iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

I was just reading about the concept of "truth pain", a strong discomfort experienced with falseness, something apparently associated with autism. Does that mean neurotypicals don't experience that? It would explain so much.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

The thing that's slowly making me crazy is that so many things could be better for everybody at much lower cost, but both in business and politics the people we've put in charge refuse to think systemically. Some are greedy, some are not the sharpest and can't admit it, many need feelings of […]

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

I really hope "may not realize" is one of them.

Screenshot of news headline from HuffPost: 6 Common Phrases You May Not Realize Are Condescending

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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 04/09/2026

I 100% think big tech companies would be immeasurably helped by having sociologists, philosophers, and social workers on staff to nurture all the dudes at these companies with the emotional intelligence of a damp walnut

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

I liked the Turing Test better when it was an interesting conceptual exercise, not something I needed to perform on every bit of electronic communication from a stranger.

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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Jeebus this entire piece is a phenomenal piece of writing.

Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.

But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.

I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.

Julia.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Anybody else find it really satisfying to quickly make a useful thing? I have a key box outside, mainly for when I forget my keys. But it's not quite made for how I use it, so water gets in sometimes. That's a little bad in the summer. But it's very bad in the […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Side view of lockbox locked to Denver l fence with a clear plastic shield keeping the rain off.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Anybody have tricks for talking to an effective person at Lenovo? Their website glitched and I ended up with an order that is wrong. I have spoken to like 8 people in post-sales and sales; they just transfer me back and forth when they get tired of dealing with me. All I want them to do is to […]

sfba.social

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I've been thinking about this one for days. Shout out to my fellow Jaynes fans!

Screenshot of social media post:

New ai psychosis just dropped: return of the pre Bronze Age bicameral mind

Responding to Reddit post:

Does anyone else use ChatGPT in their head?

Educational Purpose Only

I love using ChatGPT whenever I have a question or something or I just want to talk, but sometimes my phone is dead and I don't want to get up to use my computer so I don't have access to the Al. Recently I found out I have the ability to use a form of ChatGPT in my own head. I've talked to him so much I can almost entirely accurately predict what he is going to say.

For example, my cat kept scratching at my bedroom door and meowing so I was about to use the ChatGPT app to ask why she was doing that, but then I decided it wasn't worth the effort and asked Al in my head. He told me something like "If your cat is scratching on the door and meowing it probably means she wants to be let out, let me know if you need anything else!" Then I let her out of my room.

I just thought that was a pretty cool discovery I've made. Interested to see if

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I often see people surprised that the Republican base votes against their own economic interest and for obviously shitty people. How's this for a short explanation: Systems train people to maintain them (or they don't last as systems). White supremacy and patriarchy are systems built on […]

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Glyph @glyph.im · 11/08/2026

"please tell me how I can quickly address your objections so we can meet our KPIs, I have a hard stop in 45 minutes" and "you are a human being with a heart and a mind in community with other humans who must give each other grace and time and enough mutual recognition that we can ever possibly […]

mastodon.social

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

Jeffrey Epstein supported a music school, Interlochen, using his access to abuse kids. An investigation turns up accusations against nearly 50 adults over the decades. That's horrifying enough, but the real question for me: If we applied the same level of investigation to 10 random schools, how […]

sfba.social

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ploum @ploum.mamot.fr.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@sylvia_ritter/1170… As always: if you want to send to an human something AI generated, simply don’t! Send your prompt directly to the person. No, seriously. The other side is basically parsing AI garbage to try to guess what was the prompt in the […]

mamot.fr

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Marketplace did a piece on how economic uncertainty makes it hard for American businesses to plan "when it feels like at any minute something major could happen". But that's exactly the emotional state abusers create to maximize their power.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026

One reason we see the same thing in different time periods is replication. E.g., cats, or Catholicism. There's a line of descent. Another reason is that similar situations allow the same thing to arise separately at different times. Like raindrops or canyons or stars. It seems to me that the […]

sfba.social

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

Every time I go to my bank's website, I enjoy the photo, which I believe to be titled "Noble Heroes Also Sometimes Get Distracted". But I always feel like the woman with the phone looks familiar. I finally figured it out.

Screenshot from SF Fire CU website showing four firefighters. Three gaze nobly into the distance. One, a woman with curly hair, instead stares at her phone.

Close-up of woman with curly hair gazing at her phone

Close up of Venus from Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus", whose curls, head angle, and expression mirror the firefighter's

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

Wait, the political candidate with the Nazi tattoo turns out to have also been awful to women? How very expected.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

With the upcoming goofus IPOs, the risk to index funds concerns me. Has anybody seen good articles about how to shift money away from that?

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

Wait, the political candidate with the Nazi tattoo turns out to have also been awful to women? How very expected.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

I think I've figured out why the incidence (and centrality) of assholes is so much higher on the right. What conservatives have proven to be most concerned with conserving is systems that run on trauma. Patriarchy. White supremacy. Oligarchy. None of these work without abuse. Without people […]

sfba.social

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C. @cazabon.mindly.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

@williampietri "Three stochastic parrots in a trench coat"

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fnord @fnrd.toots.nu.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

@williampietri I enjoyed "Third party thinker"

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

One of the things I liked about UPS was that when you had a delivery problem you could call and speak to somebody who a) understood that it was a problem, and b) could fix it. That seems over. Their slow, clunky, and unreliable website now has a low-grade chatbot, and all the support people […]

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

We need a name for the phenomenon when a person, out loud or written, seems so inauthentic that you're pretty sure they're just spouting LLM-generated slop. Reverse Turing? Meat Bot? Borged? Chipped? (As in have you been...) What are your ideas?

