iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 7h

OK buddy www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 04/10/2026

Victoria Drive, Vancouver: an old storefront that the city says can’t be used for commercial use anymore, and a garden store that is grandfathered in and would have to shut down permanently if the owners ever take a break

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 03/10/2026

Well, now we know which parties will back Unite Here’s lobbying to ban all new hotels in Vancouver

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/10/2026

What happens inside the heat exchanger box? Nobody knows exactly, our scientists' best guess is "portals."

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/10/2026

man, ERVs are so cool. feels like magic that you can get fresh air without losing (or gaining) heat

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/10/2026

I actually do believe this! Every party sounds good if you read their platform, it is their place to promise everything to everyone. For example an excerpt from TEAM's platform (they are the never-change-anything NIMBY party, stopping development is their primary motivation)

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/10/2026

anyway I admit that I am kind of jaded about all of this; I place relatively little weight on platforms because they tend to promise everything to everyone (e.g. this from TEAM's platform)

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/10/2026

I may have Fry Derangement Syndrome from seeing him just not get it on housing over+over+over again. The Green platform is hard to interpret, kind of tries to have it both ways; some good things but also wants to fight the province on housing, add more public hearings, ban small units

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 01/10/2026

CentreBC has already come out swinging. Let's revisit this in a month! www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 30/09/2026

constantly see-sawing between "Wealthsimple sure is different from Canadian banks" (laudatory) vs "Wealthsimple sure is different from Canadian banks" (derogatory)

some bullshit that basically turns your savings+investments+trading into a social network

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 27/09/2026

My most boomer-coded opinion is that you should have a subscription to a paper newspaper (weekly is fine) and try to use it for most of your news intake

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 25/09/2026

I'm not sure who's right here; either the park board is bad at not killing trees or the planning department is going overboard

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 23/09/2026

The Wall Street area in East Van is nice, if a bit isolated. Some older apartments plus tiny parks with peekaboo views of industry, ocean, and mountains

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 10/09/2026

At long last, I have become an ebike guy

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 09/09/2026

status: asking the city if my house has enough character to allow a backyard office

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 07/09/2026

looking into outdoor lighting and... "Use Cases: Valentine's Day"?

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 04/09/2026

Yeah the Millennium Line has a lot of this www.google.com/maps/@49.265...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 03/09/2026

Don't take it from me, take it from Turing Award-winning computer scientist Rich Sutton's *hugely* influential essay The Bitter Lesson: www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/Bit...

The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton
March 13, 2019
The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore's law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation. Most AI research has been conducted as if the computation available to the agent were constant (in which case leveraging human knowledge would be one of the only ways to improve performance) but, over a slightly longer time than a typical research project, massively more computation inevitably becomes available. Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. Time spent on one is time not spent on the other. There are psychological commitments to investment in one approach or the other. And the human-knowledge approach tends to complicate methods in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation. There were many examples of AI researchers' belated learning of this bitter lesson, and it is instructive to review some of the most prominent.

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 03/09/2026

The report recommends "Smaller-scale, task-specific systems built on traditional algorithmic programming" but... that approach has been largely abandoned because it doesn't work as well

Exploring small-scale AI for transparency, accountability and the environment

The dominant model of AI is built on the premise that if you feed a computer enough data, intelligence will emerge. This is the approach behind large language models, and as this report has noted, it is already hitting a ceiling.

There are other ways to build AI. Smaller-scale, task-specific systems built on traditional algorithmic programming—rules-based, step-by-step logic—already exist and can be applied to well-defined local problems without requiring massive data centres or handing data over to a global oligopoly. Because they operate on explicit logic rather than opaque pattern-matching, they can explain their reasoning, offering the kind of transparency and accountability that communities and regulators have been demanding.

Technological development must be anchored in ecological limits, moving away from resource-intensive data centres that exacerbate water scarcity and climate change and toward ecosystem-centred approaches. No community should be made a sacrifice zone for costs that look negligible in aggregate, and operators should be required to report the energy and water consumed per “token” so that this cost can be factored into design and procurement decisions.

The diminishing returns of the dominant AI model are an opportunity to pivot toward these alternatives: precise tools trained on local data to address specific needs, governed by the communities they serve. Public investments and publicly funded AI research should be directed toward these small-scale, socially beneficial applications.

