iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 5h

Moments from today’s Pacific Airshow, ft. The USAF Thunderbirds in their F-16s and Captain Laz Le Tourneau in his F-22.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 02/10/2026

My thoughts that nobody asked for about LLM torture discourse: regardless of what the LLM is or is not experiencing, if you build a system that gets an LLM to act like it's being brutally tortured that says a lot more about you than it does about machine experience.

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 01/10/2026

i also just have to say that pointing at a falling down barn while bragging about how fewer people are coming to america is about the perfect encapsulation of how MAGA believes in making america smaller and weaker

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 01/10/2026

If anyone needs a good cackle I highly encourage you to check out www.morewrong.lol.

Homepage of morewrong.lol. Highlights the most recent post, titled "A Marginal-Utility Case for Stealing My Grandmother's Pain Pills." The teaser text for that post reads "A common objection to taking my grandmother's pain pills is that they are prescribed to her, stored in her home, and intended for her pain. All three observations are true but decision-theoretically incomplete." The post is by expected_value_grandson.
Other posts listed include: "A Bayesian Analysis of Whether my Girlfriend is Mad at Me," "Earning to Give and the Case for my Drinking Problem," and "Gay Son or Thot Daughter: A Decision-Theoretic Argument." Each is accompanied by an apparently AI-generated illustration.

The "About" page of morewrong.lol, describing the life of purported author Gloria Regular. It reads:
Gloria attended Stanford, where she double-majored in Symbolic Systems and Plausible Deniability, with a minor in arbitrage opportunities between ethics review boards. Her senior thesis proposed an app that sold students six-minute assignment extensions at interest rates indexed to their parents’ FICO scores.

She entered Y Combinator with APR Casino, a vibe-coded payday-loan app whose borrowers could gamble their interest rate on a livestreamed roulette wheel. Users who landed on green received one interest-free week; everyone else rolled automatically into a 940% APR “Diamond Hands” repayment plan. The app charged a convenience fee when customers borrowed, repaid, defaulted, opened a push notification, or successfully uninstalled it. The pitch deck described defaults as “high-intent recurring engagement.”

APR Casino later pivoted into Rent-Seeking-as-a-Service: a browser extension that converted cookie banners into same-game parlays, tokenized children’s future screen time, and let landlords short individual tenants’ security deposits. Its only profitable quarter came from Gloria borrowing twelve dollars from the company to buy scratch-off tickets, then reporting the transaction as enterprise revenue.

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Paul Voosen @voosen.me · 28/09/2026

New Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:

science.org

NASA’s New Horizons mission may shut down two instruments over lack of funding

Decision risks “incalculable loss” of data from the edge of the Sun’s influence, scientists say

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Grace @gracekind.net · 29/09/2026

Since I’ve done a lot of Yud defending, here are some Yud critiques: - he’s wildly overconfident, especially about things like philosophy of mind - his plan for AI safety is bad - his “pivotal act” rhetoric is dangerous - he’s failed to react to abuse in his community - he has incurable porn brain

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 28/09/2026

only took fourteen flights, three years, and one trillion raptors dying midflight but the Stupid Thing is Finally Orbital. Let's go to the freaking moon

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 28/09/2026

Raptor team needs to get locked in a room and not let out until they invent an engine that doesn't explode

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Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

An upside to LLMs is it turns a lot of shape rotator tasks into wordcel tasks and I've seen how engineers write lmao

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026

Hey, ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson here. I’m taking over the account to tell you about my new story. For months, I posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to test the company's "responsible gaming" safeguards. Spoiler alert: They made me a VIP — and I lost $10K. Here's how it all went down. 🧵

Selfie taken by ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson, a man wearing a backwards baseball cap and an orange T-shirt.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Honestly I think it's a bit of a fools' errand to try and get people to stop anthropomorphising LLMs. I say my computer is angry at me if it beeps too loud.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 24/09/2026

I am once again reposting this because downballot donations go far! Motivating voters to turn out for downballot races not only helps flip state legislatures, but also motivates performance at the top of the ticket!

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

TRUMP: the election situation has not necessarily developed to the Republican Party's advantage

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 23/09/2026

Stop dooming! Instead, watch this video by Dora Strelko about her brilliant scheme to cheat Mark Rober blind! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuyw...

youtube.com

I Beat Mark Rober's Casino with Heat Activated Dice

YouTube video by Dora Strelko

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 21/09/2026

So this weekend's project: getting @typesafeai.bsky.social's Jev to play Age of Empires III. Behold: Jev (in an enormous Python harness courtesy of Claude) defeating the in-game AI on Easy difficulty.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 20/09/2026

This is a very cold take in alien discourse and, given the total absence of evidence in either direction, I see no reason to assume that we aren't on the smart and generous end.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 19/09/2026

CAN AI CORRECTLY ALIGN A DUMBASS HUMAN

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 17/09/2026

it is genuinely kind of staggering to see what I perceive as Normal California Prices in Minnesota

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 17/09/2026

Model performance aside, I find something kind of charming in using the latest extremely powerful AI to crack old Enigma transmissions that nobody ever got around to deciphering.

