iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

A TLDR is that unless the training dynamics of leading LLMs change or open model builders run out of money, this ~6 month performance gap from closed to open models is here to stay. www.interconnects.ai/p/reading-to...

interconnects.ai

Reading today's open-closed performance gap

The complex factors that determine the single evaluation number so many focus on. Plus, how this changes in the future.

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Dave Carlson @davecarlson.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I've heard it said, though I don't really believe it, that as many as three things might be true.

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False Knees @falseknees.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

How To Live A Good Life #oldknees

The first panel shows a crow with the title "How to live a good life". The second panel shows a crow cawing at itself in the mirror with the subheading "Make friends". The next panel says "Explore" and shows a crow looking into a commercial waste bin. The next says "Try new things" with a crow eating something vile. The next one says "Be curious" and shows the crow grabbing a hissing cat's tail". The final frame says "Get a hobby" and shows the crow looking closely at a book of matches.

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Me and a small nugget of love. 🇸🇪♥️🇺🇦 @mnotme.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

two images of the human body's circulatory system. One of them with good cable management

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Micah @rincewind.run · 07/04/2026

the evolution of weaponry: * big rock * big rock but launched * explosions * guided explosions * the unfathomable power of the atom, exploding * big rock again

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Claim: Coding agents make good software engineering practices much more important, not less. If you’re not writing the code, it’s that much more critical that it be clean and modular, with well-specified and testable internal interfaces. Spaghetti is even more unmanageable when you didn’t write it

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Brian in Detroit @kanoki.net · 05/04/2026

I just tried to "up dog" my seven year old nephew. "hey, do you have up dog?" Him: "Yeah!" And runs off to his room. He comes back with a toy: the dog from "Up". "it's the Up Dog" Damn he got me

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Xe @xeiaso.net · 05/04/2026

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Some people get more tokens than others and we call that Jensen’s inequality

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

“AI” is a hard thing to have a single opinion about. One of the main affordances of the technology is predicting and adapting to your behavior. The same model in the same interface can be a helpful research assistant to one person, a code writing tool to another, and urge a third to found a cult

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

I think if one does want to use AI though, the key dimension to keep in mind is how easy the output is to verify. At one extreme, plug your LLM-generated proof into Lean and it’ll tell you if it’s right (not if it’s elegant, sure). On the other, personal psychological issues are entirely

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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

WAR DON'T SEX CRIMES HIDE CRIMES

Unfortunately formatted hand written sign at the March 28th No Kings protest in New Haven saying "War crimes don't hide sex crimes", but it also can be read as War don't sex. Crimes hide crimes"

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

It is time to become even weirder

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Laura Phillips @lauraphillips.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Via James Montgomery: St James’s Park #London this #spring morning. As you can see, London is an absolute hellhole.

Via James Montgomery: St James’s Park #London this #spring morning. Blossoms frame the lake. Absolutely stunning.

As you can see, London is an absolute hellhole.

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

the hit new track on ibiza this summer, SHANNON by technoclaude

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

machine learning is the study of numerical errors and things which turn out to be L2 regularization wearing a different hat

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

There’s a lot of this, and (more on the site formerly known as Twitter than here) also a lot of people getting polarized into “AGI in six months“ and “why do *you* need a job anyway” out of exactly the same kind of spite

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Chris Paxton @cpaxton.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Physical Intelligence has a recipe for real world RL on top of VLAs and it looks impressive: www.pi.website/blog/pistar06

pi.website

A VLA that Learns from Experience

A method for training our generalist policies with RL to improve success rate and throughput on real-world tasks.

