Big Muddy

I stumbled across this neat website, ERStat.ca, to track wait times across Canadian hospital emergency rooms.

Meta has been trialing AI support agents for some users, and it appears these bots were exploited to gain control of various high-profile Instagram accounts.

I saw this post a while ago, “Fellow Artists, I’m Begging You to Pull Your Heads Out of the Sand About AI”, but I decided to write about it today because there’s a passage in Freddie deBoer’s post today on LLMs that almost perfectly encapsulated my own fe…

Sometimes you read a piece that annoys you because you wish you wrote it yourself.

Some residents of Toronto, in my old neighbourhood of Leslieville, have discovered why the vast majority of planted ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba) are male.

DeWayne Stevenson, better known as Supa Hot Fire, apparently knocked out Ray J, better known as the guy who made Kim Kardashian famous, in an MMA fight earlier this month.

There was an amusing thread on Twitter yesterday showing all the bizarre responses of Google’s AI Overview to the question “How many Ps are in Google?”

We’ve already discussed the trend of features being added to Python package managers to guard against the flurry of short-lived supply chain attacks like the infamous LiteLLM compromise.

We recently discussed the decision by Disney, owners of the defunct politics and sports analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, to wipe the venerable website’s entire catalogue.

I wrote some time ago about how I was testing ZeroClaw, a self-hosted agent in the Claw-like ecosystem, and how I wanted to build a workflow for sending links and ideas through Telegram to turn into structured notes that I could later use to write posts f…

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the Canadian government was planning to ban crypto ATMs.

The British Film Institute has inducted the classic Flash animation Badger Badger (officially titled “Badgers”) by British animator Mr Weebl into the BFI National Archive.

Today marks the 16th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day, the closest thing the cryptocurrency has to a holiday.

To follow the theme of my post from two days ago,“hey, what are we actually measuring?”

There has been some movement on surveillance pricing (i.e., algorithmic price discrimination) bans in the United States.

Gideon M-K wrote an article recently on “The Most Persistent Myth About COVID-19”.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has responded to advancements in automated AI code scanners by deciding to close nearly all of its open source repositories.

Everyone’s talking about that New York Times article “unmasking” Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous developer of Bitcoin.

Halina Bennet’s observation that most people can’t really stomach pop culture depictions of the COVID-19 pandemic got me thinking about my country’s curious lack of reckoning to this generation-defining crisis.

FiveThirtyEight was a US politics and sports analysis blog founded by Nate Silver in 2008.

This post contains light spoilers for The Boys.

Matt Bruenig recently posted about transitioning his think tank’s website from Wordpress to a fully customized CMS vibe-coded by Claude.

This was originally a much longer post analyzing Martinez et al. (2020), which reports on the 2018–2019 outbreak of the Andes strain of the Hantavirus in a small municipality in Argentina.

This is the first entry in what will most likely become an ongoing series highlighting fun words (usually from other languages).

A week ago, I published a short essay on the state of the Internet entitled “The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet”.

The Canadian federal government announced in late April that it plans to ban crypto ATMs.

In late March, we talked about how Canada’s federal police, the RCMP, were building a case management system and data portal, alongside AI tools, to help fight a tsunami of fraud in Canada.

The bad behaviour incentivized by prediction markets are a running theme on this blog, so I’m sharing a few links I’ve saved over the past few weeks in this vein: Polymarket criticized over ‘disgusting’ bets on fate of pilots on US jet shot by Iran: Polym…

Here’s a good catch by journalist Norman Spector.

If you were a PC gamer and BitTorrent user in the 2000s through the early 2010s, you were probably familiar with DAEMON Tools.

Dr.

The seed of this post was hearing “I Don’t Wanna Wait” on the radio while shopping for groceries.

Claw-like agents are token-hungry money sinks, yet many of these agents support (or supported) diverting your OpenAI or Claude subscription to feed your agent.

Someone put together a hub for articles on prediction markets.

Python’s default package management system pip now has an official mechanism for supporting dependency cooldowns, which we previously discussed on this blog as a supported feature of uv.

When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, privacy and mass surveillance by governments were a major topic of discussion.

I recently came across Excalidraw Whiteboard in a course I am taking, where it was used to create a variety of architectural diagrams.

I think I had the general impression that New Zealand basically hugged the southeastern coast of Australia, but in fact the Kiwis are quite a bit further away from Australia than I thought.

This Smithsonian Magazine article by Brigit Katz recounts how the American crocodile in Florida, whose numbers had dwindled to fewer than 300 by the 1970s, recovered in part due to the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station.

Debate any subject with an empirical angle and you will inevitably run into the phrase “correlation does not necessarily imply causation”.

Eroom’s law (Moore’s law backwards) is a term coined by Jack Scannell et al. in 2012 to describe why drug discovery has become slower and more expensive over time.

The anonymous Polymarket trader that made over $400,000 in profit betting on Maduro’s ouster has been allegedly unmasked as special forces soldier Master Sgt.

Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the world’s most expensive law firms, has been caught submitting hallucinated legal citations as part of a routine bankruptcy case.

This is pretty darn interesting new release from Thomas Lin Pedersen and team at Posit (the company behind RStudio): ggsql, a SQL-fied take on the grammar of graphics approach to data visualization made famous by ggplot2.

Today’s post is a fun one: a working paper from 2006 entitled “Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan”.

Cancer therapies based on mRNA vaccine technology have been among the most promising medical developments of the past decade.

Stephen Johnson reports in Big Think on a movement in the United States to end the fear that parents have of having Child Protective Services called on them for giving their young children some independence to roam their neighbourhoods unsupervised.

David Oks wrote a provocatively titled post a few weeks ago: “How citations ruined science”.

This article “4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware” (originally posted late 2024) by He et al. has been doing the rounds lately.

Mathieu Laberge, Chief Economist at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, has a good article out today on why you can’t subsidize your way out of Canada’s housing affordability crisis: simply helping potential homeowners with their mortgage payments