Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 9h

That's one of my points -- regulations like speed limits are not clear and present under the main bicycle/e-bike page, but in a sub page.

Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 10h

There's legal, and then there is what's enforced by cops.

As for the speed limit, it's telling that if you check e-bike safety in BC you have to dig to find the regs www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/...

Bike and e-bike rules and safety

Learn the rules of the road and how to stay safe while cycling.

www2.gov.bc.ca

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 13h

Quebec banned a lot of them last year, but overall regulators haven't realized what these vehicles are capable of
Interesting comparison here of a bike vs. motorcycle

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Dn...

How e-Bikes are Killing Motorcycles - Aniioki A9 Pro Max Review

YouTube video by FortNine

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Fred Savard @fredsavard.com · 2d

Ça va capoter au PQ quand ils vont lire cette nouvelle 😳

umontreal.ca @umontreal.ca · 2d

#SANTÉ | 🌍🧠 Déjà bilingue dans le ventre?

Selon une étude de l’UdeM, faire entendre une langue étrangère à un #fœtus pendant la #grossesse suffirait à activer ses réseaux cérébraux du #langage dès la naissance.

👉 En savoir plus : liens.umontreal.ca/46PQOWo

#umontreal #recherche #cerveau

Apprendre une langue étrangère… avant même d’être né!

Une étude montre qu’une brève écoute prénatale d’une langue étrangère suffirait à la rendre familière à la naissance.

liens.umontreal.ca

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 3d

"Move fast and break things" and "better to ask forgiveness than permission" get us a whole suite of "AI" literally built out of consent violation and coerced control, where human consent is not meaningful a possibility, and uses that suit to try to coerce or replace anyone who might tell them "no."

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Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 3d

…not merely as fantasy but as a deep & abiding desire in their lives, & that this shows up not just in What they create, but How They Create & Use It: stealing material for training; capturing huge amounts of resources from vulnerable ppl, often outright deceptively; implemented via coerced consent…

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Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 3d

Some ppl seemingly misreading this as "consider the consent rights of the 'AI' literally created to fulfill/via tech dudes' desire for total degrading control over everyone & everything" rather than what I'm actually saying which is that a Lot of tech dudes seem to want that total degrading control…

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 3d

bsky.app/profile/radi...

Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 3d

I agreed two years ago that Trump is a fascist and wrote about it. But I keep saying is that you were not living under a fascist regime and you can still do something about it.

akatzel.bsky.social @akatzel.bsky.social · 3d

Also, when one of America’s leading scholars on fascism agrees (after previous skepticism) that Trump is a fascist, I think we can give the semantic argument a rest as well. Energy is better spent elsewhere among mostly like minded folk:

www.rawstory.com/trump-fascis...

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 5d

I see it's another day when tech people are demonstrating that they should have been forced to pass humanities classes before being allowed to do anything at all.

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 5d

Posting this to read later: how to cover populism as a journalist reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/harm-reducti...

A harm-reduction playbook for covering populists

Michael Hauser Tov, chief political correspondent at Haaretz, sets out a research-backed harm-reduction playbook for our addiction to covering populist politicians.

reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 6d

You're making me melancholic, Trevor

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The Globe and Mail @theglobeandmail.com · 7d

How Japanese paper cutting inspired Montreal researchers to engineer a new type of parachute

Using kirigami, simple disks of thin flexible material transform into parachutes with pinpoint accuracy

www.theglobeandmail.com

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 7d

"Fascist regimes work to blur reality and to confuse us, to make it impossible to know what is truth and what is fiction. And AI does this perfectly."

