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Mike @ Misaligned Markets

@MidniteMikeWrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy

18 followers 8 following 282 posts

[Migrated from zirk.us] California native, chronic night owl, and writer managing a whole mess of projects (plus a sprawling homelab). Currently building […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ freeradical.zone/@MidniteMikeWrites, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 10/08/2026

What The Man doesn't want you to do is cultivate solidarity and build bottom-up networks that can challenge those with power & money. You think saying "retard" is some kind of rebellion? They love that shit!

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

Just launched my second podcast! Unlike The Last Enclosure he Misaligned Markets podcast will highlight the work of scholars and activists addressing contemporary economic issues. First episode features my first political econ professor, who started me on this path. I have an interesting list […]

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Pusher of Pixels @pixelpusher220.dmv.community.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026

Meme of Smokey The Bear. It has 2 panes. The first one is the normal "Only YOU can prevent forest fires!

The 2nd pane is "No I'm being serious. We're defunded so you're on your own"

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

Like comptuer networks, markets are a trust technology that require well established trust boundaries. The recent DOJ egg collusion complaint shows that collusion can happen, not just when producers get together, but when they "hack" an interface the market uses to coordinate activity. In this […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11688038… Catch last week’s episode of The Last Enclosure putting AI boosters into different buckets to better understand where #aihype is coming from. #ai #technology #tech #technews

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11688038… Catch last week’s episode of The Last Enclosure putting AI boosters into different buckets to better understand where #aihype is coming from. #ai #technology #tech #technews

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@meltedcheese @OrionKidder LLMs can be scoped to tasks that a deterministic (dumb switch) like classification tasks, but even that requires expertise in a relevant domain (and data science). I've always said LLMs structurally resemble a dark pattern driven by affective design intended to evoke […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

@meltedcheese @OrionKidder LLMs can be scoped to tasks that a deterministic (dumb switch) like classification tasks, but even that requires expertise in a relevant domain (and data science). I've always said LLMs structurally resemble a dark pattern driven by affective design intended to evoke […]

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

@Gurre @patigallardo.bsky.social They design instruments to codify risk in ways markets fail to detect then offload it on to others. zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11652964…

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

@Gurre @patigallardo.bsky.social They design instruments to codify risk in ways markets fail to detect then offload it on to others. zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11652964…

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

RE: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/1169972100624… 1/ Great post by @pluralistic. Great timing too. I just released episode 6 of my podcast The Last Enclosure where I talk about people like Doctorow who are trying to provide an escape valve for hype by scoping LLMs (though I did openly […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

RE: mamot.fr/@pluralistic/1169972100624… 1/ Great post by @pluralistic. Great timing too. I just released episode 6 of my podcast The Last Enclosure where I talk about people like Doctorow who are trying to provide an escape valve for hype by scoping LLMs (though I did openly […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

@pluralistic 3/ Within my podcast episode I genuinely feel out the concerns of people who are AI abstainers and insist that we follow them. They have important points. LLMs are a dark pattern designed to trick vulnerable users to deferring their judgment. The companies pushing this technology […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

@pluralistic 2/ In the episode I reference a taxonomy of LLM use cases I'm building to illustrate ones more likely to harm the user. The two axes are cognition and measurability. Tasks that completely offload cognition and aren't measurable are the worst. Ones that don't do that (by scoping to […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 @patigallardo.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

The amount of debt funding this bubble is staggering. We’re at levels never seen in generations, perhaps ever. And the banks know. Yet they went all in with Elon on the BS valuation of SpaceX. To get their own money back.

Goldman said in a recent note to clients that the build-up in gross leverage in the first five months of the year was the largest cumulative increase it had recorded since it began tracking the data in 2016, suggesting funds had been turning to borrowing to juice up their trades ahead of the sell-off.

Concentration risk in the market has steadily grown this year, with the S&P 500's biggest 10 companies representing roughly 40 per cent of the index, according to data from Capital Group. That surpasses levels seen in the early 2000s dotcom bubble.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Repeatedly called language models “Grandpa Shelby” on my podcast The Last Enclosure. What the hell do I mean? It's a clunky metaphor from my first blog post on LLMs @ Misaligned Markets. Breaks into three parts: 1. Anterograde amnesia (Leonard Shelby from […] [Original post on zirk.us]

Snippet from a blog post “A (less) technical guide for understanding large language models. Compares LLMs to Leonard Shelby but with dementia and as a savant. LLMs are good at following regularities of language to produce plausible sentences but have no memory and cannot always reliably reproduce associations from training.

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Repeatedly called language models “Grandpa Shelby” on my podcast The Last Enclosure. What the hell do I mean? It's a clunky metaphor from my first blog post on LLMs @ Misaligned Markets. Breaks into three parts: 1. Anterograde amnesia (Leonard Shelby from […] [Original post on zirk.us]

Snippet from a blog post “A (less) technical guide for understanding large language models. Compares LLMs to Leonard Shelby but with dementia and as a savant. LLMs are good at following regularities of language to produce plausible sentences but have no memory and cannot always reliably reproduce associations from training.

