iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 6h

and then the most beautiful woman walks in the room and wants me to marry her and she has my favourite ice cream.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 6h

good luck! reach out if you get stuck with C. you're on your own with C++

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 7h

Right wingers start reading Smith and think theyve picked the wrong book. "But he seems to criticize me making money by grabbing rents. cant be right"

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 8h

Wow! a government that has a clue?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

This is such an inspiring talk! thank you @jenson.org !

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I found this surprising too. In my build system I initially used gettime but then realized I needed ns precision. Much better since I added that.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

All the media talk has been of the disappointment but even if they don’t win it next time Polanski will have clearly done what he promised - Burnham can’t ignore this threat - a large number of people will vote Green even in honeymoon period.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Taxing Entrepreneurial Wealth: Evidence from
Norway, 2021-2025
Marius A. K. Ring
WORKING PAPER 35854|
DOl 10.3386/w35854
ISSUE DATE October 2026
Whether imposing higher taxes on business owners adversely affects business activity by constraining investment and inducing capitalist flight is a central question in the ongoing debate on how to tax the ultra wealthy. To shed new light, I exploit a series of related Norwegian reforms during 2021-2024 that increased dividend tax rates, removed migration-related capital gains tax loopholes, and nearly doubled the effective marginal tax rate on business wealth. These reforms spurred international debate and, allegedly, an "exodus" of Norwegian billionaires (Financial Times,
2023). While I document clear effects on migration, these responses are concentrated among the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution and mostly confined to 2022 and 2023. My results indicate that at most 100 individuals left due to the reforms. I find no evidence of significant outmigration or reduced inflows of startup founders or inventors. I estimate that absent any outmigration, wealth tax revenues would have increased by 75% from 2021 to 2024. Reform-driven outmigration lowers the revenue gain to 71.5%. My findings further show that outmigrating owners' firms remain economically active and do not reduce investment. In a broader set of analyses, I examine whether business outcomes are affected, regardless of whether owners outmigrate, since firms may reduce investment both due to liquidity constraints or distortions to owners' savings decisions. I compare firms owned by Norwegian individuals subject to the wealth tax with firms owned by foreigners and other tax-exempt entities. By merging historical ownership data from Orbis with the Norwegian shareholder register, I perform these analyses on both Norwegian and foreign-domiciled firms.
Across settings, I find no evidence that Norwegian-owned firms pay out more dividends or invest less after the reforms,…

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Aurelien Mondon @aurelmondon.com · 10/10/2026

"The contrast between the utterly sycophantic coverage of Badenoch ... and the utterly dismissive coverage of Polanski, who has significantly improved his party’s standing over the past year, tells you everything you need to know about media bias in the UK" www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/why-the-ho...

adambienkov.co.uk

Why the Holborn and St Pancras By-Election Was a Good Result for the Green Party

The dismissive coverage of Zack Polanski’s party obscures a far bigger truth about the rise of the left in British politics

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Exactly. They benefit experts a lot.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And tech has this huge problem that it is now just layers and layers of arbitrary decisions on top of more. Huge unexplainable complexity. Ever tried to teach a Gen Z to code?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is such a good thing. The worst thing in the world right now is how much people could solve their own problems and how much they cannot because they can’t learn the tech.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think the thing it could be most useful at is bridging the gap between people prepared to code and people who just refuse. New tools, new uis will help. And every time we have an improvement in that space some of the people will be peeled off into those prepared to go the next layer down.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Frontier models are much better than that now on more common tasks. I wrote 2 procedural generators today with a dumbish (2 frontier revisions ago) model and they were both good. Asking it to code against fringe stuff is not good and involves a lot of expertise still. But “write expressjs” easy.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Does nothing to rebut my point.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And I do think you’re right about that: it will fail to scale the way Dario and Sam want. A lot of folks are going to lose their shirts and nvidia investors are going to be happy.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It does write simple code well. So it is quite useful when you have a framework to fit that in so that people can learn. So in big companies it can be useful to help bridge the gap between biz and tech.

