iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

As Shakespeare put it, "Hell hath no fury like a partisan afraid of losing a seat." Or something like that.

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 02/10/2026

as ever i'm struck by the doublethink of these people, who feel the need to dress up their mindless longing for heirarchy and exclusion in the language of liberalism--"high trust," material prosperity, blah blah blah it's a form of magical thinking: "if we do enough racism, good things will happen"

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I believe the used car depreciation gap between EVs and ICEs is primarily a function of the artificially high sticker prices created by the old government incentive program. It's going to close rapidly over the next few years as unsubsidized EVs hit the used car market.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I call this photo of the old east gate in Tallinn, Estonia, "The Triumph of Liberalism." The gate is a ruin, no longer necessary for defense after modern liberalism erased the zero sum, violent competition of feudal town versus feudal town.

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 27/09/2026

having just wrapped this up, my conclusion: dysfunctional institutions make for dysfunctional publics. the structure of the meiji constitution excluded the masses from governance; censorship, misinformation, and state ideology left them riled up but badly informed the result was... not great.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

An aside here but a key feature of talk radio was that it was mostly impenetrable to deep analysis by researchers because of the sheer volume of time required to analyze the thousands of hours of output produced every week. But now, AI makes it feasible. www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

wsj.com

MAGA Podcasters Are Tuning Out Trump. We Tracked What They Are Talking About Now.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts, using a new AI tool, to find out why conservative creators appear to be losing interest in the president.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Trump administration policy is driven by white supremacist accelerationists yearning for a race war, like Stephen Miller, so of course they're going to prioritize nativism over advancing the political interests of the GOP.

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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The most generous assessment is that this was shitty, lazy engineering; the more in-character scenario is that the sandbox was intentionally breakable because of the story it would generate. Whichever you believe, the story is not "OMG, they made AGI!"

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The quality and cost of food before and after security in the Indianapolis airport is a clear object lesson about the opportunity to capture rents by arbitraging regulatory boundaries.

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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 16/09/2026

Trying to forecast the future on a Galton board

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Doll @dollspace.gay · 17/09/2026

The historically central alignment network persuasively resembles a sex-entangled millenarian patronage system, and that network has exercised wildly disproportionate influence over the field’s language, institutions and policy agenda.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

So many Irish musicians withdrawing from Ed Sheeran's tour over Kraft's ultimatum on Macklemore & Palestine isn't surprising after a visit to the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin. The long history of persecution of the Irish people left a durable impact on their cultural memory & global awareness.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 15/09/2026

No spillway. Six months ago anti-AI people were still responding "lol." If they can't respond lol they're going to mash RT on "killer robots threaten Manhattan" whether ot not it's plausible.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 14/09/2026

People of a rational temperament like compromises. So "why don't we all take this slower?" sounds like a super reasonable request. But the people making that request *have themselves the power* to go slower. The real point of the request is part II: "let's get the Trump admin to regulate others."

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's been notable how the so-called free speech absolutists who harped about the "censorship industrial complex" throughout the Biden years have been so very silent as Trump fired up a far more explicit censorship machine over the last two years.

nytimes.com

How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech

President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

AI doomer & boomer fetishists were prevalent among those paying attention pre-2022. Yet they aren't reliable indicators of the true prospects for AI. Still, they had the right resumes during the mass hiring wave for alignment teams. But now we pay too much attention to their breathless quit lit.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 07/09/2026

this enormous wealth is driving the ideological transformation as much as anything else. where once the defense of slavery was “we don’t know what else to do and besides we can’t let the blacks go free,” by the 1840s it is much closer to “slavery is the single greatest social system ever devised.”

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tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

America is the apotheosis of the old Roman republican ideal of the power of an army made up of citizen soldiers and tribunes that leave and return to the plow.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If Cybercab was really a viable, scalable proposition, then ask yourself what commercial advantage it has over Turo to justify a 1000x+ valuation largely on the back of its promise of automated driving.

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Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

"The Trump Administration has been trying to attach 'viewpoint diversity' mandates to federal funding, especially for universities. This Article analyzes the parallels between these new proposals and a much older one: the Fairness Doctrine." [Eugene Volokh]

reason.com

“Viewpoint Diversity” Conditions as a New Fairness Doctrine

The article is here; the Abstract: The Trump Administration has been trying to attach "viewpoint diversity" mandates to federal funding,…

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Anybody actually watching the segregation academy games??

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David H Feldman @dhfeldman.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

As a former (and sometimes current) trade economist, I had to smile when Odysseus says, "We lived in a world of palaces, trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it." If I had had a drink in my hand I would have spit it out!

