Toronto Will

@torontowill

Cat lover, Trekkie (FoD), NE Patriots fan, video game enthusiast. Professionally: lawyer.

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Toronto Will@torontowill· 13d

🧐 Don't think this came out of a medical textbook

The right hipbone of the "Dip" diagram depicts a femur shape that is... not accurate.

Toronto Will@torontowill· 27d

Toronto reportedly had the world’s worst air quality yesterday, at an AQI of ~160. Today? 🤐 I haven’t seen Americans complaining about “Canadian wildfires” yet, but I know I will, and it will infuriate me. These are global warming’s wildfires, and the yanks have every bit as much ownership of them.

Air Quality
337
Hazardous. Health warning: air quality may cause hazardous health effects. Avoid all physical activity outdoors.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Jul 2

Ahh. The article originally said 50bn. Relieved I’m not the only one who realized that couldn’t be right.

• This article was amended on 1 July 2025 to clarify that Americans eat 20bn hotdogs annually, not 50bn as a previous version incorrectly stated.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Jul 2

The article says 20bn, which is still bananas, but not as bananas as 50bn.

Annually, Americans eat 20bn of them, he says.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Jun 20

Just don’t let Kira near it.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Kira Nerys preparing to obliterate a nice old man’s outdoor pizza oven, which she has spent the episode helping him build, in order to convince him to leave his farm. The planet was surrendered to the Cardassians in a treaty, or something.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Jun 9

I like to look at the "strong approve" number, as a leading indicator of whether the floor might drop out, on his stubbornly persistent ~40% approval. It's 19% in this poll, and even among self-identified "MAGA supporters" it's 63%. The floor ain't firm.

Screenshot of table from linked poll in quoted post, showing President Trump job approval split by ideology, and split by strength of approval/disapproval.

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 30

A pretty good and biting analysis of the SpaceX IPO, with only two points that irked me. One being credulousness towards Anthropic (an AI competitor's) claim to being profitable, and the other "presuming" that cooling is easy in space. No! You link to a Tom's Hardware that quantifies the difficulty.

(Presumably also the environment will help with cooling, which is often done, controversially, with water. I suppose you could radiate heat to space like the James Webb Space Telescope does?)

[excerpt from Tom's Hardware article linked later in The Verge's story, cited for the difficulty of replacing air & water cooling]

In addition, nearly all of the input power becomes heat, which must be radiated into space, which means millions of square meters of radiators to handle 1+ GW of thermal load. How much will such radiators weigh and how much will cost lifting them to space is something that remains to be seen, but since radiators tend to weigh more than solar panels, we are talking about tens of billions of dollars here.

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 29

I'm getting 2FA emails from Facebook that I did not trigger. I want to use Facebook's security tools to verify these emails are actually from them (rather than phishing), and see if there's evidence of someone else trying to login. Their page that shows what emails they've sent me is... broken.

Sorry, something went wrong.
We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 28

I sometimes get despondent at how awful the social internet is, knowing it *can* be such an amazing way to connect people and share experiences. In this case I'm not just talking about the scrolly apps, I'm talking about product reviews. Get a load of this, from the totally human "Amazon Customer":

Amazon review for Pedialyte Strawberry Freeze, from user name "Amazon Customer". Rating: 5 stars, title: "AMAZING PRODUCT". Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2026. Review:

he [sic] Pedialyte AdvancedCare Plus Electrolyte Powder Sticks in Strawberry Freeze are a game‑changer when it comes to staying hydrated. These packets are super convenient—just mix with water and you’ve got a great‑tasting drink that actually works.

The flavor is tasty without being too sweet, and it goes down easy even when you’re feeling wiped out. I noticed a real difference in how quickly I felt replenished after workouts and long days in the heat. It helps settle that heavy, dehydrated feeling way better than plain water.

Love the value pack too—great for keeping in the car, gym bag, or office. If you want fast, effective hydration with a pleasant flavor, these Pedialyte sticks do the job. Highly recommend!

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 27

You have to update your clip bumper. What a blunder!

