iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Joe Duncan

Jan Skudlarek @janskudlarek.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Elon Musk radikalisiert momentan die englische Öffentlichkeit mit rechtsradikalen Botschaften. Extreme politische Inhalte werden von einem rechten Algorithmus gezielt gepusht, andere werden unterdrückt. Deshalb: X gehört reguliert und Musks Einfluss eingeschränkt - international!

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

"We’re living through a strange cultural reversal in which eroticism—that infamous, age-old, reliable conduit for human pleasure, imagination, and the beautifully chaotic, ungovernable side of being human—has been quietly evacuated from everyday life through alarmless emergency exits."

open.substack.com

What Happened to the Erotic?

A philosophical essay on the great restructuring of eroticism

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

“The coming Slopocalypse will be the moment when the environment of the Internet can no longer support human intention. In other words, it’ll be the point when our incentives are so misaligned with powerful corporations and the technologies they provide that we can no longer accomplish what we want”

open.substack.com

The Coming AI Slopocalypse

How AI is turning the open web into a toxic waste dump of averaged-out everything—and what we can do about it.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Matthew absolutely NAILED the magnificent Simone Weil in this episode. For any others who love Weil, this is definitely worth a listen.

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Raubtier den Atem @freikampf.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Denkt dran: Der Klassenkampf ist noch nicht vorbei!

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 07/09/2025

This is one of the greatest screenshots anyone has ever sent me

A screenshot of the New York Times hardfork podcast TikTok about the ai bubble where someone has posted the smiling man

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

I’m old enough to remember when companies charged you more (time or money), it meant you got an upgraded product. Now the opposite is the norm. Duolingo’s switch from hearts to energy gives you less product for your time/money. It also makes no sense—less time on the app equals less ad revenue.

medium.com

How Duolingo’s New Energy System Is Failing Its Users

Last week, I was scrolling through my morning tech news when a headline from The Verge caught my attention: “Duolingo is replacing hearts…

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

I feel like an alien walking around with one of these antiques everywhere I go, while everyone else buries their faces in glowing screens.

Open book, Paradise Lost by John Milton.

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Daniel Kubiak @danielkubiak.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Ich höre immer wieder, Social Media ist gefährlich für Kinder. Als Vater von Kids (10 und 17) sage ich ja, stimmt. Man sollte sie begleiten, sich selbst Expertise aneigenen etc. Als Sohn und Bekannter von Boomern, muss ich aber sagen. Social Media ist hier noch viel gefährlicher. Die dürfen wählen.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

More low-tempo than my usual Medium story, but here’s my argument for preserving culture in the high-tech age based on Shakespeare’s tumultuous history.

medium.com

The Case for Preserving Culture

What the turbulent history of Shakespeare tells us about our pressing need to preserve culture

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Derek Beres @derekberes.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

The brain worm is still working its magic.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 28/08/2025

Next time somebody asks me "what if I'm wrong" I'm just going to start asking "what if I'm right?"

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 27/08/2025

The AI bubble is bursting, and the things that will accelerate the collapse are NVIDIA's growth slowing, the death of AI startup funding, the collapse of a major AI startup, big tech turning on AI, and a collapse of neoclouds like CoreWeave. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-20...

NVIDIA's Growth Slows: As discussed in the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble, NVIDIA is the weak point in the Magnificent Seven (which collectively account for 35% of the value of the US stock market) specifically because of its success (19% of the Magnificent Seven's value) and value, which is driven entirely by its ability to sell more and more GPUs every single quarter. It is inevitable that its growth slows, and once it does, the AI story crumbles with it. Perhaps it has a down quarter then an up quarter — but that's three long months to make the markets happy.

I will add that there's a chance the bubble reinflates a touch if NVIDIA crushes earnings. Or maybe the market doesn't care? We'll find out at the end of next week.

AI Funding Will Start Drying Up, And AI Companies Are The Most Funding-Dependent Companies of All Time: As The Information wrote last week, the "dry powder" (available capital to invest in totality) has dropped, and venture capitalist Jon Sakoda of Decibel Partners believes that "...if VCs keep investing at today's clip, the industry would run out of money in six quarters." Removing OpenAI and Anthropic, the party will continue until 2028...but we all know those are the companies that are getting the money.
One of the major AI companies will collapse: OpenAI and Anthropic both burn billions of dollars a year, and have shown no interest in stopping doing so, with Altman doing his best Lord Farquaad impression and saying that OpenAI is "willing to run at a loss" as long as it takes to get...somewhere. For the bubble to burst, one of these companies has to die, and I will explain how this might happen.

