Arvīds Kokins

theguardian.com‘Pure arrogance’: anger in Finland as Google illegally fells 250,000 trees for datacentreCompany ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push

www.theguardian.com/environment/... these people just don't understand consent or agreement and the "data center" was never going to be finished anyway, the bubble will pop long before the GPUs could be installed what an absolute waste

theguardian.comIMF suggests UK should cut spending rather than raise taxes on banks, as Healey prepares budget raid – as it happenedRolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

www.theguardian.com/business/liv... and here we go again, the IMF being as evil as they always have been the UK should: - tax the banks - reduce the economic role of private commercial banks by creating competing public/municipal banks

huh lol why does linkedin hate me now

I wonder if my ISP is being simultaneously used by some bot farm (though I tend to get less bullshit from cloudflare when using a more popular browser - their bot detection systems are that bad)

managed to open the page on firefox and then on the browser I originally used maybe some temporary misconfiguration or just cloudflare being shitty

huh lol why does linkedin hate me now

relating to the non-explanation in the bottom left corner the "action I just performed" was typing linkedin.com in the browser's url textbox

www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026... is there any field of study where the nobel prize hasn't historically fucked up to an unprecedented degree?

ultimately using a single model to describe people's vastly different approaches to spending money is an idea that is doomed to fail but the idea that people are rational enough to retain windfall income but irrational enough to spend their regular income? that applies to just about nobody

those who deal with money carefully, would allocate and track their savings and save temporary income, though may still spend windfalls on "wishlist items" those who just spend all they have, likely won't care to figure out how permanent that specific part of income is

www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026... is there any field of study where the nobel prize hasn't historically fucked up to an unprecedented degree?

Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick

looked into it, it's amazingly dumb: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permane... we all know someone who got unexpected money and spent it very quickly, and likewise people exist who don't change their habits based on their income (e.g. me) there's also no such thing as "permanent income"

Arvīds Kokins reposted

@shimminykricket.blacksky.app

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

I'm starting to notice a lot of AI-generated custom animated graphics in youtube videos ironically it's like the only reliable use of it but also it looks repulsive "AI" is single-handedly destroying a whole design blueprint hopefully it remains the only such blueprint it destroys

youtube.comStephanie Kelton: The big myth of government deficits | TEDYouTube video by TED

while I agree with the idea that austerity doesn't do anyone any good, the subject of the video (MMT) seems psyop-adjacent first of all, it only seems to apply to the organizations that can directly influence money "printing" - the federal governments

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net

A post-oligarch, post-American world could be a post-*austerity* world, one where we recognize that the limiting factor on public investment isn't *money*, but *resources*: energy, material, labor, expertise: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FATQ...

thus MMT implicitly advocates for 2 bad things: - centralization of power - growing inequality MMT could address these issues but somehow doesn't even acknowledge them I'm not yet sure if it's intentional but it's extremely bad, thus I chose to call it "psyop-adjacent"

centralization could be addressed by letting many more institutions generate money, particularly ones without profit-seeking interests (e.g. public banks) as for inequality, many more people have written about it and I won't do justice to all that work in a tweet (or several)

youtube.comStephanie Kelton: The big myth of government deficits | TEDYouTube video by TED

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net

everyone else (under the federal government) has fewer options - beg the federal government to give them money, beg someone else for a handout or a loan, or produce something that others will pay for and let them worry about getting the money

but even with the federal government, there's the problem that an increasing share of its budget is just interest payments interest is inherently a generator of inequality - those who already have money will receive more of it "radical" redistribution is then needed to offset that

news.bloomberglaw.comData Brokers Challenge Connecticut Law’s Toughened Privacy RulesConnecticut’s latest privacy law, which bans companies’ sales of individuals’ precise location and the use of shoppers’ data to personalize prices, kicks in Thursday as industry attempts to block it p...

news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-... in case anyone's curious how evil the data brokers are the answer is: yes

rockpapershotgun.comSingle player games might require age verification if they use Steam under EU Kids Act's current draft, according to MEP's senior policy adviserThe EU Kids Act's current draft could see single player games subjected to age verification because they need Steam for updates.

19 Sept

www.rockpapershotgun.com/single-playe... if you live in the EU, talk to your MEPs about it "age verification" = identity verification verifying someone's identity just to let them receive a game update or buy games online is insane #gamedev #EU

youtube.comThis could legitimately end Stop Killing Games.YouTube video by Stop Killing Games

here's another video on the "European Commission attempting to destroy videogames" topic with even more detail: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQRc... #gamedev #EU

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the ability for any single person to own productive, tangible properties all over the world is one of the largest perversions of property law at the same time, I need any and all (incl. international) infrastructure to be publicly owned by the people they affect

open to ideas on how to succinctly legally reconcile these two principles ownership of faraway assets isn't in itself a problem (e.g. for travel) but it's being exploited ownership concentration laws would require a regulator to enumerate one's worldwide properties, which is a complex task

if there was an ownership reassertion law (e.g. you have to show up every 6 months to renew even indirect/partial ownership) then it would require lots of meetings or at least calls to make that work but that's generally the idea - making the "owners" do more work the more assets they "own"

cybernews.comEU AI data proposal could allow training without consentA leaked EU AI data proposal could let companies train models on Europeans’ personal data without consent. Read what privacy advocates warn