Reposted by Mike @ Misaligned Markets

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 05/05/2026

(11/12) How does the bubble unwind? Already is. Watch the pricing games and the shift to charging for tokens. AI companies have been operating on Loony Toons physics, but gravity is catching up. As the bubble pops, expect the house of cards around data center financing to implode. This is as […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11688583… The history of technology can metaphorically be represented as competing train stations. AI’s history is mixed across different subfields suggesting that the next breakthrough might not come from building on Transformers. #AIhistory […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11688583… The history of technology can metaphorically be represented as competing train stations. AI’s history is mixed across different subfields suggesting that the next breakthrough might not come from building on Transformers. #AIhistory […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

New episode of my #podcast The Last Enclosure is out! I talk about Sen. Bernie Sanders and how since the beginning of the year he's been doing a media tour with AI safety organizations. Did this influence his AI wealth fund proposal? Come hear me rant about Effective Altruism, memetic […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

New episode of my #podcast The Last Enclosure is out! I talk about Sen. Bernie Sanders and how since the beginning of the year he's been doing a media tour with AI safety organizations. Did this influence his AI wealth fund proposal? Come hear me rant about Effective Altruism, memetic […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

In the middle of a move so I’ve not published anything this month on Misaligned Markets, but 4th episode of my other podcast is out! We’re talking about the AI bubble, discussing analysis from my March post. youtu.be/7bl0iLqM0oo #misalignedmarkets #aibubble #podcast

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

In the middle of a move so I’ve not published anything this month on Misaligned Markets, but 4th episode of my other podcast is out! We’re talking about the AI bubble, discussing analysis from my March post. youtu.be/7bl0iLqM0oo #misalignedmarkets #aibubble #podcast

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Chuck Darwin @cdarwin.c.im.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

With the CLARITY Act, Washington is cashing in on the crypto industry. Americans are paying the price www.rollingstone.com/politics/polit…

rollingstone.com

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

Capitalism and markets have always been at odds. Nowhere is that more apparent than in tech, where companies can decide to sell revocable products using DRM/licenses. Capitalists always get to choose how to label market inputs: misaligned.markets/21st-century-pro…

misaligned.markets

Modern conflicts over property rights and commodification

Issues like right to repair and privacy are extensions of age-old battles over property rights, which are inherent to capitalism.

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

Capitalism and markets have always been at odds. Nowhere is that more apparent than in tech, where companies can decide to sell revocable products using DRM/licenses. Capitalists always get to choose how to label market inputs: misaligned.markets/21st-century-pro…

misaligned.markets

Modern conflicts over property rights and commodification

Issues like right to repair and privacy are extensions of age-old battles over property rights, which are inherent to capitalism.

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

4/4 But even if a winter happens, LLMs will persist as a product. My thesis has been since I started working with them last summer that they'll have to be scoped well to be useful. This necessarily means big tech stops serving these as human replacements and scaling them through intense resource […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

3/4 The railway for AI is pretty mixed. As a field it has a different series of tracks that have converged at times. But There's no telling where future progress might come from. It may involve building on old tracks or creating a new line all together. All this is to say, a winter is possible.

Image is a train map imagining the history of Artificial Intelligence as train stations. Starts from Cybernetics, Information Theory, and Logic and ends at GPTs and Large Language Models.

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

2/4 As part of my analysis I created a visual metaphor. I imagined the linage of a technology's innovations as train stations along a route. The building of stations is a political act that requires social or monetary capital. Stations can be contested too as the Internet's history shows […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

1/4 One of the reasons I started discussing and writing about the AI bubble is because I took seriously the question of post-bubble residuals. No one was taking this seriously earlier this year. zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11652360…

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

Started a #podcast with my friend Nick called The Last Enclosure, about the way modern capitalists are enclosing our minds and bodies. Episode 3 is out! We talk about the full spectrum of AI boosters and how they're contributing to the permanent underclass narrative […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

Started a #podcast with my friend Nick called The Last Enclosure, about the way modern capitalists are enclosing our minds and bodies. Episode 3 is out! We talk about the full spectrum of AI boosters and how they're contributing to the permanent underclass narrative […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

(5/8) Digital goods are the perfect illustration. Digital assets are non-rivalrous; one person's use doesn't deplete another's, and the marginal cost of production is near zero. Yet, the tech industry has produced the most profitable companies in history. Why? Because they've found ways to […]

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FlohEinstein @floheinstein.chaos.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Me: "Therefore, any sufficiently complicated technical problem is indistinguishable from a curse." #infosec #sysadmin #bofh

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

(1/8) As always @pluralistic@mamot.frwrites about exactly what's on my mind a thread 🧵: My political economy begins by taking F.A. Hayek seriously. I kid you not. Hayek saw markets as a form of decentralized processing a logical “spontaneous order” that aggregates knowledge. He saw this […]

