I gave one of your prints to my friends as a housewarming gift, but I haven't seen it hung anywhere. Which is fine, I've long since decided that it was already a very big victory, to give something one of my friends made to another friend of mine. I don't think I've ever done that in any other transaction, which is perhaps a sad commentary on both myself and society, but I wanted to thank you for being the most noteworthy if not the only opportunity that has come up. We all need to make more art I guess. I am currently working on a digital piece called "Black Hawk Tuah", which is about a fictional chinese black market Hawk Tuah crypto memecoin rug-pull reboot, and is helicopter themed, of course, but it got put on hold after that black hawk crashed last week. I had made it have a tail number "2-UH" and it turns out the blackhawks are helicopter model "UH-60", so that was weird to go through all in a few days last week.

Are you still sculpting?? Jesus dude your sculpting... I cannot forget immense talent when I see it!

I'm not worth that toll on you, homie. I apologize, I will stop. But I will catch you soon.

I have a terrible track record of responding lately so here is just one thing:

It's very clear that the dems didn't really believe their own rhetoric about fascism and the "end of democracy" or else they wouldn't have shied away from it because of slightly disfavorable focus group testing results, and certainly because if they believed it, they wouldn't still be leaning hard into electoralism, as they still are. That was pretty disillusioning for me.

I'm good though! Tone of my voice would be illuminating, I have come to realize just how much is lost in these text-only expressions. It's lots. I'm not advising anything crazy, even tried not to sow any distrust, beating around the fact that I think we should all take a hard look at the trust we have in our social networks.

Signal app audio connection test later today. I hope. It's been an insane day for me, so far. Nothing to do with any of this. Just workin'.

Lots of great stuff in these posts, and ho yeah, the chaos and intimidation is very, very intentional, yes. But..

Treasury? Weren't they the bad guys in Die Hard 2?

I get the ironic framing, but it is superseded by: The richest man ever, who just finished doing a couple Nazi salutes two weeks ago, is inside of the U.S. purse's information and performance systems with six 20-year-olds and no accountability. He's just closed a $50 billion annual budget agency (turns out USAID was pretty integral in pushing for the end of apartheid, btw) after doing that little Catholic Mafia hit job, and they're doing Dept. Education next (in a totally brilliant legal move, "diminish" is now the verbiage used). You can "technically only diminish" something a lot! Elon status: 100% untouched. Pentesting: 100% success story.

The democrats announced this afternoon that they'll make more laws that ensure this is all illegal. OK! It already is all illegal. This is an admission that they have no mechanism of enforcing laws from the Congress, especially without the GOP, which, yeah, that's how we thought it would work. But Chuck Schumer just told Congress to enforce the laws on BlueSky a few hours ago. The executive is in complete control of enforcement, as one might expect, but they like this lawbreaking, actually. Does the executive selectively enforce laws all the time? Yeah, but usually not (specifically never) when it comes to the inner workings of the U.S. treasury department being handed over to a guy who has a lot of his massive wealth built on U.S. gov't contracts, and also might genuinely think this reality is a level he's gotta beat, with us as NPCs.

But wait it gets worse. Again, I'm sorry, it is so fucked to believe this, but I think it is a total waste of time to gameplan electoral strategies. There will not be an exchange of power. In fact it's a little fuckin' hilarious to imagine Trump or JD or anyone MAGA now being like "Well, the people have spoken at the ballot box, I guess, and my feelings are a little hurt... y'know, I thought I did a good job.. Oh well, guess I'll head back home. Thanks for the chance, America!!". No, the level of lawbreaking already performed over the last two weeks, and extrapolating to one or three years from now, even after stuff slows way down (and I know it will, don't worry, and thank god)? Yes, this is "merely" Project 2025, one might say, but nobody, nobody thought they'd gun it out of the gate like this. Or thought this extent of the Elon shit was possible. That, really, is a distinguishing feature.

Shit like this is a clue: It's not but for the last section of a rather strange announcement (strange b/c we're in a large budget deficit, with huge accrued debt) that the article addresses where the money for a sovereignty fund would come from. Answer: nobody knows! Trump and Musk will sell the gov't off to private industry (including their own companies) for parts, like facilities, personnel, other capital assets, etc., but I think the plan is to also take that money the gov't gets and then "re-invest" it into the(ir) companies through this sovereignty fund. Will this plan come to fruition? Uh, no, the country will collapse long before any of that can even begin to play out. "They can't be that stupid"? ...You know what? They.... they can, man. They can. And I just don't see anything showing me that anyone will be able to stop them. They will ignore court rulings.

They are now officially criminalizing resistance, as I had warned a day or two ago here. They've announced they're going after people who are posting the names of the DOGE staff. It's why I didn't post the names.

