'People can't enter recovery if they don't survive': 5 overdose deaths in 1 week puts Niagara on edge stcatharinesstandard.ca/news… via @stcatstandard

Patriotic @Ghostbusters legend @dan_aykroyd doing his part to try to get @MarkJCarney and @realDonaldTrump together on his farm to sort out tariff war before it’s too late for @crystal_head and many other biz on both sides of border of 2 great countries — torontosun.com/news/national…

A magnificent performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Variation 3, by Glenn Gould. 🎹✨

My take on data centers and AI, and learning from the Nordic countries, via a gift link: nytimes.com/2026/09/09/opini… Your thoughts?

Ontario is restoring vehicle lanes on Toronto’s busiest streets to fight gridlock and get people and goods moving again.   Our government has issued a request for proposals for lane restoration across Toronto, while immediately beginning work on Bloor Street West.

Oggi il nostro Governo diventa il più longevo della storia della Repubblica italiana. È un dato che accolgo con gratitudine e con un forte senso di responsabilità. Perché la stabilità non è un record da esibire, ma la condizione che consente a una Nazione di programmare, decidere, mantenere gli impegni e farsi rispettare. In questi anni abbiamo lavorato per aumentare l’occupazione, ridurre la disoccupazione, sostenere famiglie e imprese, rafforzare la sicurezza, governare i conti pubblici con serietà e restituire all’Italia peso e credibilità sulla scena internazionale. I risultati ci sono, ma sappiamo bene quante cose restino ancora da fare. Questa stabilità non è merito di una persona sola. È il risultato di una coalizione unita, che governa da quattro anni con una visione comune e che ha scelto di stare insieme non contro qualcuno, ma per realizzare un progetto per l’Italia. Non credo sia un caso che, da oggi, i tre Governi più longevi della storia repubblicana siano tutti governi di centrodestra. La stabilità si costruisce quando un’alleanza condivide valori, obiettivi e una visione della Nazione, non quando l’unica ragione per stare insieme è impedire agli altri di governare. Ma soprattutto, questa stabilità esiste grazie agli italiani che nel 2022 ci hanno dato fiducia. Una fiducia che non abbiamo mai considerato un assegno in bianco e che non daremo mai per scontata. Il prossimo anno torneremo davanti ai cittadini con quello che abbiamo fatto, con quello che resta da fare e con la nostra idea di futuro. E saranno ancora una volta loro a decidere se meritiamo di continuare questo cammino. Intanto il lavoro va avanti. E questa sera ci vediamo a Bari, insieme alla grande comunità di Fratelli d’Italia. Sarà l’occasione per guardarci negli occhi, fare il punto sulla strada percorsa e, soprattutto, parlare di quella che abbiamo ancora davanti. Avanti, con i piedi per terra e lo sguardo rivolto al futuro.

Good morning. A great group of wonderful pianists L-R Gary Graffman Lang Lang, Yuja Wang (who both studied with Graffman) and Emanuel Ax. Photo from a birthday party for Graffman at his apartment in New York. #music #pianists

Paris is removing cars and improving the city.

Why do I hate car dependency? I am currently getting ready to DRIVE to go for a walk in the park.

Richard Strauss b otd 1864 - such a master! "Anyone who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a menu to music." But also: "Melody as revealed in the greatest works of our classics is one of the most noble gifts which an invisible deity has bestowed on mankind."

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

On this World Bicycle Day, we celebrate more than a sport. A cycling is a lifestyle, one that promotes health, sustainability, and connection. From grassroots cycling and the iconic @tour_du_Rwanda to the historic UCI Road World Championships 2025, every pedal stroke tells a story of growth, passion, and ambition. 🚴‍♂️ Happy World Bicycle Day! #WorldBicycleDay #RwandaSports

67% of these journeys are statistically under 5km. If those who could cycle, walk, or take public transport did so, the roads would be much clearer!