iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Well there’s horses. They have been extremely resistant to retraining for office work

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You say "if." Is this a pattern you've observed in history, or a hypothetical new thing?

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Maybe it's this: in software companies, we always underestimate how hard it is to take a product from "working" to "actually can be sold in high volumes." It's typically years of work! I think AI gets us to "working" really fast. But the rest of the job requires slow real-world feedback loops.

Everything is faster now than it was during the industrial revolution, undoubtedly. But AI will also hit all kinds of speedbumps when it touches the physical world; it already is. Plus modern fixes to problems (reskilling etc) are accelerated as much as modern causes of problems.

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Wait, are we talking about employed people spending money on US services, or unemployed people in a country where... where did the local jobs go exactly?

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In my mind, AI is a specific technology the way "the concept of factory automation" is a specific technology. it's useless abstractly, but transformative as we apply it to an endless series of specific problems.

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That your point about "lower-valued jobs" and "payroll savings" is the opposite of what has been true with every other technological advancement in history

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The US is in the middle of losing a trade war of their own making. There has never been a better time to tax US-based goods and services.

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If that comes anywhere close to happening, the countries where those people live will figure out how to collect local taxes on the foreign companies. Don't worry.

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But wages have also gone up expontentially over time

It really does make a person feel rich to own an actual part of the doomsday machine

Josh Tabish @joshtabish.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Certainly not. That would be unethical. Usenet is for noncommercial use only

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Reposted by apenwarr

“Canada should be able to support legitimate investigations without making secure systems easier to attack, and without making Canadian companies less competitive globally.” – Avery Pennarun, CEO of @tailscale.com in @betakit.com

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An optimistic(?) data point here is that when unemployment spiked to ~20% during COVID, the US government (and you remember who was in charge) started mailing out cheques. GDP was also down, so this caused inflation to rise; but if GDP had been skyrocketing it would have been fine, sustainable UBI.

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Oh yeah, there’s no guarantee that working *conditions* will get better, I’m just really skeptical that we’ll run out of work. That said, the history of tech has been working conditions improving for tech workers. And maybe we will all soon be tech workers…

I feel like we just entered an ”I like waffles” situation

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Global poverty has dropped precipitously and purchasing power per capita has increased across the board

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That’s an interesting theory but is the opposite of what I just said always happens. :) Even the greediest capitalist will hire more people when ROI goes up.

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I think the U-6 unemployment rate measurement nowadays captures the cohort of discouraged and underemployed workers. U-6 unemployment in the US has been trending downward this year

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Because ROI goes up when costs go down, causing companies to invest in expansion. Hiring plans are typically calculated in incremental revenue per incremental headcount. Incremental revenue accelerates when you do a bunch of high ROI projects

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Were they put out of work because revenue went up or revenue went down? My understanding is the latter. Any those jobs are gone but current unemployment rate is very low

Sure but why do we think that will happen? Revenue went up so we fired the human workers? That doesn’t match any history I’ve heard. Also the economy stops working if buyers don’t have any income. Henry Ford was on the right track there. Capitalists are greedy, they know they need buyers to exist.

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But there were immediately a lot of new factory jobs (which were presumably worse jobs I guess). I’m not sure how long the artisans were literally unemployed for.

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The videoconferencing is clearly analog based on how it responds in low signal environments. This is pretty realistic for cross-species comms standards in my opinion :)

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I mean, hmm, the industrial revolution? Surely that had a pretty wide scope. And I’m not sure what “too fast to adapt to” would look like. GDP and production/construction capacity so high that none of us can afford food or housing or useful things to do?

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Ah, the old No True Job fallacy :)

Numbers suggest both at once, yes

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I think this is the Malthusian argument paraphrased. Malthus doesn’t have a super successful prediction history

Arguably those are labour saving devices. Which did not reduce employment :)

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I dunno, factories and printing presses were pretty unprecedented! And telecommunications and Wikipedia. It’s interesting to go from “never happened, not even once” to “will all happen in one shot.”

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We eliminated those menial jobs but created even more jobs to replace them.

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I hear you, and raise you washing machines and electronic calculators

Jobs per person has remained flat, but number of persons has increased exponentially

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So far no labour saving device in the history of humanity has resulted in a long-term reduction in employment.

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> It's a good book. You won't like it But worst of all you won't be able to prove me wrong unless you read it

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I mean, I said you won't like it :)

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Basically yes but I got there 20-ish years ago

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Amazon.com: On Equilibrium eBook : Saul, John Ralston: Kindle Store

I see endless debates about rationalists. Here's the book that completely disabused me of the notion that rationality (which I love) is a solution to anything. It's a good book. You won't like it www.amazon.com/dp/B005LXUSY...

amazon.com

On Equilibrium

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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 28/09/2026

Hmm. Rare situation where I think I’d like to be the product of choice in a *smaller* market segment please

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Repetitive Self Improvement Recursive Stress Improvement Recursive Stress Injury

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Reposted by apenwarr

Janet 🇨🇦 @jansplanet.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

“Canada should be able to support legitimate investigations without making secure systems easier to attack, and without making Canadian companies less competitive globally as more countries look for trusted, sovereign infrastructure,” #CdnPoli #BillC-22 #Security #Sovereignty

betakit.com

Tailscale, Windscribe co-sign open letter asking feds to further amend Bill C-22 | BetaKit

Canadian and European tech companies still have concerns over Canada's federal “lawful access” bill.

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Reposted by apenwarr

Andree Toonk @atoonk.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This weekend’s project: DPDK + WireGuard 🤓 I wired wireguard-go up to my packetio library and got a single tunnel to ~30M pps clean, peaking 40M pps. That’s 70× what kernel WireGuard can do! Wrote it all up here if you’re into that kind of thing: toonk.io/wireguard-dp...

toonk.io

WireGuard at 40 Mpps with DPDK, in Go

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with high-performance packet processing in Go. A lot of that work turned into packetio, one Go API for sending and receiving pa...

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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 27/09/2026

omg I had completely blotted that out of my memory