vinnie

designer // prev @krakenfx @ribbonfinance

[The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦 @Rob_ThaBuilder]

Banksy art doesnt hit at all anymore, because liberal positions arent radical and subversive like they were when he started, they've become the Establishment.

Theres nothing remotely cool about art whose messaging reflects the official positions of Government, Corporate HR departments, mainstream media, academia, and every other mainstream institutional pillar of society.

This is like a group of hard-core activists marching down the street, clenched fists in the air chanting "Support the Power!"

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

i genuinely think everyone who has “studied” TBPN fundamentally misunderstands what made the show special and are destined to nuke capital chasing it.

[yasuko @Y_Grrrr]

Thom Yorke | Live at Sydney Opera House https://t.co/HA3RbPVoxN

[vinnie @vinnie_io]

RT @zhetto64: 海外ニキのツイートが沢山流入してきたおかげで一気に知見が広がった結果、めちゃくちゃMAX4LIVEとTouch Designerの理解が進んだ。

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when software had a soul

there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.

the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.

software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.

the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.

nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.

somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.

A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.

and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.

now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.

which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.

when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.

this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.

here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.

AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.

the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.

if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.

that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

[vinnie @vinnie_io]

@dApp_boi this is sick!

[Tom Schmidt ＞|＜ @tomhschmidt]

okreleaseanagenticcodingclinowmakeasillybotlibrarygoviralnowgomakeveryonebuymacminisnowmaketheothermodelreallygoodnowmakeitfastermakeitevenfasternowmakeaschizoessaygethundredmillionviewsnmakethechinesemodelsjustasgoodnowmakeclavgotothemiladyravenowreleasethechinesevideomodelnow

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

https://t.co/G7GNgKIdLx

[Balaji @balajis]

WHO LOST CANADA?
It was obvious that China/Canada would happen. Here's how it happened, and what may happen next.

(1) First, in early 2025 it looked like Canadian conservative Pierre Poilievre was a straight shot to win Canada. Instead, all the MAGA posts about annexing Canada undercut Pierre, boosted left nationalism, and turned what looked like a sure thing into an epic defeat. The result was Mark Carney:

(2) Carney is on the left but is far more intelligent than his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. He's also the former governor of the Bank of Canada, and understands that the G7 (including Canada) is in the midst of sovereign debt crisis. And the Canadian dollar is going the way of the US dollar, which is to say that it's going to zero. Canada needs access to hard goods and will trade natural resources to get that. Hence, China. Carney's Canada may become a sort of North American Russia, trading oil and lumber to China for cars and electronics.

(3) Who lost Canada? The fundamental reason this happened is that MAGA ironically doesn't understand its own self-interest. Even the term "America First" is misconceived, because it groups a Blue American like Elizabeth Warren together with a Red American like JD Vance...when in reality the Red American and the Red Canadian (like Pierre Poilievre) have much more in common. All the "joke" posts on annexing Canada managed to needlessly put Red Americans at odds not just with Blue Americans and Blue Canadians, but also with Red Canadians.

The Greenland thing will have exactly the same effect, as it'll end up pushing Western Europeans to China. That's actually why most ultranationalist movements fail: they're just so shortsightedly tribal that they're terrible at building coalitions.

(4) Anyway, while Carney is the first to be this explicit about aligning with China, expect many other Western leftist leaders (like Newsom and Walz) to line up with China over time. The reason is that while Democrats really did fight Communists from ~2021-2024 over the question of who'd run the world's most powerful state, Democrats lost. All the chip sanctions and isolation tactics that somewhat worked on Russia, and frankly might have worked on almost any other country, just didn't work on China...because China had enough internal economic scale to essentially be their own autarkic civilization, and build whatever they needed.

(5) So: the anti-China Biden Democrats have been replaced by the China-curious Newsom Democrats. And now the China-aligned Carney Canadians. With Carney making the first move, you should expect many more blue state Democrats to align with China, particularly those on the West Coast like Newsom.

