We need to change the emphasis of "evidenced based policies" from: "policies that follow the best available evidence" to: "policies that generate the best possible evidence". Experimentation >> observational analysis.

Three years ago today, the world witnessed the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Families were torn apart, children kidnapped, women assaulted, and the elderly slaughtered: some 809 civilians were killed, while 252 would endure captivity as hostages. In January, the last body of the hostages killed was finally returned following the return of the last living hostage last year. The return offered some closure to the conflict as the last body was laid to rest, but we know the scourge of antisemitism is not over. The hatred that fueled October 7th did not remain on foreign shores. Right here in Canada, far too many synagogues, Jewish businesses and institutions have been the targets of harassment and hate. This is not, and cannot become, normal. Conservatives will always fight against antisemitism and all forms of hatred: protecting our schools, communities and places of worship so that Canadians of all faiths can live in peace and security. Today, alongside our Jewish friends and neighbours, we remember those who lost their lives that day. May their memory be a blessing.

Three years ago, the terrorist organisation Hamas perpetrated the worst attack against Jewish people since the Holocaust. My statement:

Yes…. But…. The magic happens when you are researching the solution with the same agent that will do the work of doing the solution. If you go in with a plan you might as well just do it yourself. But if you are going back and forth with the agent to find options, then up can just say “do option 2” because it already knows.

I think it’s going you take a minute to figure it ai product design for most people in most use cases. Programmers don’t typically use product the way most people do. At least not while we’re programming. You don’t tend to see programming tools with a lots of sliders and dials. We tend to have big squares where you can put arbitrary text inside. So a chat that you can say anything to makes sense to us. But pilot’s consoles on airplanes look that way for a reason. That is a way a lot of people get machines to do things for them. The magic will be when we can make consoles that before were impossible by virtue of turning those interactions into ai inputs. I suspect it will involve a lot less natural language than we currently see in ai interfaces.

I’m trying to be intentionally lazy in my daily life so I’m forced to use personal AI agents (dot, Muse, OpenClaw) as much as possible and find out what they can actually do beyond booking flights. 🙂 One of my "lazy" use cases: dot for language learning is surprisingly great. After a work trip to Shanghai, I decided to commit to learning business Mandarin. But I'm too lazy to research and sign up for classes or programs. So while driving to a birthday party, I called dot and asked it to practice with me, teach me new terms, and email me a summary afterward. ✅ I practiced for much longer than I would have with a human because I couldn’t be embarrassed by the state of my Mandarin. For ~40 minutes, I threw out sentences half in English while dot filled in vocabulary and corrected my grammar, switching between languages seamlessly. I’d call it again just to practice more. ✅ The email summary (pic attached) was formatted exactly as I'd asked on the call. 🟡 dot appeared to have no awareness of its own speaking speed. At times, it would speak so fast that the words started to garble. I’d ask it to slow down, and it would, but the speed would creep back up a few rounds later. The garbling was a little unsettling. dot made practice so low-friction and low-stakes that even the laziest version of me is doing it. More boring personal agent use cases to come if there’s interest!

My actual tax increase proposal for BC is a provincial property tax bringing rates closer to the national average, with a deferral (with interest) payable at disposition. I would allow a retroactive correction if the disposition value is lower than the assessed value at taxation. Many multimillionaires in Vancouver currently pay only a fraction of their wealth gains in their lifetimes (or afterwards) because it is in their primary residence.

I’m extremely supportive of SF’s Shabbat dinner renaissance but I have one request: Can we get literally one Sephardic Jew involved in menu planning? Judaism has suffered enough.

I wish I could nickname cards in Stripe Link. "Visa Debit" is just not that differentiating for me

You know who has a bit more? People who own multimillion dollar homes and pay the lowest property taxes in Canada and the US.

I would love to see @buildcanada get involved with promoting the message here. Canada needs builders to build, and that begins with a population where everyone gets a great math education. Better math education policies is infrastructure.

I feel like I’m the only person in the universe who is kind anti-balance bike. They make it faster to learn how to ride a bike: by making the learning curve shorter *and steeper*. bike riding is scarier and less fun at the youngest ages. and the prize of being able to ride a bike without training wheels is very modest???? like who cares if you get there at age 3 or 5 or 7 or 9

Tell me you don’t understand the difference between “marginal” and “average” without saying you don’t understand the difference between “marginal” and “average”.

I was messaging a friend about cbc comedy and typo’d it as “boomer humous” instead of “boomer humour” but decided to push send anyhow.

A provincial property tax could get us to a place to get rid of the BC deficit. /cc @Prominent_Bryan

Been running this in a bunch of repos: ``` Eliminate vacuous unit tests in this repo. Work from a new git worktree of origin/main so you do not touch whatever checkout is already open. Do not merge. Open a draft PR against main. A vacuous test locks the code as written instead of a behaviour. The giveaways are: it exercises very few lines, often one, or it only calls a deeply internal function that has very few callers. A low line count is a search hint, not a quota. Delete these without lowering coverage. When a cluster of them covers one real behavior, replace them with a few tests that run that use case (compiled program, real runtime, real caller). When a branch exists only so a test can poke it, refactor so the type system makes that branch unrepresentable, then delete the test. Do not add a test whose only job is to touch a line. Do not keep a public wrapper that exists only to expose an internal function to a test. Coverage of the lines you touch must not drop. Run the tests you change. If a line was only reachable from a vacuous test, the refactor or the use-case test has to cover it, or the line goes away. ```

I think it's ok that BC would have the top marginal rate in the world. But, combining it with nearly the lowest property tax rates in the world is absolutely ridiculous and offensive. We have a lot of wealth in BC by people who consider their property part of their essence and so they shouldn't be taxed on it like the working plebs.

If you really want to tax wealthy people more, you should impose a new property tax. Not increase the income tax

Did @codecov let their certificates expire? github.com/codecov/codecov-a…