iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/09/2026

sincerely believe no one teaching college students at a college or university should believe something like this, let alone write it. If even professors think “value” is the same thing as “monetary remuneration”, we should shut everything down.

Quite from an Atlantic article I don’t want to link to because I find it so wrong headed: “ Every major college and university touts the liberal arts as the core of an undergraduate education, but the humanities in particular—fields of arts and letters such as literature and languages, which generally do not receive much, if any, federal research funding—enjoy mostly vestigial value that does not match the underlying economics of higher education very well.”

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 07/08/2026

This should be a terrifying chart to everyone

Monthly job changes since 2010. Financial crisis aftermath in 2010-2011, pandemic, now are the only periods with net job losses.

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 20/07/2026

Sitting on my deck looking out at Hunger Mountain never gets old. #Vermont is beautiful and a wonderful place. Happy it's home.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 14/07/2026

I think this is super funny -- I _think_ this must be Claude's web chat routing requests to a latency optimized (smaller inference) smaller model for a fast response, and then the actual Opus instance asynchronously. I hadn't thought about their topology until this "you're wrong, no you're right" .

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 11/06/2026

Bold move for the Anti-Woke leader to genderbend by cosplaying as Lucy from The Peanuts with the markets as Charlie Brown

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 09/04/2026

I think having a (easily updated and minimally representationally decided) canon of 1 to 2 books that are required reading each year of education is a good idea. Society is much better off when people can refer to works of literature in metaphor in every day and business scenarios.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 11/03/2026

Which one looks American?

Ilhan Omar aggressively stepping towards the person who sprayed her with vinegar at an event

Mark Mullwayne crouching like a little bitch with fear in his eyes on January 6th.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/02/2026

Eat the old www.wsj.com/economy/over...

010

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 14/01/2026

This is such a bullshit headline on the nytimes.com home page. NATO wouldn't be "Stuck". The core of NATO would have committed an act that required NATO allies to respond. The U.S. would be required by the NATO treaty to defend against itself. Only a fucking sycophant or lackey calls that "stuck".

Highlighted headline "If U.S. were to Invade Greenland: "NATO Would Be Stuck"

021

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 06/01/2026

Else a get out of jail free card alexonfilm.com/wp-content/u...

010

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 05/11/2025

This is insane. College and University truly is worthless if grade's are treated as a meaningful measure by students. Academia's attempt to boil learning and intellectual achievement into easily measurable standardized forms (that are then used for employment), is terrible for 99% of things.

Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/grade-inflation-college-fix/684808/ with "These days, thanks to the “courseware” that has become ubiquitous in higher ed, students can see exactly how they are performing in every course all the time." highlighted.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 03/11/2025

I see a resemblance: in

020

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/10/2025

Perhaps if those over 50 didn’t have 3x the average median net worth of those a decade younger than them the under 50s would feel like they could afford to be out there. www.empower.com/the-currency...

Table showing median net worth of 50s is 191k, 75k for 40s.

120

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 30/07/2025

I always think of the introduction of Regina King's grandfather's character in the Watchmen TV show with things like this. Lindelhof and the writers nailed so much spot on.

Screenshot from the HBO Watchmen TV show of (I think) Louis Cameron Gossett Jr captioned "There is a vast, and insidious conspiracy at play"

010

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 24/07/2025

Make sure you are ready before you light all the hidden pyres in that regional airport.

The Ancestral Guardian, a large 12+ point rack undead stag in the game Elden Ring, charges at the player.

090

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 27/06/2025

storyboarding like this into ki-storygen.com. Attached an image of the WiP screen. Google Flow's implemented similar storyboarding with integrated image creation if wanted, but doesn't yet support Imagen 3's image editing, I think because this may be behind an allowlist still? 2/

110

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 20/06/2025

From www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202... look at how many more people were willing to financially support Mamdani. Think about political life with 3x the normal involvement. CUOMO IS TRUMP. Who thinks they’ll be happier with Cuomo in office? A bunch of lifeless rich people.

010

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 19/06/2025

I think I've built something pretty cool with ki-storygen.com. Another character I was surprised by the details of, prompted for an anthropomorphic elephant with Rick from Casablanca's rough description, and this is what I got.

