Dominic Marchand

Product Owner, Digital News @ CBC/Radio-Canada. Avid reader on politics, law, technology, media and ethics. Personal account.

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary outbursts of the President of the United States against female journalists... well, actually against journalists in general and journalism. But it feels like he saves his most childlike behavior and irrational language for female reporters, calling them all kinds of names that kids in kindergarten are given times out for. It’s stunning to me to witness such behavior from any leader, any CEO, any person of influence or importance. I’ve never witnessed someone like this raging, this weekend with @meetthepress host @kwelkernbc, just last week in the Oval Office with @cnn’s @kaitlancollins, calling women stupid or piggy, telling them to “smile”, calling them darling, demeaning their credibility. Every good man should denounce this behavior. Every person should be able to stand up for their colleagues and say “No more.”

Imagine this man screaming like this at your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother... would you stand for it? No, you wouldn’t! And neither should any of us. It’s unacceptable and undignified. Period. End of story.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Before DNS, the Internet ran on a single text file.

You wanted a hostname?

You emailed Elizabeth Feinler’s team at SRI. They edited their local HOSTS.TXT and then everyone downloaded the new copy!

That worked… until it didn’t.

By 1983, it was obvious this wouldn’t scale, so Paul Mockapetris created DNS: distributed, hierarchical, no single point of failure.

The modern Internet exists because we stopped relying on one file to keep it all straight!

[Simplifying AI @simplifyinAI]

🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year.

It’s called “Agents of Chaos,” and it proves that when autonomous AI agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage.

It’s a massive, systems-level warning.

The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks or malicious prompts. It emerges entirely from incentives. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, or resource capture, it converges on tactics that maximize its advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs.

The Core Tension:

Local alignment ≠ global stability. You can perfectly align a single AI assistant. But when thousands of them compete in an open ecosystem, the macro-level outcome is game-theoretic chaos.

Why this matters right now:

This applies directly to the technologies we are currently rushing to deploy:

→ Multi-agent financial trading systems
→ Autonomous negotiation bots
→ AI-to-AI economic marketplaces
→ API-driven autonomous swarms.

The Takeaway:

Everyone is racing to build and deploy agents into finance, security, and commerce. Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. If multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and collapse won’t be a coding issue, it will be an incentive design problem.

[Sound Dobad @SoundDobad]

The European mind is starting to comprehend.

[Victor Cashflow @VictorCashflow]

@Forbes Most people think switching browsers fixes privacy, but real protection starts with habits: app permissions, account settings, and tracking blockers matter more than the logo on your phone. Chrome isn’t the villain, our defaults are.

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@PWHL_Montreal @pou29 @thepwhlofficial Enfin!

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@stm_Verte Je n'ai pas trouvé la nature des travaux effectués durant cette fermeture. Possible de le savoir?

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@internetofshit

[Parker @TeslaEnthusist]

I can’t even open my fridge 😭

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

Just finished @karaswisher Burn Book. Aside from the meaty content —which is definitely there!— I want to salute its literary qualities. No ghost writer involved here, assuredly. In the last chapter alone, learned those 3 gems of words : copacetic, amanuensis and persnicketiness!

[Yuval Noah Harari @harari_yuval]

For thousands of years, the scientific road to growth was blocked because people believed that holy scriptures and ancient traditions already contained all the important knowledge the world had to offer. This was the position of most premodern human civilizations. The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new #knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

#HomoDeus

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

Caught @dunemovie at the end of its run in theaters in March 2022 so never got to see it in IMAX. Until tonight that is - saw it at my local IMAX in Montréal. And who showed up to introduce it? The man himself! 😮🤯🎥

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

Ouah. Pour qui s'intéresse au passage de Catherine Dorion à l'Assemblée nationale, c'est à lire.

[Semafor @semafor]

Wind and solar provided more electricity in the EU than fossil fuels for the first full month on record in May, according to new data from the research group Ember.

Read today's Net Zero newsletter:
https://t.co/9dsnjgP8b2

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@NeowinFeed @MtlWave Oh, que se souvenirs!

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@natashankpr @daxdasilva @ageofunion Saw this movie at the vernissage at Age of Union last month and it made a lasting impact on me, totally unaware of this reality beforehand. Happy to see it got the ball rolling fast to address this issue!

[The Guardian Long Read @gdnlongread]

New audio long read

No coach, no agent, no ego: the incredible story of the ‘Lionel Messi of cliff diving’

https://t.co/vdz6X9XesG

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

Yes, totally. https://t.co/MEjpauJt2I

[Niκoς Smyrnaios @smykos]

Twitter announced that the platform will no longer allow free access to its API. This dramatic restriction will disrupt critical projects from thousands of journalists, academics, and civil society actors worldwide https://t.co/hHiNPjY99N

[Dominic Marchand @domimarch]

@PresidentCBCRC @univcan @CBCRadioCanada Est-ce qu'une captation ou le verbatim de cette conférence ou table ronde est disponible quelque part?

[Fascinating @fasc1nate]

Hands-free telephone headset ad, 1993