People forget the last step: once someone skinsuits a cause, they must delegitimize anyone still practicing the real thing. Otherwise the mimicry collapses.

It took just one look at tumblr to see that's not changed. Neither has the median tumblr user. What a cesspit. I remain proud of my small part in helping to kill it as a business.

Using AI to create defensive publications, e.g. "creating prior art under 35 U.S.C. §102" is brilliant. If someone tries to defend with "it's AI slop", that means it's not patentable. Otherwise it is, and now it's been patent spoiled. Either way, the commons wins.

Almost all egalitarians want socialism for everyone else and divine-right monarchy over anything made by their hands and will. Collective for labor, feudal for their creations.

Around 2019, I was required to attend a corporate mandated “diversity” training workshop teaching managers how to look for clues in LinkedIn profiles to guess race, sex, and orientation to prioritize candidates. I remember thinking at the time "how can this be legal?"

The Internet exists because Bell Labs worshipped Erlang. They built X.25 and then got the math completely wrong. Their math said traffic would smooth out—it never did. The failure of their equations gave us TCP/IP. Civilization owes its freedom to Bellhead blindness.

“Once people catch you lying for their own good, they will not believe you even for their own survival.”

The Framers didn’t create the Patent Office because patents were a Good Idea, they created it because patents were corrupt. open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...

"Relational aggression" is gossip, ostracism (including transitive ostracism), and alliance-shifting instead of direct communication. If that seems normal or acceptable to you, you are unfit for leadership of any kind.

Credit default swaps are not banking. They are insurance written by arsonists.

If you can’t turn it into a transformation matrix with logical human-factors contextual inputs, it’s not "design", it’s a fad. I'm tired of fads.

Universities are bringing back bluebook exams. So now they’re grading narrative flow and penmanship. Maybe that’s progress, they stopped teaching and grading reasoning and precision decades ago.

Writing used to prove someone understood something. Journalists spent 35 years proving they don’t, and don’t want to. So now the people paying for text care only that it communicates to readers.

Elites and academics can afford to preach infinite deliberation because someone else pays for their compute. Everyone else uses heuristics because reality bills by the hour.

The fatal mistake of the corporate climber: they think everyone else is optimizing for proximity to power too.

“it’s measurable therefore it works” and “we’re good at it therefore it’s our advantage” are what people inside systems start to say when the feedback loop with reality has collapsed. They sound empirical, but they’re just self-reference faux reason.

Influencers are the dirty loophole in child-protection and advertising law. They let corps market while ignoring COPPA & FTC ad rules.

Caging the Voice open.substack.com/pub/markatwo...

Morality isn’t the enemy of freedom, it’s the accumulated scar tissue of everything that killed every group of people who tried anything else.

Hollywood isn’t capitalism gone wrong; it’s feudal patronage industrialized and finantialized. It doesn’t sell what it makes: it rents access to making. And it's fee is bodies and souls.

One example of MBA-disease: "The people who notice our shortcuts aren’t the ones paying us."

It's not "it's always DNS", is that whatever broke kills DNS first, which then knocks down everything else.

The bounded-rational analogue of the Hippocratic principle: First, do not act on models you cannot internally simulate.

Caring isn’t the same as helping, and helping isn’t the same as knowing how to help.

Any professional domain that relies on verbal rationalization of opaque heuristics is halfway to being systematized already. The remaining half is just waiting for a dataset.

QoS was supposed to prioritize important traffic, but MBAs and finbros always use it to deprioritize unprofitable traffic.

Every profession built on manual reasoning will argue that its subtle judgment can’t be formalized... until the formalization arrives and everyone quietly admits that half the subtlety was just covering for corruption, mistake, ignorance, and error.

When comprehension becomes cheap, much of what passes for “expert interpretation” will look like self-modifying hand assembled software code did in 1960: an impressive solution that shouldn't be done to solve a problem that shouldn’t have existed.