A colossal, world-weary anthropomorphic elephant, Barnaby 'Barskin' Bartholomew carries the weight of a thousand secrets behind his surprisingly gentle, yet perpetually guarded, eyes. His elegant, if slightly rumpled, white and cream tuxedos belie the grimy underbelly of his illicit operations. He moves with a slow, deliberate grace, a formidable presence in any room, but his true power lies in his extensive network, his sharp, cynical mind, and an unwavering, if jaded, moral compass. He is a testament to survival, an exile who built his own kingdom in the shadows.

110

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/06/2025

Feel like the site I'm kicking around is coming together nicely. ki-storygen.com to try it out and give me feedback!

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/06/2025

Hate GenAI all you want, but this picture is hilarious. The Google Veo Vertex API will reject anything remotely human-like, so I changed the word dwarf to penguin in a prompt I'll put in a reply below, and this is what I got.

A slightly anthropomorphic Penguin with mostly black feathers, white feathers over the eyes (like eyebrows) and then a luxurious white half-feather, half-fur beard, with long fu manchu style moustache braids, and a central braid at the bottom of the middle of the braid.

The penguin has a vertical scar through his head over his left eye.

He has a waraxe with an engraved blade resting on his right shoulder, scars on his left flipper, leather banded armour and an elaborate belt buckle.

His expression communicates that he's seen some things.

210

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 17/06/2025

This mouse just seems cool! (The production grade video generation from Google won't generate humans in the U.S. so all animals)

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 17/06/2025

I get that this is hugely disruptive to artists and fair pay, but I think it could be amazing for kids to be able to generate videos like this:

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 22/05/2025

(My apologies to Gertrude Crampton & Tibor Gergely). Made a bunch of visual improvements to 'Ki StoryGen' (and introduced the branding), tried to overdo it on sign up call to action and benefit of signing up, as I noticed a ton of user visits from google analytics, but a small number of signups.

A suspiciously similar image to 'Scuffy the Tugboat' by Gertrude Crampton, with a somewhat similar image to Tibor Gergely's artwork on a website showing an GenAI powered interactive story telling experience.

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/05/2025

I mean, I guess that hand from Imagen (only 3 -- I got errors saying the preview version of 4 can't be found) looks great and has the right number of fingers, but there seems to have been some serious accidents that gave the dog extra limbs and the child a tail.

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/05/2025

Some of these are absolutely hilarious. Read the prompt first. Then wait for it. Generate an anthropomorphic Excavator digging a hole for a foundation on a construction site. Use the a fly by aerial view point that then circles in on the excavator at work.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/05/2025

Other one from same prompt on this -- this one is way more disturbing/90s hunting computer game style:

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/05/2025

Slightly more interesting when changing the setting from fast to quality:

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/05/2025

I do not foresee the pro tier Flow AI video editing tool to take any filmmaking jobs in the near future roflmao 1/, see below for prompt

100

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/05/2025

This is showing promise (quality isn't high, but is plausible, and this is with realy bad prompts with generic examples -- working on getting interaction loop, story library etc. app features in place before doing a prompt tuning/quality generation/quality consistency set of changes in place)

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 18/05/2025

Fixed up the rendering and screen size so its functional (obviously needs styling fine tuning). Next step is to re-structure the data so that I can reproduce pages across prompt, eventually animate more like a book page turning

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 16/05/2025

Currently it just prompts the image generation with the most recent output of the AI, rather than the full story -- so it isn't consistently generating the same character -- definitely needs a fix on this. Sample image:

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 15/05/2025

Simpson's 1970's Westworld movie outcome

Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa brandishing cameras surrounded by rampaging animatronic robots. The flash from the cameras ends up causing the robots to permanently turn off.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 15/05/2025

Pretty sure it's Scrooge McDuck's vault.

Duck diving into a swimming pool sized vault of gold coins and wrapped stacks of Benjamin's.

010

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 30/04/2025

And I get that people hate that LLMs are like a kid that studied a bunch of peoples work and then started selling rip offs, but I enjoy this image I was able to generate of whats happened to all our money:

A bunch of cartoon-like drawn people with money flying out of their pockets into a vortex above them with a top hat & monocle wearing person in the middle.

000

Matt Rkiouak @rkiouak.com · 21/02/2025

Found the Elon & the DOGE's anthem (thank you Adam Sandler):

010