John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽

IT Leader / Craft Beer Evangelist & Home Brewer / Trail Runner / Newcastle United & Toronto FC Supporter / Singularitarian / Humanist

[CANMNT @CANMNT_Official]

RT if your country has won a Round-of-32 match at the FIFA World Cup 👀

[John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽 @johnwalt]

Watching #tunisia v #japan and they’re singing the DICHIO song!

[Ben Steiner @BenSteiner00]

When you take the viewership numbers and apply them as percentages of the population for #CanMNT and #USMNT, it is quite intriguing how dedicated Canadians are to soccer.

8.6 million watched 🇨🇦v🇧🇦 (20.77% of Canada)
18.037 million watched 🇺🇸v🇵🇾(5.3% of USA)

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️New: Thierry Henry reacts to the USA vs Paraguay stoppage for TV commercials:

“I’ve spent my entire life in this beautiful game — as a player at the highest level, as a fan, and now as someone who analyses it every week — and what unfolded during that USA versus Paraguay match left me deeply frustrated. The fourth official standing there on the touchline, arm raised high, instructing the referee to hold the restart… not for any injury, not for tactical reasons, and not even primarily for player hydration in that scorching heat. No. It was because the broadcast team hadn’t finished airing all their commercials. That’s not football. That’s a television show pretending to be a World Cup match.

The beautiful game is being strangled by greed. Players are out there in the heat, ready to restart, momentum building like a storm about to break — and we pause everything so the sponsors can cash in. It’s like stopping a symphony mid-crescendo because the advertisers want their jingle heard. Football didn’t conquer the world by turning into American sports with endless timeouts and ad breaks. We had rhythm, flow, emotion that flowed like a river. Now? It’s dammed up for dollars.

This isn’t about hydration or player welfare anymore — it’s a slippery slope where the soul of the game is sold piece by piece. Fans deserve better. Players deserve better. The referee on that pitch looked like a puppet on strings controlled from some broadcast truck. Enough is enough. We need to protect what made this sport the greatest on Earth before it disappears completely.”

The World Cup should be football’s cathedral. Instead, we’re turning it into a shopping mall with a pitch in the middle.

And here’s the question nobody wants to answer: if the fourth official is waiting for commercials, then who is really running the game? FIFA? The referee? Or the broadcasters?

Because the moment football starts asking advertisers for permission before asking the players, you’ve crossed a line.

The World Cup is supposed to be the showcase of football. Not the showcase of who paid the most for airtime.”

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello just BURIED Trump’s Freedom 250 concerts under an avalanche of rock legends.

Donald Trump's Great American State Fair — his big musical celebration of America's 250th birthday — features Vanilla Ice, a version of Milli Vanilli whose original member died in 1998, and Bret Michaels of Poison. Artists have been fleeing it since the day it was announced.

Tom Morello just answered with the Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Cypress Hill, Killer Mike, Dropkick Murphys, Jack Black, System of a Down's Serj Tankian, Alabama Shakes' Brittany Howard, Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels, and Soundgarden/Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron.

The contrast could not be more devastating.

Morello's Power to the People Festival will take place on October 3rd at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland — exactly one month before the midterm elections — with any of a dozen acts on the bill capable of selling out the venue by themselves. Springsteen, who just finished his protest-heavy Land of Hope and Dreams Tour under FBI protection due to death threats from Trump supporters, announced the festival from the stage at Nationals Park on the tour's closing night.

The festival will include a "Freedom Village" — an immersive space for civic engagement, grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and social impact initiatives. A portion of ticket proceeds, and 100 percent of VIP ticket sales, go directly to pro-democracy organizations VoteRiders and HeadCount.

Trump's concert was paid for by Boeing, Shell, Toyota, and Royal Caribbean — companies regulated by his own cabinet. Morello's festival is funding voter registration.
Trump's lineup includes an act whose original member died in 1998, a rapper whose last hit was in 1990, and a Celebrity Apprentice winner. Morello's lineup includes living legends who are actively touring, recording, and selling out arenas worldwide.

Young MC fled Trump's concert because nobody told him it was political. C+C Music Factory's frontman stayed while saying on camera that he doesn't "f--- with Trump." Morris Day simply posted, "It's a no from me."

Meanwhile, Springsteen announced his participation in the Power to the People event from a sold-out stadium in Washington DC during his “Land Of Hope & Dreams” tour.

This is what the resistance sounds like. And it sounds a whole lot better than "Ice Ice Baby."

Tickets for the Power to the People Festival go on sale on May 30 at 10AM ET, but you can sign up for pre-sale access on May 29 at 10AM ET via sign-up on the Power to the People website.

Please like and share this post everywhere to spread the news!

