Singer Chris Brown pleads guilty over bottle attack at a London nightclub

There’s fast and then there’s this

The advice was not unexpected but it was surprising considering it applied to a vehicle weighing almost 6,000 pounds.

“Before you let off the brake, put your head against the headrest,” the instructor said.

We — myself and a handful of Porsche customers gathered at Red River Exhibition Park — were about to experience launch control on the 2027 Porsche Cayenne Turbo Electric.

Launch control works like this: you put the vehicle in Drive, hold the brake as hard as you can with your left foot and quickly depress the accelerator pedal as far as it goes and hold it.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: Caution! Avoid shopping (except food and gas) and important decisions until after 3:30 p.m. today. After that, the moon moves from Gemini into Cancer.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

This is a creative day for you. Because you’re the artisan of the zodiac, tap into your talents and make some art or explore one of your many hobbies. However, avoid intense discussions with partners, spouses and friends. Keep things light.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Dynacare workers provide essential services that must be maintained during strike, labour board rules

The Manitoba Labour Board has ruled Dynacare workers are essential employees and their services must be maintained during a labour dispute.

Letters, Oct. 1

Did anyone else see the irony when Premier Wab Kinew announced at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre that Manitoba would adopt permanent Daylight Time (DT) and had hired 17 new psychiatrists this year?

Time for AI guardrails is right now

The genie is most definitely out of the bottle.

And while there’s little chance of putting it back in, we should be very concerned that the people who released it from the bottle are now frantically warning us that it has become disinclined to do their — or our — bidding and seems instead to be increasingly intent on following its own whims and granting wishes to itself.

The figurative genie, in this case, is artificial intelligence, or AI, and in recent weeks many of the tech geniuses responsible for its development and introduction into the digital-information realm have begun asking the U.S. government and even the United Nations to impose limits on the pace and breadth of its growth.

Their fear is that, as AI very quickly continues to advance and develops the ability to make independent decisions and essentially think for itself, it will cease to be a tool controlled by its creators and instead will become a species unto itself that might eventually decide it’s better off without humans continually messing things up.

Transit, roads and city council’s priorities

Did any of you happen to notice that the week of Sept. 14 marked an interesting confluence of events in Winnipeg? First up was the mayoral debate on public transit. Second was an announcement that the city would be undertaking a survey to determine whether their citizens’ “transportation needs” are being met.

The debate on our public bus system, from which our current Mayor Scott Gillingham was tellingly absent, focused primarily on safety rather than the efficiency of the system.

Which, on one level, is no great surprise.

After all unlawful incidents on buses and at transit stops have increased by 280 per cent compared to levels recorded around 2016. Moreover, the candidates were primarily speaking to the bus drivers’ union that organized the event, and bus drivers are often the victims of violent episodes.