Jan Richards 🇨🇦

Transit builder, accessibility advocate, nature admirer, wise cracker, whale watcher, fitness dabbler, and Dad. Opinions are my own.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

Read the whole thing.

[Jim Geraghty @jimgeraghty]

The Canadian Menace https://t.co/V5JUAoexij

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

@davidrazi @AsianBlindfold @Razgriz_094 That bridge is owned by the Canadian government. It’s the Government of Canada logo.

https://t.co/8Y26IkuHp8

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

A nice reminder of the Fire Jumpers game that Jason Thomas and I built back in the day. https://t.co/IiZSC33HQS

[Tom Antonov @Tom_Antonov]

Impressive footage of 5 @SecCivileFrance Canadair CL-415 water bombers taking turns scooping water from Lake Sainte-Croix 🇫🇷 before heading out to battle the numerous wildfires raging across southern France this summer.
📸 by Cyril Talbot / FB

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

While you slept last night, completely motionless in your bed, our galaxy shifted millions of kilometers through the cosmos.

You woke up in the same room, on the same planet, but unimaginably far from where you were the night before.

The Milky Way does not glide silently through the universe. It is racing through space at about 600 kilometers per second, carrying with it billions of stars, planets, and everything they contain on the journey. It is a good reminder that, even when life seems motionless, you are always in motion.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Trump has insulted and tariffed his European allies, persuaded Denmark to prepare for a US invasion and, by pressuring Ukraine and not Russia, encouraged Putin to keep fighting. All of which he has forgotten.
https://t.co/GhDO27FyxK

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

This is the key to understanding how to use AI.

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything , and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

I wouldn’t read TOO much into it as there is likely a lot of variability within Canada and the US-but at a high level it’s interesting that two countries that are probably more similar in many ways than any two other countries (e.g. language, media, sports) are also so different.

[Pew Research Center @pewresearch]

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: https://t.co/qBtj1ycDkP

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

My favourite part of Steve Jobs iPhone launch in 2007 is 4 minutes he spends counterpositioning iPhone to Blackberry.

Masterclass:

▫️pulls up greatest 2x2 market map ever (smart vs. not so smart, hard vs. easy to use)
▫️takes a swig of water
▫️rips into the Blackberry keyboard for being static (“there when you don’t even need it”)
▫️unveils touch gesture on iPhone (no stylus, just fingers)
▫️caps if off by saying “and boy have we patented it” (the Apple nerds lose their minds)

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Yann LeCun just exposed AI’s fundamental flaw. We’re celebrating systems that can’t do what insects do effortlessly.

LeCun: “The biggest difficulty is not to get fooled into thinking that a computer system is intelligent simply because it can manipulate language.”

Language feels like intelligence because we experience it as the highest form of human thought.

So when a machine produces fluent, articulate, convincing text, the instinct is to conclude it understands.

It doesn’t.

LeCun: “It turns out the real world is much, much more complicated.”

Language is actually the easy part.

A sequence of discrete symbols with a finite number of possibilities. Predicting the next word is a tractable mathematical problem. Impressive at scale.

Not understanding. Pattern matching in symbol space.

The real world is something else entirely. A high-dimensional, continuous, noisy signal that changes every millisecond in ways no text corpus can capture.

Physical reality doesn’t come in tokens.

LeCun: “Which your house cat is perfectly able to deal with. But not computers yet.”

This is the Moravec paradox.

The things that feel hard to humans: writing essays, solving equations, passing bar exams. Computationally straightforward.

The things that feel trivially easy: walking across a room, catching a falling object, folding a shirt. Extraordinarily difficult for machines.

Your house cat navigates a complex three-dimensional physical environment in real time.

Predicts trajectories. Adjusts to surprises. Understands cause and effect through direct interaction with the world.

The most powerful AI systems ever built cannot do what your cat does before breakfast.

That’s not a minor gap. That’s the entire frontier.

Language is the easy problem that looks hard to humans.

The physical world is the hard problem that looks easy because evolution solved it billions of years ago.

We’re pouring hundreds of billions into making language models marginally better at the simple problem.

The actual intelligence problem remains unsolved.

LeCun has spent fifteen years on this. Not making chatbots more fluent. Giving machines the ability to understand, predict, and interact with physical reality the way animals do instinctively.

The benchmark that matters isn’t passing a bar exam.

It’s folding a shirt. Loading a dishwasher. Navigating an unfamiliar room without a map.

We built systems that can write your dissertation before we built systems that can tie your shoes.

That’s where AI actually is.

Everything else is autocomplete at scale.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

@spochadoir Agreed. The Winter Olympics is basically just an awesome collection of ice and snow-themed dares.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

@AshkenasJohn @cadlam There’s also an App Store app called Gridwatch.

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

A must watch. This video is over 30 years old.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

It is impossible to win against stupid.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

Between John and Ivan.

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

How to say 'John' across Europe.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

@CalltoActivism What a weird thing to pray for.

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

A whole lot of BS political views basically amount to assuming that life in our hard won civilisations is just the way things are, and that you can simply remove the foundations.

Only a society protected by vaccines produces anti-vaxxers. Only a society with a strong military produces pacifists. Only a society with large scale industrial farming produces organic foodies. Only societies with cheap energy produce degrowthers.

You don’t get to enjoy the ends whilst condemning the means, and still be taken seriously.

[Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran]

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

[Made In Canada @MadelnCanada]

Snow birds in action flying around the CN Tower ✈️ 🇨🇦

[Wonder of Science @wonderofscience]

Carl Sagan explains how the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round and calculated its circumference over 2,000 years ago.

[Jan Richards 🇨🇦 @RichardsJan]

@TigerTime26CA @Toyota Yes, exactly, the hinges are literally ripping. This is my third Toyota. I understand that design mistakes can occasionally happen, but then a company that values quality and customer loyalty would try to make it right. @ToyotaCanada