iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Turns out one thing that should come with being an associate member of the EU is following their migration to NextCloud

Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I know that’s the model in other provinces, but I have to admit that to me it seems too clever by a half. With tons of ex party members on city councils and Queen’s Park happily micromanaging cities anyway, I think provincial parties are already too deep into municipal politics to be kept out.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just remember, no matter how many ex party leaders become mayors, municipal politics in Ontario must obviously stay totally free of having political parties

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don't think the robots are going to kill us all but I think there is a real-but-low probability that the robots make cybercrime cheap enough that the modern Internet can no longer exist

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

They even build a pretty solid diesel electric already in the KSS III

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I do honestly have some sympathy for the new development next door blocking your windows. But also I bought a house where the living room windows looked at nothing but the brick wall of the bungalow next door, and it’s still fine.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The group is full of people who, respectfully, are in desperate need of grass to touch

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Facebook for some reason recommends me content from a group called Toronto Car People. In an unsurprising twist, they hate all of those things too

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

They find ways to ding you. I was in the same boat, didn’t struggle with any part of the test, thought I’d get a perfect score. Nope. Nowhere close to failing, but definitely remember thinking how on earth I could possibly score 11/12 for speaking my first and only language

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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 11/09/2026

the thing about this is that this isn't an AI problem. AI is *accelerating* the problem, but industry investment in training, mentoring and developing employees has been waning for decades, what's different is that it's going to hit white collar work in the way it's been hitting the trades for years

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The airport rents is funny to me because the government could have just zeroed that out at any time. I think it’s like $150M a year in total? Pocket change, we make bigger affordability announcements all the time

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Canada created these kinds of savings accounts somewhere during the Trudeau years. I think uptake has tracked with normal demographics of tax-advantaged accounts. I haven’t seen studies on how they impacted actual affordability for homebuyers though (and it’d be complicated by the crash anyway)

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

We do? “The US” is objectively not a trustworthy ally when the head of state is actively working to annex us. But Americans in general are fine; friends, family, neighbours. If anything, it’s because Canadians like Americans so much that the betrayal from their government hits so hard.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Thing is that I this would look relatively normal in 2023 too. Like Trump was not as politically necessary for this as he has been for other big domestic moves like the Stadler locomotives. Supporting a dying factory in an isolated area is standard fare in a way that standing up new factories isn’t

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Buying rail cars is also just the classic well-worn way to support Thunder Bay, a “Rust Belt”-ish city in a less flourishing part of the country. Used to be mainly the TTC that supported them but I guess that model is going national. Still, I wouldn’t read it as much of a new thing.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

We used to be a proper country

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Adulthood: A - Always B - Be C - Cleaning

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Apparently there are only 20 Black people

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I honestly thought the answer was going to be Paw Patrol

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Literally world class centrist pivoters. Centrist parties everywhere constantly try and fail to do this move that the LPC pulls off routinely.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

His World Series ad with Reagan’s speech against tariffs did get blamed for the collapse of a deal last year, so he’s been quiet during this one. But bad cop is definitely a role that Ford was born to play.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

They don’t have to be the absolute best models, but the mega-prominence of Copilot and Google AI Search mean that their quality has an outsized impact on the field (and the world) as a whole. We should all want them to stay in the top 5 at all times.

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The AI bear case has shifted from “this technology will never work” to “it will never have economic use” to “it will not generate revenue” to “it will not generate profit” to “profit is not sufficient to support valuations” which does suggest they may have missed something bsky.app/profile/mexi...

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The entire debate around the Scarborough subway extension was that it was an insanely expensive boondoggle. But the people who supported it kept winning, including Doug Ford. And yet it’s still not built! There’s no punishment for spending scandals, so they keep happening.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

There’s only one villain for the X-Men.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

First of all, this thread was great, thank you. But also what I’m hearing here is we should build more elevated lines

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 05/08/2026

yeah a huge chunk of the population is seeing garbage technology that gets things wrong constantly and is nothing but social danger and capitalist monstrousness and then a tiny slice is seeing a complex, troubling, but utterly comprehensive transformation in the field of "make computer do thing"

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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

ok but pulitzer for whoever got this shot, it’s so good

dog in blue vest with sunglasses in waves with surfboard

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

$ are a straight up better gift like 95% of the time

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

There’s just not enough time in the day for me to constantly debug random issues like “why did my NFS mount break Tailscale.” I don’t care, just want to go organize my movies!

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

If you are not using an agent harness to debug your home computer setups, you are missing out. My self-hosted setup would be half of what it is now without them.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Finally I’ll have someone to speak Lojban with, my Lojban LLM compiler

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” as a foundational computer science textbook famously said

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Hannah Sparwasser Soroka @hannah-historian.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

The fundamental, delicious paradox of studying history is that: 1. These people are radically different from me, and I may never properly understand them. 2. These people are exactly like me.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

And like so many things, it’s not just a transit problem. Like school boards don’t always align their maps with transit routes. So the high school for my house is a 20 minute drive away. But there’s a bus stop on the corner that goes to another high school in 10 minutes.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

People who fly out of Billy Bishop, which handles 4% of air traffic in the GTA? Sounds like a small fringe group

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Tired: sewer socialism Wired: solar socialism

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

It’s an “if it ain’t broke” problem. The main people who care about it are right wingers seeking an excuse to mess with other language communities

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I still think of Fortnight as just the Tribes 2 construction mod

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Cheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Being so racist against and jealous of Black people that you can't appreciate Stevie Wonder has to be a curse from God.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

It’s definitely struck me since I got here. Canadians know a lot about the US and assume a kind of equality from the other side. But Americans genuinely see Canadians as kind of a joke. They don’t know Canada and can’t imagine why they might ever even want to know.

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Phillip Anderson @phillipanderson.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Sometimes I think we don’t talk about just how goddamn good Fela and the Afrika 70 really were and what starkly overt political music that actually picked real fights (with all too real consequences) was really like

youtu.be

Fela Kuti - Zombie

YouTube video by Fela Kuti

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Yeah it’s frustrating that these projects were paired when the routes and streets they’re changing are so different, muddies the discussion. Dufferin was always a far better candidate for bus lanes than Bathurst.

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This sounds like a solid argument for continuing with the original plan to extend those lanes from Bloor to Eglinton. Which hopefully council agrees to this time

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Conrad Owen @conradowen.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

It’s this. Nobody was (is?) being graded on training efficiency here, they’re being graded on making GPUs go brrr. So that’s exactly what they do

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