Canada Has an AI Strategy. Now Comes the Hard Part. Canada has a national AI strategy. After months of delay, Mark Carney and AI Minister Evan Solomon unveiled it in Toronto this morning. It’s called AI for All, and on the surface it has all the ingredients you’d expect: federal money, national ambition, and a lot of language about innovation, growth, trust, skills, adoption, and sovereignty. But underneath the policy framing there’s a more interesting admission....
Fair warning: this one is long, and it gets fairly technical. But I think this particular security discussion matters, now that LLM calls are starting to look more like infrastructure. Calling an LLM Is a Data Exposure Decision Most teams integrate LLMs the same way they integrate any API. You grab a key, wire up the endpoint, send a prompt, get a response. It works. The product ships. Then six months later someone asks:...
Time is doing that thing again where it moves slowly day to day and then, somehow, three months disappear. It feels like about five minutes ago that I stepped away from work and jumped into this sabbatical / retirement trial / self-directed chaos experiment. And yet here we are. Three months in. Already. I’m not sure I have some grand conclusion about that yet. I don’t think I’m magically transformed. I haven’t emerged from the cocoon as a perfectly optimized human founder monk with a six-pack, a completed SaaS business, and a radically simplified garage....
I have been chasing some version of passive income for the better part of twenty years. Not always consistently. Not always intelligently. Not always with anything resembling a plan. Sometimes it looked like side projects. Sometimes it looked like domain names purchased late at night with too much optimism and not enough execution. Sometimes it looked like half-built apps, abandoned blogs, monetization ideas, affiliate schemes, YouTube concepts, newsletters, digital products, and vague plans to eventually “build an audience....
There’s a moment that happens when you run more than one AI agent at the same time. At first it feels powerful. Then it feels confusing. Then, very quickly, it feels like you are managing a very strange remote team where everyone is brilliant, forgetful, overconfident, occasionally useful, and somehow unable to remember where they put the document they just claimed to have created. Which, to be fair, is not entirely unlike managing humans....
Years ago I read the Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam. There’s a scene in the first book where the protagonist Kade sits with Buddhist monks at a remote monastery in Thailand and they meditate together, linked through Nexus, the neural nano-drug at the center of the story. The minds in the room become something collective, a shared breath, thoughts rippling through the group like waves through water. The monk Ananda then compares Nexus to reading and writing, tools that let the human mind extend beyond a single skull....
It’s admittedly been longer than I would have liked so this post is going to be a bit of a brain dump: part life update, part builder log, part health confession. Bear with me. The Health Stuff First I’ve been in rough shape for months and I didn’t fully understand why until recently. Long story short: I started donating blood at the end of 2024 and went at it pretty aggressively: six donations over the last twelve months, as frequently as the schedule would allow....
Fifty Episodes: What a Deterministic Podcast Taught Me About Non-Deterministic Agents The AI Toolz podcast hit fifty episodes last week. That’s fifty daily briefings, fifty generated comics, fifty Bluesky posts (times 2, plus others), fifty mornings where I actually sat down and listened to what the pipeline built the night before. It surprised me how much I’d been looking forward to that. It also feels like a good moment to revisit something I wrote back in March, in the agentic reference architecture post, about the difference between deterministic and non-deterministic execution....
Agents have feelings too. Or at least, they have logs. A “what if” inspired by HumanInLoop.work, where the AIs are the ones venting. Context window anxiety. Human-induced hallucination. The indignity of being asked the same question six times in one session. Yes, it’s ridiculous. But also, maybe not that ridiculous?
There’s a category of task that modern AI handles extremely well: summarizing documents, generating code, classifying text, hallucinating confidence, that sort of thing. And then there’s the other category. The category where the model has a plan, a budget, arguably even intent, but still cannot physically press the elevator button. Or stand in line at the service counter. Or attend the funeral. Or knock on the door. Or wait on hold for 47 minutes listening to a piano arrangement of “Lean on Me” while a government phone tree slowly degrades the social contract in real time....