iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Having an ex NAMED Boomerang is just too rich.

Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Hey! Something just hit me. Owen Mercer (Boomerang from Titans) could be her ex again. It fits what Waid's done and probably redeems the "creepy" side since they'd be the same age in this timeline. (Or she'd be older, counting her death.) Thoughts?

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

But if Kim ever did want to get Saul out early, it would almost certainly involve deflating Walter White's myth, revealing what crimes he took false credit for, revealing Walt took credit for things he couldn't have anticipated or didn't do out of pride and Jimmy did the same out of remorse.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It just has me thinking how the status of being useful idiot is precisely the kind of "government handout" or charity that Walt would hate to acknowledge while being the perfect beneficiary of in some kind of proxy war. Not that it's practical to pursue. Just interesting to think about!

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And we actually know that Walt didn't kill Hank. The biker gang are an actual conspiracy whose repression from in universe public knowledge adds falsely to the myth of individuals like Walt. So any deeper conspiracies and these characters and their mythologies would UNRAVEL.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

For all the reasons that most conspiracy theorists BUY INTO conspiracy theories (explaining lack of agency), the Breaking Bad characters would be crushed by conspiracies being real. Just establishing that Walt didn't kill Hank undermines Walt's legacy, cuts Saul's sentence in half,

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

But, my god, Walter White's death, legacy, and ego already hinge on him falsely claiming credit for Hank's death and some of Gus' actions. It would be crushing to the man he was if the Russians were secretly helping him and German nationalists were helping Fring and the CIA backed Salamanca.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There is essentially a hidden Nazi network in Breaking Bad that probably goes back to WW2 if you want to trace Gus' connection to Madrigal through escaped war criminals collaborating with Pinochet and how Jack was recruited.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There's enough of a whiff of geopolitics in Breaking Bad and BCS not to make it a completely alien idea. Endemic police corruption, Gus' implied relationship with Pinochet's government and the implicit ties to far right German elements at Madrigal, a Nazi network that potentially involves Jack.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So how WOULD Walter White react and what would it do to his legacy if state actors were his guardian angel the whole time?

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Gloria Steinem famously collaborated with the CIA, who carefully suppressed her rivals. This is just verifiable fact, regardless of how much she did or didn't cooperate with them. It's an echo of the famous word: Antidisestablishmentarianism. Controlled opposition.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

@petergould.bsky.social I keep coming back to this idea. We exist in an age of influencers and politicians who may be backed by foreign intelligence or domestic. Clavicular may be an unknowing asset. This isn't new exactly. See Iran-Contras, Bill Paley and Iowa Writers Workshop CIA involvement.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Implicit to this episode is that the Section 31 movie could have had William Shatner playing a werewolf and be timeline accurate.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

There is no level of property I think is fundamentally justified, which is kind of an Adam Smith POV. Not a chair or a house. The justification from it essentially starts as an exception to something unjustifiable. It's less a right and more the absence of not-a-right that is socially useful.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It just means being about two years behind and possibly not that far if you get smart about doing more with less.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Right. And I think we could absolutely put a pause on frontier models or let people opt in to collaborative use of their hardware with electricity they're paying for. Just treat compute as a private individual person's personal good. Lagging edge models are not THAT far behind bleeding edge.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

And it shouldn't be because property is fundamentally immoral, not just when it's means of production even when it's for labor to what it creates. Humans work backwards from a bad premise (property at all) to allow people the stewardship they need to organize and make things and have comfort.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I don't see it even arising to the level of Fair Use because what they're analyzing isn't even owned by anyone. Copyright isn't in the premise, the language itself, the plot. Writers don't own our whole book, only the arrangement of connections drawn in a specific execution.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Except the core technology isn't if you don't have data centers or big companies involved. I don't think you need to equate those with AI, not even with modern LLMs.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

So they get rid of Jonathan Majors who was comparing himself to MLK and is MAGA and then they give us Kelsey Grammer, who compares himself to MLK and is MAGA.

Kelsey Grammer compares X-Men's Beast to Martin Luther King in Avengers Doomsday interview

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

And we need to get artists living wages and work guarantees through grants and loans when there's an audience there.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I think we need to tap, not slam the brakes by ending the chip monopolies and having development happen on people's home computers with electricity individual users are paying for to run AI locally or on their own private web service accounts.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The fears about the end of work, the end of art, the end of cybersecurity? These are overhyped scare tactics to convince us to buy them out, shut parts of them down, create chip embargoes, and halt their smaller competitors. It's a fear based sale.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This entire project is about transferring the world's money into the hands of the already wealthy at a higher rate and scapegoating it on a technology that could eventually assist cancer treatment or act as an artist assistant.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

And when they say they want regulation, what they really want is monopoly on the ability to develop the frontier models and legal monopoly on chip acquisition to keep competitors out or private users from not needing a subscription or non-aligned models from disputing their ideologies.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

And none of this does anything for artists or thought labor. I think this has been a pump and dump from day 1 by overselling capabilities (which it turns out require skill to transcend slop), overselling threats, and eyeing the world's governments and their taxpayers as rubes who will bail them out.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

So what you have is a deeply unprofitable business that's rapidly become too big to fail by essentially making their business model around creating a hardware monopoly for technology that increasingly doesn't need the hardware. They're trying to pump up fear to stoke governments into buying them.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

But I don't think they're marketing to users. I think they're marketing to governments because essentially the only way to maintain the ludicrous spending needed for a chip buying monopoly is to become a top defense contractor or to be acquired by a government.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

You drum up fears over the existential risks of AI. And I'm not saying there aren't any but their goal here is to make their product seem dangerous and weapon-like. They want you to be scared of it. @taylorlorenz.bsky.social is right to call this marketing.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Buying up chips to create a monopoly on computing is inherently unstable and a pump and dump tactic. The "dump" happens when they run out of money to raise, they lose the monopoly on the best chips. At this point, what do you do?