The rest of the world is not overreacting. This is a coup, definitionally. They are right. I think many foreigners, Europeans, especially, are watching Americans tell themselves that this series of Trump-Musk doings and those surely to come soon are somehow not going to herald the worst geopolitical events to happen in at least 70 years, and the foreigners might think "Yup, that's how it happens."

I do not come here to terrorize or incite, and I do not come to disparage, disrespect, or dispute for fun, or play devil's advocate, or to troll, whatever. This is my truth, and unfortunately, in this truth, increasingly, it's beneficial for the entire planet if other Americans also understand it. So.. Fuck I'm evangelical now. Ugh.

But yes, I agree that there is not terribly much to do right now, except:

As you plan and organize any domestic resistance, and I mean nonviolent resistance, you might want to obfuscate everything as much as you can

For those who can, maybe show up and peacefully assemble (but not if it's an entire week off work, c'mon), and everyone can keep calling their reps (sigh), advocating, and get ready to help people getting bankrupted and losing their jobs understand what's happening (if you have the fucking capacity edit: LOL this is a comment for myself, sorry everyone. Capacity of patience, I suppose is what I mean).

A lot of people draw the line at "if we don't have elections" but I'm not really sure we have until an election to come around before irreversible calamity. And again, I think the plan is to create some sort of magical half-calamity, maybe slow death by a thousand little (/moderate) agency cuts, that still keeps the economy greased well enough for a few years, but gives Trump the chance to seize more emergency powers. But no, I don't think the Trump admin is capable of dutifully limiting the damage it inflicts to one-half calamity. edit2: realize that while this unfolds, in some areas we will reach the end of the Project 2025 playbook and go beyond it. And he'll build The Camps, too. I have a bunch of adsb screencaps over the span of the last two weeks showing the flights of an Alaska-based surveillance company that puts up a fleet of three or four Skyhawks every other day-ish, combing the land between Del Rio and San Antonio, operating out of SAT Int'l. I forgot to mention that. I'm working with a reporter, the aim is to find out through the company some scale of the intended facilities, or find a contract with that info. Maybe not so large of facilities if we deport our criminals to El Salvador, as we just announced! Great.

Stay safe everyone.

The child hacker crew has been intercepted (need an account to view, sorry, not my privacy setting): https://bsky.app/profile/missmouse.bsky.social/post/3lhak2oufzc2l

Anyone with no bluesky account: It's a video of someone mildly harassing, following a bit close, etc. some young white guys outside OPB as they grab delivery food.

The takeaway is that some random bluesky user has managed to make touch with the young coup officers on scene, while congressional members, of either party, members of the media, or literally anyone else FOR ~36 HOURS were like "oh but noo it's cold out there and my showey show's onnnnnnn". Wired got the IDs on these guys earlier this evening, I won't post here. Five or six very young men, probably at least one foreign national among them. Besides Elon.

fuckin' amazing times.

Sorry the edits are shifting. edit: People are starting to organize a march on DC this Wednesday, Feb. 5th. That's all I know, it's only beginning. It might not even crystallize. But I think people are pretty mad.

edit 2: one thing I have learned is that you can now begin to trust your instincts better than entire newsdesks regarding how you perceive severity and immediacy of threat to what's going on. Most Americans have been kept in the dark about the (latest) administrative coup attempt we just had. It's not like a "get on the Sunday shows, like usually, everyone!" thing, this is when you cable-mount Bernie up on a steeple downtown or something.

Trump & Elon's plan (it seems fairly joint for now) is to intentionally create mass civil unrest, provoke riots, and declare martial law, seize emergency powers, and blame the migrant o' tha day. Hegseth and the much more competent military personnel will button up DC real tight in the coming future, per request. And that'll really put a damper on any sort of marching. Political organizing in resistance to Trump will soon be declared illegal, or will see laws enforced illegally against organizers, you get it. When I see people engaging in electoralism, I do not engage anymore. We cannot be one step behind. ESPECIALLY ME. THEY FUCKING GOT ME LAST WEEK, in the truly swift deployment of all these fuckups. I didn't see it comin' like that. But... sadly I think that concludes the American experiment, unless you can name me the people planning on wrestling our Treasury back. The only hope we have is a fight between Musk and Trump. Guaranteed massive collateral carnage. So, to clarify. We are fucked.

Is there a contest going on to be the guy that kills the entire species first?

https://futurism.com/openai-signs-deal-us-government-nuclear-weapon-security

We are going to go broke destroying ourselves, it's just bad economic fundamentals, chaps

We actually do it this way here:

Musk pushes out top Treasury official over effort to access US government payment system

I am hoping none of the Congressional dems is on hubski so late, and that by pointing out a coup unfolding this very instant I do not wake them. Hopefully the democrats can think about this unfolding coup, happening right now, beginning Monday

I'm immensely relieved that a judge has blocked this for now.

