iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 28/09/2026

Rivalled only life's other constant — left wing infighting! (Is this horseshoe theory?)

Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 04/08/2026

Airtable’s insistance on agressive per-seat pricing is a pretty perfect encapsulation of what you’re describing. Product’s at its best when whole teams have access, or when you can share access with clients. But the business model has bacially guaranteed that doesn’t happen.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 29/07/2026

We especially haven't reconned with the long-term impact on social spaces, institutions, community orgs, etc. Every org I'm involved in is in some way still trying to get back to pre-COVID state/capacity. (Never mind doing anything new.) *Of course* that's going to have a lingering effect on society

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 02/06/2026

And here I was thinking the 100m-in-a-single-hand joker was some kind of cruel joke. A mathematical impossibility there only to taunt us. Little did I know…

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Nora Loreto @nolore.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Last week, @policyalternatives.ca put together an urgent call for Canada to tax the profits that the oil and gas industry is making off the war in Iran. Yesterday, the best Carney could do was removing tax on average people, further defunding the state. www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc...

policyalternatives.ca

The oil industry is making billions from the Iran war—it should be taxed - CCPA

The current windfall could be Canadian oil's final boom—so the proceeds must be reinvested into economic diversification and industrial planning

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 14/04/2026

Part of me wonders if the fundamental validation patterns that make LLMs good at code are inherently at odds with ecological awe. It pulls very hard in the direction of "does it work" and does little to build the sense "holy shit, I can't believe this thing works." Keen to hear more as you go on!

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 14/04/2026

At a much smaller level, this feels related to some of what I've been trying to work through re: vibe coding. Initial awe quickly gives way to a sense of alienation from not understanding how the thing you've produced works, nor being able to meaningfully contribute to the ecosystems around them.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 09/04/2026

We need to stop the bleeding, and if focusing on harm to children is how we muster the political will so be it. Doesn't mean we recognize that this is a band-aid fix. Esp when, unlike cigarettes, it's possible to mitigate the harm. Targeting short-form swipeable video seems like a clear first step.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 09/04/2026

My worry is that we remove youth from the public sphere because adults stay on social media and have no incentive to build alternatives. Much more of a concern when bans target 16+ though. Hard to justify this handwringing (or frankly the legislative effort) if it's just going from 13+ to 14+

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 09/04/2026

If anything, my main concern is that we're scapegoating kids to avoid reflecting on the effects it's having on adults. True for cigarettes too of course, but the big difference is that being able to smoke doesn't impact public participation.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 02/04/2026

Absolutely. This generation of “tech but good” seems to be a bit more alive to it than the FOSS moment for example, but there’s a long way to go. Big tech’s understanding that people will gravitate to convenience cannot be dismissed as trivial or moral failing on the part of users.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 02/04/2026

I think there’s a lot of hope here in projects like ATpro. Not just building the tech but also building systems, communities, and economies to support it that operate by different logics. (Current discourse notwithstanding…)

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 02/04/2026

I think Erik Olin Wright is instructive here. Revolution may not be feasible (or desirable), but there are already people operating by different logics within the current system. Foster those and gradually build power.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 29/03/2026

It’d be hard to overstate how much the capture and degradation of the media environment contributes to this. I know lots of people who read the NYT and The Guardian religiously; almost nobody who regularly reads the Globe. Appetite is there, but not for the paywalled husks that pass for our MSM.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

Anyway, shameless plug for aia.guide Some of the specifics are a bit out of date, but I regret to say that I think the analysis is increasingly relevant.

aia.guide

Get to Know Canada's AIA

Learn more about Canada’s open-source Algorithmic Impact Assessment—or AIA.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

Yes, there should have been an AIA. At the very least that might have allowed some alarm bells to be rung before this person's life got turned upside down. But we deserve and should expect so much more from our government than the right to know when to yell at them.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

Points directly at fundamental flaws in the GoC's approach to these issues. Compliance with the DirADM has always been an issue, but the requirments in the Directive wouldn't really have prevented this. It requires notice and human review, both of which ostensibly happened here.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

As far as I can tell, the whole system is in violation of the Directive on Automated Decision Making, as it's clearly in production and as far as I can tell there are no published algorithmic impact assessments covering systems for PR applications. search.open.canada.ca/opendata/?co...

search.open.canada.ca

Open Government Portal

Effectuez des recherches dans les données du gouvernement du Canada, apprenez comment travailler avec les jeux de données, et voyez comment nos données ont été utilisées.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

These are the exact issues we've known about for years coming to fruition. GoC itself has been thinking about this stuff since at least 2017! They have a whole Directive intended to prevent these kinds of harmful systems. There really are no excuses.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

If the goal is aesthetics and creativity I think that something like calligraphy, where the aesthetics really are the only point, might lend itself better.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 26/03/2026

I agree in principle and I think the potential is there, but in my experience cursive lessons fell very short of this ideal. Cursive was mostly framed as a matter of efficiency and social conformity; if your fine motor skills can't keep up you're going to be a failure as an adult—that kind of thing.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 24/03/2026

Even by their standards calling Florida a "bastion of normalcy" is WILD

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 16/03/2026

oscar winners vibe coders 🤝 "and, of course, my agent"

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 13/03/2026

I think this is where it’s important to conceptually separate “has anyone had this idea” from “has anyone with this idea been able to martial the resources necessary to try it.” Or put another way, going from “I’m the most special boy” and “I rationally have something unique to contribute here.”

