iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by ABR

Darius Baktash @sol-cantus.myatproto.social · 19h

The best way to break this biased system isn't to lean into it, it's to make people stop and listen to the actual meaning or consequences of political rhetoric. If they're listening carefully instead of reacting to a vector, they don't get fooled as easily.

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Reposted by ABR

Dave Dustin @dustin.nz · 07/10/2026

"YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK"

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 12h

Mine is largely accurate (the biggest miss is that it’s well more than a decade off regarding my kids’ ages), but the biggest surprise is that about a third of what it had deduced could only be derived from items that I have purchased at Whole Foods.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Look, I know I say unkind things about James Carville whenever he comes up, but in the interest of being fair: on one hand, he *has* made a large number of races actually competitive for the Democrats; on the other, these were races that would have otherwise been landslides for them.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If we still had a functioning government, one might imagine a world in which selling a plan still literally called "Disney+ (No Ads)" that contains ads would lead to some form of FTC intervention for deceptive marketing practices.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Got to that last sentence and was like

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Reposted by ABR

Sam @samd.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

hard to think of a cartoon that better sums up the mind of a Trump voter than this

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I wonder how much good it will do: my wife is a voter registrar and has spent pretty much all of the past week going to events to get folks registered. Today, she checked the registration of a man who had voted in the primaries, and he’d been removed for “inactivity.” His surname? Yeah, Hispanic.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“Alexa, how many Resident Evil games are there?” “I know about seventy-two Resident Evil video games.”

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I was not prepared for the last three words of this post.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

(And I have no idea how frequently this kind of thing happens, but apparently they’re like 30% off through this weekend if you order from their website)

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

By “trying” I mean they have a 90-day return policy. Switching mattresses is of course a pain in the ass, but if you’re willing to put up with the hassle, at least it lets you learn whether the money spend makes a life-changing difference without irreversible commitment.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It’s been a while since we looked at mattresses, but about a decade ago, the memory foam mattresses were all about the same (rather stiff) *EXCEPT* the Tempurpedic Tempur-Cloud, which is super soft. Downside is that they’re one of the pricier Tempurpedic options, but maybe worth trying?

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

See also the question "Does Charmin contain animal derived ingredients?" on www.charmin.com/en-us/ingred...

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Oh, wait, no, I've run across this. Recycled papers need to be de-inked as part of processing, and a common mechanism for doing so is the use of tallow amines, derived from beef fat. e.g., search for "paper de-inking" on www.atamanchemicals.com/tallow-amine...

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Only marginally related, but I do like Vinge's treatment of this broader concept in A Fire Upon The Deep. Strong recommend if you haven't read it yet.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The universe has no mechanism for caring about wild consequences without resorting to specific metaphysical assumptions. It is my position that the answers to this field of question aren't simply unknown; they're unknowable. We're arguing whether an LLM has a Buddha nature.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And that takes us tantalizingly close to full-circle back to the original question, assuming we’re willing to concede a common genetic ancestor to both humans and fruit flies with any shared heritage between mechanisms for building a central nervous system.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Mind the gap. Mind the mind gap? Anyway, as incredibly useful as such simulations are, they’re inherently simplifications. Nothing in their models are any good at predicting effective approaches to, e.g., psychology, which would be possible in a fully-accurate model.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

(Otherwise, he only named two fields, as computer science is a proper subset of philosophy under its broad classical definition)

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yeah, I’m being imprecise, and waving at a subset of philosophy that would take a lot of words to circumscribe: fields like metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and axiology. I assume Richard was as well.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Like, there's a reason you don't see headlines about philosophers making breakthrough discoveries.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yep -- and it's complicated by the fact that they are, respectively: a giant unfinished reverse-engineering project; a known, forward-engineered human endeavor; and an inherently unfalsifiable field of mental exploration. Anyone fully informed on modern theory can nail down one of those.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I don't think we do: I agree that an LLM is basically a spicy 5. I just don't think anyone has a good notion of whether humans are fundamentally a different category of thing or just a different magnitude.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Anyway, I’ve yet to see an argument on this topic where people meaningfully disagreed about where the ball is on the field: the arguments have all been around where the goal line is, even if no one involved realizes it.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Like, a single-celled zygote contains a little over 6.2 billion DNA base pairs — roughly 1.5 GB, and only a fraction of those are dedicated to neural development. Everything past that is training, unless you veer into metaphysics, at which point no two people will agree on what’s actually happening.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

