Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Page 6: ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Pr... Pretty constant across the ages, though some dropping from Great -> Near Great and Not Sure in Gen Z.ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net 010
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Interesting! Curious what the results would have been if "What worries me most" also had "A flood of _high_ quality work" as an option. (Given math's experience, I personally think is coming along with the flood of low-quality work) 030
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026I worry that the persuasion ability may go both ways 0140
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Isn't this proposal just "give the permanent oversight committee staff more power?" But the executive could still ignore you just as they do Congress today. Seems like you'd need to move the entire executive branch under Congress for this to work. One weird trick to a Westminster system! 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026This isn't my area of research, but I've actually wondered for a while if the "stochastic parrot" moniker has grown more correct over time: If you get a bunch of mediocre reasoners together, one of them might (stochastically!) have a good idea. Identify the good idea, and everyone else learns it 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Is that Davisville? I had to travel the Rosedale–Bloor slow zone for the first time in a couple of years today and man it was slow 140
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Not sure about a nice box specifically, but the Formality Effect is quite real: www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-rese...hks.harvard.eduForget fun fonts. A new study finds formal government communications can be more effective.HKS People Lab researchers and collaborators find a counterintuitive “Formality Effect” in which subjects associate formality with credibility and importance—leading them to act. 001
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 27/09/2026I look forward to Congress deciding to move the entire administrative state under itself and leave the President as a rump head of state who can just appoint the heads of agencies 021
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 24/09/2026I would only add that the large influx of TFWs also put strain on other “long lead time” systems, eg, I knew several newcomers who couldn’t find a GP for over a year 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026But like “I used it on one assignment in an entire school year” drops you 20 points which is the same effect as using it on one assignment a week? Something is fishy (honestly probably “self reporting bias”) 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Those latter stats don’t pass the smell test to me. Usage “once or twice a year” has the same effect as usage “once or twice a week?” 110
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026There are versions of this, eg, Recurse www.recurse.com/about And also things like BITS www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/bits But they’re short termrecurse.comAbout RC - Recurse CenterThe Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City. 110
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026I really want some government to take a lesson from this and do something like mandate medical records be storable in an Atmosphere-like account (though probably through something closer to Solid than ATProto) 040
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026For what it’s worth, there is some decent evidence that RESEA programs (which aren’t job training but job search assistance) are surprisingly effective (eg arxiv.org/pdf/2606.146...)arxiv.org 2132
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Out of curiosity, do planners prefer monthly passes because of loss aversion or would a fare capping program with equal economic value be acceptable? 011
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Agreed, but in Nolan's case, I think he already has a job that would be remote :-) I have a good number of friends who started their careers in the States and then continued their practices after moving to Canada 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026That is a bummer. I am somewhat surprised that some province hasn’t said something like “PhD from this list of institutions gets a provincial nomination” 010
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Not sure how the Express Entry queue is currently, but there's a pretty big community of international consultants who live in Toronto. Also I personally would welcome more Kentuckians in Toronto :-) 290
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Seems like the percentage shift is almost entirely due to the denominator shrinking while the numerator stays constant, though, unless I've done the math wrong. 1110
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Sure, but converting those rates to actual numbers, there were 1666 homicides in 2024 and 1374 in 2025. 64% of 1666 is 1066, and 79% 1374 is 1085. So roughly equal (see oag.ca.gov/news/press-r... for raw numbers)oag.ca.govAttorney General Bonta Releases California Criminal Justice Statistical Reports for 2025Policy, policing, and community intervention have positively transformed California public safety OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced the publication of the California Crim... 120
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 03/09/2026I actually don't know, but isn't some of it mechanical? If the number of homicides cleared every year is 1000 and the number of homicides drops from 2000 to 1500, then the clearance rate goes from 50% to 67% with no changes 3430
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Genuinely curious: is the issue that maps are the screw (too low down the value chain to have a big impact? too expensive to pull off?)? And if so, are there any services where someone *could* build a reasonable competitor 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Fair enough! Though is that true of just a maps alternative or more generally the whole sovereign cloud and surrounding initiatives? (I’ve been hoping to look into reading a bit more about whether that has been successful at all) 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Not trivial, but spinning up a copy of OSM and migrating the GC websites to it shouldn’t be impossible 100
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 31/08/2026I do wonder why the feds aren’t poring some money into building alternative services to things like Google Maps as part of the defense budget. Information is as important as airplanes 450