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This is I think a deliberate attempt to obscure what a personal computer can accomplish with AI to centralize control, to set themselves up first as central utility that deals with big IP firms and try to force people into cloud subscriptions to use AI, again by creating chip scarcity.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

They decided they had to create barriers to entry by centralizing high end research and began (largely inefficiently) borrowing and raising huge amounts of money for centralized training. They created essentially an embargo on chips for consumers by buying all the chips at inflated prices.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My situation assessment: I think business people 10 years ago looked at transformer neural network AI, saw incredible potential for it to disrupt markets in favor of little guys, possibly end aspects of IP, which hurts billionaires more than artists. They're also terrified AGI will be a socialist.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

So here's my $.02 on AI as a leftie with an MBA: I think we have to remember that Silicon Valley is business people cosplaying as techies and that their MO is largely not developing tech, it's finding a way to do something illegal with just enough tech to bypass regulations. See: Crypto.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

People say, "Cut off the data centers." And here's the thing I keep saying that nobody outside tech takes seriously even though it's demonstrable: We don't need the data centers. The technology doesn't require them! It works offline, on a laptop depending on the model. Everyone is focused on them!

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Criminalizing AI is also generally a nonstarter because unlike viruses, you don't necessarily have malicious uses to identify when it's being used. It's like criminalizing adverbs. It's a technique for doing things.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

First off, I'm copyleft. I generally support the idea of large model transformer AI as a good thing and society can decide what it wants to do about training. I don't think training is theft and I similarly don't think you can police it very easily if it is because it doesn't retain copies or access

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I have had similar thoughts to @doctorow.pluralistic.net about Hugging Face. But I'll recklessly go one further. I think the big AI companies are at their limit for credit, strapped for more investment, and are stirring up panic in hopes of nationalization. doctorow.medium.com/https-plural...

doctorow.medium.com

LLMs are real, AI is fake

No, it didn’t “go rogue.”

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I'd honestly be happy if there was no AR wall, minimal CG budget, just a low res, brightly lit, blurry soap opera in tight close-ups with more 5 act cliffhanger subplots. Even the music. I like New Trek but just do this on a Galaxy class ship, a bit smarter. BTW, there's two post-credits scenes.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

@seanferrick.bsky.social Spoiler free thoughts on the soap opera episode. It was supposed to be a gimmick but the lighting, pacing, acting, camera work... minus the silliest bits, it felt like 90s Trek, dumbed down. It looked like DS9. They should just do a cheap soap opera with 20 episode seasons

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Any guesses at which parts of the postnup renegotiations with Melania that @michaelcohen212.bsky.social is going to screw up in exchange for his pardon? @kathryntewson.bsky.social @legaleagle.tv @kenwhite.bsky.social I think he drafted amendments to it and is about to claim incompetence/conflict.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The poor writing and filming of the gimmick and dream ending drag it down. If they'd, say, had everyone with phased/intangible arms and just written that standard, it would work surprisingly well with modest tweaks.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I think a better puppet episode would have been possible if they had a sense how to use, act, and film them. They wavered in and out of talking like Muppets. Conversely, take this script, nix the dream ending, find a better gimmick and I'd rate it 6-7 of 10!

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I went in ready to defend this. Honestly, I liked the comments about disability/differently abled. The Rascals structure wasn't bad. They just didn't nail the premise and felt like they had beautiful puppets they didn't know how to film or write around despite Peck's commitment.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Watched it. I felt it was weak but they at least committed until the end, which felt tacked on. Taking it back at the end doesn't improve anything IMHO. I will say in the annals of puppet episodes, it was better than Community's and I had more fun than Legends of Tomorrow and Angel's.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

(So people describe them as failing to pander broadly to a mythical general audience-- something Voyager did -- when that isn't the goal or a fair thing to judge if the goal is turbocharging subsets of the existing audience.)

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This is me DEFENDING Akiva and Kurtzman, actually. Which you might be flabbergasted by someone doing a long knee-jerk post about!

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

In a lot of business strategy formats, you might actually be encouraged to think of what 80% of the market wouldn't like! This is normal and not stupid! But it never gets a fair trial until you're running multiple lanes simultaneously at different segments.

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This is more broadly about the strategy of gimmick episodes! Not anti-or pro- specific episodes except recognizing that having gimmicks at all is heated!

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Patrick Gerard @patrickgerard.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

TLDR My conjecture from knowing business strategy and having an MBA is that modern Trek was never about some new general audience. It was juggling. You take 20% slices of existing fandom, half the episodes, 5x the budget, and you run 10-20 at once trying to get them to spend money in new ways.

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