Mark Zuckerberg: “I don’t think that we need some kind of industry-wide coordination... I think that just each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to make sure that you’re proceeding safely… “we’re entering a phase where trust and alignment is actually going to be the most important next set of capabilities. I think we’re getting to a point where it may not matter that much how much better it gets at math. “I happen to think that there’s plenty of commercial incentive to get this right. We delayed the launch of Muse for a few months because we wanted it to be a better product for users. This was not a sacrifice on our part, but rather the right decision for the users and for Meta. I believe this approach would also be correct for other companies working on developing this technology. “When you hear people in the industry talk about some trade-off between capabilities and getting it aligned, I just disagree with that. I believe that alignment is actually the next most important ability to master if we are going to make this system useful to many people.”

🚨 Waterloo is often described as the MIT of Canada. On CBC, Waterloo math instructor Dan Wolczuk describes first-year students arriving with inflated grades, missing foundational math skills, and unprepared for university math. The problem has worsened over time. He makes several important points: - High school math classes have been weakened so students can get better grades. - Less testing in high school and fewer standardized tests both hurt student learning and lead to grade inflation. - Grade inflation doesn't help students in the long run. It's demoralizing to get 99% in high school and fail your first calculus test b/c prerequisite knowledge isn't secure. - Some memorization is necessary in math. Math builds on itself and students need to be able to easily retrieve foundational knowledge. - The testing effect matters. More testing helps students retain information long term. - More low stakes testing also helps curb test anxiety. Dan thinks we need a national standardized test in Canada. I wholeheardedly agree. Link below (Excellent job by @KrissyHolmes CBC, Newfoundland & Labrador, Sept 9) @CBCNL 👇

"by lowering the cost of code, we are going to do so much more with it. This will result in software becoming more useful and the leverage of engineers going up dramatically, which coincidentally will mean we need more of them, not fewer."

Here is a memo to all Canadians: There are no protectionist paths to free trade. Its that simple.

Deployment of Roman confirmed

First and second order reasoning clearly shows the solution - unilateral liberalization.

And that is, of course, how it will be done. Sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon, can solve global warming for ~1B years.

Canada’s response to American tariffs should be incredibly simple: slash our own tariffs and trade barriers. And do not impose counter-tariffs. Think about what retaliation actually means. Trump imposes a tax on Americans who buy Canadian goods. So our response is supposed to be…imposing a tax on Canadians who buy American goods? How exactly does making Canadians poorer punish Donald Trump? If the Trump admin wants to shoot itself in the foot, the Carney government is under no obligation to shoot Canadians in the face with a twelve gauge shotgun for the sake of "reciprocity" Instead, open Canada up. Eliminate tariffs. Eliminate non-tariff barriers. Make it cheaper for Canadians and Canadian firms to buy goods and inputs from Europe, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else. Give Canadian consumers more alternatives to American products and Canadian producers cheaper inputs with which to compete. And no, free trade does not require the other guy to be smart enough to reciprocate. Historically, a huge share of trade liberalization has been unilateral. This is especially true for small economies like Canada! The best response to American protectionism is not Canadian protectionism. It is to make Canada more competitive, more open, and harder for American tariffs to hurt. This the same message I was saying in 2025. Its the same that Canadian free traders said in the 1930s when facing the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Its the same that free traders like Richard Cobden made when arguing against food taxes/tariffs in the 1830s and 1840s.

The PM should share with Canadians the full details of what was on the table, what had been agreed, and what the "last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms" were that caused Canada to walk away Given the impacts, vague assertions of "we negotiated in good faith" probably won't cut it

The public needs to hear the details. We want transparency.

