iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The creation of Hamas is the responsibility of Israel. Israel gives the Palestinians passports? No Hamas. Israel returns the territory, or spins it into a new nation? No Hamas. But Israel decides it wants the land but not the people, slowly ramps up the oppression and killing, and we get here.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ukraine is genocide too, just a softer version. Russia wants to turn Ukrainians into Russians, Israel wants to turn Palestinians into corpses.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Computer programs doing what you don't expect is totally normal, there's no serious programmer in the world who avoids that. Just this normally means something like "why is this segfaulting?" or "why is this consuming 100% of CPU and doing nothing?"

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Don't know how anybody would dispute that. Except war involves larger number of bigger bombs than terrorism, and so is even worse.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Environmental protesters blocking roads is also a nicely direct comparison with fascists blocking ports.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

There's some useful-looking stuff at that link, thank you.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The problem there isn't the need for sympathy for fascists, it's that people who do this sort of thing to their political enemies are likely power-seekers, and so cannot be trusted to participate properly in democracy.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

One can get paid a wage for shelf-stacking, and instead of purchasing some small luxury with the leftover cash, decide to make the world a better place with that money and look to effective altruism for how to do this. The mistakes of AI cultists in doing this are not compulsory.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Note that the basic idea of EA is perfectly fine, and conclusions like "parasitic worm treatment is a good charity choice" are completely sound. The mistake made by the AI cultists is that their predictive capabilities relating their actions to the future of AI are zero, which needs multiplying in.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I've been anthropomorphising my computer for decades. "It doesn't like that disk" for example. Human intelligence evolved to process social situations, assigning humanity to whatever it's currently thinking about is just how it works.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Of course, the difference between 7 and 32 here is still vast, particularly as the growth in number of positions is exponential.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Hate Musk, that Nazi who's killing millions of people, but... he's actually got the right idea here, it is the number of potential positions, not games, which is relevant to solving chess. You map each position to win for white/black/draw by iteration. It's been done for <=7 pieces on the board.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

We've solved chess with 7 or fewer pieces on the board. The numbers grow exponentially with each piece you add. Chess has 32 pieces.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Trademarks make sense, since they're an anti-deception measure rather than an anti-doing-stuff measure. That's the problem with saying "intellectual property", it means several completely different things all at the same time. (And encourages confusion between those and real property.)

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

That's one reason to boycott them. Bundling spyware trojans in Windows security updates is what I usually mention.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I don't know whether he realises it or not, but I do know that realising it wouldn't stop him from saying that, because these people just do not care about consistency.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Does he think people can't read "Hindu nationalist" in the picture he's using?

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Well, if your story is _about_ something, it's not going to take hundreds of hours to tell, because you'll do what you wanted to do and then stop. Super-long stories just end up being events for their own sake. I reckon needing more than about ten hours is highly unusual.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

That's a bit strong. It's perfectly acceptable to, for instance, make Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse on the assumption that viewers will have seen Revolutionary Girl Utena.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Never happened in anything I've seen. The only season 6's I've seen are from Doctor Who, Yes (Prime) Minister, Red Dwarf, Simpsons, South Park and Teekyu, all of which break the storytelling up into far smaller chunks. I can't imagine a serial over six (or more) series actually being any good.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I find the idea of watching something which can be labelled "lore" bizarre. Which doesn't mean you can't have long series where you should watch every episode, but it should be because it tells a serialised narrative.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Well, the longest properly serialised narrative I've seen would be 64 episodes of FMAB. Which are all by the same writer and some production team with the same protagonists all the way through, so if you like one bit, you'll probably like the rest. These films and TV series...?

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Harry Potter merchandising kills people. (In conjunction with copyright laws.)

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

"We understand that plagiarism is bad and would never do it, so anything we do obviously isn't plagiarism."

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

That's got hundreds. "Strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

One note about an unclear thing earlier - the reason the German revolution was different to the Russian revolution and so might have produced socialism is because Germany was capitalist, whereas pre-revolution Russia was feudal, and capitalism has to happen before socialism can happen.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

...divide the working class and prevent them from uniting and taking control, into overdrive. it may be state-supremacist, but it can also be race-supremacist (Naziism) which is even worse. It doesn't really have a coherent ideology, fascists will just say whatever is convenient for them at the time

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It does this basically by destroying segments of society to take their stuff and supplement profits, and making fictional wealth, as we see now with things like blockchain-currencies and the LLM bubble. And it does this by putting ordinary bigotries which regular capitalism uses to...

