General Stanley McChrystal in a recent NYT interview laid out why the entire Iran war strategy is built on magical thinking. He described three “great seductions” that trap American administrations: covert action that never stays covert, surgical Special Ops raids that don’t change facts on the ground, and the myth of air power dominance. He’s seen all three up close. And he’s watching all three fail in real time in Iran.

“Everything after this will be harder,” McChrystal said.

All of them have declined.

https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116178291534758736

I have to admit I'm enjoying OpenAI's progression from "we're building the future of synthetic sentience, we will be the birthplace of a new silicon hypergod, everyone better watch out" to "well, artificial general intelligence is kind of hard to define, maybe that's not a useful term" to "we can't figure out how to make any money selling people personally-tailored pornography generators so we're turning their chatbot girlfriends off."

I'm looking forward to their next big innovation!

"Canada rejected her permanent residence application. Her job duties were made up — by Immigration’s AI reviewer"

Added wiring and assembling control to expected job duties... She's a doctoral researcher in the immunology of aging.

I'm really hoping that this sets a legal precedence for the standard of the duty of care that the government is held to when using technology that does not care for reality.

https://www.thestar.com/gift-redeem?t=2a2f2922-489d-47cb-b5ff-36b188263d9a

#cdnpoli

We’re excited to invite you to our Software Carpentry Python: Coding for Beginners workshop in partnership with Instats!

🗓️ Dates: 22-23 April, 2026
🕙 Time: 8:00 am - 12:00 pm North American Eastern Time (UTC -4)
💻 Location: Zoom

Taught by certified Carpentries Instructors, our #Python workshop is an introduction to programming for those with little or no previous experience.

Welcoming, hands-on and interactive, this workshop teaches the fundamentals of #Python, preparing learners to:

• Automate repetitive tasks to process data efficiently
• Use conditionals to initiate code
• Write functions to perform tasks
• Create plots (visual representations of data) to recognise trends, patterns, and relationships within datasets.

Interested in learning more? Please use the following link to find costs, full details, and to register: https://instats.org/seminar/plotting-and-programming-in-python

We can’t wait to learn with you! 🌟

EDIT: Updated to add event link.