Tweet from @carterleffen reading: "Two days ago, GPT-6 Astra broke a yet unsolved German Army Enigma message from 1941. Amazingly Astra was able to autonomously:
-Search historical archives
-Compare uncertain letters
-Find contextual cues
-Build an Enigma simulator
-Write cryptanalysis code
-Run parallel experiments
-Recover the plaintext
-Cross-check the results"
Accompanied by an image of faded nonsense writing on yellowed graph paper.

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Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The fact that Musk himself is sponsoring so many of the anti-trans ads this cycle presents a pretty golden opportunity for Dems to point out that of course the guy who literally wants to build a gas-powered data center in your backyard wants this election to be about trans people.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 15/09/2026

i would like to have a lot fewer high-breathlessness low-details confessional letters/essays/tweets/resignations from big ai and a lot more specificity & transparency

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 14/09/2026

On further reflection on this I do think Elon at least is joining in on this because he probably stands to benefit most out of these three from a slowdown: a slowdown could let SpaceX catch up to the Fable/Astra frontier.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 14/09/2026

This is very true and I find it frustrating just how much of the current AI discourse environment stubbornly refuses to engage with the reality that the President of the United States is patently insane

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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

the elephant in the room surrounding all talk of AI regulation is that the federal government is currently run by people ideologically opposed to the concept of governance

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 13/09/2026

I've voiced my own skepticism about the traditional xrisk doom narrative but I very strongly agree with this basic take — xrisk is important (and is more than just AI deciding to kill everyone!) but there are smaller risks that are already here and in need of management

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Existential AI risk is obviously critical, but it is not the only AI thing that requires policy. I worry it will become the sole focus of AI discussions. We don’t need better models for AI to have wide impacts on jobs & society and we need to be preparing to encourage good outcomes & mitigate bad.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 13/09/2026

This is IMO really frightening. Dario being freaked out about AI is one thing — it's kind of his whole thing, actually. But the fact that Sam Altman AND Elon both went "Yeah, Dario is right and we should pump the brakes" is really disquieting.

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Angry @angrystaffer.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

If Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk all agree that we have to slow down - and now - something serious clearly happened with a frontier AI model. Journalists should be digging in to this. We aren’t getting the whole story here.

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Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I suppose my opinion on AI regulation is that at present, you have to mentally add "as enforced by Donald Trump" to the end of every legislative proposal and for that reason, I'm functionally a libertarian until January 2029.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 10/09/2026

Since there's discourse happening about AI safety I figured I'd share my own thoughts, as someone who takes this stuff seriously enough to apply for fellowships working on it. In a sentence, I'd say I'm extremely safetypilled but that I'm not doompilled.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 09/09/2026

This is good news and I'm glad to see Anthropic taking these breaches seriously. Building a robust safety culture around these kinds of outcomes and preventing their recurrence is critical and I'm encouraged to see Anthropic seems open to doing that work.

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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

In light of kind of insane AI safety discussions recently: 1. AI progress is very fast 2. we should be careful about how we roll out the tech 3. the world is not actively ending

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 09/09/2026

I'm increasingly coming around to this point of view. It very much seems we're in the foothills of RSI, especially given OpenAI's announcement today that their internal Navier Stokes model is far better than GPT-6.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I'm just saying. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/philos...

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

best post of last 24h sorry yall

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

if you have a small amount of awareness it protects you. this is antivaxx

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I don’t *care* if LLMs are stochastic parrots. It doesn’t fucking matter if they are, holy shit. Sure, they’re a stochastic parrot! The stochastic parrots have made it exponentially easier to ransomware hospitals and are making groundbreaking mathematical proofs! That matters more!

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 07/09/2026

Big moment for the European space industry, and not a moment too soon, given the rumors swirling about SpaceX wanting to retire Falcon 9 sooner rather than later.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 03/09/2026

So for clarity this is basically the dumbest thing ever. It's a little solar electric smallsat that they want to rideshare to LEO, and then have it spend the better part of a decade spiraling out of the solar system pointed in the general direction of Alpha Centauri.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 02/09/2026

Definitely of the opinion that this is like, a power surge from someone plugging in a coffee pot at Gran Sasso or something, but if it's NOT.... This could be the beginnings of one of the biggest discoveries of our lifetimes.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 01/09/2026

Fermi Explorer rolls worst mission design ever, asked to leave solar system: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnlv...

youtube.com

The Fermi Explorer Mission - Humanity's first journey to another star

YouTube video by Fermi Explorer

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 31/08/2026

At Yuri's Night a few years back, I recall encountering the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, who want to build a bunch of satellites on the moon to shoot at the Earth-Sun L1 point to stop climate change. I thought they were nuts. It's remarkable that Elon has cooked up a more insane version of that.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 30/08/2026

I am going to keep banging this drum: the essence of MAHA is the belief that foods are only unhealthy if the Big Bad Food Companies put the Evil Ingredients That Make You Fat in them. They do not comprehend that a burger and fries is just not good for you.

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 29/08/2026

The next big telescope is ready to fly! Super exciting mission for dark energy and the like

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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 29/08/2026

skeleton key to understanding SpaceX in the big 2026, IMO:

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Laura Jedeed @laurajedeed.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

The predictable Discourse is starting and I'm going to take a strong stand here: you can both want to abolish ICE and laugh really, really hard at Milo Yiannopoulos getting arrested by ICE after a decade of stoking the ethnonationalist hatred that led us to this point

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