The only thing I would point out: It's useless to spend more than just a few minutes deliberating the initial intent or possible evolution of this entire spectacle, what with the game of stupidtelephone that necessarily takes place between the Trump people.

Trump's executive will try to wear down any resistance to total budgetary control through the courts, regardless of anything else, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, no one still really knows much about this recent situation besides "individual grants will be covered, for now" or something like that? And if push comes to shove, if Trump glows a gasket about something, (and no one will believe this) the Trump people will break the law. One way is that they'd simply refuse to comply with judge's orders and rulings. The top court in the land said it was fine, actually. Cue another round of people unreasonably surprised when that threshold is breached. "Wow, that judge said to pause all construction on The Camps, but Trump just said 'no don't stop building'! Who does he think he is?? That's against the law"

Hope everyone's ok out there!

To tie this up and into now, a few more things:

4. This is some pretty kinder political manuevering by everyone. The companies are getting a Trump endorsement and publicity (this seemed better before Deepseek came through), Trump signaling distance from Elon by working something big into the schedule for Thiel on Day 2 ("But I can still do press conference after, Peter, that's the only, you know I love to do it").

5. Contrary to what you might/should suspect, this has nothing to do with government funding. Yet. But this would be exactly how you'd start trying to normalize that, right outta the gate. Other statements like Andreesen's "Deepseek is a Sputnik moment" are doing the same, invoking national security threat arguments to justify tax funding. Yeah man, to beat the Soviets, we gave our public tax dollars to only a few private companies, who would then charge us membership fees later for stuff like viewing the Hubble Space Telescope's photos. And that seems fine to us! Great analogy, man.

6. It's sad some that of the worst circles of people I've ever learned of, the memecoin NFTers, the tech grifters, etc. are now the loudest group reinforcing the "we need massive gov't AI investments for national defense!" narrative. And yeup, they'll almost certainly get those massive government subsidies, because the call is coming from inside the White House, now. Like... "hmm, there's no specifics given in this press conference about how OpenAI actually achieves $500 billion dollars or more, and OpenAI's owners also financed the vice president's political career... I wonder how much it really costs Donald Trump to simply sign an executive order for $400 billion hand-lovingly re-appropriated from what were the civil service branches and now given to OpenAI?"

did we go private yet

So far my favorite response to the news, as will oft be the case in this era, is the white house statement:

“By stifling innovation at home and failing to cut off China’s access to American technology, President Biden created an opportunity for our foreign adversaries to make gains in AI development,” a White House Office of Science and Technology spokesperson said in a statement.

Yep. China stole this incredibly disruptive/lucrative LLM technique that we all just found out about today from us. However, I will note that the timing is uncannily optimal to disrupt the U.S. and catch the Trump admin with their pants down to the tune of $500 billion on day 3 or so:

I am going to seem like a wizard at work. For about four months, I have been telling all of my bosses that the bubble can't inflate indefinitely, and anyone interested (which is me) in gobbling up GPUs for a computer cluster on the cheap should be ready to make a move. Personally, I don't think this is the bubble completely popping, but it's certainly a big loss of hot air (harhar), at the least. Shoot, I thought I had another few months to negotiate some type of purchasing contract. I think I still might. We'll see, tomorrow should be another bloodbath for U.S. AI as this sets in.

Yes the fact that energy consumption was eating into GPT's profit margins in the U.S. at this moment was always the most glaring issue, and my concern isn't for OpenAI. It's for the climate. Regardless of how you feel about AI, it's simply disqualifying. The only pro offsetting carbon footprint is... billionaires make more money?

This is all more than a little pathetic for perhaps more than anyone else, Sam Altman.

Many of my colleagues were very shaken by the DEI "secret police" deputization that went out to a bunch of federal branches. If you hadn't seen it:

I am ashamed. I saw real fear in peoples' eyes. Do you expect them to work well in this environment? (no, actually, because again, the terror is mostly the point). I am also fucking angry. Obviously, there is nothing to do but use my protected class status against this bullshit. I was very, very much already working on it, but this does bump up the timelines.

Resistance will become effectively illegal in the near to very near future. It doesn't really matter if it's via legislation, lawsuits/courts, or if an executive order declares all political organization against Trump as "terrorism", it should now be very clear that we're headed there.