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

high-dimensional geometry in general doesn't make any sense for instance: as the number n of dimensions increases, the volume of an n-dimensional ball concentrates into a thin outer shell close to the boundary; the interior shrinks away

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

i think the actual threshold of prediction is that people always try to imagine the course of current progress, and once their mental model of that breaks down they predict AGI

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

I suspect the YIMBYs, like the NIMBYs, who think this are mostly wrong. If you own a house, you own land, and land is more valuable if it’s more intensely developed There’s more variance (what if a homeless shelter goes up next door?) but land in Manhattan wouldn’t be worth more if it were SFH-only

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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 15/11/2025

productivity tip: stop listening once you realize the crux of a conversation is purely semantic and everyone has a different definition. it’s a waste of time

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Prose and Khans @temujin9.t9productions.com · 15/11/2025

time again for my favorite venn diagram

venn diagram of circles "incel", "excel", "me eating a fig"
first two overlap "sheets are never clean"
last two overlap "makes a mess on my desktop"
first and last overlap "the dying gasp of wasps"
all overlap "incorrectly assuming something is a date"

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Tarja Porkka-Kontturi @tarjapk.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October

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Stella Biderman @stellaathena.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Hyped to write "The models in this paper cost us 476,246.57 USD to train. I'm sorry you are sad we didn't redo all of our experiments on multiple independent training datasets. If you'd like to give us a million dollars we'd be happy to run the experiments you wish" in my response to a reviewer.

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

A brief taxonomy of crypto: 1) Bitcoin: digital gold 2) Ethereum (+ probably one or two more): very speculative tech stocks 3) everything else: scams

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

downsides of space-based industry: impractical, expensive, how are you going to dissipate the heat upsides of space-based industry: no one is going to NIMBY you

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chevalier d'ely @ely.fyi · 11/11/2025

"babies are born worshipping unknown gods" is one of the most incredible dwarf fortress bugs i have heard of. its poetry.

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by putting about 20,000 specific people in prison for the rest of their lives

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

yeah my most out there technology and crime belief that be implemented is if we can mandate new cars have backup cameras we can mandate they have ignition interlock devices. the first time you get caught driving over the limit it gets turned on. extremely doable technological non-carceral solution.

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Does anyone who understands this want to enlighten me? Feels bubbly

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

This idea of affordable mass market Corollas is just propaganda from developer shills, what we need is an income-restricted lottery for three (3) Ferraris

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

It's interesting that RLHF'd LLMs and influencers talk the same way. Perhaps through the evolution of clickbait, we'd already found the local maximum of attention grabbing

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

yeah I actually think the development of a staggering array of new medical procedures and treatments that are vastly more effective than what was available even a decade or two ago is a significant component of material prosperity that greatly improves quality of life, not just a joke

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

yes, though the same reasoning should lead you to expect that a few specific prices would be extremely salient: housing, maybe rent especially, gasoline, labor (i.e., your wages)

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Chris Paxton @cpaxton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Words to live by tbh

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no. @joles.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

applying for jobs again

screenshot from an online job application form. the question reads "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond single prompt usage" (a red asterisk indicates that this is a required question).

an answer has been typed in the textbox below the question:

"there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask.

it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same.

it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.”

there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price

for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

slightly metaphorical but real sense in which the future changes the past: we understand our lives as narratives, but we don't (entirely) select actions that way and the narrative that best explains what you've done can change as you do more things

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

The brain specifically I dunno about: 2+ rather than one must be energetically expensive, why not selection pressure for fewer? How do they multiplex access to motor control centers? But the immune system! It does complicated, goal-directed, long-term adaptive action and planning. Is it conscious?

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Trump actually acting like a king is really helping me understand why various parts of Anglo-American government work the way they do

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

This is the crux of the problem. In the age of highly-centralized media, there WAS a strong relationship between "narratives about the economy" and "the actual economy." But that relationship is falling apart. So suddenly it matters a lot whether the real driver was "narrative" or "real conditions"

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Why you should always have been (and still be) skeptical of arguments for foom

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Gary Brannan @garybrannan.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

ITS A COYOTE! CHASING A ROAD RUNNER!

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Michael Saxon @saxon.me · 05/11/2025

More than choosing good project ideas, to me "research taste" means recognizing what the interesting part of a result is and how it connects to a bigger narrative. Almost any nontrivial result can be important within the right lens. More than anything my PhD taught me this.

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

What is this feeling that isn’t cynicism and despair?

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" fits awkwardly with the Church-Turing thesis. It would sound less obviously applicable to a (certain sci-fi kind of) robot, right?

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

This should be a sarcastic street name for cocaine

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

I don’t think how people are tracking how quickly this is happening, for better or worse.

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