iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Bree (half of Kit Rocha) @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 29/09/2026

And you know if they had actually succeeded in making products that broadly improved the lives of anyone outside software engineering they might have gotten away with it! Instead it's been "now your potato peeler costs $15 more because it has AI, use it or we'll shoot this puppy"

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Angela Collier @acollierastro.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I wish the people actually cared about the safety of children playing sports because I don't think children can consent to playing tackle football and it should be illegal to have it in public schools.

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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

@aoc.bsky.social just put out a great statement on AI. Refreshing to see a major politician on the left nail this. "Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves." 🎯

Charles,

Last weekend, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest Al companies in the world, publicly asked his industry to slow down Al development.

Shortly after, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAl, followed suit. Then Elon Musk.

This all came days after an Anthropic researcher quit, citing his belief that this technology could wipe out humanity and that Al companies are "gambling with our lives."

For years, people have warned that generative Al could slip out of our direct control.

Those safety concerns must be taken seriously.

And this is why I have advocated for strict safety standards on how Al is built and deployed, public oversight over this technology, and using existing laws to hold these companies accountable when they cause harm.

But I want to draw your attention to another reality: Right now, the U.S. economy and our financial futures are riding on Silicon Valley's bet that Al will soon be immensely profitable and pay off. And that bet isn't looking good.

The formula for a profitable business isn't complicated: make more money than you spend. But the biggest Al companies aren't doing that. They are spending hundreds of billions per year on data centers, chips, and other costs while their ability to make revenues that exceed their already-immense sunk costs are unclear. Experts estimate that these Al companies will require another $600 billion of debt just to finance

themselves in 2026 alone. That is more than the entire budgets of the U.S. Departments of Justice, Transportation, & Education combined.
Meanwhile, despite almost every single one of these companies not turning a profit & having sunk billions of investor dollars in development of data centers & other infrastructure, Al companies are also on a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying & dark money in our elections.
It would be one thing if we were discussing a few private companies with a poor business model. But last year, virtually all stock market gains - 80% - rested entirely on just a handful of Al companies.
That tells us two things:
1. Nearly the entire U.S. economy outside the Al industry is relatively stagnating and faring poorly & the gains from these few companies are disguising it; &
2. Millions of people's retirements - including their pensions, 401ks, & investments - are potentially exposed to this risk.
That's why these Al companies' dubious financial positions matter to working people.
These companies argue that debt is necessary. They'll tell you that building transformative technologies requires upfront capital, & that massive borrowing today will pay off in generating unprecedented prosperity tomorrow.
But this is not the typical debt that startups take on while they build out a company. We are talking about billions going on trillions of dollars leveraged with no indication that these companies will be able to recoup these funds profitably. And they are increasingly looking to the government as their source of cash.
In an effort to hide their debt, tech companies have been relying on "circular financing" where tech giants like Google, Amazon, & Microsoft give billions to Al startups like OpenAl & Anthropic, only for those startups to hand that money right back to buy Al processing power.
In other words, these Al companies are luring in new investors by making it look like their financials are healthier than they really are.

What's even worse is that retirement & pension funds are key to supporting this illusion.
When the Al companies issue bonds to raise more money, your pension funds & retirement accounts are some of the biggest buyers. When Musk's Al business went public, it became part of index funds where millions of Americans invest our savings. Many Americans don't even know that their retirement investments are tied up in these companies at all.
From Big Tech's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug. By tying our futures to their reckless gambling, Al billionaires are trying to make themselves too big to fail. They think they can take such dangerous risks because we will bail them out if things go wrong.
Sound familiar? This scene is dangerously reminiscent of the rampant speculation, corruption, & broken incentives leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that plunged millions of working class Americans into financial chaos that we never fully recovered from.
It is no accident that these warnings from Altman & Amodei come months-if not weeks-before these companies were meant to go public.
When companies go public, they have to be more transparent about how they are doing financially. And after a waiting period, they typically have to let private investors-like their own employees-sell their shares.
The New York Times recently confirmed that OpenAl has postponed going public for this very reason. They are in no rush for the truth about their finances to come out.
But the moment these oligarchs began to seek our public tax dollars & public contracts while exposing their companies to public pension funds & investments, they opened themselves to public accountability & scrutiny.
Silicon Valley billionaires have rigged the game & are attempting to shift their financial risk to working people: If they're right about Al's potential, they reap the profits. If they're wrong & the bubble bursts, they are setting up the American people to pick up the tab.
Heads, they win; tails, we lose.

We can stop this, and we shouldn't play their game. Together we can address both the economic and safety threats of unrestricted Al development and prevent financial chaos and stabilize market risk.

We must make it clear now that should the Al bubble pop, Congress should not bail out Big Tech.

And across our federal agencies, we have the authorities and tools to hold Al companies and their leaders accountable for releasing dangerous, unvetted, and defective products. We must not wait.

Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity.

But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves.

It's time we hold them accountable.

Thank you for reading.

In solidarity,

Alexandria

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

it feels odd that what's holding technology back from benefiting humanity at this moment, isn't really a technological problem, but a bureaucratic issue of incentive structures there's so much money being wasted on things that are either neutral or a net negative within tech now, it's weird

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

"I'm not quite sure yet how to stare into the fourth dimension" is a pretty great sentence

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

This is a video about Angela being angry and it's very relatable because I am also angry and on some level I feel like not being angry in 2026 is like... kind of a yellow flag tbh

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

You can't tell me it's impossible to go through life without using chatbots because not only am I doing that just fine, literally so was every single other human less than like four years ago. Is your memory really that short?

