And in the spirit of Rambo
Today: summer in Montreal, silly side projects/networking, and why make babies.
Today: summer in Montreal, silly side projects/networking, and why make babies.
I know I've harped on this repeatedly but I'm still not used to a place with four seasons, nor one with as much variation within each season. Seattle is consistent in the best and worst ways: 2-4 months of the best summer weather possible followed by virtually non-stop grey for the remainder of the year.
Meanwhile, just days after a beautiful (if very warm) Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebration, we were poured on during an excellent free outdoor show during Jazzfest.
Saint-Jean-Baptiste is the actual national holiday in Quebec (everyone takes Canada Day to move, all at once). In addition to a huge show with like 20,000 people, there are block parties like this local one in our quarter (Villeray)
This is far from the greatest view of a fantastic guitarist Yasmin Williams (NPR Tinydesk Concert), who apparently had few friends until they learned to play, using the videogame Garageband originally. All their stuff is nonvocal, important for some folks in my audience that listen while doing email/code jobs.
The value of this chaos is that you don't have to wait too long for gorgeous or at least tolerable weather. And my tolerance for just wandering around is considerably improved by the fact it's difficult not to stumble into something neat in most neighborhoods and especially around Place des Arts, Old Montreal, or Quartier des Spectacles.
Like, for instance, when I ran into a Pink Floyd inspired Cirque (sponsored by the provincial lottery) on my walk home from the queer badminton group Gbleus.
I have a talent for filming video of the least impressive parts of a given show - these fellas were doing backflips and stuff right after this clip stops. Montreal is a big town for circus (cirque) performances and the origin of Cirque du Soleil, which, if you are unfamiliar, is a little like Shen Yun but is not a front for a far right religious movement.
Besides applying for the occasional interesting local job that comes across my feed, I'm (1) spending a bunch of time on small side projects, (2) research into various technology topics [[1]] that I had been meaning to become more familiar with, and (3) networking with cool tech folks.
On that last note, it was Startup Week here in Montreal. I skipped the actual event but managed to wrangle myself into a couple of side events - one thanks to an extremely cool person who I've now seen repeatedly at these things.
There's a good robotics crowd in Montreal and one of them hosted an afterparty. The product is a painting robot, used to reproduce original work while compensating the artist - basically a very high end print.
With the near-nonstop flood of negative news these days it wasn't too shocking to hear a friend who had recently had a baby expressing some complicated feelings about bringing a new person into such a world.
Having a kid is, of course, a deeply personal decision made for all kinds of reasons (or just simple mistakes, like me! Hi mom!) and I want it on the record that pronatalists are almost exclusively creeps and reactionaries.
All that said, something that remains with me, and allows me to occasionally sleep at night, is the knowledge of the history of that sentiment. It almost always seems like the world is ending.
And it is! And another one is being born. It's happening all the time. And there will still be people here after. [[2]]
Many of the readers of this blog were, like me, born in 1983. For many, it is difficult to forget that this was the first year Ronald Reagan was president. Easier to forget now is that the Soviets thought he was an insane religious fundamentalist [[3]] and they were convinced he was going to start a nuclear war [[4]] during the Able Archer 83 exercises.
And now it's incredible warm and the city is full of smoke due to wildfires. Great time to cut the carbon tax!
Well heck you made it this far. Get a load of this dog
A thing you can do when petting dogs is check in with them about whether they wanna be pet by stopping. You can see Bunny freaking out that I had stopped so I continued.
[[1]]: I remain pretty bearish on LLMs but the underlying bits - neural networks, transformers - are fascinating and very much have practical applications (like transcribing handwriting)
[[2]]: Credit for this wording to Chris Wade and Matt Christman's Hell On Earth podcast, which is on another of the many times it looked like the world was ending (the Thirty Years War had it all - climate change, new media, fucked politics)
[[3]]: At least partly true
[[4]]: Not true but entirely believable. "The exercise is considered by some to be one of the closest moments the world came to nuclear war during the Cold War"
