iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Maher is in fact a complete imbecile and has been his entire career. No idea what anyone ever saw in his commentary or writing.

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JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

I honestly don't understand how people can have so much difficulty reading the nature and intentions of people like Trump and his enablers. They've always been extremely clear.

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JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

It's a pretty safe bet that it was largely written by AI.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

if you ever needed any assurance that most tech CEOs are in fact lizards in skin suits, a post like this should eliminate any further doubt. The utter and complete failure to understand human empathy is rather shocking. We allow these people to run the world and then wonder why it's going to hell...

This spending on a rush to space is one of the most amusingly misguided concepts I've seen to date - and I'm a hard sci-fi fan. These people have fallen for their own fiction and lack any appreciation for the number and scale of the hurdles that remain in front of any serious development in space.

It's important because the mere existence of billionaires severely distorts the political system in ways that the existence of mere millionaires does not. It is by no means a stretch to say that their very presence is among the most severe problems modern society faces.

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It's basic math. There is no debating the fact that someone else having more money dilutes your buying power. If you don't understand how that works then any further economic discussion becomes a waste of time.

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The problem has become simple. If people are permitted to buy politicians, then it becomes a remarkably inexpensive purchase for a foreign government to make.

It ain't a complex plan, it's true.

000

Not sure what point there is to pretending that the administration is in any way obliged to acknowledge the courts when the highest court in the land has spent the last several months granting him complete latitude to ignore said courts, just as the Congress has entirely abdicated their own duties.

Sure. Nothing is infinite, period. But you can for example pump the value of some pointless imaginary asset to the point where it essentially renders all other avenues of achievement or incentive nearly irrelevant - and then a lot of people who work for a living starve.

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Obviously there are limits to physical resources - but the existence of billionaires absolutely makes the rest of us poorer, pricing us out of markets where they actually spend their money. Real estate is a big one, capital markets are another, and most crucially the political 'market'.

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Most money in this day and age is not backed by a physical resource.

000

Sure. Nor is there any real support in the publisher driven industry, which has become far more exploitive over the last several years - to the point where they now punish success to nearly the same degree as failure. You're getting fired either way.

000

Money is not a finite resource - but it is absolutely a competitive one. If you and I each have 100 dollars we each can 'affore' 50% of the goods in the market. But if a third person enters and is given 900 dollars, you and can now only afford 5% of the goods in the market, due to inflation.

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Corporations are fantastic at wasting money. The just get to pile their losses and dept into shell corps to 'dispose' of them - and when they REALLY screw the pooch, remind me who has to bail out Wall St every time? That would be the taxpayers.

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Given that America's strongest growth period coincided with some of its highest marginal tax rates, I think it's pretty clear that by themselves they do little to hamper investment and growth.

000

Don't forget blatant and massive violations of antitrust laws.

There's the little noted fact that Amazon blatantly violated antitrust and anti monopoly laws by intentionally operating at a massive loss in order to drive most of their competition out of business in order to monopolize the online delivery sector. So by 'innovate' you mean 'broke the law'.

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I've pretty much given up on firearm legislation for the foreseeable future. The US has embraced violence and open hostility to such a degree that we may actually need them as a matter of course - which is pathetic.

'smart' people who make statements in that category are lying, intentionally. They are attempting to present a world where it is morally acceptable for them to own everything, because someday you will too! It's a fantasy story crafted to forestall arguments against vast inequality.

000

So did they just post the wrong ad, or did that toss an AI generated one up that says 'out now' because that's the kind of thing that AI thinks you should put on game adverts when you autocomplete them?

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These aren't the kind of problems you can solve just by being smarter, because again, we don't generally lack for solutions - we lack for the will or consensus to implement them.

000

As frustrating as it is, most of the serious problems we face today are not due to any lack of solutions - they're due to conflicts of interest over which solution to pursue, problems without stable solutions, or an initial disagreement over the nature of the problem itself.

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The funny thing is this assumption that most of our problems are 'solvable' with more intelligence. Game Theory strongly suggests otherwise.

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I don't think most people these days know what RSS is.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Don't forget Thomas Midgley Jr. - the ultimate poster child for why active government regulation of industry is completely non-optional.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

I mean, if the Rule of Law were even meaningful any longer I'd maybe be interested in this - but it isn't, so I'm not.

000

Yes. You know that and I know that, but the developers either don't know that, or are really into lying about it. These models are not - and will never become - AGI, which is explicitly what they are trying to bill them as.

000

As long as you don't mind occasionally fertilizing your garden with saltpeter, go right ahead and follow its advice. Probably only a 30% chance it'll advise you to get rid of garden pests using cyanide gas and jello.

000

The dirty secret here is that they can do exactly what CEOs want, which is to pump out an endless firehouse of low quality derivative garbage that's been plagiarized from everyone's else's work. It's like their wet dreams come true - an instant enshitification machine.

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Wow. Are you saying that a computer cluster requiring the output of a nuclear reactor is almost (but not quite) capable of barely comprehending a game that can be mastered by a six year old in a few hours? Technology is amazing.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Yeah, I think we can stop pretending the rule of law exists any more. They're now openly arresting journalists in LA now. Welcome to the dictatorship club USA.

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This has not been a good day for Elon - or Trump for that matter. Good laugh for the rest of us though, apparently including the Polish foreign minister.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Psst. Hey Elon... We already knew that. We didn't even have to steal terabytes of govt data to figure it out.

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JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Well now, this is a fascinating new form of stupidity.

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Yeah, it's funny how money manages to distort pretty much everything that comes into contact with it. <sigh>

JesseK @vastin.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

washingtonspectator.org/project-russ... This article (dec 2024) is very disturbing. It highlights a book that likely outlines Putin's plan for the future of the world, and it manages to predict the first several months of Trump's regime with startling accuracy.

washingtonspectator.org

“Project Russia,” Reveals Putin’s Playbook | Washington Spectator

Between 2005 and 2010, a set of books called “Project Russia” was distributed to high-ranking officials in the Russian government and other influential thought leaders. The books offered a detailed…