Canada is more powerful than most Canadians realize—especially in soft power. Our country-brand is among the strongest in the world. That trust and legitimacy are not abstract virtues; they are strategic assets.
I don’t like the Trump administration’s comfort with overt hemispheric domination. But it is exposing a failure of the liberal center across the West: we have mistaken following the right rules for achieving good outcomes. When process replaces results, trust in rules erodes.
Trump’s real reminder isn’t that power is good, it’s that power is real. Canada’s global posture, and its relationship with the U.S., has to start from that fact.
The mistake would be to respond with panic or fatalism. In a world where power is power, Canada has far more leverage than we admit, much of it non-military: legitimacy, trust, alliances, convening power, resources, industrious people. We underuse it because we underestimate it.
The task now is simple: understand our power, use it deliberately, and defend our national interest and sovereignty with clarity rather than comfort.
A last minute holiday treat!
Use background actions sprinkled with some shop context to hook into @gadget_dev's adaptive rate limiter for @Shopify
(and it's all done with a single API call)
Tired of dealing with 429s when writing to @Shopify?
Now you can hook into the adaptive rate limiter used to power our Shopify syncs for durable writes and actions in your Gadget apps!
@rdraward shares the holiday cheer below
Missed last month’s live build with Gadget CTO @harrybrundage?
He took on the challenge of building a fully functional role-playing game using ChatGPT and the OpenAI Apps SDK — all inside Gadget 🎮
Victoria Garland transformed from a theme agency to a full-service dev shop using Gadget.
The results?
- 50% revenue growth with Gadget
- Development time cut from months to 1 week
- Apps stay live and profitable with no ongoing maintenance
Read the full story: https://t.co/7egxHJnlOv
Say goodbye to debugging headaches...
You can now use a real debugger with your Gadget backend! 🎉 Pause execution, inspect variables, and step through your code—all directly in VS Code. 💻 Take your debugging to the next level.
Take your debugging to the next level.
@ChatGPTapp apps built with Gadget now include OpenAI’s new Apps SDK UI design system!
Build a cleaner, native-feeling UI without extra work on your end
@rdraward shows it off below 👇
@harrybrundage is building a @ChatGPTapp app LIVE, at 1pm ET today!
Watch here or on YouTube to ask questions and follow along:
https://t.co/wWK0vObAhh
@nikitabier Please fix broken ad platform next, please. I don't understand why it's so broken. I successfully get to pay you for ads I want to run about 40% of the time. The other 60% of the time, some random-annoying twitter bug gets me to ragequit... Please, take my money.
You can now build, run, and scale fullstack ChatGPT apps with user authentication, API integration and hosted embedded frontend widgets w/ Gadget starting today!!!
Introducing the ChatGPT connection from Gadget🚀
Build, host, and ship full ChatGPT apps, no setup needed
✅ SDK integrated
✅ Auth & MCP configured
✅ React UI ready
Go from idea → live app inside ChatGPT in minutes
I suspect it will be quite significant for landing pages and simple things like that.
And it might actually make it so that Shopify starts being more competitive more downmarket against Wix and Squarespace given that the platform feels too complicated for someone with a blog that wants to sell one t-shirt. This suddenly makes them competitive on those use-cases like they used to be in the past.
Non-pedigree'd teams deserve Capital for their pre-product ideas too..... (specially given that most successful tech CEOs are non-pedigree'd when they start).
I don't think the original post was advocating for funding stupidly, but rather just funding a lot more, which the Canadian seed ecosystem definitely needs.
"You have a killer product, you can easily raise early in the US" is silly.
1- for many ideas, the earliest money comes before the killer product or even a killer protytpe can exist
2- Canadian VCs might have Capital, but they also have the risk appetite of my grandmother. Undeployed VC money is non existant VC money. Numbers on a chart, but nothing int he real world. Once Canadian VCs start deploying capital on wacky early stage ideas, and not copy-cats of US companies building identical things for our smaller market, then you can argue there's sufficient VC seed money in Canada.
3- some founders, like us at Gadget, escape this paradigm and raise big from US investors pre-product based on industry reputation, but that's a hard thing to come by in a nascent tech market like Canada.
Net net, it's in Canada's best interest for there to be a lot more super early stage capital deployed by people with much higher risk appetite than the Canadian VCs of today so that the only people who can get funding for ambitious ideas ARENT the founders with existing reputations, or the ones working on ideas that allow for a killer product/prototype to be built prior to the first fundraise.
My bet is that's individual stores that use individual apps, or custom code, served on AWS such that it took down their entire store and theyre blaming Shopify instead of the faulty code?
The web is so cloud dependent now that even if youre not on AWS, someone you use in some way will be and that will impact you. As an example Gadget is entirely on GCP, and yet our billing provider Orb who is also on GCP, emailed to let us know they will not issue/charge our customers for their usage-based invoices because they're worried that there are delays in how one of their underlying DB providers might be handling incoming data and they're worried they will issue incorrect bills. So Gadget, the entirely GCP run company stops working in some ways (new invoices and usage-based billing reports) because some provider is using some provider that's using some provider that's using AWS.
The businesses that my generation will build will be embedded in ChatGPT.
@gregisenberg gave me the idea to build an AI health concierge ChatGPT app.
I built this demo with @gadget_dev in ≈3 hours.