iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

You're right - it's shocking how difficult it is to rent a car when you consider how many logistical problems would be solved by being able to rent a car easily. Especially in a place as car dependant as most of the US.

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Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It doesn’t make sense to pose it as a contradiction: you have to be a very impressive explorer to bring about an encounter across the Atlantic that led, just as a factual matter, to both colonization and genocide. It’s odd to frame these points as contradictory when one is required for the other.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Having spent the bulk of the week responding to people pasting paragraphs of unsourced ChatGPT analysis into an email and saying "look into this," not surprising if this is also wasting code reviewers' time.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's getting really tedious how when someone points out extremely specific flaws with AI (water use, the output being mediocre, etc.) there is always a reply guy showing up to talk about an acceleration in capabilities leading to vague, bad outcomes.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Classic move in AI discourse: - AI super intelligence is an existential threat to humanity - maybe, because of the impact of data centers in climate change - [ignores climate change] actually, I saw a chart of exponential growth that could happen to AI intelligence and you need to acknowledge this!!

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The main reason I can afford to start a family is that my spouse and I live in an already transit dense area and can get by with one car. Even if we were to move away after starting a family, it wouldn't be possible without the existing investment in transit.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If nothing else, his family dynamic sounds extremely familiar to anyone with hardcore Trump supporters in the family. Everything bad happening is because of people out to get them, personally, for political reasons and they're always willing to help a neighbor as soon as it's too late.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Being as charitable as possible to this truck driver claiming he is a lifelong Democrat, it sounds like there's no way he could ever criticize Trump and stay in good standing with his family. In these communities, not being a diehard Republican is virtually the same as being a Democrat.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This whole story is a missed opportunity to actually engage with how these purported Trump swing voters actually experience politics. At a minimum, they think of political issues as being mainly about them and are surrounded by people who dogmatically parrot the party line re:immigration.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There's the added bonus that if you watch any of the movies it's spoofing, about half of the scenes seem like a reference to Airplane not the other way around. The guitar scene seems shot for shot the same, to name one example.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm supposed to be taking home a six figure salary, but how can I do that if I never leave the house!?!

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Claude can probably write like 20 songs in as many minutes. I'm not going to be that impressed if one of them happens to be a banger.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

So much artistic production and innovation comes out of creating a bunch of mid output. Even if AI can create a "very very good" song, that's only happened because of trial and error with a bunch of music. That's impressive if a human does that work - I don't care much if a computer does it.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Even people critical of this take are normally being too nice to AI music. There are so many untalented human artists who think Road to Nowhere would be improved by singing it at half tempo with a piano backing it like an Adele breakup song. But at least they created bad art themselves.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The burger place near where I grew up was able to shift to a model where you had to fill out your own ticket back in 2010, small businesses having to deal with all their orders being done with a call from an AI chatbot are just going to stop taking routine orders over the phone.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Theres going to be a phenomenon with these gimmicky AI bots where these businesses just revert to using a website or platform to do this so they don't have to deal with the hassle of interacting with chatbots.

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 26/09/2026

Genuinely, half of me thinks the main area of AI experimentation going on right now is in how fully the concept of an "ai agent" can legally indemnify its operators

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

if you don't know your own address it's because you specifically don't have to know it. people that detached from reality shouldn't be in a position to drive social policy for those of us living in reality

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A manager probably spent a Q3 performance meeting bragging about sending their client AI slop as an efficiency, and is now going to throw an analyst under the bus bc they lost the client. Like this technology might be able to cure cancer but its main goal is to reward the laziest people in society.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

For the past few months, this meant the team was asking ChatGPT to write that bit of the info they were sending the client. Unfortunately the client actually does have a subscription to the source and chewed out the analysis.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Specifically, this is using ChatGPT to try to read articles behind a paywall. This team has been asking to get some subscriptions to NYT, WSJ, etc. and their management doesn't want to pay for it. They've been told to "do more with less."

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

And if you ask for a better AI tool that can actually do the task competently but is more expensive, that is what gets senior management to just say "actually, this task isn't that important, just don't do it anymore." Of course, every worker on these projects has said this for years...

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

One of the more frustrating things about AI getting pushed into work is that workers are asked to do a task with AI, it does it badly, and it's ignored until a client picks up on the quality issues. At which point it's too late.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

And this basically sets off a flywheel where you become less essential to the business because any innovations or local insight you have is less critical to the business model. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of restaurants stops cultivating any kind of artisan spirit.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So to make the business a profit, you start buying into the kind of cookie cutter industry standards and diluting your brand. This sets off a flywheel where you get some growth in profit and foot traffic but lose customer loyalty, which you don't mind as much because that makes you more profitable.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Pretty interesting, and this is a kind of Neoliberalism Trap situation for private businesses. Hypothetically, maybe you want to make good quality affordable tacos, so you start doing that successfully. You need cash to expand, sell out a bit to PE, and this means your business goals change a bit...

theguardian.com

‘Don’t spend $20 on an acai bowl’: gen Z are shunning private equity’s restaurant takeover

As more PE firms invest in food establishments, people are bemoaning the ‘same-ification’ of NYC’s restaurant scene