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026That was what I was referencing. :-) And while it expires in 2028, the expiration looks like a benefit cut to boomers, so was just proposing one way boomer benefits might not be quite as locked in 120
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026Is that entirely true? Didn't OBBBA make it so less of the benefits were subject to income tax? Couldn't you change that? 110
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026FWIW, this is actually what I do Monday through Friday. But I’m also the guy who wears a backpack to work and just clip it on the strap. I sometimes forget and don’t worry about it much and still will grab a bike share bike on a Saturday without one if I don’t have my helmet on me 030
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 25/08/2026I have a pet theory that the sale of Connaught was a terrible foot gun. By dint of size, middle powers are less able to create competitive markets in hyper capital-intensive industries, so you probably should nationalize them (or have an Air Canada Act) 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 23/08/2026People have been dreaming of it forever, but I wonder if MCP will finally get end users to demand breaking up the data layer (e.g. via Solid, ATProto Spaces, etc.) and the application layer (e.g. table management, websites, MCP). Probably not but you can dream :-) 110
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 21/08/2026You've kind of nerd sniped me on this one. If I took a stab at doing the empirics (with a large help the AI coding agents) would you mind? I'm very curious! 120
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 21/08/2026This is really neat! Out of curiosity, have you tried computing the empirical exponents from archived gtfs and schedule data? Would be curious to see how much the theoretical model reflects the empirical data! 130
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 20/08/2026Out of curiosity, do you think people want their own walls because doing work is a pain otherwise? If so, Toronto’s rules vis-a-vis shared walls are horrendous (speaking from experience) and there are some obvious reforms to the rules that would make them much better 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026One of my favorite books to read with our four year old www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/728777...penguinrandomhouse.caWaiting Is Not Easy! An Elephant and Piggie Book by Mo Willems | Penguin Random House CanadaMo Willems, award-winning, New York Times best-selling creator of The Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Unlimited Squirrels, presents best friends Elephant Gerald and Piggie. 010
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Don’t know if you read Anthropic’s write up of the Riemann improvement, but the prompts literally included “believe in yourself” www.anthropic.com/research/rie...anthropic.comLearning more about Claude's mathematical capabilitiesAn unreleased version of Claude has made strides on a problem related to the Riemann hypothesis. It improved the lower bound for the fraction of zeros of the Riemann zeta function that satisfy the hyp... 030
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 15/08/2026A crazy recent idea I had was that social media should require that accounts held by kids can only be messaged if the kid has given them a physical business card. Cut down on randos DMing on Roblox 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026And I don’t see the TTC board making hay of Metrolinx’s incompetence, probably because they have bigger fish to fry in their own budgets 030
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026I struggle with who to complain to. The Metrolinx board doesn’t even have construction folks. The chair’s bio begins: Nick is a trusted executive and leader, and has 40 years of experience building sales teams, establishing targets, and creating environments conducive to peak-level performance. 140
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Only two provinces have French as an official language. The other 9 only have English 000
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 09/08/2026This was actually the one time I really appreciated Air Canada. I arrived in Cincinnati and they’d lost my car seat. No way out of the airport except driving. So they gave me a brand new car seat they had in storage for exactly this occasion. There was a specific requisition form and all! 070
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 09/08/2026Apparently also true in Ontario…. Curious as to how common the taxi exemption is www.ontario.ca/page/choosin...ontario.caChoosing a child car seatLearn what child car seats are right for your baby, toddler or small child and how to install it to keep them safe. 141
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 09/08/2026In London, if you’re driving you need to bring a car seat. If you take black cabs everywhere, you can hold your infant in lap. If you take an Uber, it’s back to a car seats 141
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 08/08/2026Funny story: they were originally a Canadian brand, so survived in Canada a bit longer. During this time my mother requested I bring as many boxes as I could fit every time I visited 080
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 27/07/2026Hah! I have regrettably given in most of the time :-( 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 14/07/2026Also true of transportation planning, survey methodology (ie Census), policing…. 020
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 22/06/2026Is the goal to completely get rid of Tesla and FSD? I think that’s a very tall order. I do think accountability would take quite a bit of time (either through the civil or the criminal route). But if I had to bet, I’d bet on the systemic civil route versus the individualized criminal route 030
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 22/06/2026True but the tobacco companies also had the best legal teams money could buy at the time 120
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 22/06/2026But with this you run up on the fact that charging anyone for harming another person with a vehicle almost never happens. With the civil suits you have things like the tobacco precedent (creating nuisances, additional healthcare costs, etc) 180
Kevin Wilson @khwilson.bsky.social · 22/06/2026Actually now I wonder how you’d implement this…. First thought would be a public database (maybe even, heaven forfend) a block chain, but that in itself is a privacy nightmare 000