Inherited elites owned the consequences of their rule: their estates, tenants, names, and family reputations. "Merit"ocrats own nothing but their CVs. Dis-establishing inheritance de-coupled power from accountability. This is one of those unhappy things I wish I had not realized.

Lisa Simpson isn’t a parody of smug liberalism: she’s what happens when the writers stopped knowing she was one. Early on, Lisa was the tragic moral voice: right, but insufferable. The joke was that the world didn’t care. 1/2

OpenAI’s current institutional psychology is that of a California liability-optimized risk-averse communications firm masquerading as a research lab.

Prosecutors, like press secretaries and political consultants, occupy a professional class where truth is instrumental, not intrinsic. Their job isn’t to discover truth, it’s to construct a narrative that makes chosen actions appear lawful, moral, and inevitable.

Rust is the C++ of an elegant language that doesn’t exist yet.

If you are a volunteer maintainer of an open source project, you owe nobody a "responsible disclosure" policy. If enterprises and foundations want you to have one, tell them they can pay you.

For obvious reasons, the TRON mythos has been on my mind as of late. And I just had a flash of insight: “The software projection of the humans overindex on their purpose until it becomes their vice.” It’s the entire moral architecture of the mythos in one sentence.

VCstan: the empire where product strategy flows from revenue dashboards, not technical ambition.

If moral seriousness is supposed to belong to literature and philosophy, why was it that when I was an undergrad, the colleges of engineering students had mandatory ethics training, and the colleges of humanities students did not?

DLP/UEBA/CASB systems are rewarded for minimizing incidents, not for maximizing workflow. A perfect security system, from their KPI perspective, is one where nothing dangerous ever happens, which naturally converges toward nothing happening. 1/

When a skilled "master" mocks a technology that multiplies human leverage, it doesn’t elevate his mastery. It marks the point where he’s chosen identity over ability and outcome.

hardware is just software with a really inconvenient build system

Every layer of abstraction eventually leaks. Every metric eventually lies.

Why "the culture industy" tries to overlook Gen-X. We are "bad" media SaaS customers, and are everything that finbros and marketers hate: Low churn tolerance Low brand loyalty High technical literacy High piracy literacy High bullshit detection

Gentoo: obsessed with personal control → breaks standardization. Nix: obsessed with moral purity → breaks collaboration. Debian: obsessed with process orthodoxy → breaks speed. Each community is smart, sincere, and absolutely pointed 90° away from the problem customers pay to have solved.

Classic Cost Disease, Baumol’s original insight: In sectors where productivity doesn’t rise as fast as the rest of the economy, relative costs explode. E.g. a string quartet still takes four people an hour to play Mozart, while a factory makes 100× more widgets per worker.

First Age: The Making (Arts & Crafts → Art Nouveau → Deco) Second Age: The Dominion (Bauhaus → Modernism → International Style) Third Age: The Ruin and Return (Brutalism → Postmodernism → Neo-Modernism → Minimalism) Fourth Age: The New Wild (Parametricism → Ecological / Vernacular revival)

Cost disease is not an economic inevitability; it's a governance design choice. We built an economy optimized for: legal insulation, credentialed mediation, moral theater, & political patronage. Every "ethics board", "ESG framework", & "compliance audit" is another metastasis of the same cellline.

Design trends FINALLY die when there’s no remaining visual sugar to strip away. After glass, flat, neo-flat, and "material" the only thing left is truth: rectangles, labels, actions, and a neutral, mid-value palette.

“Modern” is a self-own masquerading as confidence. It always means “current fashion mistaken for timeless progress.” The moment something calls itself “modern,” its decay clock starts ticking.

Why finbros are stupid: they do not grok "Variance is not risk when downside is bounded and upside is convex."

Firewalls, by ossifying IP, made themselves irrelevant. They forced the collapse into "everything over TLS/443", and now firewall are blind, nothing more than routers with ACLs. The actual control points are identity and application-layer policy, not ports