Screenshot of “Listen wherever you get your podcasts!” graphic at the end of the clip. It features the logos of five major podcatcher apps and… Maximum Fun.

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 23

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 21

The military-industrial complex is hard at work misunderstanding sci-fi, yet again.

USS Enterprise NX-01 (it had a grappler)

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 19

That sounds like an Onion “American Voices” job title.

Blake Popa, Retired Francophile (Apr-May 2026 issue)

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 17

I got really mad at a CBC article for writing a long article about intellectual property without even comprehending the basic difference between copyright and trademark, and then just as I was posting my tirade…

RSS feed headline of the CBC article, “FIFA is notorious for strict copyright rules…”

Crop from the article, accompanied by angry face emoji, “Given all the copyright rules in place…”

Another crop from the article, this time referring to “FIFA’s intellectual guidelines”, when it should be “intellectual PROPERTY guidelines”

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 11

“I don’t know what to do with my arms, does this look natural on camera?” “Nailed it in one boss, don’t change anything” “Really, just hang my hands limply like this?” “PERFECT”

Crop of one of the bland white dudes in collared shirts sitting on a couch from the 4-up in the original post. His elbows are pointed outwards symmetrically, while his hands hang limp. His knees are squeezed together, making him narrow at the bottom and wide at the top, it seems as if he might tip over (but he’s sitting). He stares straight into the camera with the sheepish look of someone who’s just ripped a massive fart and is hoping nobody notices.

Toronto Will@torontowill· May 4

You point out the "insatiable demand" isn't real in the sense that it's really just 2 companies who happen to be heavily subsidized by the companies they're buying the compute from, but I'm also suspicious that supply is not actually "overwhelmed". Somehow it's always available if you pay more!

Six months ago, Krea signed a six-month contract to rent several hundred Nvidia Blackwell chips for $2.80 [annotated with red box outline, sad face] an hour per chip after several cloud providers competed aggressively for the startup’s business. But in the last month, when the startup began looking for more AI servers to train a model from scratch, some sales representatives at cloud providers wouldn’t pick up the phone, said co-founder and CEO Victor Perez.

In the end, the founders reached an agreement to pay $3.70 [annotated with green box outline, smiley face] an hour for another several hundred Blackwell chips in a one-year commitment—32% higher than their last deal. And even that price seemed cheap, given the chip prices he had seen from other providers.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 21

Incredible. A new camera angle that makes Snap’s dork spectacles look even dorkier. bsky.app/profile/ktla...

Screen shot of linked post. To overcome inability two show media of two quoted posts simultaneously.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 20

I'm weary of overreacting to single polls, been fooled by it before. Trump remains over 41% in the RCP average, and he actually had comparably awful numbers about 18 months into his first term. Breaking through that floor of support is like jackhammering cement.

RealClearPolitics Poll Average, "President Trump Approval", dating back to 2017. Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/approval-rating

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 16

🤡

Screen shot of original post that shows all replies blanked out and failing to load (the like button also does not work)

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 15

Wait wtf is this. I’m just learning that Snap is doing AR (??) and in 2026 this is what they have to show for it, the man went on stage looking like this.

Image associated with linked article, cropped to focus on man on stage wearing the dorkiest AR glasses you could possibly imagine.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 14

Winner! And my verdict is that the headline poorly describes the article. There is some anxiety among OpenAI investors that they’re making questionable tactical decisions, but there’s no specifics of anyone being worried that the company is valued too highly. I still think that makes no sense.

"You have ChatGPT, a 1bn-user business growing 50-100 per cent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" said one early backer of OpenAI.
"It's a deeply unfocused company."

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 13

Meanwhile just today a huge, obtrusive Copilot button toggled itself *on* in my Outlook mobile app. (But it might have been pushed on by my employer, it didn’t toggle on for my personal account).

Settings menu in Outlook for iOS, titled “Copilot”, a toggle for “Turn on Copilot” is enabled (not by me!)

iOS keyboard in Outlook mobile app in compose view, above the letters is a row of functions, with a large colourful copilot button that is literally glowing.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 10

If you let yourself think you've become smart enough to *intuit* answers without doing the necessary work to actually find out, the mistakes will start to pile up. Even worse when someone's ego gets so inflated they trust their intuition over evidence.

