iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Not a professional photographer, but starting to build up some work I'm proud of so figured I'd share. If you like my stuff, more can be found here flickr.com/photos/13060... #portfolioday #artshare #photography

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 21h

And also if you're an artist (I would imagine) you're doing it for passion. I'm a programmer and I feel like most people don't even have any like professional pride in what they're doing, it's just a job to make money. Which, like, fair enough, we all gotta capitalism.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 21h

Because I actually have any level of respect for the people I work with, I'm not going to subject them to slop spam responses to slop spam.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 13/10/2026

And of course said incompetent people look good to management because they're producing so much output! Look at this extensive documentation they produced! Meanwhile I can't get anything done because I'm too busy reading through the shit they're spamming out.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 13/10/2026

Are AI coding tools making my job way harder because the most incompetent people I work with are now outsourcing all of their work to AI and are just straight up posting insanely wordy incredibly wrong walls of bullshit from Claude in Teams which is now my problem to review? Yes

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

If we did that we'd run out of oil. Don't get me wrong, we should tax the shit out of their profits, but a certain moron has managed to break the global oil supply, so the only two options to reduce consumption are price increases to decrease demand or straight up fuel rationing.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

And the way that, in practice, the stock price continues to reflect the theoretical intrinsic value of the company is because any time it doesn't a bunch of traders say "I think this value is too high/low" and trade and that's price discovery.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

But if I'm a company attempting a hostile takeover I need to acquire your (small) share (and everybody else's) in order to do so. And so if the stock value was ever lower than the intrinsic value of the company, the company would get bought out. And so the stock price is tied to the actual value

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

And it gives a voting ownership stake in a company that has actual lines of revenue and intellectual property and likely actual physical property or land or whatever. Like, if nothing else, Disney could melt the castle down for scrap metal. Unlike crypto which has zero relation to anything at all

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

(to clarify lolno it's not socially useful and I'd maybe even say socially harmful, I just don't think it's gambling)

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

Not actually sure if we're disagreing. Yeah, agreed, it's information arbitrage and they're rewarded for having/using the information first to make the stock price as "accurate" as possible at any given millisecond. Now is this a socially useful activity to this extreme? Debatable (lolno it's not)

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

I say in theory because yes the market can be insanely irrational and completely decoupled from any actual real value (cough TSLA) but it's still broadly very different from gambling in the Las Vegas or even cryptocurrency sense

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

circumstance, so they are engaged in price finding and are rewarded for being able to "accurately" price the asset. A better analogy would be a skilled sports better who can profit by being more accurate than the bookies (the broader market). If you can consistently make money, it's not gambling.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/10/2026

Ignoring whether short term trading is socially good, it's absolutely not gambling. Unlike with crypto, the underlying asset has actual value which in theory can be valued. Short term traders make money when they identify that the current price differs from the underlying value due to a change in

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 11/10/2026

Why review it yourself when you can just dump the labor of reviewing it onto the people you're trying to replace and have them do the work for free? Dumping piles of possible shit for humans to review is kinda their whole MO.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 10/10/2026

But I dunno, maybe we all just hook ourselves up to an IV that gives us a constant stream of happy juice and be done with it. Get some robots to keep the nutrient tubes topped up and we'll be good. Why do anything, why create anything, why think anything?

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 10/10/2026

This is an insane take. Precisely because I have a "regular" job, the time I have outside of that to create art is the only time I have to actually exist as a human outside of the capitalist hellscape. And I'm sure as hell not outsourcing the creative expression I do get to make to fucking AI.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 08/10/2026

Of all the agile nonsense, I'll defend story points. People are notoriously shit at estimating time. But if they estimate complexity in arbitrary units, if they are kinda consistent in applying this arbitrary unit, you can just see how many "points" a team does in two weeks for capacity planning.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 08/10/2026

"oh I'm just using it to help me learn how to solve the problems and provide guidance" Nope. I could retain the information just long enough to get a good grade on the test but man I wish I had actually done a better job actually learning that material. Outsourcing your brain is a dangerous road

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 08/10/2026

Yeah, I was in college around when Wolfram Alpha got popular as a thing that could help with calculus/physics/etc. And even as a fairly motivated student, the damage that access to that website did to my ability to actually learn and retain knowledge was enormous. So AI in schools really scares me.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 07/10/2026

Man Wasteland Weekend was such a fun event to photograph (and attend) flic.kr/s/aHBqjD6RM3

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 07/10/2026

Like, I think you can make a credible argument that Democrats in Maine were willing to engage in mental gymnastics to try to ignore the red flags, and people who wanted to dump him from the start have been proven completely correct. But it was also never some cult of personality around Platner.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 07/10/2026

There's a big difference between thinking you finally had a candidate who's able to effectively advocate for the kind of policies you want and not wanting to give that up (but ultimately doing so when the evidence became damming) and MAGA style worship even after mountains of evidence.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 05/10/2026

"AI lets you focus on higher level ideas, but also it's great for helping you brainstorm!" (Because actually we just don't give a shit and want easy passive income spewing out slop)

