Tech on Big Muddy

How effective are Amber alerts?

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:15:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, I experienced a situation familiar to many Canadians, described in this article from Jonathan Jarry of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society:

On Sunday, March 22nd of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was woken up at 4:25 as cell phones lit up and screamed. An Amber alert had been broadcast. Less than four hours later, the two missing children were thankfully found, unharmed, and the alert was cancelled.

Thankfully, my iPhone respects silent mode and only vibrated forcefully, but apparently not all phone brands respect this setting. Unlike in the United States, Amber alerts to cell phones in Canada cannot be disabled.

The statistics regarding child abductions and Amber alerts discussed in this article are equal parts comforting and disconcerting. For example, most children who are the subject of an Amber alert are recovered unharmed:

a study published a decade ago and looking at 448 Amber alerts in the U.S. revealed that over 95% of the children had been recovered alive and nearly 90% recovered alive and without physical harm, sexual abuse, of withholding of needed medical care during the abduction. Even when Amber alerts don’t trigger a helpful tip, the child is usually found.

Other research from the United States indicates the Amber alert plays a part in the recovery about 25% of the time. However, they may be issued too late to prevent the worst outcomes:

How SARS-CoV-2 variants get named on GitHub

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Bioinformatics has long been an unusually collaborative and transparent field, with genomes, protein structures, and other complex biological data habitually deposited into open databases during the course of research. The situation was no different at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a small group of scientists developed the Pango nomenclature for classifying variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Outside of a handful of Greek-letter “variants of concern” names assigned by the World Health Organization, the Pango nomenclature is the standard for tracking the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You may recall names such as B.1.1.7 (Alpha or the UK variant), B.1.351 (Beta or the South African variant), and P.1 (Gamma or the Brazilian variant). You can see a complete list of active SARS-CoV-2 lineages using the Pango nomenclature here.

By August 2020, the work of defining new lineages of SARS-CoV-2 had moved to GitHub, where the scientific process could happen in transparent and collaborative way. The definition of new lineages happens on proposals submitted as GitHub issues. In May 2023, a second GitHub repository was opened to move discussions of smaller or less clear lineages out of the main repository. These discussions can be promoted to the main repository, as this issue tracking LP.8.1 sub-lineages was in May 2025.

The work of defining new lineages of SARS-CoV-2 continues to this day on the GitHub repository, as the virus continues to mutate and evolve. And bioinformatics continues to be a shining beacon for open science for the rest of us to learn from.

Prediction markets are coming to Canada

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:00:00 -0400

(Archive link to this story)

Wealthsimple is a fintech company at the forefront of a lot of innovation in Canada’s personal finance sector since the company’s founding in 2014. Notably, Wealthsimple was the first broker in Canada to offer zero-commission trades, back in 2019. In 2020, they started offering the ability to trade crypto. In 2025, they launched zero-commission options trading. This year, the company received regulatory approval to bring prediction trading to Canada.

Unlike in other parts of the world, prediction markets have not flourished in Canada and have been considered basically illegal since a 2017 ruling from Canada’s federal securities regulator. Wealthsimple has been able to get around this ruling by only offering contracts on a narrow set of questions:

Despite a 2017 ruling that largely banned these kinds of short-term, yes-or-no contracts, certain regulated firms that are CIRO members are able to offer certain types of “event contracts,” […] The approval for Ontario-based Wealthsimple permits it only to offer contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends, the company confirmed – not sports or elections, which are among the most popular uses of prediction markets in the United States.

Wealthsimple has driven innovation in the Canadian personal finance sector; however, their new product offerings over the last few years seem to be speedrunning the Robinhood trajectory toward high-risk, high-volatility trading and away from their traditional niche of broad, diversified funds/ETFs for ordinary people to set-and-forget. This pivot can be understood as part of a broader trend toward the casinofication of everything, which took off with crypto and the legalization of online sports betting.

Some insight into writing a book using Quarto

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:48:00 -0400

Prof. Kieran Healy (Sociology, Yale University) shares some nice insight into the process of writing a book in Quarto using R in this post. The output screenshots he shares look beautiful, and the idea of deploying the same content as a clean PDF and a responsive website is awesome. A full draft of the book, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (Second Edition), is available as a website here.

I have grown increasingly tired of writing in any format other than a plain text file I can easily version control and move around, so the idea of writing a book in Quarto is appealing to me (as long as it has enough technical content to justify the format).

Open banking comes to Canada

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:03:00 -0400

Canada’s banking sector is legendarily stable. However, this stability comes at the cost of innovation. Canada lags behind peers such as the EU, UK, US, and Australia in an area I care a lot about: open banking.

The premise of open banking is that consumers should be free to share their financial data with the third parties of their choosing, such as a budgeting app.. I have been following open banking in Canada for years now, ever since I started closing tracking my own finances. For a long time, I have been looking for a better way to export transactions than logging into my bank’s website and manually downloading a CSV file representing a certain time range.

Over the years, people have tried to solve this problem by writing third-party packages to retrieve data from specific banks. However, these packages were fragile and prone to breaking, and they usually relied on you providing your full account credentials, granting them to ability to impersonate a login to your account. Shockingly, this is actually the default security model for Canadian fintech companies: even a humble budget app must be given your username, password, and (implicitly) the ability to take any action on your behalf. Needless to say, this is at best a grey zone for liability, since you are willingly handing over the keys to the kingdom to a third party.

