Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)

Holy shit, Montréal is about to become a surveillance city: https://old.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/1o0q9wa/the_spvm_will_start_using_an_american_ai/ American software collecting the movement history of all people in Montreal. Millions of hours of video will be sent to the US, including the movement history of all citizens, and police will be able to access it all _without a warrant or judicial oversight_.

Karakatsanis et al 2025: "PyTrim: A Practical Tool for Reducing Python Dependency Bloat" https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00674
Their tool achieves 98.3% accuracy in replicating human-made changes; when run on 971 open-source packages, it identified and trimmed bloated dependencies in 39 of them.
#nwit

Canada issues warning for citizens with gender-neutral passports travelling to U.S.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-united-states-travel-warning-1.7648381

Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" is 50 years old this month.

So, so tired of cop shows. I want a series about three generations of an activist family. The grandparents were part of the anti-war/civil rights movement in the 60s. One of their kids is a slightly conservative gay corporate lawyer, the other manages a community center, and her kid is a trans college activist who's angry all the time. Throw in friends (and enemies) for all three generations, and start filming.

Are you a software developer living with chronic pain? Mairieli Wessel and colleagues would like to interview you: for details, please see https://developerpain.github.io/

Looking for data on the # of IT jobs in Canada from 1990s to present day. Would settle for data for US or EU, but can only (easily) find data going back to just before COVID.

Larooij & Törnberg 2025: "Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social Simulation" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385 The authors built a bots-only "social" network and found it inevitably spiraled down into partisan echo chambers, elite formation, and polarization. None of the six mitigation strategies they implemented (including chronological feeds, hiding likes, and bridging strategies) changed those outcomes. #nwit

@mhoye s/child/CEO

Does the teaching tool I want exist? Top-left pane shows editable HTML source. Bottom-left pane shows editable CSS. Right pane shows rendered view, and automatically updates whenever both the HTML and CSS panes are in legal (parseable) states, so that each valid edit is immediately displayed. (I know of many such tools that redisplay when told to, but I want polling + parsing + render-when-valid. I could build it myself, but I'm hoping it already exists.) thanks in advance

There is a lot of ageism in tech. One reason, I think, is that 30-year-olds spouting recycled Y Combinator bullshit don't like having the obvious flaws and contradictions in their statements pointed out by people who've lived through two or three previous hype cycles. Not hiring the elderly ensures that they're always in a high-adulation environment, and never have to worry about whether staff will resist being guilted or bullied into sacrificing their personal lives for someone else's gain.

My father enjoyed building little wooden clocks and bird houses, and my spouse enjoys knitting sweaters and baby clothes. I enjoy writing little pieces of code. I believe our hobbies satisfy the same underlying urge: to make something well on our own timeline and on a human scale.

My sister Sylvia died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at the age of 47, leaving three teenage children behind. The mRNA cancer vaccine being developed in the US was the best hope we've ever had to prevent this. The Trump Administration's decision to cut funding for this live-saving research based on pseudo-scientific hysteria condemns more people like my sister to death, and more children to grow up without their mothers. https://third-bit.com/2012/01/21/the-life-i-did-live-the-breath-i-breathed/

Does anyone have pointers to books, articles, or training materials on succession planning in long-lived scientific research projects (rather than succession planning in general)? For example, if you've been running a study of a patch of northern forest for 30 years and want to retire, how do you pass that project on to someone else? Please note: not looking for specific tips here, but rather pointers to resources people have found useful. Thanks in advance.

Executive Order 14162 – "Ending Vagrancy and Restoring Order" redefines homelessness and mental illness as matters of public disorder—not public health. It further instructs the DOJ to help states override legal limits on involuntary psychiatric commitment, thereby lowering the bar for institutionalization.

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/fascist-fight-club

My mother taught hundreds of children to read, to clean up after themselves, and to hug their friends when they were sad, and I think she believed that the world would be a better place if everyone would do those three simple things.

And sure, maybe the tech debt is piling up, but that's tomorrow's problem and you don't even know if you _have_ a tomorrow because the company let 350 people go last month but didn't cut its targets and crap, dad's forgotten where the coffee maker is and you can't remember the last time you weren't exhausted. Claude can write some unit tests and a commit message while you sort that out and all these people complaining that it takes the fun out of coding can just go fuck themselves. 2/2

Please don't compare using AI tools to what it's like for you to work under the best possible circumstances. Instead, ask if it's helpful when you're working sixty hours a week to make rent while supporting an elderly parent, all the while watching your inbox in case you're a victim of the next round of layoffs. Will it write an email or lesson as well as you could at your best? No. Will it produce something you can ship so you can gulp down dinner and fall into bed? Yeah, it can do that. 1/2

Pro tip: if you post a photo of "rock star developers" from a Y Combinator meetup in Paris, and _every single person_ in the photo is white and male, you're probably telling your audience more than you thought you were.