Halifax Examiner @halifaxexaminer.ca · 7d

AI is fascism
Morning File by @timbousquet.bsky.social

AI is fascism - Halifax Examiner

Eventually, fascism runs its course, just as the AI hype machine will. It's just a question of how much damage will be done before it's over.

www.halifaxexaminer.ca

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 9d

Lifelong sculptor and provocateur from Quebec is fighting to save the fountain he built in San Francisco (you may know it from Tony Hawk)

gift article

Montreal sculptor fights San Francisco’s plans to remove controversial fountain he designed decades ago

Armand Viallancourt’s fountain has been the centre of cultural moments, including being spray-painted by Bono and inspiring a Nike sneaker

www.theglobeandmail.com

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 9d

Stanford researchers found that AI-generated "workslop" is actually making people less productive, in part because workers have to correct errors or decode the useful information/intent buried in a flood of auto-generated garbage:

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...

hbr.org

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Toula Drimonis @mtltoula.bsky.social · 12d

“There are many living witnesses to what happened,” Mastromonaco says. “But it’s either not broadly acknowledged or it’s trivialized, perceived as anecdotal and insignificant. But it wasn’t anecdotal, and it wasn’t insignificant.” @thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca/were-immigra...

Were Immigrant Kids Barred from Quebec’s French Catholic Schools? | The Walrus

Former students say yes, historians say no. A new investigation is forcing the province to confront its past

thewalrus.ca

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 13d

This guide teaches investigators how to try to identify AI-generated content, even under deadline pressure, offering seven advanced detection categories that every reporter or investigator needs to master.

The essential handbook for AI Detection: seven strategies to identify digital fakes

From perfect faces that betray themselves to physics that don't add up

www.digitaldigging.org

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Alex Usher @alexusherhesa.bsky.social · 14d

Canada could be cleaning up in the global competition for highly qualified personnel, were it not for NIMBYs, cowardly city councils and Conestoga having ruined it for everyone.

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 14d

The US Administration is moving to severely restrict lawful, high-skill immigration.

First H-1B visas.

Next comes barring int'l students from staying to offer their talents to the US after graduation.

I wrote earlier on the economic harms Americans can expect—> www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

Claire Savage (UK not USA) @csav55.bsky.social · 14d

Why the f*ck are you promoting this claptrap without pointing out thalidomide wasn't rigorously tested, drug safety testing was completely redrawn because of the thalidomide disaster.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 15d

I assume most of the actual reporting pointed out that this is bullshit, but this is one of those cases where even repeating the claim in a chyron or headline is irresponsible, unless the headline itself makes clear that it's not true.

Matt Negrin still host of Hardball on MSNBC @mattnegrin.bsky.social · 15d

All your media is state run

GMA: TRUMP ADMIN CLAIMS LINK BETWEEN TYLENOL & AUTISM

CBS Evening News BREAKING NEWS: White House Claims Link Between Autism & Tylenol

ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT: TRUMP ADMIN LINKS TYLENOL TO AUTISM RISK

CNN BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP ADMIN LINK AUTISM TO ACETAMINOPHEN USE DURING PREGNANCY

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 15d

To be clear, there are no data that provide a link between short-term use of Tylenol during pregnancy and autism. In fact, one of the best prospective studies w/ sibling controls, if anything, pointed to a protective effect for use less than 7 days
acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 15d

Again, with the essential use of sibling controls, in a nationwide prospective study in Sweden of ~2.5 million children, no increased risk even with higher dose exposure
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Let's talk about "gold standard science"

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Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · 16d

/4 Also struck by Texas giving us the best statistics — because of their record-keeping of these these — irrefutably documenting that both legal and undocumented Immigrants commit crimes at very significantly lower rates than native-born people.

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Kevin Gould @kevingould.bsky.social · 17d

Straight from the people making AI: All AI systems make stuff up because they were (inadvertently) designed to lie. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04664

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

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Reposted by Kevin Gould

George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 @gtconway.bsky.social · 19d

"Depressed people often don’t have the energy to commit violent crimes, and psychotic people usually have trouble executing an elaborate plan. It’s angry people who kill, particularly angry men with access to firearms."
www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/...

The more I talk about gun violence, the less I have to say

Child psychologist Ellen Braaten wasn't an expert on gun violence when she received a call from a TV producer in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy. But I did know how to comfort and advise parents af...

www.wbur.org

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