The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:07:00 -0500

Time zones are hard. As a well-known Computerphile video so eloquently puts it:

What you learn after dealing with time zones, is that what you do is you put away your code, you don’t try and write anything to deal with this. You look at the people who have been there before you. You look at the first people, the people who have dealt with this before, the people who have built the spaghetti code, and you thank them very much for making it open source, and you give them credit, and you take what they have made and you put it in your program, and you never ever look at it again. Because that way lies madness.

The Canadian province of British Columbia recently decided to switch to permanent daylight time. I wanted to see if this update made it to the IANA Time Zone Database yet. Luckily, we can now view updates to this database as commits on GitHub. And there it was in the news file!

I’ve perused the tz repository before, and I always learn something interesting. For example, during WWII Britain adopted double summer time, adding two hours to the clock in the summer and one hour in the winter. The bulk of the comments in the database are dedicated to documenting this extensive history of time zone changes across the world.

It's incredibly easy to game Twitter's trending news algorithm

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:30:00 -0500

Twitter’s “Today’s News” section is a mix of real news, very minor stories (usually discussion of a random AI-related post), nonsense trends, and barely disguised marketing.

The algorithm behind it seems pretty easy to manipulate.

This trending topic revolves around an explosive DM warning of imminent 25% layoffs at a FAANG company:

Here is the original post, which comes from an account called Tech Layoff Tracker (@TechLayoffLover):

There is no reason to believe this post is real. The account, created this month (February 2026), made its first post 7 hours ago. The post in question was made 5 hours ago, or 2 hours after the account’s very first post. Of course, the account carries an utterly meaningless blue “verified” checkmark.

But despite all this, the news summary puts “Tech Layoff Tracker” right in the headline, as if it’s a known reliable source and not an account (most likely) created the same day as the summary itself!

The increasingly inevitable social media ban for kids

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:57:00 -0500

Jon Haidt writes on his Substack about the increasingly popular movement to ban social media for kids, following the implementation of Australia’s under-16 social media ban a few months ago.

Why a Canadian news site just launched an AI publishing tool

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:49:00 -0500

It’s no secret that Canadian journalism (like journalism everywhere) is in trouble. Newsrooms face a steady stream of layoffs despite a couple hundred million Canadian dollars of direct and indirect government subsidies every year. The vast majority of outlets eligible for these subsidies take advantage of them, and combined they can subsidize half of a journalist’s salary. News organizations are desperate to diversify their revenue streams.

The Hub is a right-leaning publication launched in 2021 with a focus on policy and politics. Notably, the outlet declines or donates their subsidies, citing a valid concern that the scale of such subsidies threaten the perceived trustworthiness and independence of the media.

In late January 2026, The Hub launched NewsBox, an AI-powered publishing tool. NewsBox aims to make it easier for creators to transform their content (written, audio, or video) into other formats, such as speeches, essays, or talking points, while maintaining the author’s distinct voice. You can see examples of the tool’s output on new articles in The Hub, each of which is accompanied by an AI-generated summary and list of quotes at the top of the page. There is also a “Hub AI” chatbot in the sidebar of every article.

The app very much uses The Hub’s branding, prominently featuring the outlet’s co-creators, who also created NewsBox. While their pitch talks about preserving creators’ voices to avoid the “soulless prose” and “slop” outputted by ChatGPT and similar tools, I have to wonder if tighter integration of AI into the news and opinion side of the operation will raise its own issues with trust. The Hub has always been fairly tech-friendly, including a longstanding sponsorship by Meta.

msgvault: A personal email archive and search system to watch

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

Here’s a new project to watch if you are interested in taking control of your email: msgvault. The tool provides a local, searchable version of all of your Gmail messages and attachments, backed by SQLite and DuckDB.

The author, Wes McKinney, says he may add support for other email services in the future, as well as WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS. I’ll probably look into it for myself once the project matures a little. Although given that it stores everything in a single giant database file, it won’t fit into my standard backup strategy of versioned, incremental backups. Still, it could be a nice step forward in regaining control over my email archives.

^{Hat tip to j4mie on HackerNews.}

A/B testing for advertising is not randomized

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:09:00 -0500

Florian Teschner writes about a recent paper from Bögershausen, Oertzen, & Bock arguing that online ad platforms like Facebook and Google misrepresent the meaning of “A/B testing” for ad campaigns. In A/B testing, we might assume the platform is randomly assigning users to see ad A or ad B, in an attempt to get a clean causal interpretation about which ad is more likely to drive a click (or whatever outcome you’re tracking).

But according to the paper, this is usually not what is happening. Instead, the platform optimizes delivery for each ad independently, steering each one toward the users most likely to click it. In other words, the two ads may be shown to different groups of users, and differences in click-through rates may be attributable to who is seeing the ad, as opposed to the overall appeal of the ad. Ad platforms convert A/B tests from simple randomized experiments into murky observational comparisons. For example, an ad may appear to do better because it happened to be shown disproportionately to a group with a high click-through rate, not because it presents a more compelling overall message. Advertisers get the warm glow of “experimentally backed” marketing without the assurances of randomization.