iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Some early first-hand accounts of the experience of encountering a narrow superhuman intelligence as mathematicians grapple with the hundreds of big AI proofs released by OpenAI. Problems solved in inhuman ways that make us wonder what it means to actually know things... scottaaronson.blog?p=10169

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 30/09/2026

Very important to watch yesterday’s big speech so you know what’s going to happen to the UK’s productivity figures in the next year. Nice of OpenAI not to clash with whatever Andy Burnham was saying too.

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

good to hear. I think it’s clear that if you know how to learn and want to learn, AI will not impede you and will most likely help. what I don’t know is what proportion of people are like that. people talk about college kids like they have to be forced to learn, or tricked into it. isn’t that weird?

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I don't understand the need to say dickwad CEOs can't make good stuff. This is the world we live in. A lot of my favorite things in the arts and sciences come from absolute bastards. The real argument should be about how to channel dickwaddery into good social outcomes, not whether the stuff works.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 19/09/2026

The attention being paid to Tilly Norwood is like me turning up to your economics class and saying ‘you guys assume everyone is a rational actor and that’s just not true lol’

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

So many people with aviation psychosis claiming that the Wrights’ invention is going to reshape global geography when it can’t even go more than 25 yards

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 13/09/2026

People are going to start losing their jobs to AI. We urgently need ways to deal with this, but the policy wonks still think it’s sci-fi and the academic commentators who they lean on are still telling everyone the tech is all hype, for some goddamn reason. It’s a bad situation!

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 13/09/2026

Muting the word ‘billionaire’ is very effective, I recommend

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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 10/09/2026

The Guardian’s data centre reporting is needlessly hysterical (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/the-guardi...

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

The Guardian’s data centre reporting is needlessly hysterical

Less talk, more context.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 02/09/2026

Hard to see what BBC breaking news notifications are achieving at this point

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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 28/08/2026

Any MP who signs on to Burgon's motion is not acting within the national interest. We need more data centres – and it comes down to a question of security: takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/the-case-f...

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

The case for Nightingale Datacentres

Britain isn’t prepared for the looming AI national security crisis

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Sarah Jones @sarahjones.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The Imagination Library is a truly wonderful thing, a beautiful idea that meant so much to so many people at home and all over the world

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FT @fucktheory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Imagine being talented and beautiful and rich and famous and still the most noteworthy thing about you is how good a person you are.

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 22/08/2026

Gonna briefly do an AI take: it used to be possible to have interesting discussions about AI here, and it's got progressively less so. You can't just think AI is bad, or overhyped, you've also got to subscribe to a very particular worst-case scenario about *how* it's bad and how bad it is.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 14/08/2026

Last August was dry, and I had to stay up late one night monitoring my parents’ neighbour burning his scrub in an impromptu bonfire. Nice line of trees between me and him. Little jolt of adrenaline every time a spark went their way. Some people are just not that bright and don’t watch the news.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 14/08/2026

So that really triggered the mad libertarians huh

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Victor Geislinger @victorsvector.com · 13/08/2026

Been testing this 'sign-language-to-text' (SL2T) for almost a year & it's so awesome to see this out! Looked at this almost a decade ago & knew we'd get the tech & ML models there eventually (but super challenging). Talking w/ some Deaf folks, an equivalent of 'voice-to-text' was huge for them

deepmind.google

Putting sign language AI into users’ hands

Introducing sign-language-to-text (SL2T), our breakthrough model powering new sign language features for Deaf and hard of hearing users.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 12/08/2026

Just walked to a more westerly window in order to be closer to the sun

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 11/08/2026

BIG NEW piece by me. A few years ago, if you asked me to summarize my entire worldview in one article, I would’ve said it was too broad and too difficult. But this year, I decided to do it.

worksinprogress.co

Every disease is a policy failure

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 10/08/2026

I get that the sirens’ song is inherently not composable. But Christopher Nolan has infinite money and any artist in the world would take his phone call. Maybe try *something*. Hell, get AI to invent a musical psychology and compose something that induces a compulsion oh no wait

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

There's lots of stuff LLMs can't do, but if you want to disbelieve all the recent math, you have to believe a bunch of Fields Medalists with long track records are just straightforwardly lying about the thing they care most about. Here's a recent blog by Gowers: gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a...

gowers.wordpress.com

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 23/07/2026

Tucked away in this article is an appeal to the AI skeptics to PLEASE stop writing off stories like this OpenAI accidental exploit of Hugging Face as a dishonest marketing trick Frontier models can find and exploit vulnerabilities now, it helps nobody to pretend that they can't!

Resist the temptation to write this off as a stunt #

There will inevitably be some people who dismiss this story as a dishonest marketing trick by OpenAI to make their models sound terrifyingly effective. I found 81 instances of the term “marketing” in the Hacker News discussion of the incident.

To those people I say pull your heads out of the sand—you’re now including Hugging Face in your conspiracy theories, just so you can deny the crescendo of evidence here!