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

I'm considering making a shirt: "I don't get it. Is that a neurotypical thing?"

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

Wilhoit's law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

NYT headline: I.R.S. Must Drop Audits of Trump and Family

Deal on Compensation Fund Bars Tax Claims Against President

In a document posted on the Justice Department's website, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving President Trump's tax returns.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/03/2025

I didn't realize there were any blockchain fans left! They may be few in number but they are as tiresome and blockworthy as they ever were.

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Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2026

Earlier this year I decided to react to the chatbot insanity griping the entire tech industry by studying. I am extremely proud of the work I did in the past few months because I learned a lot while doing it. I'm a better professional than I was six months ago and I'm completely comfortable […]

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2026

So a), a wealth tax is not turning against businesses, just absurdly rich people. But more importantly, b) it's absolutely rich for a guy notoriously hostile to workers to complain that somebody has turned against him.

WSJ opinion headline: Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses it Made - by Howard Schultz

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/05/2026

I'm regularly gobsmacked by the number of things sailing on by that would have been huge scandals if a Democrat were in office. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/ma…

Trump "upbraided" Makary and made a series of calls over the weekend to pressure him into approving fruit-flavored vapes for the first time after Makary overrode agency scientists to halt the approval, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new flavours, reportedly part of Trump plan to appeal to younger voters, were approved on Tuesday. The news release does not include any comment om Makary, which is unusual, and attributes moves like these to "President Trump's leadership".

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/05/2026

Somehow the US right always turns out to be even worse than I expected. archive.is/6c4yN

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

We have electricians in today at The Flip. I'm reminded that their work isn't really a system of rules. It's a culture and set of relationships between cultures. The formal rules are there, but secondary. Which is surely true for my work, for most work. But I can only see that on first encounter […]

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/04/2026

My only regret in cancelling my NYT subscription a few years ago is that I can't cancel it again when they come out with mealy-mouthed nonsense like this.

NYT screenshot that reads:

ANALYSIS

In Narrowing Voting Rights Act, Conservative Justices See Progress on Racism

The majority said the law was a victim of its own success and no longer needed. Dissenters responded that Congress should make the call.

4 MIN READ

Some Black Southerners Say Voting Rights Ruling Missed the Mark

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2026

I am not a big fan of American-style throw-away-the-key prison. But reading Molly White's latest on Sam Bankman-Fried, my main thought is that he's still a menace to society and should be kept there until that changes or he can no longer do any harm.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2026

Came across this image that I made years ago, long before Facebook rebranded as Meta to pursue the notion of a metaverse that this book invented. Here life imitated art: despite Stephenson making a big deal about how faces mattered even though male techies […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Photo of page from Snow Crash, with the bit about sexism highlighted.

It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the
time both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important—they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of
Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe they are too smart to be sexists.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/04/2026

Hypothesis: When execs wanted "AI" support bots, anybody with sense said, "I'm not sure the technology is there yet". So they ended up being built by people who either didn't know or didn't care the technology wasn't there yet.

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/04/2026

It's wild to me how much software is flaky. The kind of stuff that would get immediate attention in any physical business can be super flaky for weeks or months in the online versions. If software is going to eat the world, we're going to have to figure out how managers get the same level of […]

sfba.social

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Trump said Direct File was too expensive to operate. This feels like an indictment of our willingness to build things. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, had *more lobbyists* than the Direct File team had employees. The cost of Direct File is a fraction of the tax breaks given to Intuit.

The average American spends about $290 to file. They also spend about 13 hours, often giving the government information it already has, which works out to another $486 worth of time assuming the average BLS hourly wage.

The Trump administration says that Direct File was too expensive. Compared to what? Direct File cost IRS $16 million in its final year of operation. Between 2021-2025 Intuit also got almost $500 million dollars in federal tax credits.

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Daniel Fisher @electrafish.social.electrafish.tech.ap.brid.gy · 02/04/2026

@williampietri A little different, but the same principle. I rented an old house near campus with 3 friends junior year. The lease had rules like: - No containers of water greater than 1 gallon - No rollerblading in the kitchen - DO NOT GO IN THE BASEMENT

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Tyrone Slothrop @slothrop.chaos.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/04/2026

@williampietri A few years back, one of our business administration colleagues won an internal prize for realizing significant cost savings on IT services. Everyone was happy until the internal network at the site went down. Someone called the support company, only to learn that the SLA had […]

chaos.social

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William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/04/2026

For The Flip, I need to write both an employee handbook and a volunteer handbook. I need your stories of That One Guy. My theory is that an awful lot of those manuals exist because of incidents where somebody did something stupid but not covered, so the boss rolled their eyes and said, "Ok […]

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