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 05/10/2026

Even China, a country famously much more competent at doing authoritarian shit, seemingly has a hard time actually fully filtering the Internet.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 05/10/2026

The Trump administration is too incompetent to be able to effectively weaponize having Internet be a public utility by... Blocking access to Bluesky? If they tried it would be ridiculously easy to bypass with a VPN because incompetent

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 04/10/2026

And it would probably make sense to have it run at the state level like the other public utilities/state sanctioned and regulated quasi-public monopolies.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 04/10/2026

Counter counter point, the government is at least ostensibly beholden to the voters and restricted from taking actions (in the US) by the first amendment. Currently the on off switch to the Internet is controlled by a bunch of rich technofascist fuckers.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 03/10/2026

God I love Wasteland Weekend so much and I'm so hooked now

A sign reading "do gay, be crimes, weasal 4 sheriff"

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 29/09/2026

What if we took the bullwhip effect in the beer game except not only is there no information sharing, all the parties involved are incentivized to actively lie to make their business look better, and also everyone involved is operating at a loss burning through the same pool of investor capital?

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 25/09/2026

I would agree but also he's the political genius behind "I'm sorry the gas prices are going up, but help is on the way and your national security, yes, is even more important than your pocketbook." so probably a few things to constantly bring up

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 23/09/2026

I assume the answer partially amounts to "global supply chains are complicated" and we end up doing something dumb like banning "exporting" an intermediary product to a refinery in Canada or something. And also the global retaliation will be painful and drive costs up even higher

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 23/09/2026

And then of course you start down the rabbit hole of "actually modern cameras in general are maybe too good?" and start throwing vintage lenses on and trying to emulate the look of film

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 23/09/2026

Man drybrushing is just some kind of magic

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 21/09/2026

And of course, while the placement of each individual tree is "unimportant", the application of math creating the forest itself is still an art form. Procedural art is awesome. See also generative modular synth music.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 18/09/2026

"Will AI kill us all" Yes, I predict within ten years we will reach an artificial intelligence singularity, where a techbro reaches such an artificially inflated sense of their own intelligence that the force of gravity drags it in upon itself, creating a black hole, as depicted in Claude's logo.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

It must suck to get lumped in with the ethnonationalists hijacked your ideology. But it also sucks that the ethnonationalists use the word antisemitism as a cudgel against any criticism of the state of Israel's genocide. But neither of those comes close to as bad as being a child in Gaza right now.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

And where does the line of their ancestral homeland get drawn? And who decides that? And how does that get enforced when the people currently farming the land in that ancestral homeland disagree? Zionism as a concept may not be inherently violent, but there's no way of executing it that wasn't.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

But now the Israeli government and a large portion of the Israeli population very clearly are not acting as if the Palestinians have the right to live in their ancestral homeland. And so, what, does the UN now need to use military force again to compel Israel this time to acknowledge that right?

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

The problem forms when one group feels that a right exists, and another group feels that a right does not exist. And I think it's fair to say that there is disagreement that that right exists, but the UN ultimately said that the right existed, and relied on military force to enforce that right.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

But if the country is rapidly backsliding into fascism and straight up "immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country" territory then yeah, if you're still trying to be apolitical then you're on the side of the Nazis.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 15/09/2026

Depending on how you want to define apolitical, people like Fred Rogers maybe? Obviously things were not great for lots of reasons back then, but there's an argument to be made that if the country is making forward progress, being seen as apolitical lets you spread a positive message more widely.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 14/09/2026

It's also a symptom of seeing every problem as a problem to solved with more software, and never as like... A social issue or an infrastructure issue or an organizational issue. And now we've got the shiny piece of software called AI to try to bandaid our shit software development processes.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/09/2026

There's a little bit of tragedy of the commons here. If you "waste" your money on juniors, then your competitors will just poach them when they become economically valuable. And also oh man the brainrot that reliance on the chatbots is causing in juniors... But yeah, very self destructive behavior.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/09/2026

And I'm going to make art, even if it's shitty and trite and nobody is ever going to see it or care, because I don't think that's the point. I create because I need to create. Humans have been making art as long as there have been humans, and I'll be damned if I let the tech bros take my humanity.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 12/09/2026

I've had this thought. And sure a different me would be happier if I didn't think so damn much, but that person isn't me. I can't not think, I can't not learn, sure a different me would be happier if they knew less and thought less, but I'm me, and the world is too damn interesting.

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 11/09/2026

I guess the idea is while the AI could write the engine from scratch, it's still going to cost some amount of compute/time to complete. And so they can make Waifu Sim 3000 faster/cheaper if their AI uses an engine. But also let's not stop there, the AI might as well write Waifu OS...

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 06/09/2026

Oh, for sure. My point was just that even for good stuff we tend to push them forward at a rapid pace, ignore or even try to cover up all the downsides, paint anybody against it as anti-progress, and realize only after we've done immense damage that "oh, shit, it turns out freon is nasty stuff"

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Alec @denmachi.dev · 06/09/2026

It's actually very difficult to find any revolutionary technology that didn't come with some side effects that the people pushing said technology would rather we just ignore because that might hurt profits. Electricity is great, coal power plants are not so great, etc.

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