In both of these cases, going public will be nigh-on impossible, and even if successful will expose what I believe to be their rotten economics.

Big Tech Will Turn On AI: Meta's AI hiring freeze isn't enough: Meta, Google, Amazon or Microsoft needs to bring an end to their capex burn, and they need to be definitive that it's A) happening and B) that it's happening, at least in part, because they have "built enough" or "exceeded the opportunity in AI." These companies are barely making $35 billion in revenue from AI in 2025, and I doubt that revenue is increasing.

Another part of this: The Markets Make Big Tech Put Up Or Shut Up: At no point have the markets really interrogated the revenue from AI. I can imagine some weird fucking games happening here. Microsoft, the only member of the Magnificent Seven outside of NVIDIA willing to talk about AI revenue, stopped reporting AI revenue in January, when it was at $13 billion "annualized" (so a little over $1 billion in revenue a month). One has to wonder if this means revenue is flat or falling, as annualized is monthx12.
I can also see a scenario where these companies start putting out obtuse "AI-enabled" revenue stats. I do not think this works, and if it does, it only puts off the inevitable, because they cannot avoid the capex crunch that's coming.
This particular scenario is one that will happen in pieces.

AI Startups Will Start Dying: As I've discussed previously, AI companies are currently raising at suicidal valuations that make it impossible for them to ever sell or go public.
CoreWeave Will Die: AI data center developer CoreWeave is a time bomb, burdened with, to quote analyst Gil Luria of DA Davidson, "deteriorating operating income." It’s also a critical partner to OpenAI, providing compute as part of an $11.9 billion five-year-long contract, despite the fact that it's unclear if it has even come close to finishing its data center development in Denton, Texas. This has to be done by October, in part because that's when OpenAI is due to pay Coreweave, and in part because that's when it has to start paying back its massive, multi-billion …

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 27/08/2025

Premium newsletter: My 14.5k word piece, "AI Bubble 2027" - extrapolations of what may happen in the next 18 months, conditions that might accelerate a collapse, and how OpenAI and Anthropic overstate user numbers and revenues while hiding their awful burnrates. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-20...

wheresyoured.at

AI Bubble 2027

Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan - One Of Us Is The Killer An MIT study found that 95% of organizations are getting "zero return" from generative AI, seemingly every major outlet is now writing ...

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Denis Trubetskoy @denistrubetskoy.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Tja, eine weitere schreckliche Nacht hier in Kyjiw gewesen. Und leider ist es noch nicht vorbei mit den Drohnen. Bisher mindestens acht Tote.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

“Flow state” sounds like a characteristic of the exhaust on your car. First the industrial world and now the machine world subtly shapes the language we use in ways that constantly try—intentionally or not—to remove us, the humans, from it.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Maybe it’s me, but “flow state” sounds way more boring than “rhythmic, orgiastic, Dionysian ecstasy,” but of course, we have to operationalize everything these days and try to strip the human vivacious from it all.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 24/08/2025

One thing I think people need to get used to is that not everything works out the way it did in the past and, indeed, new things are going to burst forth from this chaos that can be energising and, I believe, lead to better things. And at the very least we may see some smarmy perverts proven wrong

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Watching @edzitron.com make excellent points on Newcomer. He shows the AI-market faithful for what it is—a religion:

youtube.com

Ed Zitron Hater’s Guide to Generative AI

YouTube video by Newcomer

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Kasey Kagawa @punkey.org · 21/08/2025

I mean, they are singing from the same sheet of music in a way - shareholders. If the big whale shareholders have decided LLMs are over, CEOs will change their tune very quickly.

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 21/08/2025

Here's part 2 of this week's two-part episode of Better Offline. I walk you through how America’s economic growth has become dependent on Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta’s AI capex - and how this will harm both our economy and markets. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... linktr.ee/betteroffline

podcasts.apple.com

The AI Money Trap, Part Two

Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 08/21/2025 · 42m

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Benn Jordan @bennjordan.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

I'd love to live in a country where law enforcement views prolific child sex traffickers as a higher priority than your gardener.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

"You’re not training for the fucking Olympics, Carol, you’re training for…what exactly? Oh, right, another fucking Tuesday. You do the same six things every single day in a slightly different order and pretend it’s freedom."

open.substack.com

Can "Life Coaching" Please Go Away Yet?