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

1/2 I'm starting two new podcasts. The first is the Misaligned Markets #podcast! I'm narrating some of my posts, but also I'm interviewing activists, researchers, and scholars in my area of interest as I put off going to grad school. misaligned.markets/misaligned-marke…

misaligned.markets

Misaligned Markets podcast teaser

Misaligned Markets intro episode0:00/202.1139911× Transcript Welcome to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm also the writer of the Misaligned Markets blog. Fundamentally, Misaligned Markets is a project about a marriage that has gone deeply wrong, a marriage between capitalism and markets. Now,

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

1/2 I'm starting two new podcasts. The first is the Misaligned Markets #podcast! I'm narrating some of my posts, but also I'm interviewing activists, researchers, and scholars in my area of interest as I put off going to grad school. misaligned.markets/misaligned-marke…

misaligned.markets

Misaligned Markets podcast teaser

Misaligned Markets intro episode0:00/202.1139911× Transcript Welcome to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm also the writer of the Misaligned Markets blog. Fundamentally, Misaligned Markets is a project about a marriage that has gone deeply wrong, a marriage between capitalism and markets. Now,

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sam henri gold @samhenrigold.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

the fact that copying text is paywalled in the read-only version of microsoft word is absolutely bonkers

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

2/2 If you can't get enough of my voice, I'm hosting a second #podcast with my friend called The Last Enclosure. It draws a throughline from the Enclosure Movement to the present by exploring modern systems of political and economic domination. This season Me and my co-host are debunking myths […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

Listening to Muse while packing. Every new album there's at least one song to obsess over. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsSnwzjKAxc

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

3/4 Thiel's vision of markets is a logical continuation of the naive market fundamentalism that imagines markets are self-regulating, then looks away when those mechanisms are distorted by market actors. Theil at least has the “decency” tell us the objective: capture more value than created […]

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

(2/2) Enforced asymmetries of action exist all around us but are becoming more common as wealth and power concentrate and market participants closest to market formation influence the mechanisms of exchange. They can shape what it is they're exchanging as well as the conditions under which […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

(2/2) Enforced asymmetries of action exist all around us but are becoming more common as wealth and power concentrate and market participants closest to market formation influence the mechanisms of exchange. They can shape what it is they're exchanging as well as the conditions under which […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Silver Spook Games @silverspookgames.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

Reviews like this make the blood, sweat and tears working on this adventure game while being an underpaid social worker in the US ghetto worth it. And yeah, let's make cyberpunk PUNK again! store.steampowered.com/app/673850/N… #cyberpunk #indiegame #indiedev #SteamDeals

Holy 90s adventure revival, Batman. Neofeud is a non stop feast of deja vues of interesting but
arguably worse games from the 90s like Noctropolis, Harvester or | Have No Mouth and | Have
To Scream, done mainly by a (arguably very very intelligent) guy that is from Hawaii and works
as a robotics teacher in a probably difficult place - meaning, what you see in the game are
things that probably he has been living there. The best part though is how he mixes all the 90s.
“cd rom multimedia" cyberpunk aesthetic and how he runs with it all along. And the game is
very well written, very fair (for the moment at least) and has atmosphere in spades.

Maybe if the references are nothing to you, you will not be able to enjoy it. But that's part of it.
Neofeud is a game about empathy, about humanity, about fighting the oppressor, which is.
what Cyberpunk was about until it was washed out to be the bland neon aesthetic of today. |
love it, | love the author, and | hope to see many things from him.

Was this review helpful? db Yes No © Funny |

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

The SpaceX IPO shows that the rule of markets matter more than what is being exchanged or how "valuable" it is. And some market participants are closer to shaping rules than others. misaligned.markets/rapid-unschedule… #capitalism #spacex #misalignedmarkets #economics

misaligned.markets

Rapid Unscheduled Devaluation: The geometry of the SpaceX IPO

No rules were broken in the making of the world's largest IPO, revealing a deeper flaw than critics realize.

Reposted by Mike @ Misaligned Markets

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

The #SpaceX story illustrates why ETFs are just like web browsers and can be exploited in a similar way. Read my newest post where I explore the company's IPO like a CVE. misaligned.markets/rapid-unschedule… #cybersecurity #IPO #misalignedmarkets #capitalism

misaligned.markets

Rapid Unscheduled Devaluation: The geometry of the SpaceX IPO

No rules were broken in the making of the world's largest IPO, revealing a deeper flaw than critics realize.

Reposted by Mike @ Misaligned Markets

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11652964… (1/2) My writing explores what I call enforced asymmetries of action. This is when systems like markets give one party a greater range of actions than a counterparty who is forced to “take it or leave it.” Usually by putting up with the […]

Original post on zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @midnitemikewrites.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

RE: zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/11652964… (1/2) My writing explores what I call enforced asymmetries of action. This is when systems like markets give one party a greater range of actions than a counterparty who is forced to “take it or leave it.” Usually by putting up with the […]

Original post on zirk.us

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Chris Nelder 🤘 @chrisnelder.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

RE: mastodon.energy/@TransitionShow/116… The DOE estimates that geothermal power could meet as much as 40% of US demand growth by 2030. Listen in and find out how!