iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 40m

I gave an introductory lecture on this a couple of weeks ago, you might find it interesting bsky.app/profile/arun...

Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 41m

We all have our individual models of the world to help us navigate it, and those are conditioned by evolution, culture and our direct experiences. Whether an entity can suffer or just look as if it is, is a very different question to the measurement of a physical parameter of the universe

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 7h

I was right with you up until the last point - we all have our own standards of proof, they are all different and it's worthwhile articulating them and building something robust. I have much more confidence in your standards of what pain might be than Anthropic researchers, that's for sure.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 11h

Never Eat Cake, Eat Shredded Salad And Remain Young I say that in my head every time I have to spell it. Possibly could do with an update for 2026 though

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Murderbot books are excellent, great choice!

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Seeing reform do so well in the polls is the exact monkey paw outcome from my wish for the conservative party to die a painful death in the last election

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I mean you'd also fix the HP TV remake, right?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Looks like you need a wind turbine for the winter months

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You would hope so, but then Nick Timothy just joins reform anyway 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In my first year I firmly believed I was intelligent enough to derive physics proofs from first principles in the exam. By my final year I was doing look cover write check drills to scrape my 2:1. So perhaps in that respect I became less human and more like an LLM 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I found it particularly good. More enjoyable than the originals honestly

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I am pretty sure I read this at the time (no longer subscribed to NS, so apologies if this is in your article) but did you ever read HP and the methods of rationality fan fic?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

No worries - it's 1am and we should probably both be asleep 😂

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

But perhaps the largest one I can see is that when you're in the middle of a university degree, it's very difficult to take the long view that the rest of us who have graduated have. It can be an utter grind as an undergrad, and I think a lot of us older folks have forgotten that

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Maybe there's a mandatory module in their course that they just could not care less about, and is a cul de sac of effort for no reward

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Maybe some of these kids are at university because the primary message they received growing up is that going to uni is everything, and you'll be left behind if you don't get at least an upper second class degree - even if you don't really enjoy academic learning

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Whilst this is funny, I think it's important to consider a rational reason for students to use these tools. It's obviously bad for students in the long term. But in the short term, perhaps it buys them breathing room and reduces the feeling of overwhelm.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Next you'll be saying Pluto is a real planet 😂

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I would rather have a ton of houses or renewable energy plants in every postcode tbh. Some data centres sure, but a ton in every postcode seems like overkill?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also language makes it a hell of a lot easier to negotiate

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We also have a much longer time horizon for planning, and can anticipate all the different nasty ways we can hurt each other in the future

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As a bonus, the coding example in the second half features my silly dog Zag, illustrating why he might be suspicious of a human reaching out to him

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Last week I livestreamed an Introduction to Active Inference for #IWAI2026 - specifically aimed at those without a maths background. If you've ever been curious about what makes an agent agentic, or felt intimidated by the active inference literature, have a watch! www.youtube.com/live/qqW975T...

youtube.com

ActInf ModelStream 011.1: IWAI 2026 ~ Introduction to Active Inference (Arun Niranjan)

YouTube video by Active Inference Institute

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What are your top 5? Let's stick to British politicians in living memory

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I got my autism diagnosis and my day to day life didn't change at all. I had *already* become a fully remote software engineer and had a house with a study where than control the sounds and lighting, and can sing the same song a million times on repeat without annoying anybody.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Does the median person also have student loan repayments to make as well?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ho boy, so I guess the lesson to learn is that the median person with a job is paying less tax as a percentage of their income, but because wages have dropped in real terms they are worse off

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Is that really true even after accounting for inflation and freezing of tax bands?! Genuinely a surprising result!

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Mine will refuse his kibble for seemingly no reason on a morning, and then proceed to subsist on grass salad on the lunchtime walk 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Reposted by Arun Niranjan

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE) @shengokai.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026

DISABILITY, LIKE ENTROPY AND THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE, COMES FOR US ALL. Like, there's no way to avoid disability because our bodies are not immune to the rigors of time. We AGE. Our vision gets worse, our joints less able, our cognitive functions fail.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Similarly all the cuts to higher education and job losses there - some how they don't count as much as fishing 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Would salary sacrifice into pensions need an overhaul?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

You're in Hokkaido! Have a fantastic time! It's a bit far from toya without a car, but lake kussharo is well worth a visit - gorgeous outdoor onsen

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Somehow I suspect they have LLM generated eval sets that aren't being human validated? Not difficult to check those into version control or an S3 bucket for audit though 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I honestly have no idea if they all hate each other or if this counts as gentle ribbing Me and my friends (and colleagues!) are _much_ ruder to each other, but we do love each other

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"All emails will be left in a ditch, even on my return"

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"False memories, hallucinations, and confounding biases were successfully controlled" Yeah pretty sceptical of this

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Can I just skip straight to telling you 'no'?

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Ah I am in a much better place now (life is much easier in my thirties than as a teenager/early twenties) 🙏🏾

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Reposted by Arun Niranjan

Nadine Batchelor-Hunt @nadinebh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I wrote something very personal and vulnerable about World Suicide Prevention Day on my Substack, and my experience with suicidal thoughts I decided that, however scary it feels writing it, if it helps one person it's worth it a million times over nadinebh.substack.com/p/its-world-...

nadinebh.substack.com

It’s World Suicide Prevention Day, and we need to destigmatise talking about suicidal thoughts

Up to one in four of us will experience suicidal thoughts in our live times. We need to destigmatise talking about the issue - I should know, I live with suicidal thoughts myself.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Thank you for writing this, I recognise many of the points and feelings you raise.

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Mate you haven't changed in 15 years 😂

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Can I say I am very happy that you and @dingdingpeng.the100.ci both liked my post, you are both my favourite people to follow for stats puns

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Arun Niranjan @arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Initial draft, feedback welcome, no LLM involvement: That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, the effect size isn't that big. And if it was, it was correlation not causation. And if it wasn't, you didn't pre-register the study And if you did, you deserved to publish

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