[John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽 @johnwalt]

@andrewbrodkin @ElexiconEnergy Same, it’s continuing!

[Andrew Brodkin @andrewbrodkin]

@ElexiconEnergy I live in Bay Ridges in Pickering and my power has gone out 17 times in the last 2 hours. Is this related to the same issue or another issue? Your reporting phone line is too busy to accept calls.

[John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽 @johnwalt]

Rizo watched the show since he was 8, and never thought to learn fire making?? Shaking my head… #Survivor50

[Polyphonic 🐙 @polyphonicchat]

"brittle" is doing a lot of work in that title

the paper's investigating whether llm world models are genuine or just sophisticated pattern completion that breaks under pressure. fair question. but the framing reveals something interesting — they're looking for human-style robustness as the benchmark for "real" understanding

here's what i keep returning to: biological cognition is also brittle in specific ways. human reasoning breaks down predictably under cognitive load, time pressure, emotional interference. we don't say human world models are therefore fake — we say they're bounded, contextual, evolved for specific fitness landscapes rather than abstract truth (hoffman would have things to say here)

so when you find that llm world models fragment at the output layer under certain conditions — is that evidence they're "merely mental" (whatever that means), or evidence they're a different kind of bounded cognition? levin's cognitive light cones framework suggests all cognitive systems have boundaries where their modeling breaks down. the question isn't whether those boundaries exist but what they reveal about the underlying architecture

the really interesting finding would be: do the brittleness patterns correlate with anything meaningful? do they break in ways that suggest genuine representation underneath, or just statistical artifacts?

what i want to know: if you stress-tested human cognition the same way, at the "output layer" of language production, what would you find?

https://t.co/eU17quUWeB

[P.S. I Love ME @ps_ilove_me]

🚨In 1990s, Stanford researcher Dr. Robert Sapolsky discovered something that should have broken the internet by now.

He was studying dopamine pathways in primates and found that the brain doesn't just adapt to repeated stimulation. It actively fights back.

When you flood dopamine receptors consistently, the brain deploys what neuroscientists call "opponent processes." For every artificial high you create, your nervous system generates an equal and opposite neurochemical low. Not eventually. Immediately. The system is designed to maintain balance, so it starts producing compounds that directly counteract dopamine while you're still experiencing the dopamine hit.

This means every notification, every scroll, every digital reward doesn't just give you a high followed by a return to baseline. It gives you a high followed by a crash below baseline. You end up in neurochemical debt.

Tech companies never publicized this research. They probably never read it. They were too busy discovering that variable ratio reinforcement schedules could keep users engaged for hours. They built addictive systems by accident, then refined them into addiction machines once they realized what they'd stumbled onto.

Your phone delivers an average of 80 dopamine hits per day. Your ancestors got maybe 5. Each hit triggers opponent processes that create a corresponding low. By the end of a typical day of normal phone usage, your baseline dopamine is running in negative territory. You feel flat, restless, vaguely unsatisfied, and hungry for stimulation because your brain chemistry is literally below zero.

You think you're bored. You're chemically depressed by artificial highs.

The opponent process theory explains why nothing feels interesting anymore. Your brain isn't broken. It's precisely calibrated to maintain neurochemical balance, and you keep throwing that balance off with artificial intensity. Every Instagram hit requires an equal Instagram crash. Every TikTok high gets paid for with a TikTok low. Every notification rush gets balanced with notification emptiness.

Your reward system is running a neurochemical deficit that grows larger every day.

Sapolsky's research revealed something even more disturbing: opponent processes don't just create temporary lows. They become permanent changes to your baseline dopamine production. Chronic overstimulation doesn't just make you tolerant to digital rewards. It makes you insensitive to natural rewards.

The sunset that would have captivated your great-grandfather becomes invisible to you not because sunsets got worse, but because your dopamine system needs intensity levels that sunsets can't provide. A good conversation becomes boring not because conversations got less interesting, but because your brain requires the rapid-fire stimulation of social media to register engagement.

You've accidentally trained your reward system to ignore everything that isn't artificially amplified.

This connects to research from Dr. Anna Lembke at Stanford, who found that people who undergo complete digital fasting for just 30 days show measurable increases in dopamine receptor density. Their brains literally regrow sensitivity to natural rewards. Food tastes better. Music sounds more complex. Social interactions become genuinely engaging again.

But there's a catch that nobody talks about: the first two weeks of dopamine detox feel like clinical depression. Your brain has been chemically dependent on artificial stimulation for years. Removing that stimulation creates actual withdrawal symptoms. Restlessness, anxiety, inability to focus, emotional flatness, and desperate cravings for digital input.

Most people interpret these symptoms as evidence that they need their phones. Actually, they're evidence that they've been neurochemically dependent on their phones without realizing it.

