iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Points to the NYT for making an appropriate comparison:

The practice of filming and broadcasting an execution is more common with terror groups like the Islamic State, which became infamous for videos of gruesome executions of prisoners who were not given due process or convicted of crimes. Mass shooters have in some cases broadcast their killing sprees on livestream sites.

“Which political faction has responsibility for Banco Master” is becoming the Brazilian version of “Who was President in 2020?”

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 14h

Livestreamed regime snuff films, Jesus Christ, how quickly barbarism erupts from our national soul.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 16h

I wonder how many people realize that, for example, ADHD and “dyslexia after the age of 14” are disqualifying medical conditions?

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 18h

(The Scott Aaronson post on this adds some additional color — evidently OAI and Anthropic steered clear of trying to break cryptosystems in these efforts, but are “gingerly and discreetly” moving ahead in that direction. So more of a “we don’t know what we don’t know” kind of concern.)

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 19h

Green is one of those folks who you don’t want to hear saying things like this, but I’d like to hear more details from him; does he think there are fundamentally exploitable weaknesses in specific cryptosystems, or is this more of a general “fuck, that’s a /lot/ of math” reaction to the OAI drop?

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

As I like to point out, by the Wonderlic the smartest guys on the field are on the o-line: Urschel is a mathematician; former OT Todd Steussie, a data scientist; Blaine Nye got his undergrad and master’s in physics before picking up a doctorate in finance. Gotta be smart to read the field like that.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There are a great many people who will vote for Paxton because Talarico is a “fake Christian, “socialist,” etc. — but this is only possible because they allow themselves to pretend they aren’t voting for Paxton at all. The more they see of Paxton the harder it is to pull the lever for him.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’d be curious to see what the harnesses are doing under the hood for handling those, since crossword clues are almost paradigmatically “how many r’s in ‘strawberrry’” problems that AIs are inherently blind to.

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Reposted by Convolver

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Ok so basically what half these proofs show is that every beautiful and perfect result in mathematics is just another fucking Borwein integral under the hood and we never bothered calculating hard enough for the scales to fall from our eyes.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The Christian cosmology includes an afterlife presided over by an angry and hateful being wreathed in flames, but, uh, that’s not heaven.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Mine is surprisingly ambiguous about my home city but extremely certain about my soy sauce preferences.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You can’t steal a diamond and then get out of trouble by offering to pay for it. The crime is the crime, it’s done.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah, he was definitely one of the more competent figures in the Western theater for his style of warfare; his main problem was just not having a good grip on large combined force maneuvers, Pea Ridge being probably the worst given how he split his forces and kept losing track of them.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Sigel had one good day, but to his credit it was a hell of a good day, and no mean feat to make Van Dorn have a very bad day.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Mozi’s views on the great questions of human life were not, to put it mildly, the same as Confucius!

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

LLMs are in the most literal sense “next token predictors,” but that phrase is doing a lot of concealed heavy lifting when you think about just how remarkable and complex the evolved optimizations for that prediction /are/.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If I’m just going to present the canon of early modern and modern Western liberalism as this list does, then for an Asian perspective I’m probably heading first for Masao Maruyama, but, hey, let UT pull random historical names out of a hat, why not.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Treating Confucius as synonymous with the entirety of schools of Chinese philosophy over thousands of years is considerably worse than just leaving him out entirely.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This cycle’s going to be Scudder’s make-or-break as TX Dem chair. I don’t have any particular feeling for him one way or the other, but his breaking out from the inside-the-MoPac Austin bunker is at least a recognition that Dems have to scrap for votes in every corner of the state.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Then there were the German radical left-wing revolutionary refugees who weren’t actually any good at command but could recruit the hell out of Germans in the Mississippi Valley.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And this last week King Willem-Alexander presented the results of a historical study he ordered that quantified just how much money the Dutch republic made from VOC slavery, and formally apologized for the Dutch history of slave trading (in both oceans).

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This /is/ peak Bluesky Leftist With Burrito Taxi Characteristics, but it’s also just … social media? This tendency for commentators to scour X for things they agree with or Bluesky for things they disagree with, or vice versa, and treat them as authoritative policy views is deeply poisonous.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Looked at a house once that was a true jerry-rigged special: 1910s knob and tube spliced to 1970s aluminum wire attached to a Federal Pacific panel. One of those “don’t flip the light switches, back slowly out of the house” places.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Totenberg did nothing wrong, damnit.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Farmers, famously known for their love of sleeping in every morning.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This photo reminds me that the evidence is still that Trump was given privileged access to Retatrutide … for some unspecified reason.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One thing we know is that gradient descent over a sufficiently complex system creates absolutely mind-bending task-specific optimizations. The literature on attention-head taxonomies is fascinating in its own right.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

could never become German regardless of how indistinguishable in culture, norm, and behavior they were from other Germans, because the antisemites would always perceive them as “othered.”

