iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Variation: some people have gotten lucky as if they flipped heads 30 times in a row, believed it skill, and are wholly unprepared for when their luck changes

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if beef didn't already exist and it was growing fast we'd all hate it. I am also rationalizing being in the tech industry and the tradeoffs that come with that; and I was also already a grumpy vegetarian

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And it lands better having gone through the whole book. HistoryHistoryHistoryHistory ... and therefore, we're gonna be okay, we're gonna be spectacular

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bolson @bolson.org · 25/09/2026

just finished @adapalmer.bsky.social 's "Inventing the Renaissance" and it finishes with as resounding a pep-talk of optimism of humanity as I have heard anywhere. Beautiful stuff. Love it.

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cutting out film is a weird split? What if there's money in "scifi" but not money in "books"?

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bolson @bolson.org · 25/09/2026

iirc he retired comfortably to a nice part of California. I got a short story collection signed by him at a local indie bookstore event when he was very old in the early 2000s

bolson @bolson.org · 25/09/2026

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intenti... AI Philosophy says that whether it's true or not, sometimes our easiest way to understand it is to think about it in these terms. Daniel Dennett got way out ahead on this one.

en.wikipedia.org

Intentional stance - Wikipedia

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bolson @bolson.org · 24/09/2026

{song} is ok, but {artist} has better stuff But at this point {song} has its own network effect and people like it because people like it. Everyone knows it because everyone knows it

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bolson @bolson.org · 24/09/2026

Amazing. I once bought a custom built suit that only worked if you stood around statuesque in it. (Indochino is garbage, avoid)

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bolson @bolson.org · 24/09/2026

'this way lies madness', but, so does the other way, so maybe sometimes wisdom is choosing the better madness

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bolson @bolson.org · 22/09/2026

"All models are wrong, some models are useful" and I think these are useful for understanding the world and worth reading and talking about. Go forth and understand and build better society

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bolson @bolson.org · 22/09/2026

The best model I have of a person being racist comes from Hannah Arendt "Origins of Totalitarianism" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ori... She describes 'race consciousness' which I understand as viewing the world as a zero sum game between race-teams, my team wins and your team loses, etc

en.wikipedia.org

The Origins of Totalitarianism - Wikipedia

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bolson @bolson.org · 22/09/2026

The best model of systemic racism in the US is "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste:_...

en.wikipedia.org

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Wikipedia

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bolson @bolson.org · 21/09/2026

Arendt defined 'race consciousness' as thinking about the world as a kind of zero sum game team sport. A racist's goal is my-team-up-other-teams-down. In that model doing genocide is a win

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bolson @bolson.org · 17/09/2026

The new "ai" stuff can do some neat tricks, but I'll be really excited when the trillion dollar companies profiting off of everything ever written are taxed to give back to everyone now alive #UBI

bolson @bolson.org · 14/09/2026

@datadoghq.com your docs are bad and you should feel bad. The Python SDK has no notes on using the new personal access tokens. The best way I've found to design a new query is to use the web 'explore', then turn on browser debugging, reload, and watch what queries it does

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I believe they will "cheat like hell", they will id-challenge people, they will throw away ballots, they will intimidate with armor and guns

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alas, mapping IP to geo-location is an inexact process also, lol what a miss I wonder if they've updated their IP map database since I installed it fall 2024

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And we should absolutely have these debates and I want to have them in a smarter more honest way. Go find some activist philosophy professors to read. 😉

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Sometimes there will be the desire for the rare/exclusive thing, getting the handmade unique thing in a world of un-special industrial indentical millions of things

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bolson @bolson.org · 12/09/2026

Some part of the AI debate is essentialism. The belief that a thing is better _because of the story behind it_. Sometimes this is a compressed bundle of beliefs around labor and justice and sustainable economy; but sometimes it's just magic.

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I want to blame MongoDB which defaults to strings keyed on length

bolson @bolson.org · 12/09/2026

Make a band edible: Buns n Roses

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bolson @bolson.org · 11/09/2026

If you do your usual job of over-researching it and all its weird side quests, I will SOOOOO preorder that and put the hardcover on my shelf next to City on Mars

bolson @bolson.org · 11/09/2026

Vaccine hangover I'm not _really_ sick I'm only _practice_ sick

bolson @bolson.org · 10/09/2026

Do not pass your brain by reference

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bolson @bolson.org · 09/09/2026

qntm is the scifi-horror writer for our age

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bolson @bolson.org · 09/09/2026

I hear getting a tattoo on the sole of the foot is a terrible idea, but if I was drunk and getting a tattoo right now it would be ⏚ ("earth ground") on the sole of my foot (because I'm a little bit electrical engineer and a little bit hippie)

bolson @bolson.org · 09/09/2026

as many as half of the grifters have also fooled themselves and believe the nonsense they're spouting; or, if they're a little self-skeptical they still think they can fake-it-till-they-make-it, or possibly 'make it up in volume'

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bolson @bolson.org · 08/09/2026

aggressive metta is a hell of a mood; I love it

bolson @bolson.org · 08/09/2026

"my coworkers are all smart nice people" is the "A- minus is the bare minimum" of my corporate existence. Across many jobs in my career it really is an outlier where there are shitty people around. Lucky me?

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Automated redistricting is totally possible, if we wanted to do it the big debate would be what metric to optimize for. How can we mathematically define what Good and Fair districts are?

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Every ten years I run this on the new census data for about 4 years of cpu time (parallelized) and get hundreds of pretty-good maps, but there's no way to know how close to 'best' any of them get.

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Yup. I think we're agreeing with different words. I wrote a pretty good solver that has a random start, 150000 different maps of little improvements in .5-3 hours depending on the state, then log that and start over with a new random seed.

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Can the Bernie fan club survive him? Yes, because he helped build up AOC and Mamdani and others

Hahaha, lol no. The best automated redistricting works hard for a while, tries millions of things, keeps statistics, and we land at good-enough based on the distribution of what we found

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Dune (1984) for the epic rock opera score Inerstellar - two terrible plot holes, but go look up pipe organ covers of Interstellar and crank it up

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The flip of "why does everything cost so much?" Is "why is everyone paid so little?"

bolson @bolson.org · 02/09/2026

Now I want some of the "Murder She Wrote" episodes to wind up being secretly under pen name by that other Maine writer, and Fletcher is the author-insert-as-author character.

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bolson @bolson.org · 02/09/2026

Ok but what explodes to resolve the paradox? Apollo? Cassandra? The audience? The universe?

bolson @bolson.org · 02/09/2026

I do not like async/await (Sam I Am) It effectively adds another type to functions that has to be type-checked or type-coerced and it's _tedious_ I always run into it as a burden: "oops, that's async so now I have to do async stuff" In both Rust and Python it's just an awkward extension to me

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Gaming addiction? Don't WASD your life away

probably pissing in the rain, but I went to google maps and right clicked on Lake Ontario to select "Add a Missing Place" and filled it out for "Lake Ontario"

Google Maps, as I right-click on Lake Ontario and select "Add a missing place"

I filled out "Add a place" form on Google Maps to report that Lake Ontario, a Historical Landmark, was missing

The oldest bakery in Somerville is getting redeveloped ... and they'll move right back into the same spot in the new building

I don't expect there's anything actually deficient in Safari, so it seems pretty self-dealing for #Google to offer a checkbox where GAFYD admins can insist that gmail only be used from Chrome

"Your organization recommends Chrome for safe app access"
which popped up when I opened work GMail this morning (in Safari)