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Bold Politics @boldpolitics.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This man has achieved more in a year outside of parliament than a lot of politicians do in a lifetime. He's rightly taking this moment to thank everyone that tirelessly supported the campaign, but let's put some respect on his name too: big up, Zacky P! We're proud of you x

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Many people would say stupidity is a working class accent and swear words but actually it’s comfortable middle class never mentioning bodily functions because they’re not nice and dying of stomach cancer.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is so weird but obviously done to further their nonsense about having made a god. At work in a very large corporation our internal ai is such a prissy bitch that it’s worse than dealing with many of my colleagues. We are cutting our own heads off with stupidity.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is a bit silly tho. Obviously one could run a simulation that had feelings - theoretically. Isn’t the only test for this really the Turing test? Which I would suggest was surpassed in the 70s with that Eliza story about Weizwnbaum’s assistant.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’m 55. I think from the end of next year I will spend the rest of my career cleaning up the mess made during these last 4. Everything “one shot” people made will fall apart.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

DHH? He’s the guy that chose those backgrounds?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

No one even advocated for it as far as I can see. No one said to old people “you may not have noticed but these young people didn’t get to do what you got to do when you were a kid - to save you - to ensure that our hospitals weren’t full of dying old people”

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I sort of agree with this. It was a sacrifice they made - it would not have remained so if we had done anything ANYTHING to redress it - fund more 3rd spaces, deliver better schooling, lower university tuition costs: but none of that was done so that we could continue paying for the triple lock.

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Mariana Mazzucato @mazzucatom.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

We can't do 'good' in the economy with an economic theory that only tells us how to fix markets if and when they fail. The common good is an objective, not a correction, where the how matters as much as the what. @Book_Fair | 10 October | 15:00-16:00 CEST ➡️ event.buchmesse.de/de/sessions/...

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I think I was thinking of Clarke?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I think that’s right. I never used XP, being a Linux guy at the time. But that’s what folks say. But now? It’s not easy to get help? I hear that too. A lot of this might just be generational noise idk. The numbers didn’t chime with what I’m seeing in culture.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I think I don’t have much of an opinion… I see the same thing as you but have been considering using LFS as a base to make my own distro. I’m not a regular user. My wife uses Mint tho. I think she’d prefer to stay there for now. Unless AI contribs turn out to be awful.

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Maria Farrell @mariafarrell.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

OpenAI are parasitic scum. As Wikimedia says; “AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.” These are DDOS attacks by a corporation's software doing exactly what it was designed to do. Why are we not seeing criminal charges?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A friend of mine made a tool called blnq which is all web so maybe you don’t like that but I felt like the things you could do with that were amazing in terms of making apps and I was trying to work out how to make an entirely local version.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Oh yeah. That guy. I remember him. There was a Jim something at Netscape.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Was he a Netscape guy? You toast his death because he was awful?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Update trauma seems like a choice now. Things like Mint? Rock solid.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What Conputer is like that? No computer I’ve ever seen is like that. Windows certainly not. Have you used Windows lately? Endless update issues. Presumably a lot of hidden flaws too that either LLMs already know or will do soon. Again - not fanboying. Linux has issues.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Sure. But is that the case with Linux still? And isn’t there a lot more room in there before we hit the “not for everyone” level? With everything ms have been doing to make people hate windows I think it’s odd.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And yet Linux installs seemed to have dropped. Weird.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is obvious to me. When I fail no one bails me out. Why should they get bailed out? I genuinely would like to understand why most people think this is wrong.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

That’s where it all went wrong after all. Teachers who wander or in some other way are not routed to the absolute front of the class room.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Not his car though because even at 86 he’s an excellent driver.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Mine too. Can I claim tax claw back? I mean. It really is. I’m doing so much r&d it’s crazy.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Trying to watch England but itvx sucks.

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Is it just me or is argp an absolute crock of shit?

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Tirrikindir @tirrikindir.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Catholic here, loving Leo so far. Also want to throw in this: Source: Daniel Mitsui, artist who does a mix of secular and Catholic sacred art, who is also a consistent AI hater to no one's surprise. www.danielmitsui.com/00_pages/no_...

Text in the image: "according to legend, Albertus Magnus had spent thirty years devising an oracular head, a mechanical device that could answer questions posed to it. Thomas Aquinas smashed it to pieces. Different versions of the story say that this was out of annoyance, or of fright; I prefer to think that St. Thomas had prophetic insight into the evils such device could and would cause. While I generally avoid putting my religious drawings on everyday merchandise, I thought that this small scene was timely and appropriate and humorous enough to make an exception." There is a drawing of two men inside a medieval monasterty. One of them is St. Thomas Aquinas, and he is poised to swing a large club at a bust on a pedestal, which presumably is Albert the Great's 'oracular head'. The other is Albert, and he is running toward Thomas with a look of shock on his face, hands out to stop him. There is also text that says "KILL YOUR CHATBOT" and a header that says "artwork by Daniel Mitsui, www.danielmitsui.com"

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

They say that when it goes over 5.6 bad things start to happen?

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Nic @nicferrier.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The part that really interests me about this is that it feels the internet is capable of going round rich people for this sort of stuff to the artists themselves - even if the results would be a lot more lofi. But we are still not being able to do that.

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