Andrew Burke

@ajlburke

Software guy and nerdy digital artist from Halifax Nova Scotia. He did Bloomsday Halifax and Starshipsstarthere.

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Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 5d

So, um, maybe avoid Hollis for the next while

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 5d

Heavy but insightful post from @xoxogossipgita.bsky.social about the surprising duo of Cronenberg and Charlie XCX talking about death. aftermath.site/charli-xcx-m... Includes this epic comment on how great @actordougjones.bsky.social is

Briefly met Doug Jones once. Asked what work he was most proud of. Said the work he's put into his marriage.
Caught me so off guard and immediately asked me right back what mine was. I didn't have an answer. Started anxiously rambling, flailing for something to say.
And he just hugged me mid-ramble. Long enough for me to calm down.
I didn't really take the lesson then but I do now.
I won't die thinking about my work. And thank god for that.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 5d

So it turns out you can have your reputation and life ruined and spend 18 months in jail just for having a slightly similar username to someone else. No other evidence on your laptop or phone? Somehow even more damning! Glad Tim's on the case, as everyone's wondering how TF this happened

There was no evidence on the phone and laptop, but as I'll explain next week, even that lack of evidence was mischaracterized in order to falsely implicate Klayme. For now, let's just concentrate on the user name.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 5d

Also, does this sound at all familiar?

For the reader not previously versed in the psychology of authoritarianism the preceding chapter may have come as something of a surprise. At first sight the traits of orderliness, tough-mindedness, obedience to authority, punitiveness and the rest may well have seemed the very embodiment of hard-hitting masculinity - ideally suited to the job of being a soldier. Unfortunately, as represented in the authoritarian personality they are only skin-deep - a brittle crust of defences against feelings of weakness and inadequacy. The authoritarian keeps up his spirits by whistling in the dark. He is the frightened child who wears the armour of a giant. His mind is a door locked and bolted against that which he fears most: himself.
Since the truth of this may be a hard pill to swallow (for it threatens the whole elaborate structure of personal defences), we shall now describe another piece of independent research which has reached similar conclusions by a different route. Like the research on authoritarianism it started with a quite specific aspect of perception - in this case, the extent to which people can respond analytically rather than globally to the mass of information reaching their senses! A special instance of this ability is the degree to which people can ignore irrelerant...

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 5d

This, from "On The Psychology of Military Incompetence" (1976), really hits in 2026.

some of the data 'are hair-raising. They suggest that we could find in this country [USA| willing recruits for a Gestapo.4 The results delineated the authoritarian personality. People who were anti-Semitic were also generally ethnocentrically prejudiced and conservative. They also tended to be aggressive, superstitious, puni-tive, tough-minded and preoccupied with dominance-submission in their personal relationships. That this cluster of traits suggested a unique underlying personality structure was borne out by the clinical interviews. It seems that authoritarians are the product of parents with anxiety about their status in society. From earliest infancy the children of such people are pressed to seek the status after which their parents hanker.
There seem to be two converging reasons why such pressures produce prejudice and the other related traits. In the first place, the values inculcated by status-insecure parents are such that their children learn to put personal success and the acquisition of power above all else. They are taught to judge people for their usefulness rather than their likeableness. Their friends, and even future marriage part-ners, are selected and used in the service of personal advancement; love and affection take second place to knowing the right people. They are taught to eschew weakness and passivity, to respect authority, and to despise those who have not made the socio-economic grade. Success is equated with social esteem and material advantage, rather than with more spiritual values. Then again, they are imbued by their par ents with rigid views regarding sex and aggression.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 6d

I think it was a library they had handy and then they added extra details with a "fatbits" editor, maybe something like this one for Lotus Notes that I hated so much

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 13d

How I feel whenever I visit friends/family with children

Cartoon of an eccentrically dressed woman talking to an exhausted haggard-looking family: "Anyway, I'm gonna follow this goose for a while and see where I end up."