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Fascism is best understood as a process which is kicked off by an extended crisis of capitalism. Its purpose, if it can be said to have one, is to keep capitalism going even when economic activity would normally grind to a halt due to a low profit rate.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It should be needless to say there are no communist states, since no state can be a stateless society, but for some reason this chart gives examples. Okay, fascism. Trying to understand it as a thing which makes sense, as this chart is doing, is always going to fail.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Individual rights cannot be secondary to the collective good, because the collective good is nothing more than the sum total of everyone's individual good, for which individual rights are critical, that idea makes no sense. You just don't have _powers_ being dressed up as "rights".

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Not "everything" is communally owned under communism, you can still have reasonable amounts of _personal_ property, the things which you own and use as part of your daily lifestyle. It's _private_ property, things which you own to control or extract rent from the users which no longer exists.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The main goal of socialism isn't defined, but was originally envisaged as being to advance the productive forces beyond what capitalism can achieve with its inherent contradictions. There are no current examples of socialism, the best chance we had to get one was maybe the German revolution of 1918.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Under socialism, the means of production are not controlled by "the people" or "the state" but by "the workers who use them". A factory is controlled by the people who work at that factory, managed through workplace democracy. Not by some nebulous "the people" or state capitalists.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Let's critique this chart. "Firstly, the "democratic socialism" column is a good description - of social democracy. "Democratic socialism" just means "socialism", it's like saying "a bicycle with wheels". If it isn't democratic, it isn't socialism.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Easily provable by noting how literally no sport which I'm aware of had its women's side dominated by trans women or even had disproportionate numbers of trans women amongst its top performers, before they all started banning them.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Well, misogyny and toxic masculinity are very much on the rise at the moment... (Not forgetting the nationalism, imperialism, and the whole poisonous idea of making heroes out of people who carry and use guns in the first place.)

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

It's one thing to sometimes notice tells and other times not notice them. It's another thing to have vigorously measured your false positive and false negative rates.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Back when I just called myself "liberal", I was calling for equitable property distribution since this will maximise thing-usage liberty. As the philosophy most targeted by ruling class propaganda in the West, what a liberal believes can very enormously depending on how much they've been fooled.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

There's no such thing as an 'expert' on computer program consciousness. There's no way to gain expertise. There are no experiments you can do which will give one result if it's conscious and another result if not. All you can do is fall victim to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Observe that property ownership is actually a restriction of the liberty of all except the owner, and deduce that laissez-faire capitalists (eventually, all capitalists) are getting libertarianism wrong and left-libertarianism is the correct approach to it.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Do you mean left-libertarian (sane, tends to recognise that capitalism is an intolerable restriction on liberty etc.) or right-libertarian (crazy fantasy about capital working without a huge capitalist state to enforce it)?

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

No. Good government and the existence of a ruling class are fundamentally incompatible, since for a government to be good, it must obviously serve the needs of everyone, but if a ruling class exists, a government will serve primarily the needs of the ruling class.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

...And it's fuzzy with all sorts of grey areas, potential contradictions and elements which can be changed, and it's not recorded by a birth certificate?

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I think I've figured out stuff like this recently. People who sacrifice truth for social cohesion need to convince themselves that they don't, and in the process may lose the ability to understand truth-seeking at such times completely. "What social goal is this pursuing?" becomes all they can think

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Angel's Egg. I remember when I though there was no chance of me ever seeing that film at all, despite its imagery being what drew me into anime in the first place via some live-action thing. For things to have changed so much that it actually gets shown in two cinemas in my city!

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I used to identify as 'centrist' when opposing 90s privatisations, defining it as "we should have a mixed economy". (Then I learned what capitalism and socialism were, and hence that the USSR was not 'left'.) But it mostly means chasing the media-political consensus ever further rightwards.

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Ben Mann @ben-mann.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

I suggest the description "formalised nepotism".

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