Longform

A Trickle, Not a River

Recent developments in RSS, including new apps like Current and Inkwell, have sparked interest in “river of news” approaches. I’m trying to keep to a trickle of well-curated sources, but am keen to experiment with Inkwell.

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🎶 Having claimed recently that my kids have good musical tastes, I was chagrined when my daughter mixed up Peter Gabriel and Pearl Jam. Parenting fail!

As my penance, I’m now sending her a weekly song to make sure that her musical foundation is sound. These won’t necessarily be the best, most popular, or my favourite songs (though sometimes they will be all three). Rather, they will be influential to my musical tastes and worth her consideration.

Given how this started, the first song is Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel. There are plenty of his songs to choose from. I think this one is a great place to start.

There’s a lot to like in Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. I certainly didn’t expect Thucydides and Havel to get cited.

Carney was clear about the problem. For example:

More recently, great powers began using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied— the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture of collective problem solving — are greatly diminished.

Along with ideas about how “middle powers” should proceed:

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on diminished institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. And it is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities. Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.

But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

And a pitch for Canada:

Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. We have capital, talent, and a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse, and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable, reliable partner—in a world that is anything but—a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

Jen Gerson has a good follow up in Go home, America. You’re drunk. that includes:

Nor can we trust the American people to rise up against tyranny in any great numbers: they are not who they think they are, and far short of what they once were. Americans as a people today are unequal to their nation’s history and to their own sense of greatness. This is being demonstrated to us, every single day, in the clearest possible terms.

Out of a swirl of emotions that include anger and fear, I think the dominant one for me is sadness. America was obviously not perfect, but it at least had aspirations that I could admire and a long friendship with Canada that brought us both prosperity.

Of course, as Gerson points out, the real test will be what Carney and Canada do next:

In short, the Canada that Carney is describing is one that isn’t satisfied with half assery and speechifying. What would be truly provocative is if Carney didn’t just say the right things, but also demonstrated he was dead serious about following through with a plan to make this country tough enough to withstand America’s increasingly crazy bullshit.

Annual polar bear swim

In what is now an annual tradition, my son and I went for a polar bear swim in Lake Ontario. We usually go on January 1st, but yesterday was -20°C which seemed almost dangerous. “Only” -10°C today so much more reasonable 🥶. I’m often asked why I would do such a strange thing. Part of it is for the tradition and challenge. The more thoughtful reason is symbolic. The bracing cold, excitement of running into the lake and back, and bonding with my son feels like a great way to shake off last year’s residual complacency and start the New Year with an adventure.

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Year in books for 2025

2025 was another great year for reading, even if only to get away from mindless scrolling on my phone. My favourite non-fiction book was Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler and fiction was Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Those are narrow favourites though. I could have happily picked other books from the list. No major changes planned for 2026. Maybe just some more targeted books on Canada, given the state of my nation and the rest of the world.

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There’s a new interesting Day One Labs feature: Daily Chat. This is an LLM that you chat with throughout the day. Usually it starts with a question about your intentions for the day and then asks follow ups that expand on your responses. Then at the end of the day, Day One converts the chat into a fully narrative journal entry (as in, it doesn’t just paste in the chat).

After using the feature for a few days, I can see the appeal. The entries generated are far more detailed than I would typically write and are quite reasonable summaries of the chat. The responses from the LLM are also usually on target, eliciting more details, but also move on to new topics without getting too repetitive.

At first, I found I had to write a lot of “as you know” type responses, since the LLM didn’t know anything about me, my interests, or family. So, things like “as you know, I have a dog named George”, so that it knew George wasn’t one of my children. This seemed to improve over days, so presumably the previous entries are getting included in the processing. There’s also a short biography you can write to guide the LLM.

Despite being impressed with the feature overall, I don’t think I’ll use it. The main reason is that I prefer to create entries throughout the day, as they happen, rather than having one summary entry per day. Also, I can’t quite get over that the LLM is writing the entries as if they are from me. I know that I provided much of the content. But, I prefer that my journal be where I write things down, not something else on my behalf.

I’ve found the “Go Deeper Prompts” more compelling. These are LLM generated prompts that are based on what you’ve written so far that trigger further writing. I find these are helpful nudges and I’m still the one doing the actual writing.

I’m glad DayOne continues to experiment, even if I don’t end up using all of the features.

“The Problem Factory”- Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services is an interesting analysis of why infrastructure projects are so expensive in the “anglosphere”.

This kind of risk – very high stakes and very low visibility of probabilities – is extremely difficult to manage and consequently extremely unattractive to private-sector investors and developers. It creates a tendency to attempt to “bulletproof” infrastructure projects. Rather than an expected net present value approach, the costing of large infrastructure projects is a process of casting the net wide to define a “risk surface” covering all possible issues which might present a probability above some threshold value of derailing the project, then spending as much as needed to mitigate those risks below the threshold value. And since almost any possible objection or issue could (with unknown and unknowable probability) be the reason for an entire project to fail, almost no potential issue is ignorable, and any expense spent on mitigating the risks is likely to look like value for money.

A key point is summarized by the phrase “the cost factory is owned by the benefit factory”. An entire industry is deeply embedded in these projects to propose, evaluate, and document potential issues, all with an incentive to put significant effort into the task.

At no stage in this process are any of the major actors likely to feel that they have a genuine choice as to what to do. Lawyers cannot ignore new precedents; they need to inform their clients and potential clients. The planning authorities are institutionally averse to losing judicial reviews, and so they consider all the objections placed before them. Objectors to planning, in an adversarial system, are unlikely to leave any potential weapons on the ground. Developers need to maximise the chances of carrying through a viable infrastructure project. The professional and scientific services firms are literally doing their job. So, the risk surface expands. Apart from the objectors, everyone involved is trying to help, but the final, systemic and predictable consequence of their actions is the gradual sclerosis of the system.

The article goes on to contrast this approach with the more statist one used in many other countries and incorporates this into some lessons and potential mitigations that would fit into the anglosphere model.