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I mean, you're right, the few dollars a week I'd spend on something like this wouldn't be a great revenue stream. I don't see that being offered as an option though, at least not for the things I'm interested in reading. Not a dig at 404 by the way, I'm talking about more traditional outlets.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I would gladly pay like $1 to read just one pay-walled article or get a day pass to an outlet I don't read enough to justify a subscription. It would definitely give me a more diverse media diet.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Makes you wonder whether this is happening as often if not more in China's intelligence apparatus. We likely wouldn't hear about it if it did, but the Chinese navy isn't exactly doing this kind of operation nearly as often.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It really sounds like his thesis kept being proven wrong and he is trying to retroactively defend it. Maybe I'm being unfair to the initial work, but I'd have to read the book again to be sure. Also, not that there would be anything bad about him just adjusting his analysis.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It's funny watching Francis Fukuyama doing the podcast circuit and saying "You don't understand, The End of History doesn't mean history ended. Obviously that's wrong. I meant to make a point about megalothymia. Look, it's actually in the book where I'm making a point that is also wrong."

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bendwalsh.bsky.social @bendwalsh.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

the main thing about popular country music is that on it's highly produced pop targeted at the median suburba/ex-urban American and made by a small elite cadre of industrial artists who by and large work for the same few large corporations. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Ella Langley. ‘Landman.’ The Rural Vibe Shift Is Real. (Gift Article)

Social marginalization means something different today.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Relatedly, I'm not sure why some people think "act like a stereotypical two-faced politician when pressed on a hard issue" is some kind of stroke of savvy political genius.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So if your goal is anything besides "I want Democrats to win a Senate seat in Texas," that distinction is actually important and you now have a 50/50 chance as a voter that this guy doesn't actually represent your vision.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If he is actually just a moderate Democrat who can squeak out a Senate win in a bad year by being generally inoffensive and the lesser of two evils for most of the electorate, that's also great if you want Democrats to win. But the first thing is not the same as the second thing.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I'm just going to say about Talarico that last year he was getting talked up by Moderate Democrats as someone who could wrap inclusive politics in a package that could appeal to a swing voter. That would be cool if your goal is for Democrats to win in Texas.

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

READ: If you read (& perhaps clutched your pearls over) that Tyler Austin Harper piece in The Atlantic about DEI and Bates College, then I hope you’ll have the integrity to read this rejoinder by Andrew Baker, a Black male professor who preceded Harper at Bates. open.substack.com/pub/thedrift...

open.substack.com

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

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Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Socialists: Joseph Stalin would be in the DSA and love Mamdani!! ︀︀Other Socialists: NO! He would hate WOkeness!! ︀︀Josef Stalin in 2026: Comrade Ezra Klein, thank you for having me on your show. I'm a massive fan of your recent book. We need a Five Year Abundance Plan.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Well, simple, just assert that the activists don't care about science and Deep Questions because they are too focused on silly abstract things like paper straws. Then it's still a problem, you just don't have to do anything to deal with it because the people pushing for change are not pure of heart.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Say a guy grew up and went to college and got a little involved in climate activism and it gradually faded as an important thing in his life. He called this an existential threat to humanity, how can he be opposed to it now?

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Had a hot take this morning that the Woke 1 backlash idea is largely a convenient excuse that older millennials and GenX can use to fully drop commitments to social causes they now find inconvenient as relatively secure members of the middle class.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Worst part about that though is they did a bunch of layoffs recently and other people in the industry will straight up not hire those employees because the company's reputation is that it's a slop factory and its employees have to relearn the fundamentals of the job. So, yeah, accurate reporting.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Two of their biggest customers found out they were doing this and wanted a new contract with 30% off future work they sent. They lost one customer and the other I think negotiated a renewal that basically cut down the workload to remove the bits ChatGPT actually helped with.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

They figured out they could copy a lot of the work into ChatGPT and get something that was close to what they needed, especially if they changed their editorial standards. It actually worked better than doing it by hand sometimes.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Basically, it was a professional services company that did a bunch of back-office work facilitating corporate partnerships. A lot of data cleaning and re-writing material for different audiences, but too idiosyncratic to actually automate.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I started reading this thinking it was overstated, but then got to this section, which is effectively killed the business model for an old client I had.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 28/08/2026

it is in fact just the media, which has devoted more attention to this than it has to the fact that multiple republican lawmakers are dealing with “we hired nazis” scandals and that the “we hired nazis” problem extends to the white house

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I also love how people will say driving is great because you can just make your own schedule, then insist on starting a trip at either 5am, 2pm, or 7pm to miss traffic, otherwise it's not worth the drive.

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Roman Fire @romanfire.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I think the point of this is about drivers being a little self absorbed but appreciate the premise that most drivers generally want to do the right thing, but they also have this vehicle and it's supposed to get them somewhere quickly, right? So why not rush through that intersection?

This false belief spawns other false beliefs, leads drivers on to believe that they are the one competent person on a road full of idiots, that their urgencies are greater than the urgencies of other people on the road, that their causes are righteous. In other words, their judgment may or may not have been good before they got behind the wheel, but it is assuredly bad now.

And the only things holding back these perfectly nice people hopped up on the false whispers of the society-wide Wormtongue that is driving are the simple absolutes of traffic laws.

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