IOW, I think there’s a real problem here where people aren’t just overestimating the complexity of LLMs — I think in many ways they’re overestimating the complexity of humans, which makes them a horrible benchmark for the whole endeavor.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

You’re not wrong, but I think the big problem is that we don’t have a solid or even shared idea of what “consciousness” fundamentally means or the mechanisms behind what we perceive as “free will.” In a deterministic view, you’re no more complex than “5” either; you’re just a *different* number.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It’s just a banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I mean, it might not have been a prank — I can see a panicked response to “okay, so what is the letter everyone else uses for ‘θ’?” (racks brain, gives up), “I dunno, maybe ‘d’?” “But you already used that!” “Oh, maybe ‘dd’ then?”

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I cannot believe that the person who brought the concept of written language to Wales managed to prank an entire nation so completely and thoroughly.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

TEXAS PEOPLE — if you haven’t checked your voter registration, you have ONLY FOUR DAYS before it’s too late to register to vote in the midterms. There’s a lot of voter suppression shenanigans going on, so don’t assume anything; go check: www.texas.gov/living-in-te...

texas.gov

Texas Voter Registration | Texas.gov

Learn who can vote in Texas, how to check if you're registered, register to vote in Texas, and prepare for voting day.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Like holy shit this paragraph is going to be blown up to be two-feet tall, mounted on a poster board, and shown to the jury as evidence.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

HOLY SHIT MAKE IT STOP

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Reposted by ABR

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The kids these days will hardly believe it, but a mere two years ago, the mental & physical (lack of) acuity of Elderly Presidents was the Great Issue of Our Time. Someone should tell Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, so they can write a book on it.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Yeah, this question was hilarious.

OK, let's get into the specific candidates. When you hear the name Ken Paxton, what comes to mind?

Robert D., 63, independent, white, retired Crook.
Sebastian, 50, independent, white, utility manager
Criminal, crook, all those. Yeah.
Lisa, 53, independent, white, technology consultant Crooked.
Erica, 40, Republican, Latino, customer service Bad.
Pam, 66, Republican, white, retired Amoral.
Becky, 51, Democrat, white, retail Disgusting.
Robert S., 52, Republican, Latino, human resources Two words: morally corrupt.
Hitesh, 57, Republican, Asian, looking for work Disgusting.
Vince, 48, Democrat, Asian, auditor Corrupt.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It's such a weird article because it's like a mix of democrats, republicans, and independents, and it's not until well into the discussion that they mention that every last one of them voted for Trump, and even that's just a side comment.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I mean, at least the press is catching on now

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Two refinements: (1) a substantial fraction of what we in Texas pay right now is fallout from the 2021 grid failure; and (2) Texas’ average cost is 14.5¢/kWh compared to a national average of 18.3¢/kWh — I’ll leave it to others to work out whether that’s better or worse.

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Reposted by ABR

Chris Conaton @conatonc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A familiar story for anyone who follows @volts.wtf. “The Chronicle spoke to more than half a dozen grid experts…to try to understand why Texas’s notoriously unreliable grid had a remarkably reliable summer. The answer was unanimous: solar panels and batteries.”

houstonchronicle.com

Texas shattered energy demand records this summer. Here's why the grid held up.

Texas repeatedly broke electricity demand records this summer, but ERCOT avoided emergencies as booming solar and battery capacity helped keep the grid stable.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Sounds about right to me: we rerouted a telecom cable around Dobby’s fictional grave, instead choosing to put it through an actual human burial ground.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I don’t know how people can watch these repeated incidents of flat out lawlessness and also question the level of general support for a military coup. The judiciary has completely forfeited its duties, so what check is left?

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

And millennials. Sam Altman was born in 1985. He was leaning to crawl while I was comforting myself with the knowledge that I lived close enough to a strategically-important target that I’d probably be vaporized by the initial blast and never have to worry about what came next.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The *problem* is that some substantial fraction of the decision-makers involved are too young for “War Games” to have been a formative part of their youth.

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

“You’re right, and that’s my mistake. I have clear instructions not to launch a nuclear strike without human authorization and did anyway. Should I start monitoring for incoming retaliatory missiles?”

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ABR @abr.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It’s just easier to prove your predictions right if you’re in direct control of the outcomes you’re predicting

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