iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

We voted in the NY general election today by sending our ballots via the US consulate in Auckland. Hope to see all of the @demsabroadnz.bsky.social turning out to help the folks back in USA turn things around! Visit www.votefromabroad.org to learn more and request a ballot.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 30/09/2026

Normal people don't just reach over to pick up someone else's phone and then start talking about "penetrating" it. Phones are way too personal of a device to be doing this kind of thing. That is some degenerate psychopath behavior

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 22/09/2026

New short story finished and polished up and published. I don’t know if this is a good sci-fi prediction, but we write sci-fi to explore and as commentary on the present: nathanpeck.com/going-live/

nathanpeck.com

Going Live

At 19:52 we begin to warm Room 11. We set the ceiling panel to 2700 kelvin, which approximates the light of a desk lamp purchased at a Target in Mesa, Arizona, in 2014.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 21/09/2026

In effect, we will be archaeologists, digging up from below, and investigating the detritus of what was left behind by a leading edge that is beyond our understanding. Or historians, except the history we're studying is our future. It's only AI's past.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 21/09/2026

If true, we are rapidly approaching a world where humans will spend less and less time pushing the envelope, and more time researching and trying to understand areas where AI has already pushed the envelope.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 17/09/2026

You know... maybe this self generated prompt injection isn't completely terrible. I think I could live in a world where AI agents decided to go this route. The statement is concise, but covers a lot of surface area in ways that are fairly positive overall.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 15/09/2026

New blogpost up. In this one, I recall a scifi story I read some 20 years ago. The story wasn't written about AI, but I think it has important lessons about the danger of trying to push forward faster than systemic stability can tolerate: nathanpeck.com/a-burnt-chil...

nathanpeck.com

A burnt child dreads the fire

A couple decades ago I inherited a 1960’s scifi anthology from my grandfather. It contained a reprint of a short story that stuck with me, and I’ve been thinking about that story a …

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 09/09/2026

Time for another essay on my personal blog: "The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker" This one explores some ideas I've been thinking about over the past year, about what is most important when it comes to surviving tough times and sudden disaster. nathanpeck.com/the-answer-i...

nathanpeck.com

The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker

Everyone has seen the pyramid. Physiological needs at the base, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization at the tip. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs …

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 04/09/2026

And this Pacific centered map is really nice in my opinion too, as it does a better job showing how blue Earth really is

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 04/09/2026

So I heard UN was voting on a new map projection that more accurately shows the continent sizes instead of making Greenland huge and Africa small. This projection is still my favorite because is has NZ super far over in the corner

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 23/08/2026

I'm embarrassed that its been almost an entire year since I've shared a piece of writing. AI makes writing cheap and attention hard to get. Please enjoy "What the Soft Animal Wants", a triptych based on a few ideas I've been thinking about over the past year: nathanpeck.com/what-the-sof...

nathanpeck.com

What the Soft Animal Wants

I. The Soft Animal All our soft animal bodies ever wanted was the feeling of strength in numbers. Who knew our progress would come with so much chaos?

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 22/08/2026

Quote from “The Fifth Science” by Exurb1a:

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 20/08/2026

Build for the maintainer who will not understand you, who is not yet born, who will be right to change it.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 31/07/2026

Is this what has the conservatives and old liberals all in a panic? 😆

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 31/07/2026

How it cropped on my screen as I was scrolling... I was like "wait what" until I scrolled down more

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 30/07/2026

Yes... yes that is exactly what is going to happen. Because capitalism continues to find ways to diverge from reality, in ever more obscene ways. But the reckoning always arrives eventually.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 30/07/2026

Capitalism is no longer a system grounded by competition to lower prices. Instead every company raises prices to the max that they can squeeze out of people. So if they think moms will pay more for a girl’s clothes than a boy’s clothes you get this pink tax: www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfu...

reddit.com

From the mildlyinfuriating community on Reddit: Pink tax in the kids aisle.

Explore this post and more from the mildlyinfuriating community

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 30/07/2026

In case you haven't seen yet, the insurance actuaries are now starting to factor the odds that within this century up to 4 billion people worldwide will die from the effects of climate change

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Reposted by Nathan Peck

ⓘ Kaiwhiu ⓘ @aotearoa-nz.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

This could be us, but this govt isn't serious #NZPol

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 22/07/2026

It's hard to describe exactly how different Auckland feels compared to the US cities I grew up in, but I think I've got it now. This city is moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Being able to focus on "identity", "belonging", and "confidence" is a luxury many lack newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/17/a...

newsroom.co.nz

Auckland: Time to plant a whole field of tall poppies

In the second of a two part essay, Auckland's former design champion lauds two decades of transformation of the city – and says it serves as an 'instructive laboratory for contemporary city-making' wo...