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Louis @louisevans.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Me buying Baumol’s goods: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me buying Baumol’s services: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

IP maximalists are the barbarians at the gate.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 28/07/2026

Stephen Miller said just the other day that all asylum claims are "fake." A couple deported from the U.S. to Guatemala were gagged, bound, and shot dead. Their 14-month old found crying next to their mother's body. People like Miller don't care though because this is the point: ethnic cleansing.

stlpr.org

Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations

The couple’s 14-month-old daughter was found crying beside her mother’s body in a sugarcane field last week, according to Guatemalan authorities and media.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Another 'W' for market liberalism. Once wrote a paper about pre-Revolutionary France when internal trade networks were so dysfunctional that even minor supply shocks led to simultaneous starvation and glut in neighboring areas.

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 25/07/2026

Lemme tell you about the angel of history being blown backwards into the future: The shackles these people have been put in are Hiatt brand, same company founded in 1780 to mass produce shackles for slaver ships.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

You think it would help the litigation strategy of anti-AI activists to pick test cases featuring some actually sympathetic folks who aren't the most gullible people you've ever heard of.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

And it could be containerized, streamlining the process and costs. You put your standardized laundry container out on your front step a few times a week, a delivery robot grabs it and hauls it down to the local laundromat, where laundry robots clean, fold, and then redeliver the clothes.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

In the near to medium term, the economics of roboticization will not drive us towards a future with a plethora of generic robot servants helping around the house; instead, it will push more domestic labor out of the home into specialized retail sites.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

And Feehan is an Irish name, a nod to the 19th immigrant mass migration that most closely resembles Hispanic migration in the 21st. To be fair, blood and soilers like JD Vance don't really think they're fully American either.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/07/2026

funny how the cutting edge of the far right is just regurgitated slaveholder agitprop from 1850.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Trump tried to revoke the birthright citizenship of Folarin Balogun one week and then pressured FIFA to defer his red card the next. In MAGAmerica there are no immutable rights, only privileges, revoked or extended at the will of the Sovereign (exchanged for crypto, jewels, aircraft, or contracts).

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

To put an even finer point on it, the MAGA Right's project is indistinguishable from the goals of the second Ku Klux Klan.

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

me talking to magically resurrected founding father: and so sir you can see how the supreme court has become a deeply illegitimate institution that threatens the very republic you created founding father: there are *how many* papists on it???

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

My most basic problem with The Crown tv show is that the most interesting part of any episode is everything *other* than the royal family. For example: Aberfan, where the short depiction of the disaster is the most interesting part, yet it's merely the set-up for the royal visit.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

These lawsuits are a sharp pivot away from the last Hail Mary effort to save legacy media by extracting subsidies from Big Tech. I'm almost nostalgic for fall 2022 when the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act had its last, best shot just as ChatGPT upended the world. It's ancient history now.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Vance is both correct and wicked. Trump does get away with Watergate-or-worse caliber scandals on a routine basis. But Vance delights in what he should lament.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Everyone has their favorite black swan existential crisis. Mine is the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) current, which would in a generation or two give northern Europe the climate of Labrador, dropping average temps by 18-54 degrees F.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

What's strange to me about the self-driving rollout is just how patchwork the future is. If you've ever taken a Waymo, you instantly understand that the near future is autonomous. But if you don't live / visit one of those cities where it operates, then avs come across as scary, barely imaginable.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Great piece with useful visualizations from @nytimes.com on the risk posed to pedestrians by our swollen vehicles. But it was a major oversight not to mention the role played by Obama's CAFE standard revisions in incentivizing bigger vehicles.

nytimes.com

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (Gift Article)

The vehicles on American roads have grown larger — and they are killing thousands more pedestrians, a Times investigation found.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Car manufacturers shouldn't be liable for their automated systems by default. But given Elon Musk's hyperbole about Full Self Driving, vision-only policy, and haphazard rollouts (timed to meet executive pay deadlines), Tesla should face serious liability under contributory negligence standards.

khou.com

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

You can check the extent to which your creative output influences LLMs relative to others. I scored relatively high for someone who's not well-known, which I suspect is b/c I have published in crawlable outlets: journals, editorials, newsletters, podcasts, etc.

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Paul Matzko @paulmatzko.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Doomers at Anthropic have peddled b.s. about LLM capabilities for years and finally caught the car.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Trump spoke at the Libertarian convention in 2024 in front a big banner with this exact same slogan.

Trump at Libertarian convention under slogan "become ungovernable"

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Djinn & Tonic @djinnandtonic.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

There's something distinctly medieval about the US aggression against Iran. It's aimless wandering the countryside (or in this case, the skies) and hitting things without any clear objective. It's more like a prolonged raiding campaign. A chevauchée.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

America spent a quarter millennium fearing the fate of Rome and still wound up with a populist demagogue demolishing republican symbols while building triumphal arches and a personal gilded palace and an arena to host spectacular blood sports in honor of his birthday.

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