Rejoining the Rat Race

camping # Direct link to this section

Few things pick up the spirits and rejuvenate the soul than a long camping trip. Also great if you want to lose some weight without consuming the strange new skinny drugs with unknown long term side-effect. I went into my latest trip weighing just fine but still managed to lose a belt buckle setting and 3kg.

AI and VC # Direct link to this section

A year or so after taking a Mila course of study on the modern AI, I logged plenty of hours watching the local Montreal scene present their pitches, ask for funding and generally socialize. In the process I also chose to spend some Sundays at Shopify with the <builders> expecting to meet some local yokels building! I did. But I was also low-key miffed that none of the builders were building for Shopify even though Shopify was nice enough to host all these builder meet ups. I also failed to demonstrate anything of interest but I did help some of the youth out in the vibe coded explorations and that was good enough.

Where I was intrigued was in the tooling. AI begs for some tools to not only keep it in line, but also to ensure it does what it should be doing, following instructions. There are some neat local projects for this. I also had a chance to re-unite with Claude Theoret at the AI Salon where local people meet to discuss their projects and socialize, and that has been fun. The last one coincided with the biggest AI conference, so it was a little bit more suit and tie than hacker ethos. No matter, all good! Familiar faces abound.

Ruby is making a comeback with a local October meetup and Marc-Andre will be presenting. About ten years ago at the local Ruby meetup he built a back-propagating neural network in Ruby that was trained right then and there on numbers, as symbols, and within an hour, that little demo worked fine and was able to correctly choose the right symbol from data it was not trained on. Ten. Years. Ago. (or a lot longer before OpenAI and Anthropic were dreams). Makes me wonder about the hype machine today and how off the rails it can sometimes seem to be.

Best firepit of 2026 # Direct link to this section

This firepit was old, on the shores of the Bloodvein, and it was a bit of a struggle even finding it as the whole campsite was overgrown. An X was marked on the map indicating a campsite though, so through 5 minutes of perseverence and stomping around the shore line, we discovered the flat spots and settled in making it a home. Turned out to be amazing. The view was superb, but it was the firepit that rose to the occasion. Awesome for cooking, and staring at fire.