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

I feel like the dystopia finished manifesting real quick all of a sudden

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

The discord voice chat I am in right now is just six people trying to crowdsource how to boil an egg

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Today's episode of The Pitt was very stressful

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Bree (half of Kit Rocha) @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 19/12/2025

a post that should be incoherent but is not because we're all trapped on the same emotional roller coaster together

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Every technology problem is three social problems in a trench coat

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Trump is as insecure about nothing as much as he is insecure about crowd sizes.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

I've never had emotions like this about the fate of a TV show.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I think I was 13 when the first photograph of a live giant squid was published. I remember watching those old Discovery channel shows where they'd talk about searching for things like this and then not find them. And then... we did. And now... this??? There's so much cool shit out there.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

I do not like it when my personal troubles and my national troubles line up at the same time.

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Jill Weinberger @jillybobww.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Every time these folks talk about "expanding the tent," they're actually talking about MOVING the tent. Just picking it up & moving it to the right & leaving a lot of HUMAN BEINGS behind w/o protection. All to pursue these mythical centrist voters who, what, don't mind fascism but HATE abortion?

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Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · 06/09/2025

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

theatlantic.com

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

Badly need news outlets to realize the Democratic Party having super low approval does not mean it's too far left

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Everything---*everything*---is politics. If you're "not talking about politics" what you're actually doing is talking about something that isn't politically controversial among the people who are in the room with you. Change who's in the room, and suddenly it can become politics again.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Can't depend on anyone these days smh

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

I am home. I am tired. I love all of you. #WotCon

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Temperature discourse. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

You know, I come from a place of very significant privilege. I'm White, I grew up and still am middle class, I grew up and still present as a man, I grew up and still (mostly) present as straight. (1)

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

If you're a giant megacorporation and you have a division somewhere that makes art or entertainment and that division doesn't break even in your profits do you think it's possible that isn't the end of the world? Don't you want people to like you? Like as a company? Isn't that good for business?

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence. They are in charge.

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

once again I must tap my own sign

@clairewillett

honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion

6:00 PM • Aug 12, 2020

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Inametaphor @inametaphor.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Joy has been my favorite non-reader reactor since I found her videos. She's truly a part of this community and her reaction here speaks for all of us, I think. (Also, she's going to react to the books, which should be amazing) #TheWheelOfTime #SaveWoT youtu.be/jfe_ceIOsnE?...

youtu.be

Save The Wheel of Time (PLEASE)!!!

YouTube video by JoyScott13 Reacts

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

This is what Ribbit Jordan thinks of Amazon Prime Studios right now. Do you really want to disappoint Ribbit Jordan? I thought not. #SaveWOT

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Remember that time when I said that Amazon Video was weirdly one of the only capitalism places selling me something I actually wanted hmm...

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Rebecca @readingthepattern.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

So #WoTSkies let’s get prepared for a #SaveWoT campaign to Apple because it’s too soon to give up on a new home for #TheWheelOfTime

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Xy, First Minister of Furries and Autism @xylaria.vg · 17/05/2025

So, we need to get very loud about something: There are at least 16 people dead directly because of cuts to the National Weather Service and NOAA. A tornado went *unwarned* in a major community for over 30 minutes last night. No sirens, no alerts. Multiple people are dead. This is Trump's fault.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

This is pretty neat but what I actually want to talk about is the headline because no, Vox, the future to fighting airborne viruses is to give people fucking healthcare. whttps//www.vox.com...

vox.com

The future to fighting airborne viruses is in…lamps?

How to block the next Covid in mid-air.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

[hasn't heard from a friend in a while] my brain: do they hate me what did I do

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Every time a meme from @kangus.bsky.social goes viral Ribbit Jordan comes out of his home to judge us. #TheWheelOfTime #WotSkies

An edited picture of the iconic Robert Jordan photo standing against a brick wall and wearing his broad-brimmed hat. His face has been replaced with a large and quite prominent green frog, who---to my eyes at any rate---looks very judgy.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I did that thing where I finally checked the mail after like two months and sure enough there was a pile of new postcards from @meej.dragonsworn.net and every one of them was beautiful, somehow in my 30s I accidentally managed to have amazing friends

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I was watching a video by a someone unrelated to WoT and he was talking about creator integrity and something he said really stood out to me: that because algorithms favor conflict, it's more profitable to lie and say you *do* like something than lie and say you don't. The haters are the shills

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

I do like the idea of "oh look the Dragon Reborn is a woman! She won't go mad!" [goes mad anyway] Don't need magic madness just regular mental illness

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Andor is a stressful show

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

This show has felt very close to perfect for me in so many ways. Watching a queer person be overthrown and then executed the state was just... very difficult to watch for me, right now, in 2025. But one show cannot deliver a cure for a lifetime of mistreatment.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Good night, #JordanCon. This was the best day I've had in a very long time. #WotSkies

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Just as a general rule exposure to "sexuality" is not anywhere close to as "damaging" to children as the lack of exposure to sexuality is.

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Ryan @ryanbars.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

#WotSkies #WoTShowSpoilers okay but no one's asking where Sammael's hammer went it seemed pretty good we should take it

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