(6) It's simple coalitional math. Democrats are the ingroup, Republicans are the outgroup, and Communists are the fargroup. So, for Democrats: the enemy of their Republican enemy is their friend. And there is much for them to admire in the Chinese political system. After all, Democrats and Communists both built one-party states:

(7) Newsom in particular is likely the next shoe to drop, because even in 2023 he was reaching out to Xi. He's also spoken in Xinhua (Chinese state media) about becoming China's "long-term, stable, and strong partner." Newsom posts images of himself shaking Xi's hand, while also posting images of Trump in handcuffs. It's clear which President he's more comfortable with:

(8) The California wealth tax is also worth mentioning here. As M. Guimarin correctly pointed out, the net effect of the wealth tax is for blues to drive tech out of the state. That's not an unintended consequence: the purpose of the wealth tax was to either rob or deport the sole remaining political opposition to Democrats in California, namely technologists.

(Side note: Democrats are historically much better at mass deportations than Republicans, as they take a whole-of-society approach to it, and persist with it over decades, and do it silently and nonviolently. That's how Republicans were pushed out of university faculties, media companies, and California itself. It was once a dark red state, and now it's deep blue.)

(9) Anyway, with the technologists pushed out of California, Newsom's blues can welcome in the Chinese, who won't be subject to the same wealth taxes as they aren't US citizens.

(10) There is also an obvious geostrategic aspect to this: Chinese Canada is a bridge across all the blue states, from the West Coast to the Northeast. So as blue states like Minnesota and California engage in more "soft secession", they can all link up with Canada, and get supplied by China.

Decades ago, this map was made as a joke.
Perhaps it becomes all too real.

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

The sails of the Sydney Opera House have tonight lit up with a Menorah, in message of love and resilience in the wake of the Bondi terror massacre.

Quite a contrast to the mob of hate, who descended there calling for Jewish blood two days after Oct 7 attack.

[TAKEO WATANABE @takeo_watanabe]

昨日は音楽仲間の丸山氏とセッション。
美しいノイズとテクスチャーを意識した日頃とまた違ったスタイルで音を重ねる。
Hikariのカオスシンセサイザーの刺激なノイズとギター、ベースアンビエントとの融合が新鮮なサウンドを生み出してくれた。

[Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA]

Privacy is the only way to keep blockchain infrastructure neutral. Transparent ledgers make validators targets. Blindness protects builders. Base layer privacy is essential.

Watch @valkenburgh lay it all out at Devconnect https://t.co/2PgETJXTw4

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I asked Gemini 3 to make an interactive web page summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics over the past 15 years. Result:

https://t.co/b9LmllwDVz

Pretty cool IMO.

[vinnie @vinnie_io]

@DanielHussey2 lfg

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

"The Debasement Trade" since COVID:

In USD: NDX up 165%, SPX up 102%, Home prices up 56%.

In gold: NDX up 7%, SPX down 18%, Home prices down 37%.

In BTC: NDX down 78%, SPX down 84%, Home prices down 87%.

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

Meta is by far my least favorite big tech company and it’s precisely because they’re willing to ship awful, dystopian stuff like this

No inspiring vision, just endless slop and a desire to “win”

[Sean Maloney @seanny202]

Tricky to call when you’re fighting back tears of happiness. Never seen a game like it before, may never again. #RSAvAUS

[Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer @poetengineer__]

i asked llm to chart my interests from our chat history, gave each a random weight and force, and just watch them drift, and form constellations ✨

[Warp Records @WarpRecords]

Out today - a special repress of @markprtchrd’s ‘Under The Sun’ [WARP244]

Originally released in 2016, ‘Under The Sun’ draws on the sounds and influences genetically coded in Pritchard’s musical DNA; ambient, nu-wave, avant-garde electronics and folk; but reimagines them through an otherworldly filter that cements this release somewhere in the future, rather than the past.

Available on 2xLP black vinyl, CD and digital platforms
→ https://t.co/axzWphdgS6