Some thoughts on Dario’s post: 1. Dario does not actually address Gavin Baker’s account of what he said – something he could easily deny if it were inaccurate. 2. Dario claims his critics live in a “bubble” where all regulation equals regulatory capture. He calls this an overly simplified view and notes that “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.” This argument is a straw man. Of course treating all regulation as capture would be overly simplified – but almost no one holds that view. I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech. If Anthropic continues toward monopoly or duopoly status, I would be among the first to demand those rules apply. 3. Regulatory capture is not vague or in the eye of the beholder. Nobel laureate George Stigler defined it as regulation acquired by an industry and designed and operated primarily for its benefit. Stigler challenged the traditional view that government regulation arises from a benevolent state protecting the public from market failures. Rather, industry groups have concentrated stakes and pour resources into influencing regulators, whereas the public’s stake is diffuse and unorganized. The revolving door between companies and the agencies that regulate them compounds the problem. Anthropic understands these dynamics: it has hired multiple senior Biden AI-policy officials and built a substantial government-affairs operation plus a network of aligned organizations to push its preferred frameworks at state and federal levels. 4. Dario has consistently pushed for a new federal agency to review and approve frontier models prior to release – a proposal framed variously as an “FDA for AI,” an “FAA for AI,” and most recently a “FINRA for AI.” I call it a “DMV for AI” because a review process modeled on the FAA or FDA (which takes years) or FINRA (which issues rules for a staid industry widely seen as protecting incumbents) will create long queues as AI models wait for testing and approval. This process will only become more labyrinthine as rules accumulate to prevent theoretical harms. This would handicap the U.S. relative to China, which will not adopt the same constraints. It would also undermine Anthropic’s own business model, whose pricing power depends on remaining ahead of open models. Whatever Dario states today, it is difficult to believe the company would simply accept outcomes that erase that advantage. 5. Anthropic is on track to become one of the most valuable companies in history, with the resources to navigate any approval process and shape the rules while competitors wait. Dario wants open models under heavier scrutiny – he has called them dangerous in Senate testimony, criticized them for not being centrally monitored or withdrawn, and linked them to IP theft. He says he has never sought a ban, but he could achieve a similar result by insisting that identical rules apply to both open and closed models. The U.S. risks becoming an island of costly closed models while the rest of the world races ahead with broader choice. 6. Dario acknowledges that AI is structurally centralizing but attributes this mainly to chips and scaling laws. Access to compute matters, but the deeper risk is who decides which capabilities are available to whom. His preferred pre-deployment testing and FAA/FINRA-style oversight would place that gatekeeping power in a federal bureaucracy working hand-in-glove with a small number of frontier labs – reinforcing centralization rather than countering it. 7. The second part of Dario’s post assumes we have amnesia about Anthropic’s well-orchestrated campaigns hyping AI fears. His May 2025 claim that AI would wipe out 50 percent of entry-level knowledge jobs within five years still lacks supporting evidence fifteen months later. Similarly Anthropic breathlessly promoted its heavily contrived “blackmail” study on 60 Minutes. Yet Dario blames public negativity on a long-standing loss of trust in institutions rather than his own messaging. 8. These narratives have done more than anything to shape public fear. People are left asking the same question Mark Zuckerberg posed: why race to build a future you describe in such negative terms? Thomas Sowell’s "The Vision of the Anointed" captures the mindset – elite intellectuals convinced that only they are enlightened enough to control the outcome. As Zuckerberg notes, concentrating power in the hands of an enlightened few has rarely produced the promised results; the practitioners turn out to be less enlightened in practice than in self-conception. 9. Gavin Baker summarized the disagreement cleanly on our pod: Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize. Dario appears to believe, sincerely, that safety and progress are best served by centralizing authority in a marriage of corporate and state power. The weight of human history gives us reason to fear that outcome.

"used to require years of ecological fieldwork, manual planting crews, and budgets that made large-scale restoration nearly impossible. now two people with a drone and an AI model trained on local soil data can replant 50 hectares before lunch"

Good morning. Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night. This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

✈️ JUST IN: The X-59 has gone supersonic! The X-59 achieved supersonic speeds for the first time ever today — a major milestone for NASA’s Quesst mission and an important step toward upcoming flights that will demonstrate its quiet supersonic technology ahead of future community overflights. Fast now. Quiet soon. 🔊➡️🤫 Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4o8gENs #NASA #X59 #Quesst

A statement from the CEO of Windscribe.

C-22's architecture is most similar to laws in place in China, Russia, India and Vietnam. Among allied democracies, the closest analog is Australia's TOLA Act (2018), which Australia is now amending due to the economic harm it caused.

On the helicopter leaving the ship right now. This planet is impossibly beautiful from every altitude I’ve seen it…surface to 250,000 miles

To build a sustained human presence on the Moon, we are building @NASAMoonBase, prioritizing surface operations and scalable infrastructure.  - Frequent robotic landings and mobility testing including MoonFall drones  - Starting in 2027 nearly monthly cadence of equipment and rovers with scientific payloads landing on the Moon.  - Investments in power, communications, and surface mobility  - Scalable infrastructure to support long-term human presence The objective is clear: build the foundation for an enduring lunar base and take the next step toward Mars.

the value of this technology will mostly not be captured by its inventors, the labs, or even the chipmakers, but rather will be captured by the consumers as surplus. these are highly competitive markets without any natural monopolistic effects like many other technologies before it, machine intelligence democratizes abilities previously only available to the wealthy, in this case by commoditizing the services of the white collar elite who mostly live in rich countries it’s not that there are no programmers, it’s that really anybody can make software now now so the “rents” of the “human capital” of knowing how to write JavaScript for example should shrink dramatically this will reduce the inequality between countries: services that previously required lots of human capital now require chatbot subscriptions at worst, or may even be given away for free you can receive medical advice worthy of a $1000/hr American specialist doctor likely for free while living under a thatched roof in eg Papua New Guinea somewhere while I think Americans have plenty of reason to be excited by AI, I would be more excited as someone in a poor country

🎉 CCF WINS! 🎉 The Federal Court of Appeal has upheld the ruling that the Trudeau government unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022. This landmark victory protects Canadians' Charter rights and civil liberties, and sends a clear message: emergency powers have limits.