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 03/09/2026

This is pretty rough. I would recommend getting it reviewed by someone who understands the space better. This section is particularly bad for 2 reasons: 1. Those "other ways" don't work as well, that's the whole Bitter Lesson 2. Cost (in $ and resources) of intelligence has been dropping *fast*

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 02/09/2026

soft spot in my heart for buildings that attempt to convey an impression of serious, sober-minded, never-laughed-once-in-my-life commerce and absolutely nail it

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 27/08/2026

first off, it's called disc golf not frisbee golf second, they knocked 17,000 doors in between disc golf rounds

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 27/08/2026

I have revised my Vancouver municipal party chart. Pray I don't revise it any further.

chart with 2 axes: "New housing is usually good/bad" vs "Left/Right"

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 27/08/2026

this is my latest very scientific chart

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 25/08/2026

more results today. clear preference for avoiding Coal Harbour and Yaletown, this is anti-yuppie discrimination

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 25/08/2026

Life of the Party Party. The deck's entire purpose is to tutor LotP and then flicker it as many times as possible, giving opponents umpteen huge goaded creatures. *Very* satisfying when it goes off, makes for big combat turns moxfield.com/decks/RTGVJk...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 25/08/2026

Broken down by people who live in Vancouver and outside of it. People outside Vancouver really like Kits Beach

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 25/08/2026

Fun little website. Vancouver results so far:

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 24/08/2026

Getting better at wok cooking. Someday I’ll get my shit together and dry the rice properly

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 22/08/2026

All the federal parties can agree on something, what a time to be alive www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Opposition parties expressed support Saturday for the Prime Minister’s decision to walk away from the negotiations.

What Trump’s new tariffs mean for Canada’s economy

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released a statement Saturday morning expressing disappointment that the U.S. has chosen to impose further tariffs on Canada.

“Canadians must stand united to defend our country against these unfair attacks on our jobs and businesses. Canada cannot accept one-sided tariffs that will deindustrialize our country. Nor can we accept a bad deal. Instead, we must continue the fight for tariff-free trade,” he said, adding that he will be seeking a call with Mr. Carney.

“Conservatives support action to protect Canadians and our industries targeted by these unfair U.S. tariffs,” he said. “All Canadians must stand united for our workers, our businesses and our country.”

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet expressed support for Mr. Carney’s plan to impose counter tariffs. He also said in a statement that the federal government should provide support for affected businesses and workers.

NDP Leader Avi Lewis said the Prime Minister was right to walk away from the negotiating table.

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 22/08/2026

building a filter for my feed...

FILTER_INSTRUCTIONS = """
Reject US politics, dunks, ragebait, outrage posts, etc.
Canadian politics is fine, including Canadian posts that touch on the US.
In general if a post is like "look how bad this person is" I don't want it.
Keep everything else.
Default to keeping a post. Reject only when it is clearly US politics,
culture-war content, a dunk, ragebait, or outrage bait; do not reject posts
merely for being brief, casual, or lacking context.
""".strip()

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 21/08/2026

5k likes for a post endorsing hostility to people who tried Bluesky and found it too hostile who knows why Bluesky is shrinking, impossible to say

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 21/08/2026

greatest city in the world vancouver.ca/doing-busine...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 20/08/2026

I'm a single issue voter: TransLink needs to build a bridge to Commercial-Broadway Station on the north side

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 20/08/2026

building's in bad shape, everyone knew this was going to happen, but it's election silly season so this will probably blow up www.straight.com/music/once-m...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 19/08/2026

please ask your coworkers to do something about Erick, he has cooked his brain and now Spacing is a platform for weird cartoons from Vancouver's most conspiratorial NIMBY

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 15/08/2026

Unable to send rapid response teams to one fire, because there's already too much smoke from another. Christ.

At the co-ordination centre, the photo gave Mr. Litke an idea. Maybe nearby parattack firefighters, who use parachutes to deploy quickly, could get to the fire while it was still small enough that they might be able to catch it. He asked them to try.

The team immediately began gearing up, and they huddled next to their plane near the runway outside, scanning fire reports on their phones and checking the BC Wildfire Service’s mobile mapping app, preparing their tactics once they hit the ground.

But the sky in the Thompson River valley at Kamloops was still choked with smoke. It hung too low for the jump ship aircraft’s pilot to take off. The parattack firefighters were grounded. A whole squadron of water-skimmer planes and several large tankers were also sitting on the tarmac, unable to see far enough to safely take off.

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 14/08/2026

learning about some new parties from this

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 12/08/2026

yupppppp, even the good candidates like Bula are excited to use this as an excuse to be less ambitious on housing thetyee.ca/News/2026/05...

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 11/08/2026

suburb-ass density in one of Vancouver's best and most central locations

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GRIDS Vancouver @grids.reillywood.com · 11/08/2026

Land prices aren't home prices. If cheap land made a neighbourhood affordable, Shaughnessy would be an affordability success story (it's not) reillywood.com/blog/land-va...

It’s a similar story in Shaughnessy, historically Vancouver’s most exclusive neighbourhood:
Top: Fairview/South Granville apartments+condos. Bottom: Shaughnessy mansions

South of 16th we zone for mansions on very large lots (making the land relatively cheap), and north of 16th we allow apartments and condo buildings (making the land relatively expensive). If you know Vancouver at all, you know that those apartments are a lot cheaper than the $10M+ Shaughnessy mansions!

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