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 19d

I've been getting more serious about guitar in the last year or so and to push myself I'm playing my first live "gig" tomorrow: all 3 minutes of The Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" at a friend's backyard music party. I may not be very good yet but at least a pretty guitar makes for a rocking selfie!

A hazy black and white low-angle "rock star" selfie of Andrew with a black PRS Silver Sky SE Stratocaster-style guitar

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· 20d

I laughed out loud in this food court and people are looking at me funny

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jul 13

So Eastern Front is co-producing "Frenchy's The Thrift Musical" with Parrsborro's Ship's Company. That's a bit out of the way from HRM if you don't have a car - so they're doing a bus trip! Includes lunch at the Harbour View, and stops at Masstown Market, and of course Frenchy's in Truro!

Let EFT do the driving in a comfortable passenger bus with wifi and air conditioning. You'll make some stops along the way so you can enjoy some scenery and snacks, art and shopping, and of course -- a meal!

All of this will culminate in the main event: a performance at one of Nova Scotia's incredible rural professional theatre companies.

Before or after the shows you'll have an exclusive chat with some of the artists involved before we making one last stop at the market for an ice cream or a snack on the way home.

Tickets are $145 for each trip, including lunch!

SATURDAY, JULY 25th
Frenchy's: The Thrift Musical
EASTERN FRONT THEATRE FIELD TRIP
SATURDAY, JULY 25th 2026
FRENCHY'S: THE THRIFT MUSICAL at Ship's Company Theatre
8:30 AM - DEPART ALDERNEY LANDING
10:00 AM - GUY'S FRENCHYS (TRURO)
12:00 PM - HARBOUR VIEW RESTAURANT
2:00 PM - FRENCHY'S: THE THRIFT MUSICAL
4:00 PM - ARTIST TALK
5:30 PM - MASSTOWN MARKET
7:00 PM - ARRIVE ALDERNEY LANDING

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jul 12

Day 2 of the kite festival meant finally having vada pavs for lunch - though the wind was gustier and more changeable today, so it was rare to see both big kites up at the same time

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jul 1

So Tesla is back at Elon's favourite price. Just needs an extra 0.09

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 26

Just as people are starting to really figure out how much the AI thing is a reheat of the Crypto thing, and not in a happy way, OpenAI have named their latest models Terra and Luna, like the Ponzi fiasco that started the big crypto collapse of early 2022

Quoting OpenAl
Simon Willison's Weblog / Jun 26, 2026 at 2:15
PM
We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT-5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT-5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost. [...]

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 26

I agree that the current Iran thing is a historic blunder, but, Mr Schumer, history is full of worse blunders - in fact there's one still ongoing on the north shores of the Black Sea, and even that isn't the worst blunder in that part of the world heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-23-2026

"Trump's historic blunder in Iran will go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made, or any country has ever made," Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said today.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 25

An insightful take on Anthropic's "Mythos" branding from Om Malik om.co/2026/06/07/t...

The crucial distinction is epistemological. Logos makes claims that can be interrogated.

Mythos makes claims that are received. You do not verify a mythos. You inhabit it. The community that holds it says it is true, and that is sufficient, because the story explains things that need explaining and provides a framework that holds the world together.

When Anthropic names their frontier model Mythos, they are encoding an instruction. Operate in mythos-mode when thinking about this. Not logos-mode. It's not show me the safety eval, the benchmark or the capitalization table. Instead, just receive it. Like I have said, this is authority posing as confessional cosplay.

Consider what Dario himself wrote earlier this year:
"I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species."- The Adolescence of Technology, January 2026

Rite of passage. Inevitable. Test who we are as a species. That is not the language of a scientist or an engineer. That is mythos. And it is coming from the man who named the model.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 24

I keep thinking about this but from the inventor of Claude Code last week. He had Cowork book his next trip and "it worked perfectly" ... except for oopsie where it booked a $5000/night hotel room. That's NOT perfect, buddy!