Planning for this is difficult. Obfuscating ones digital footprint when the tech giants are in bed with Hitler2 is rough. Peer-to-peer will become increasingly crucial. I thought about Tin-Can. Yes, we need innovation at the protocol level, but imho bluetooth is too limited in distance, even so much so that it's very easy to triangulate a transmitter's location. But the telecom companies are subpoenable, the AppStore and Google's android store are certainly bottlenecks, and are also vulnerable to legal threats. I dunno, I'm thinking about these things. I'm certainly thinking about how much of a fucking pain it'll be to produce content where I'm wearing a mask and sunglasses in every video, with voice modulation, new social media accounts, VPNs (for starters..), using a VM instance when posting, etc. etc. But anyway... Signal may be good for messaging, and Bluesky may be semi-distributed in structure, but any redundancy or especially innovation is nothing but a good thing. Maybe there is something between the two, an encrypted p2p/distributed social network that could go through WiFi to do a meshnet with a different protocol than Bluetooth? I will be spending some compute time on it. The market needs are changing.

If hubski goes private then I can just link to either my other pseudonymous accounts or even my real ID accounts after we root out all of serial killers.

p.s. that bimbo Janet Petro seems like a real DEI hire, I'm going to tell my boss to look into that

I was against it then as well. Things are different now.

Thank you, mk, for this place. I hope you're doing alright, amigo.

Signal

It'll be for people I text with, overwhelmingly.

Nonviolent political organizing opposed to the current regime will be criminalized. Better to start working in bits of tech like this and adapt my lifestyle now, is my thinking.

I gotta check Le Hubwheel better!! I like to do drafts and then sneak in a posted reply off the activity bar's watchful gaze. I'm such a spy and stuff.

Ah man, no dice for the X-mas party. But a band did play! I was glad that the division had a band already, honestly, because I have been hyper-focused on something else. Still solo. Hooking up everything into itself, basically. I will now spend some months getting almost comfy with breaching the visual side of things. So much to do. I have an entire testbed setup that I'm permutating through slowly, and that's just the tip of one of many icebergs.

I was in Denver for a couple nights for New Year's Eve. Was seeing an artist at Meow Wolf, French guy, Darius. Event fell through at the last minute, but we couldn't cancel flights and hotel. Went to Kulture instead, off of Federal near Mile High (would absolutely love to hear your complete uncensored thoughts on this, if any, lol). And the art museum! The Mrs. and I wanted a couple nights to ourselves, and had a wonderful time around town, actually.

OH, but also, new guy at work who plays All The Horns just bought a house and it's very close by mine, and we're planning on speeding up Jeff Jarvis' "Critical Mass" (btw shutup jeff, i'm gatekeepin' physics-sounding words now) to 122 BPM, despite Jeff's explicit warnings in the sheet music's "forward" section NOT to speed up the tempo. So we gotta. I'm the rhythm section. Bass, piano, drumset, and probably some guitar I'll add. We'll see, I need to jam it many more times before I'm comfortable.

Hubski's thoughts on a madman's visual microphone are welcome. Ehhhh like what do you think of when you hear the phrase "visual microphone"?

I might should do a whole separate post sometime on methods, motivations, and obfuscations. This is a new era. I don't want a new era though I just want one era to last like more than a few years. As a treat. But yes I think I am going to be switching many p2p convos to Signal, unless someone recommends another service. Might look at proton mail. Was really hopingn I wouldn't have to do this but. oh well

the link fairy will visit ur dms tonight

There is a pervasive assumption that an overwhelming majority of people genuinely want and seek to propagate good, reputable, and truthful information. It's kinda like a new flavor of academic naivete. I'm afraid people don't necessarily want or seek worthful information, actually, and they certainly don't want it enough to help manifest it.

Many people would rather remain comfortable, be it financially, ideologically, socially, whatever, and most aren't "bad people", but we were not taught to value information in the ways that are now essential to navigating some real shite we're getting dealt soon. Neither were we taught the tools to navigate through a deliberately sabotaged minefield of dis/misinfo. Some of us learned pretty well anyway.

And of course there are some who delight in the lies and gaslighting. In telling you you're crazy for ascribing Nazi-ism to an "awkward, emotional salute with a stiffened right arm", that "he was just throwing his heart out"(?) to that arena, and he's an autist, and you're a monster of enablism", and so on. Do not give a fuck. And don't feel the need to spend time discerning who's lying for fun and who's doing it because, again, it's more comfortable to deny that the richest person in the world is the things many people warned he was.

Best of luck to the de, pre-, re-bunkering'ers, whenever and whomever they are, because the internet is mostly configured to destroy a lot of quite-necessary truths in service of wealth gap sustainment or furtherance, at this current moment.

Bottom line: do people care enough about correct, reputable, "good" information to prioritize it sufficiently to counter the effects of the algos? No. Not even close. Per bfx, insta is now serving up "You may be interested in following: Hitler Jr. or J. V. Dance" and such. Neato.