iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

METR as the equivalent for the AI industry of FINRA in Finance?

Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

A South African friend sent these photos on WhatsApp. This is at a debate. The second photo is (i think) when he was part of a group who disrupted Mandela giving a speech on campus. I was there.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Nvidia, Alphabet, Google, Meta together would need to earn almost twice as much after-tax profit in 2036 as the entire U.S. corporate sector earned in 2000, (adjusted for inflation to 2026 dollars), to justify their current market cap. If that happens these companies would be behemoths.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Strip out “compute for research,” and OpenAI is actually on track to turn a small pretax operating profit this year, as is Anthropic under its best-case scenario. Add it back in, and OpenAI doesn’t expect to break even until the 2030s. Anthropic forecasts reaching that milestone sooner.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Checking in in on the Network State guys. They are keeping faith, for now it seems.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Since I’m becoming a Vibe Coder…

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

On my way to Frankfurt where tomorrow I’ll be on a panel at the 14th ILF Conference on the Future of the Financial Sector. My panel’s topic? Stablecoins. 😬

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Tether has been struggling to get back to it's peg with the dollar for three days now. stablepulse.raak.work #stablecoin

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

"Stablecoin" Tether (USDT), has been struggeling to return to the dollar peg for more than a day now. How do I know? I vibecoded this app, have a look for yourself. stablepulse.raak.work

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

A lot of how her belief coloured her conversion is in the first 5 minutes, so just listen to that and then decide if you want to continue. For me personally the piece is full of little details like this, which said to me, outsider, complex person and conviction politician, it kept me intrigued

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Via the international bank correspondence system and dollar dominance the US has chokehold sanctions control on all banks, also European ones. As Lagarde tells Martin Wolf, a Digital Euro can provide European citizens and entities with money services that the US can't sanction. 3/

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

And this pre-moderation is a bad thing? 🤯

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

The US 🇺🇸 brain drain of ethnic Chinese to China 🇨🇳 is gathering pace.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I put it through NanoBana, for a different representation of the same data. Spain not that different from Portugal. Poland not so pro the US as one might expect. The Netherlands most pro a move towards China. Overall, not a massive divergence between these countries.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

The crash “was all so spectacular that American Bitcoin quickly became the symbol of not just the crypto market wipeout of late 2025 but also the collapse of the myriad ventures that the Trump family has been promoting”.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

DeepSeek in its latest technical report, admits closed source models’ performance are improving faster than open source — also DeepSeek. Proof the chip ban is working? #geopoliticaltech

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

And US conceptions of speech are perfect. Platforms should carry no liability, (while they destroy rational debate in every public sphere they operate in around the globe). At any rate, you don't need to use European social media, and Europeans not yours.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

First here is my view of the problem, a longer way if saying human nature is part the problem. Things to consider: Require a "driver's" license, civic exams (media literacy: concepts like context collapse, how moral outrage is an adaptive trait for small communities etc). (cont)

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

The UK's Labour Government Policy Spiral. * Sorry, forgot from whom I got this idea.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

China’s Tsinghua University (Also Xi's) now outfiles top US schools in AI patents—4,986 since 2005, 900+ in 2024 –– more patents each year than MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard combined.. Quantity is state-backed, strategic. Europe: this is a sovereignty issue, not a league table. 1/x

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Lots of 🤯 information and charts in this post Re AI. These are my pick of the lot: The scale of the investment is already historic; 💸 New datacenters built overtaking new offices; 🕋 Energy transition electricity demand dwarfs AI; ⚡️ AI impact on water 💦 www.understandingai.org/p/16-charts-...