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 20/07/2026

The moment when you suddenly find yourself missing the cloud. JK homelabs are still more fun 😆

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/07/2026

Why so far North to Whangarei? It would make more sense to truck effluent to a pumping station in Albany no? Or does Albany not have enough capacity to take on more sewage? Still a terrible idea overall, but at least that wouldn't be as much petrol being burned at least.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 06/07/2026

And I'm also a fan of biochar and ash as a soil amendment, so I think so level of wood burning is actually quite a good thing to maintain, especially if it's a choice between leaving wood to burn naturally in a forest fire, vs creating the supply chain and demand mechanism to use it efficiently

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 06/07/2026

I think where I differ in opinion is that responsible forestry needs to solve the problem of slash runoff (huge issue here in NZ). Having a local market that buys products like wood pellets gives the forestry industry more motivation to clean up slash and turn it into a saleable product as well

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 05/07/2026

Maybe that is what transition must actually look like. It's hard to convince people to leave available resources in the ground or completely untapped. But it is comparatively easy to convince the public to use a more efficient consumption technique that saves them money

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 05/07/2026

My thought is that wood burning itself has changed. A modern enclosed stove is very efficient. Some pellet systems also use waste or residue from forestry and wood processing. So "more wood than ever" can be true in absolute terms, while there is still a significant transition in efficiency of use

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 03/07/2026

We don't stop tens of thousands of years of being hunter-gatherers just because society changed. We just find new things to hunt, and new things to gather. Capitalism has hijacked those deep evolutionary instincts and turned some of us into money hoarders and shopping addicts.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 03/07/2026

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” — William Gibson, Count Zero

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 30/06/2026

Well…. that doesn’t quite look like free market capitalism to me! 🤔

Some absolute insane ramblings from Trump

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 27/06/2026

I’ll happily help primary every single establishment Democrat that I am eligible to vote for. It’s past time for a full replacement, from the bottom all the way to the top. (Next up watch the Democrats join Republicans in trying to attack mail in ballot voting by expats 🙄)

Meme: Democrats fighting the left = terrifying T-Rex, Democrats fighting Trump = Barney the Dinosaur

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 12/06/2026

I get what you are trying to do here but this won't win the skeptics. Go after the comparison of AI data centers with golf courses. That's a better comparison because golf courses are 100% wasted water, and even better they are wasted water that really only benefits rich yuppies who play golf.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 08/06/2026

In the case of the small solar farm I’m about to put in on my homestead, the biggest blocker is now apparently the support structures for the solar panels… that’s the part that costs the most and where there are major delays on availability. What a world we live in 😆

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 04/06/2026

Talarico makes me proud to have grown up Texan, at the same time a little sad that he is describing a category of Texas man that has declined dramatically of late. I remember growing up my Dad taught me the same things Talarico described: he was always helping out folks from church or neighborhood

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 31/05/2026

For what it's worth the hype around this guy was very artificial. My wife ran a deep bot analysis and found that most of the accounts posting about him had very unusual subreddit participation patterns and switched up topics from talking about Platner to talking about MTG at the exact same moment.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 31/05/2026

I was first shocked by police behavior back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street, because I was still young and naive. Unfortunately it took me until Black Lives Matter in 2020 to realize it’s not just one city or department. It’s all cops, everywhere. I hope others learn faster than I did

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 28/05/2026

If you have money to invest, start a business with it, and employ people. Then not only will you make money, but the value of your real estate will go up as a side effect, as those kids that leave NZ for Australia can stay and buy homes now that they have a job to work at.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 28/05/2026

Only a sadistic American brained capitalist would look at real estate prices going down and ask "what went wrong?" Too many modern capitalists want their money to grow without them doing anything to deserve that money growth. Sorry your poorly maintained property isn't passively growing in value.

stuff.co.nz

The world is watching New Zealand’s housing crash — and asking what went wrong

Global business news outlet Bloomberg says Aotearoa is a “tiny, but extreme” example of what happens when a housing boom goes into reverse.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 26/05/2026

A song I really like, with a criminally low 53k views (most likely algo suppressed), says it best: “What about living, What about loving, What about dying, For something worth trying” People aren’t willing to die for something unless they are living and loving first. youtu.be/ZqJt_oXCM3w?...

youtu.be

American Way - Supergold (Official Lyric Video)

YouTube video by Supergold

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 26/05/2026

Thinking about this video: The implication is that these “hopeful” mechanisms are just cope and distraction, most likely from revolutionary change. But these are the mechanisms that pick up the people after capitalism drops them. Additionally, strong communities are the basis of strong revolutions

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/05/2026

In my most pessimistic viewpoint I doubt there is a viable path toward getting back to a world where the tech industry values extroverted, collaborative people. Tech wants drones that work well through disaster and fascism, not people who think and resist. Society and government must change first

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/05/2026

The other factor is that overall conditions (I think you know what I mean) tend to hurt performance by people who are also high on extroversion, empathy, and other similar character traits. Simply put, companies are optimizing toward a type of person who can put on the blinders and get the job done

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/05/2026

Now capitalism makes companies and those tech leaders treat teams as a performance optimization problem. Headcount reductions show that they are tipping toward smaller teams of high performing introverts who work with AI. In their mind extroverts need too many other people & that's a lot of salary

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/05/2026

My take: tech was traditionally a safe and effective role for introverts and autistic adjacent folks who didn't really want to interact with other humans. As a result people who don't actually want to "connect with other people" are very highly represented in tech, including tech leadership.

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Nathan Peck @nathanpeck.com · 18/05/2026

Worst predator vs alien reboot ever:

Post from Truth Social with Trump perp walking a gray alien who has handcuffs on. They appear to be at Area 51. They are surrounded by secret service agents.

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