganda, turns doubters into believers. Propaganda! We only need propaganda. Of stupid people there are always enough.” —Adolph Hitler c. 1919, as cited in Goodbye Eastern Europe

«BERLIN, Feb. 3 [1939].—Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five “Aryan” actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.”» —NYT 1939

Human-Powered AI – A Fun Way to Understand How GenAI Really Works by @MarkLevison

In a very simple fashion, we demonstrated how GenAI works. It isn’t intelligent. It selects the next most-likely word (or, more accurately, ‘token’ – a partial word chunk) in the sequence. We also saw that GenAI doesn’t learn and doesn’t have memory. Nothing from the first round of the simulation is carried over to the next round.

ChatGPT 4 has about a trillion times as much data as our human-powered model. So it’s not surprising that ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are better mimics, because they have more parameters. However, they are still not intelligent.

The End of Summer