The best models we have today have the ability to both find and exploit new vulnerabilities. The ExploitGym paper itself concludes that “autonomous exploit development by frontier AI agents is no longer a hypothetical capability”, and this incident is a perfect example of exactly that.

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

the problem with AI is that it works, not that it doesn’t

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 19/07/2026

Tech commentary often has to be ‘what if now, but forever’, and that doesn’t work well when change is so rapid. An easy flipside is discussing power dynamics rather than the tech itself, and that’s very effective at riling people up, but the world still turns.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 09/07/2026

Bear in mind the people telling you Binface isn’t funny think political cartoons are the height of comedy

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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 07/07/2026

"In mid-2026, autonomy is not just some hypothetical or highly experimental technology. Self-driving cars have already been invented, and are a thing that have existed in the world for some time."

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 06/07/2026

Since we can exercise discretion about breaking news alerts for overnight football matches, maybe fewer murder alerts at Christmas?

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 01/07/2026

I honestly thought I would never see the day workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/06/work...

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

Google Workspace Updates: Work with delegated Gmail accounts from mobile devices

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 28/06/2026

Quite fun watching the normie press discover ramageddon now that Apple has put its prices up. Thankfully there’s 6 months of deep dissection in tech podcasts that will help the coverage be sensible and informed.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

It is weird that there is still a substantial set of people who believe "AI is mostly hype" at this stage: Five Eyes is warning about AI, exponential revenue & token use at the AI labs, unit distance/Erdos proofs, and so on... There are many real issues with AI, not being real is not one of them.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 22/06/2026

“I am appalled at the man blasting music over this very serious occasion. Anyway now back to gleefully reporting on successfully hounding another Prime Minister till they cried.”

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John Scott-Railton @jsrailton.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order "safety" is risky. 1/

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Kinell @sinistercinemastudios.art · 28/05/2026

Couldn't think of a song related pun for the headline no? Nothing in his back catalogue you could link to still not being dead

TMZ

TMZ

@TMZ

Barry Gibb is not dead... the singer is healthy and happy.

Read more: bit.ly/42YDuNX

7:15 PM

5/26/26

114K Views

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 26/05/2026

I love the smell of a moral panic in the morning. (A surefire sign you're hitting peak moral panic and heading into the backlash: thing X gets called "the new smoking". Nothing is *ever* the new smoking. Nothing ever will be again.)

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Jacob Aron @jjaron.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Always good to have your response to a consultation immediately ready to go. Suggests you've definitely engaged with the results of the consultation and that the entire thing wasn't a waste of time.

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Dustin Moskovitz @moskov.goodventures.org · 08/05/2026

I seem to be a bit of a contrarian on this and yet it seems to distort a lot of discourse: at the current stage, the model scale and "the weights" are only part of the capability story. The scaffold/harness, the memory systems, the files, and the pilot themself also cause very divergent outcomes 1/6

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 05/05/2026

Weird how GDPR doesn’t apply during elections

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 28/04/2026

Trying to think up examples of media that has tipped over into myth. Where people fully act like it really happened, despite sorta knowing it’s fiction. Lord of the Flies is a big one, and Romeo & Juliet. But also: Love Actually

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 21/04/2026

I would love to know why effective altruism of all things triggered the mad conspiracy gene in so many people

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Tom Freeman @tomfreeman.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

"April Fools' Day" is cultural appropriation and we in the fool community, who live with our own foolishness all year round, do not appreciate being turned into a sanitised mainstream joke. I have worked hard to overcome popular prejudice and am proud to be the president's special adviser on Iran

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Every few months, I write an updated, idiosyncratic guide on which AIs to use right now. My new version has the most changes ever, since AI is no longer just about chatbots. To use AI you need to understand how to think about models, apps, and harnesses. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

open.substack.com

A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

It's not just chatbots anymore

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 12/02/2026

Claude Code users: if you have a mouse with a bunch of buttons I highly recommend: —setting one to toggle+paste SuperWhisper (or speech->text app of your choice) —mapping another to Enter Feels absolutely decadent, but so pleasing.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 08/02/2026

It’s the #superbowl tonight. If you enjoy that you should try the #hyperbole. It's a million times better.

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 08/02/2026

Bluesky AI haters: you need to know that it is coming and it cannot be stopped and you need to help. Ask anyone in coding and you’ll hear that AI is a freight train heading our way. You need to get past ‘it doesn’t work’ and ‘I hate Elon Musk’. I know it sticks in the craw. But please start thinking

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Andrew West @awest.uk · 06/02/2026

Tech: extraordinary and possibly world-changing things happening at rapid pace Politics: seagulls round a bin, forever

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Rory Cellan-Jones @rorycj.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

www.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/airport-bo... Great piece on “airport book brain” - the tendency of politicians to swallow simplistic solutions. Latest example the Jonathan Haidt book shaping policy on teens and social media

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