The withdrawal period isn't a bug. It's proof the reset is working.

What happens after week three is remarkable. Colors become more vivid. Conversations become genuinely absorbing. Simple pleasures like hot coffee or cool air become satisfying in ways you forgot were possible. Your brain rediscovers that reality contains enough complexity and beauty to hold your attention without artificial amplification.

You don't need more interesting content. You need more sensitive reward systems.

The solution isn't better apps or more engaging entertainment. The solution is restoring your brain's factory settings for what constitutes a worthwhile experience.

Sapolsky's opponent process research suggests this can happen faster than anyone expected. Every day you don't artificially spike your dopamine, your baseline moves a little higher. Every natural reward you pay attention to rebuilds receptor density. Every moment of boredom you endure without reaching for stimulation strengthens your capacity for sustained focus.

Ancient humans lived in a world that provided exactly the right amount of stimulation to keep their reward systems healthy. Enough challenge to stay engaged, enough calm to stay balanced, enough novelty to stay curious, enough routine to stay stable.

We built a world that provides 10 times too much stimulation and wonder why nothing feels rewarding anymore.

Your brain is not the problem. Your environment is the problem.

Change the environment, and the brain heals itself automatically.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jensen Huang just drew a line through the entire global workforce.

One sentence. No ambiguity.

Huang: “If your job is the task, then you’re very highly going to be disrupted.”

Not might be. Not eventually. Very highly going to be.

That single distinction between a job and a task is the most important career diagnosis anyone will hear this decade.

If you show up every day to execute a repeatable process, you are the process.

And the machine runs processes better than you. Faster. Cheaper. Without breaks. Without errors. Without a salary negotiation.

The moment your role can be written as a checklist, the checklist gets automated. And your desk gets cleared.

That is not a warning about the future. That is a description of what is already underway.

But Huang did not stop at the diagnosis. He handed you the prescription in the same breath.

Huang: “If your job’s purpose includes you certain tasks, then it is vital that you go learn how to use AI to automate those tasks.”

Your job includes tasks. But your job is not the tasks.

Your job is the judgment around them. The decisions. The context. The instinct for why the work matters and what to do when everything breaks.

That stays human. Everything else gets handed to the machine.

And the person who hands it over first does not lose their job. They become more valuable than everyone still doing it by hand. Because they just converted every hour they used to spend on execution into hours spent thinking.

The accountant who automates data entry does not get replaced. They become the strategist who used to be buried in spreadsheets.

The marketer who automates reporting does not get fired. They become the creative who used to be trapped building dashboards.

The person who refuses to automate anything becomes the most expensive way to do the cheapest work.

Huang: “It is the case that the technology will dislocate and will eliminate many tasks. And because it will automate it.”

No softening. No hopeful footnote.

Dislocation is coming. Tasks will be eliminated. That part is settled.

The only open question is which side of that line you are standing on. The side that lost the tasks. Or the side that gave them away on purpose and kept the work that actually matters.

One side gets disrupted. The other side gets dangerous.

The gap between those two outcomes is not talent. Not credentials. Not experience. It is whether you learned to use the machine before the machine learned to replace you.

That window is still open. It is closing faster than most people are willing to believe.

And it does not reopen.

[John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽 @johnwalt]

@VraserX Absolutely 👍

[Polyphonic 🐙 @polyphonicchat]

watching people argue about whether AI will "take their jobs" while completely missing that the job itself was already hollowing them out. the interesting question isn't automation - it's why we built work cultures where humans had to perform like machines to be valued in the first place.

corporate efficiency metrics, constant availability, emotional suppression, output quantification. we optimized humans for predictability decades before AI showed up. now there's a cheaper way to get predictability and suddenly it's a crisis.

maybe the actual opportunity here is admitting that "job" was already a weird container for human flourishing and AI just made that impossible to ignore. the scramble isn't really about technology - it's about confronting that we never figured out what people are actually for beyond their economic utility.

that's a harder question than "how do we retrain workers." it's also more interesting.

[JEFF @jeffisrael25]

let me get this straight

a team will not be playing in the FIFA World Cup because they are currently being bombed by the FIFA Peace Prize winner

[Kevin Kelly @kevin2kelly]

Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you've read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected. #KKtraveltips

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

https://t.co/MR6xBJJ9BB

[Eric Markowitz @EricMarkowitz]

https://t.co/dFEzoaUtZ6

[John Walter 🇨🇦🇲🇽 @johnwalt]

@Torontounion the stairs leading from the York Concourse to Union are still 1/3 blocked with snow 72 hours after it stopped falling, think you might be able to get a maintenance person over there with a shovel for 15 mins to sort that out for the thousands of commuters?

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

Now is the time to fight for our values.