The darkness persists and so do I.

Cat sleeping with crossed paws on my wife’s hand.

If I knew this was on the table I would have moved to NY just to vote.

While we’re at it pin minimum wage to a value relative to median rent in the area. Make landlords and businesses owners fight it out.

Any wealth greater than 1000x the median household will be taxed at 75%. Encourage people to want everyone to have more.

Momo asking pets

Momo

Adorable cat curled up like a pretzel

Reahi

I’m reminded of Law 20, from Akin’s laws of spacecraft design. “A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.”

Where design is a book cover.

www.ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/201...

I’ve had a couple coworkers bring him up today in a way that makes me look at them with side eye, thinking “huh, didn’t peg you as a fascist”.

I feel for his children, but he’s a victim of a world he helped create.

Me too. The Franz Ferdinand of the 21st century.

I’m sure there has to be a worse CI/CD system than bitbucket pipelines, I just haven’t found it yet.

Your number for self made is correct, all it means is that they didn’t inherit their billions. However it does not mean that they started with nothing.

I’m not sure why you really want there to be no luck (birth, circumstances, timing) in the process… but you certainly seem to.

For the average person without substantial initial wealth, connections, or other advantages, both outcomes are extremely unlikely - though building substantial (non-billionaire) wealth through consistent saving and investing has much better odds.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

While the raw statistical comparison suggests roughly 20-40 times more likely to become a billionaire than win Powerball, this is misleading. For most people starting from average circumstances, the practical likelihood of becoming a billionaire approaches lottery-level improbability.

Major lottery jackpots:
- Powerball: ~1 in 292 million
- Mega Millions: ~1 in 302 million
- EuroMillions: ~1 in 140 million

- Odds: roughly 1 in 7-15 million globally
- There are 2,600-3,000 billionaires worldwide out of 8 billion people
- Varies dramatically by circumstances - if born into wealth, have advanced education, live in certain countries, or work in high-growth sectors like tech, odds improve significantly

Luck being a part of their success doesn’t take away from their hard work and ingenuity, but most people are more likely to win the lottery than to become a billionaire by building a business.

There are obviously counter examples, but most billionaires, even “self-made” ones aren’t from humble beginnings. Other counter examples include Oprah Winfrey and Howard Schultz …. Most billionaires will happily admit at the very least to some level of right place right time luck.

While I’m certain he would have been a great success on his own, he started out in a wealthy family, got a great education and his family invested 250k in Amazon when it started. He was also lucky enough to be born at the right time to take advantage of the birth of the internet.

A way to develop expertise and automation in the logistics and warehouse space. Books were the easiest product to start with, due to size and uniformity, but overall the disruption was in logistics not online sales. That said not everyone has the same opportunities as Bezos.

Bezos is clearly brilliant, and ruthless. Arguably the book store was his second best decision, the best was his API mandate, which ended up creating the way for AWS, which is actually where Amazon a lot of its money, which also funded the store for a long time. The store was alway…

You’re missing the step where they start with a wealthy family who invests in their company, and whose contacts provide them with initial employee’s who make the business a success. I’m not saying that Bezzos and others didn’t have good ideas or create value, just that without startup capital.. 🤷‍♂️

No one in history has ever considered that possibility.

Millionaires are often made by hard work, billionaires are made by luck mostly.

Help settle a debate between me and my sister: if you are American, did you learn about Crispus Attucks in school?

I did not. I learned about him on Bluesky.

Hunger Games, squid game, Civil War (2024), V for Vendetta.

I’d argue pretty strongly that being a Christian and believing in Christianity are separate things. My mother is a good example of this, always been a believer, sings in the Choir at her local church, but doesn’t stay for the sermon, because the politics is so different from the teachings.

My most recent commissions

#pixelart #commission #vgen

I also cannot stop watching.

So far I’m under the impression that llms are just pretty bad at rust. My experience with go and python are much better than my brief pass at writing something in rust.

I have not spent the last two years of my life fighting like fuck against these bullshit draconian censorship laws while being called a shill for Big Tech and accused of wanting to harm children for you, who just discovered the issue, to insist that Someone Will Save You.