A partial answer to “what happened to Jim?”, she and other friends said, lies in the very triumphs that made Watson, in Hopkins’ words, unrivaled for “creativity, vision, and brilliance.” His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed: by listening to his intuition, by opposing the establishment consensus, and by barely glancing at the edifice of facts on which a scientific field is built.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 10

It’s probably just legal ass covering, to save face from copyright infringement (when the bot copies without attribution). Also they want to own copyright over contributions, and you cannot assign them copyright if you don’t have it in the first place.

1. Sign the OCA
Like many other open-source communities, the OpenJDK Community requires Contributors to jointly assign their copyright on contributed code. Oracle is

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 9

A nominee for comment of the year award

@tlass3088 1 day ago
We have an AI that scores 100% on cyber security benchmarks! - company that recently had their whole source code leaked

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 9

@edzitron.com 👀 whoa. I don't love Linus for a variety of reasons, but he's kind of a big deal, and this feels maybe significant as a mainstream breakthrough (towards the things you've been screaming for years).

Screen shot of YouTube video preview from the "Linus Tech Tips" channel. Video title, "The Worst is Almost Over", posted 1 h ago, 104K views. 6 Chapters in this video, first "Intro", second "Tell me about the Tulips", third "Where's the Profit?" (remaining chapter titles off screen).

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 9

Actor Arnold Schwarzeneggar in “Commando” (1985). A gun is pointed from some standing off-screen left, as he stares down the barrel calmly. In this scene the gunman has just said “fuck you, asshole” and pulled the trigger, but there’s no bullet in the chamber. Arnold quips back, “Fuck YOU, asshole” shortly before murdering the man violently. Arnold pronounced “hole” in a distinctive Austrian way, which is a frequent audio drop on podcasts Greatest Trek and Greatest Gen.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 5

I'm simplifying this to a pithy tweet, obviously the full story is more complicated, it's a book (Karen Hao's). But officially: no, it played no part in the decision to fire him.

From "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao:
The independent directors laid out what they knew: This was not the first time that senior leaders had described Altman in this way. In total, the three of them had heard similar feedback from at least seven people within one to two levels of Altman, inclusive of Sutskever, Murati, and Amodei, who oversaw safety and nonsafety parts of the company. Several had described Altman’s behaviors as abuse and manipulation; most had highlighted his lack of honesty and their inability to trust what he said. Then there were the myriad other issues that the independent directors themselves had found, including the disempowerment of the nonprofit; Altman not disclosing his legal ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund; Altman neglecting to mention Microsoft’s DSB breach; Altman trying to force D’Angelo and now apparently Toner off the board.

They decided not to even touch Annie’s allegations. This was ultimately about Sam’s professional capacity as OpenAI’s CEO.

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 5

They do have to personally sign a declaration. For civil liability they'd be insured, but the fear would be criminal penalty. Below e.g. in a filing from Microsoft. The statute: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

CERTIFICATION PURSUANT TO

SECTION 906 OF THE SARBANES-OXLEY ACT OF 2002

(18 U.S.C. SECTION 1350)

In connection with the Quarterly Report of Microsoft Corporation, a Washington corporation (the “Company”), on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2025, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Report”), Amy E. Hood, Chief Financial Officer of the Company, does hereby certify, pursuant to § 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (18 U.S.C. § 1350), that to her knowledge:

(1) The Report fully complies with the requirements of section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934; and

(2) The information contained in the Report fairly presents, in all material respects, the financial condition and results of operations of the Company.

/s/ AMY E. HOOD

Amy E. Hood

Executive Vice President and

Chief Financial Officer

October 29, 2025

Toronto Will@torontowill· Apr 5

"Mistrust" was the headline reason, but mistrust *about what*. The things he was being slippery with the Board about were generally angled towards moving faster and being more aggressive, in ways that cast aside safety concerns. From Karen Hao's "Empire of AI" (just a quickly-spotted example):