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The game he’s playing is essentially inverting the concept of assimilation from “a group adopting local customs and manners” to “whether or not self-appointed representatives determine they are assimilated.” It’s exactly the same as the kind of antisemitism you can read in Wagner’s works, where Jews

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The anti-“race is a social construct” guys out here literally saying that race is, in fact, a social construct.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

involved has to occur in a specific way in the physical world to generate experience and qualia. But this doesn’t deny that /intelligence/ can’t be simulated nonphysically, so you can have intelligent but non-conscious math.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

increasing with the complexity of the systems involved (see, e.g., Friston). So there’s a physical statistical mechanics component to consciousness in this view that isn’t tied to “magic mind meat” as such, but does demand some form of physical embodiment, because the information processing /

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I’m a primitive panexperientialist, in that I believe that the rudiments of experience (in Whitehead’s telling) are globally realizable in some sense, but my evolving belief is that this is bound up with the minimization of variational free energy between physical systems, with consciousness /

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I’m less of a biological materialist than I take Seth to be, but also believe that consciousness is intrinsic to physical properties that are not strictly simulatable, though /intelligence/ probably is.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Seth would even go further and say that Claude lacks the necessary embodied substrate for consciousness because (simplifying here) the /chips/ are not consciousness-creating, therefore the software running on the chips cannot be, either. (As you might guess I’m sympathetic to this view!)

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I suspect Third Way is congenitally allergic to wide-ranging reform and want to keep the load-bearing nine Justices, so throwing up an option that is at best going to come aground on a 5-4 vote against is essentially just posturing rather than taking the hard political choice.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

question, the people you’re trying to term-limit out are the ones who decide whether you can do so absent a Constitutional amendment. The less-fraught path is to either modify the Court’s jurisdiction, or pack the hell out of it, both of which can be done under Congress’ established authority, but/

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I’ve read the briefs and I’m not persuaded; they rely on the argument that, because judges who voluntarily take senior status are still judges, you can involuntarily place a judge in a different role without affecting their “office,” which is a leap. And, because this is a novel constitutional /

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

tfw you remember her as the /young/ Congressional aide Newt cheated on his seriously ill wife with…

static.klipy.com

Man Ages Rapidly

ALT: Man Ages Rapidly

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As a confirmed property dualist I’m comfortable with the idea that consciousness if not necessarily intelligence supervenes on uniquely physical properties that pen and paper, and potentially if not obviously computer memory and processors, don’t satisfy.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is where the big five-ish, big three, and the BigLaw firms are already set up (modulo Accenture and Deloitte U, though their offices are in Harwood), so it’s a pretty natural fit for the exchanges’ second homes anyway. It ain’t Manhattan by a long shot, but it’s close enough to get work done.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oak Lawn to Harwood to Victory Park to the north side of downtown proper. South downtown’s going to be hurting with the AT&T pullout, definitely.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s mostly the emerging downtown Dallas hub that’s going to be the focus: NASDAQ, NYSE, TxSE (lol), Morgan Stanley, etc. Interesting moves being made.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s kind of amusing that, having made the jump five years ago, they landed in the right metropolitan statistical area but on the completely wrong side of the city from where the entire financial industry is now relocating.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This kind of close-hold nonsense has the advantage of limiting courts martial to those who were directly involved in drafting and viewing the justification, so you don’t have to go all the way down the chain of command. Helpful for future prosecutors.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just to be clear, with legislation you can pack the Court or radically restructure it. You /cannot/ set a term limit in contravention of the plain Constitutional text, and anyone suggesting that is not to be listened to, because they’re either incompetent or trying to quiet-kill reform.

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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Pete is lost in terms of modern war. I use the example of this outgunned Ukrainian army officer who successfully terrorized a Russian unit for weeks because she "did the math." At the time, someone commented, "yeah, in combat, 'I did the math' beats 'I can do 100 pushups' every time."

Ukrainian female soldier: Okay, I said the idea is this: There is enough time to empty one full can of 32 grenades and be gone by the time the return mortar fire reaches us. I did the math.

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Totally on-brand that he, Gingrich, and Musk are basically swiping concepts from early-‘90s RTS games, is what I’m saying.

static.klipy.com

Yuri's Revenge: Udo Kier as Yuri

Alt: Yuri's Revenge: Udo Kier as Yuri

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Convolver @convolver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Luckey, the guy who cribbed off his professor’s work on inexpensive VR optics and got rich selling his failing company to Zuck so Meta could set $100bn on fire.

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