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

2/8 That posture has flipped. Under Trump, the U.S. 🇺🇸 is embracing crypto in finance and geopolitics: touting stablecoins as digital dollars and pitching tokenisation as capital-market modernisation.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

This is the essence what we wrote: 1/8 FTX’s 2022 collapse gave regulators a brief ‘told you so.’ DC’s playbook was to let crypto burn—keep banks out, deny legitimacy, and allow failures to clear without rescue.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

This week Andrew Bailey, head of the bank of England, ostensibly softened his stance on stablecoins in the FT. Of course he must be under a lot of pressure. But many missed the pertinent question he raised - the question of credit creation.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

In other news, the Springboks hand the All Blacks their biggest ever defeat. And in New Zealand. Perhaps the world is not such a bad place after all. #rugby.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

It all makes sense, because those that crave peace must prepare for war, am-I-right?

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Extreme poverty is way down, other forms of poverty is relatively up

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

In English. My question. How secure is that security partnership really? Especially in the light of new pressures on European digital regulation?

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

I find AI chatbots an incredible tool for learning and discovery. So I wondered what educational theory said about that.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

The top US models lead the best Chinese models in general Chinese-language capabilities. The top three models are OpenAI’s o3, o4-mini (high), and Google’s Gemini-2.5.-Pro. The top Chinese model is ByteDance’s Doubao-Seed-1.6-thinking.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I am wondering whether you did not understand those graphs or are being wilfully obtuse? Here they are in full, with captions. Your claims are supported by them in which way?

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

(and good governance) is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this Sam Altman sentence - a compressed footnote that contains a massive complexity that's being acknowledged but not unpacked. He is being strategically vague. blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

And @joostbastmeijer.bsky.social says farmers control most capital in the country. Farming is less than 3% of GDP. Historically Afrikaner farmers were significantly poorer than English whites. In 1938 Afrikaner farmers produced 87% of all agricultural products, but look at this table:

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

The Dutch were in the middle of their Golden Age, wealthy, a VOC sailor earned five times less than a polder boy or peat cutter in the Netherlands. A typical German looking for work in the Netherlands were desperately poor. They often ended up working as indentured labour. Historian Giliomee:

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

The USA does not like European digital taxes. But in the same breath Project 2025 says:

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

Wondered what Project 2025 had to say about data sharing agreements between the EU and the USA? Wonder no more. They frame it as a form of trade restriction, and think US counter leverage should come from intelligence sharing with the EU.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

"With 70% of the world’s utility-scale solar under construction in China, many of the most ambitious solar projects are clustered inland in regions such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia."

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

"Coal, solar, wind and hydropower make up the majority of China’s total installed capacity — which grew by 15% to over 3,300GW in 2024 — and are spread across the country according to geographic suitability and power needs"

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

"it is China that now leads the latest global technology revolution in electrification and renewable energy" "Clean energy sectors accounted for a record 10 per cent of the country’s GDP and drove a quarter of its growth last year" www.ft.com/content/f867...

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

True, for many categories of things, but not this IMO. Also a useful read (same author). Makes the point that AI (LLMs and Generative AI) really boosts individual performance rather than organisational performance, and you need to figure it out for yourself. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/ai-in-orga...

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

And this book, the Price Is Wrong, ( I have not read it) argues the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive (it's not, and the energy is cheaper), but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

De-risking: When the state creates "safe" and "profitable" spaces mainly to attract private investment. Why is that a problem? Because what is good for profits of a few companies is not necessary what's good for society as a whole. Here's Bloomberg's @weisenthal.bsky.social with an example.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Well if Starmer finally showed he had a pulse — but I suspect “Hard Labour” is entirely derivative and not his own. There’s no life in it.

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

They plan to make Germany a major datacenter hub (elsewhere these are often heavily concentrated because of the data connectivity and electricity connections required) but CONTRADICTION the agreement also says they will distribute them regionally especially in Eastern Germany. /6

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

Another idea that sounds like wider EU initiatives (EuroStack) is a "European-compatible" sovereign "Germany Stack" that integrates AI, cloud services, and "basic" components as services, but to government and municipalities. They say they will check whether suitable European providers exist 1st. /3

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Wessel van Rensburg @wildebees.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

"Digital policy is power politics." The German 🇩🇪 coalition agreement also has a section on digital sovereignty. The intro is light on detail but strongish on prose, a (misinformation) riposte to Vance's Munich speech in the third para?

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