@ec.europa.eu could you stop being blatantly corrupt for just one fucking moment? cybernews.com/ai-news/ai-c... there is no "legitimate interest" for mass "training" the use cases are: - performance theft - profiling - identification - data laundering none of these are even remotely acceptable

Arvīds Kokins reposted

Ed Zitron

@edzitron.com

Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...

counterintuitively, any optimizing technology is fundamentally anti-productivity (if productivity is defined as $/time) in other words, they all shrink the economy including gen"AI", to the extent that it actually saves anyone time

more broadly speaking, anything you can convince someone to pay you for expands the economy and anything causing the opposite shrinks it economy = how many different ways of being useful to each other we have figured out well, that, plus any extortive payments (rents)

this definition of an economy also informs one's understanding of finance the more people can express what's useful to them, the bigger is the economy finance produces concentration of wealth -> less people can ask for less things -> economy gets smaller

in Latvia, there have been lots of conversations recently around boosting productivity as well automation is often mentioned due to the reasons above, automation is not the answer it increases relative competitiveness against other companies but also shrinks the economy

one of the most recent economic boosts (strangely enough) comes from "age assurance" (identity verification) tech personally I hate all of it but the economic impact is undeniable so, contrary to what many have said over the years - regulations can expand the economy

therefore the idea that gen"AI" (or anything like it) unlocks the potential for *more* revenue? it could not be more wrong - the exact opposite is the truth optimizing technologies cannot expand the economy, only completely new goals and capabilities can do that

consequently, the idea that gen"AI" can "earn" its value? if the value is in fact negative? technically it is earning its value now by losing money the vast funding spent on the GPUs and the construction of new "data centers" is all the value gen"AI" will ever create

if a person earns $ based on how much time they spend while working, reducing their working hours simply makes them earn less if a person gets paid for results and produces more, less such people get hired either way, less money changes hands for the same result

cnn.comI started fact-checking Trump 10 years ago. Here are 15 things I’ve learned | CNN PoliticsTen years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate ...

at that point, relative to a larger company that hires any of these people, there's now room for competitors to reduce the price - so eventually the companies also get paid less in the end, everyone loses and the economy shrinks

Arvīds Kokins reposted

Mehdi Hasan

@mehdirhasan.bsky.social

“I’ve heard people dismiss Trump’s mendacity with a shrugging “they all lie,” but we are witnessing a rare, very possibly once-in-a-lifetime political liar.”

our local government recently approved a special law for underage investment accounts the trick is - you can't take the money out without a court order banks were involved in writing the law, as the ministry of finance admitted I'm not sure how to feel about all that

frankly most adults shouldn't touch anything more complicated than an index fund, let alone kids given what the world's like these days, even index funds are basically gambling now, since one orange dude can randomly start wars and screw up the economy of the whole world

I really want to say that this is it - they can't possibly go any further than that but finance is like binary with just two foundational elements (betting and lending) one can chain them together in infinite ways we'll probably have "just in case you have a grandchild" investment accounts soon

they avoided the obvious traps by disallowing the use of leverage (borrowing) however other than that, there seem to be no restrictions on investing on individual stocks or forex so the kids can still lose all the money, but only their own this is extremely bad - they're letting kids gamble

all things considered, this reads to me like an extremely cynical move that will create a new generation of people with a gambling addiction but with a few "concessions" thrown to make it seem like they care about making a balanced law (but really they're just avoiding losses by disallowing loans)

on one hand, it's good to have protection against parents reaching into the child's savings and while the whole shitty system exists, it makes sense to "invest" the money at the same time, it's one more step towards inequality, and more exit liquidity for VCs/institutional investors

futurism.comHow Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per MonthBrown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.

unsurprisingly, the use case for "AI" is spam my old idea should come in handy if any government wants to implement it: bsky.app/profile/arch... alternatively, I propose the death penalty for extreme cases of spam

jon christian@jonchristian.net

NEW: We spent months investigating a little-known media startup called Brown Brothers Media, which buys legit news sites and turns them into AI-powered zombie content farms What blew my mind was its traffic -- it appears to be getting more readers than NPR or CBS News futurism.com/artificial-i...

at the end of the day, Carney is just another brainrotted neolib who thinks that privatization is the answer to every problem "private investment" = a part of the revenue is given to the ultra rich people and the banks I hope the people over there deservedly grind his ass into dust for this move

Rachel Gilmore@rachelgilmore.bsky.social

Well, it happened: Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans to open up Canada’s four largest airports to private investment. So....privatization. That's not the only thing he pledged to a room of obnoxiously rich people. I talked to economists and a top labour leader to break this down:

14 Sept

once again xitter thinks I'm "not human" or something wants to read my palms (both of them for some reason) for "verification" specifically gloves don't work, bending some fingers doesn't work either has to be with all the fingerprints 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 totally not suspicious at all

I also tried the palm reading thing again but with covering my fingerprints this time it kind of worked but seems broken in many ways - the picture is too zoomed in, and somehow too dark - and when it seemed like I validated the left hand and switched to the right, it switched back soon after lol

16 Sept

and ultimately it often didn't detect my palm at all, was quite laggy, and the time limit (for both hands lumped together!) ended after like 20-30 seconds nowhere near enough to try to get the stupid thing to work the other (fingerprint sensor) thing was at least OS-based so doesn't leak data

in case my left hand ends up suspiciously at some database or even crime scene, this could be why lol I also don't see how this solution (as seemingly the only option) would work with e.g. veterans of a sawmill, not to mention a war xitter employees seem unencumbered by thoughts