The boring-ass-life industrial complex

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 21/08/2025

Also, this is a significant moment, a huge one. I don't know if there's another hiring freeze on at Meta right now. Their only hiring freeze is for the thing that everybody says is the future. Will they spin it as "efficiency"? Sure. I don't think it will play that way for long. Blood in the water.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 21/08/2025

It's Joever. Various old men that look and sound like Dracula are complaining that A.I. talent is taking away from what's most important: shareholder buybacks. This is what they start doing when they are tired of whatever dog and pony show a company is doing. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...

Mounting concern from investors over the costs of the tech giants’ AI buildout has played a role in this week’s selloff of technology stocks. In an Aug. 18 research note, analysts at Morgan Stanley warned that the fast-rising stock-based compensation offered by Meta and Google to lure AI talent could threaten their ability to return capital to shareholders via buybacks. Lavish spending on talent, the analysts wrote, “has the potential to drive AI breakthroughs with massive value creation or could dilute shareholder value without any clear innovation gains.”

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 21/08/2025

Hahahahahahahahahahahahha hell yeah dude

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Reposted by Joe Duncan

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 21/08/2025

Oh yeah things are falling apart. You've got paranoid guys on Blind freaking out now

Community
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Amazon • EL TRUMP
Something very strange is going on
There is a seemingly coordinated effort to FLIP FLOP on Al. All of the execs who were hyping Al to death just a few weeks ago are now claiming that Al is a bubble, that AGI is nowhere near, and that Al will have a much smaller impact than anticipated.
> Altman called it a bubble
> Eric Schmidt said that AGI is basically bullshit
> Matt Garman (AWS CEO) downplayed its impact
WHY the sudden narrative switch?
WHO gave the orders?
I swear, it's like they're all part of some cult. They all embrace the same talking points all at once, and abandon them all at once.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

A combination of AI and police cameras in Hamburg to investigate "[how] social relationships between local actors and those with state actors like the police changing." Yikes. This makes me thankful to be in an Asian city that's well behind the times.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

AI Slop is coming for the open internet. I shed a single proverbial tear to think that this is how such a beautiful project like the Open www dies by *literally* mindless slop churned out by machines using probability predictions.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

I just discovered fellow Big Tech critic (though he's a lot better at it than I am) @edzitron.com—and he is awesome. Follow Ed to stay sane in the Big Tech era. My early-2024 prediction that Generative AI might just fizzle out is still holding up well.

medium.datadriveninvestor.com

The Future of AI No One’s Predicting

What if the sensationalist predictions about AI are wrong?

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

I’ve been revisiting Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays lately, those beautiful, verbose slogs of aesthetic perfection. They’ve inspired me, here in Thailand; I’ve got a new essay on U.S. culture from-a-distance coming up in Counter Arts on Medium.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Aside from being a professional writer, I'm also a musician. Here's my cover of Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor, played on synthesizers in FL-Studio (links in thread):

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

I hope the rest of the world understands that only 23.1% of the U.S. population voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Ich hoffe, dass die Welt versteht, dass nur 23,1 % der US-Bevölkerung für Trump gestimmt haben.

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Derek Beres @derekberes.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Wellness influencers love bashing statins and peddling cholesterol pseudoscience to sell supplements. Yet statins are one of the most effective—and most inexpensive—health interventions ever. Dr Danielle Belardo joins me on Clarity Lab to discuss. sirishealth.substack.com/p/what-you-n...

sirishealth.substack.com

What You Need to Know About Statins and Cholesterol

Dr Danielle Belardo breaks down heart health

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Η Ελλάδα είναι στα μπαλάκια της, δεν κάνει μαλακίες. Greece is goin' wild (again).

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Ebenfalls. Genau das Gleiche.

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weird medieval guys @weirdmedieval.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

crazy how this app is actually pretty good

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Mona Mona @philosophypublics.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

substack.com/@philosophyp...

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Super glad we’ve finally got a new old-Twitter.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

This isn’t an immediate cause for alarm, as much more needs to be learned before anyone can say anything definitively, but this mutation in H5N1 is alarming. H5N1 doesn’t usually infect humans and has a difficult time spreading in humans, but when it does, it’s unusually lethal.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Let’s get this party started.

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Wolf Tailor @wolftailor.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Me, myself and nein.

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Joe Duncan @joemduncan.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

It's time someone thoroughly vetted (and debunked) the "fertility crisis" panic that's been all over the media.

open.substack.com

Debunking the Fertility Crisis

Should we be concerned about dwindling sperm and fertility collapse?

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