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

What's missing? The public. Decisions about whether AI can surveil American citizens or autonomously deploy lethal force are being settled in a contract dispute. No Congress. No democratic deliberation. No accountability. We've outsourced questions about the use of force to a corporate negotiation.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 16/12/2025

And once you do have the mortgage the relationship with the bank is really weird. They’re on the deed, you’re forbidden from renting any portion of the “condo”, and all sorts of weird stuff like that. My whole life has become this meme.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 16/12/2025

Having been through this recently I wouldn’t say mortgages are impossible. In a way it’s a lot weirder. Only two banks will do them (Desjardins and Banque National), and if any part of the unit is already with one of them that’s your only option.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 14/11/2025

Thank god for Patreon notifications

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 14/11/2025

No idea if this is just perception, let alone related, but my YouTube algorithm has been reallly weird today. The usual stuff is suddenly mixed in with poker videos, drama videos, award show videos…

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 04/11/2025

Every thing has a bloody whiteboard and Google Docs/Notion clone now... Please, just let me take my little video calls or manage my tasks in peace!

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 16/10/2025

Congrats! (Also: sick shirt 🔥)

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Sabina Vohra-Miller @sabivm.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

In Canada, top 1% of wealth holders hold 24% of total wealth. Meanwhile, PM Carney has an ‘austerity budget’, which will impact the disadvantaged. Patriotic Millionaires Canada, which I am a board member of, estimated that a 3% tax on wealth over $100-million could raise $25-billion annually.

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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

listen i am not saying he should be running anything but eric adams should certainly be encouraged to continue to post forever

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Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 22/09/2025

I did a deep-dive into Ben Mulroney's extracurricular activities: At the same time as Mulroney is filling-in as host of The West Block, he is also working for two registered lobby groups and as an adviser to several companies – some of whose CEOs he's interviewed on Global News 640 Toronto radio

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no brain, only alison @alisonborealis.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

100% The continued interest in cloud computing (and using American and other non-Canadian companies for it) is also a major threat to Canadian sovereignty. If we lose control of our data and information, we could easily lose ourselves. #cdnpoli

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 29/08/2025

If you're interested in how this is *supposed* to work, might I humbly suggest aia.guide. (Soon to be updated for recent revisions!)

aia.guide

Get to Know Canada's AIA

Learn more about Canada’s open-source Algorithmic Impact Assessment—or AIA.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 29/08/2025

Notable that there's no published algorithmic impact assessment for this system yet. Regulation is clear that AIAs are to be published prior to production. Yet here we are, $15.3 million in the hole on an incredibly risky system with no transparency or public input.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 15/08/2025

Always very telling what gets called “spending” and what’s “an investment.” If we spend less of frivolous things like a social safety net we can invest more in shipping our wealth overseas!

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 23/07/2025

I think it's useful to tease out what's really new with AI (persistant chatbots, the ubiquity and near-simultaneous rollout of AI features across the industry) and what's AI (once again) building on the groundwork laid by past hype cycles and the constant push for growth.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 23/07/2025

The Acrobat screenshot does make me wonder how much more agressive this push for AI has been than the pushes for other features. Adobe and plenty of others have been using pushy "new feature" pop-ups long before they were hawking AI.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 13/07/2025

I started using Kagi a few months ago and haven’t looked back. As my friend put it, “Kagi is basically paying $10 a month to get Google from 2007 back.”

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 08/07/2025

I was curious if there was any research to back this up. There seems to be some, but not much yet. The few studies that have been done seem be finding decreased brake time in high-urgency scenarios but not this specific problem of pedal confusion. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

One-pedal or two-pedal: Does the regenerative braking system improve driving safety?

Electric vehicles equipped with regenerative braking systems provide drivers a new driving mode, the one-pedal mode, which enables drivers to accelera…

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Keith Fitzgerald @keithfitzgerald.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 21/06/2025

Reading Henri Kissinger’s Wikipedia (as one does) and got jumpscared by this absolute nightmare of a blunt rotation

Colin Powell, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Kissinger in March 2016

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 13/06/2025

Very cool, and especially cool to be keeping the banner of the vanilla web flying high. Terrible puns aside, thanks for building and sharing!

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 30/04/2025

Also kinda fascinated to see how the new era of pop might force change. It seems to me that the ‘00s and ‘10s produced a lot of acts whose music/personas lent themselves to mega tours. Even if the bubble somehow doesn’t pop there are only so many Katy Perry nostalgia tours you can produce.

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Nick Gertler @nickgertler.ca · 30/04/2025

Pretty sure we grew up in similar concert-going eras and I’m never sure what’s actually changed vs what’s just me getting older and grumpier. Absolute banger video though—I think you hit the nail on the head with the feedback loop between rising prices and rising expectations.

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