Over the last year and a half there have been so many moments like that. I had one with Cowork recently. Every time we release a new model, I experiment with it to see the frontier of what it can do, because one of the hardest things about building on a model is that it's advancing so fast - you have to recalibrate every month, as I'm sure you know. I used Cowork to book a bunch of flights. Usually it works okay; this time it worked perfectly. Now, any time I travel, I use Cowork to book it. It booked eight flights and five hotels. The only mistake was that one of the hotels was way over budget - | think it was like $5,000 a night.

Newton: Cowork wants you to have a great time when you go on your stay.

Cherny: I said, "Please rebook this one." But otherwise it just worked for a couple of hours and did all of it. It was so cool. I feel that surprise every week, every month.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 23

Did you get to the Valhalla DLC where you meet her?

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 23

I know, right?

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 22

Ahahahahahah down 16% IN A DAY. This is like the Heavy blowing up shortly after launch

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 22

So @philmoscovitch.bsky.social was 🔥 in today's Morning File www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file...

Imagine there's a big push to get everyone to eat more hot dogs.

Every time you go out to eat, you notice hot dogs being incorporated into more and more dishes. You order General Tao's chicken, and it comes with slices of hot dog. At a buffet, there are multiple trays with sliced, crumbled, and fried pieces of hot dog, each with a flashing sign saying, "Add hot dogs!" High-end restaurants have hot dog sharing plates.

Vegetarian options disappear, or are only available if someone else in your party orders hot dogs.
Artisanal meat markets add hot dogs to their offerings, first as a way of seeming edgy, but then just incorporate them into the offerings as standard fare. Because they now need a lot of hot dogs, they just start ordering them from chain restaurant suppliers.

Every recipe you look at online becomes unreadable until you swipe away pop-ups asking if you've added hot dogs yet, and telling you how hot dogs will revolutionize your eating experience. Even after you swipe away the ads, the recipes all include hot dogs.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 22

So after a huge post-IPO boom SpaceX is back down to pretty close to its starting price. See that slope on the left? That's a whole lot of overexcitable suckers being given a bag to hold.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 21

My Father's Day thing is from a month or so ago when I discovered that my late father was in the famous Halifax "Encounter on the Urban Environment" documentary - he doesn't say anything, he was just in the background at a reception, but it was still nice (if weird) to see him again after so long.

A black and white still of a reception. Chris Burke is having a drink and listening to the discussion

A group of economic development policy men talk at a reception, Chris Burke listens at the right of the frame

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 18

Hey is that the Bluenose in the harbour? I guess showing the Racers that we've been doing fast sails for a while!

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

For the next round: the ineluctable modality of the visible! #bloomsdayhalifax #bloomsday

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

Saw this on FB - might have been why all the extra signs

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

The ultimate #bloomsday combo: a cold glass of stout with Molly Bloom on top of

A Guinness with a photo of Molly Bloom printed on the foam head

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

Maybe it's not a 100% authentic #bloomsday Dijon on a Gorgonzola sandwich with a Burgundy, but it does come with fries! I don't think fries would have been a thing outside of Belgium in 1904, but they make a great addition

A grilled cheese sandwich with fries. A glass of red wine. A plastic bottle of Heinz Yellow Mustard

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

Collecting essential virtual items for #bloomsday as well #bloomsdayhalifax #bloomsday2026

A screen capture:

4. Calypso
You have found:
Plasto's High Grade Ha
His hand took his hat from the peg... The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's high grade ha.
He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip of paper. Quite safe.

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

"And I had a potato in my pocket, as was the style at the time..."

A small potato and a wrapper saying "Potato I have."

Andrew Burke@ajlburke· Jun 16

A new ritual for me as part of #bloomsdayhalifax 2026 is letting the sea wash my Blubdstones at Black Rock beach #bloomsday