iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I’ve been inspired to make AI video: a Becca Bloom style “wholesome rich lifestyle” reel, except it’s Marie Antoinette showing off her lifestyle, talking about the “quaint peasants” in their toy village at Versailles, and showing off her jewelry, clothes, and food her chefs make for her

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Omg Instagram’s algorithm has decided I need to see a lot of tartarian conspiracy nonsense and I’m getting dumber by the hour

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

You have to have ridiculous control and mental capacity to play Bach’s 4th fugue from WTC1. Up to five voices beautifully weaving and building upon each other, flowing between the pianist’s hands. It blows my mind that someone could write it at all. It’s a constraint solving masterpiece, and pretty!

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Set aside all the hype and societal implications and discussions of whether it’s fancy autocomplete or not. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be having complex conversations with my computer in 2026, I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s remarkably cool

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Somehow most of the ads I see on LinkedIn are from Van Cleef & Arpels, which is odd since I’ve never bought jewelry from them and have also never bought jewelry online. Poor ad targeting and wasted marketing budget?

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Whenever I see someone with those plastic license plate covers, I think they’re shady. They’re all illegible and there’s no legitimate reason to get one other than to hide the plate

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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

NYT provides no evidence here, probably because the claim is flatly untrue. See eg recent Pew data, or many posts on the subject from @gelliottmorris.com this year www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

And the award for worst dialog box goes to

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Yale School of Public Health @yalesph.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Why do babies need the hepatitis B vaccine if they aren’t high-risk? Short answer: Because hepatitis B is a tricky virus. Longer answer: Continue reading ⬇️ 🧵1/9 @kkjetelina.bsky.social @meganranney.bsky.social @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social @enirenberg.bsky.social

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

I bet that @anthropic.com will eventually just make Claude Code (with their new fancy UI) into the default way of using Claude. It’s already far better at doing non-coding stuff than the normal client

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 04/12/2025

DOJ's newest recruitment ad features Judge Dredd, the comic satire about the dangers of lawless policing and authoritarian power

dhsgov
Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens.

Become a deportation judge.

Save your country.

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Repeat after me: context window size is not the limiting factor in any of the mainstream coding agents today. My context window is way smaller than Claude’s and I perform a lot better. These things can perform decently but not by brute forcing more shit into the context window

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

What’s sad is that there are plenty of cool things you can do with LLMs for language learning, but they didn’t, and they just further enshittified their product. I cancelled my membership

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I need a search bar for my house

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David Burbach 🇺🇸 @dburbach.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Insane. Can I take Geology 101 and reject the final exam with "God made the world in 7 days" and get a good grade? Same thing. If I took a religious studies course on Christianity and submit a citation-free essay ignoring the question, just asserting "Jesus is a false prophet", I'd expect to fail

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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

This ridiculous sentence is written like a bothsides-ish balancing statement, but it isn’t one. When the mob is in charge, paying the protection money they extort from you is a cost of doing business. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

There are a lot of excellent universities in this country, and I think when this all shakes out it will be extremely easy for future generations (including my kids) to exclude any school that caved without meaningfully reducing their choices or the quality of the school they end up attending

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I wish more people understood how incredibly difficult and athletic ice dance is, as well as being fun to watch

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I visited Anker.com to download a manual for a charger. No account, no login. A few minutes later, I get an email saying “your visit unlocked an exclusive discount from anker”. Turns out advertising innovation is companies like SafeOpt correlating cookies across sites to identify and spam us 🤬😩

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Beer Laimbill @beerlaimbill.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

NYT: “Epstein emails a distraction from the Republican shutdown victory” WSJ: “We estimate the Epstein files to be 67% Trump by weight”

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Zach Everson @zacheverson.com · 14/11/2025

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

A stamped letter saying "Die Wohungsnot Schuld Der Juden"

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Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

the only thing democrats should be saying today is “the entire republican party is engaged in a coverup of the most notorious child sex trafficking ring in world history”

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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

I Want You to Understand Chicago
Politics Chicago
2025-11-08

I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.

Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again.

An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next.

Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st.

Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

It blows my mind that a few years ago, if we’d said “we evaluated our results using the same model that generated them”, nobody would take the results seriously. Now someone coined “LLM-as-judge” and suddenly half the field is cool with the idea

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

At some point, the reliance on these euphemisms becomes a kind of propaganda or acquiescence.

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Sorry but 'let's get Dan Brown in here' is better than any joke I could make about Weiss booking guests

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Again, one thing I was deeply wrong about these last years was that some baseline level of professional pride existed that would prevent journalists & media outlets from so thoroughly & publicly debasing themselves in the face of authoritarianism. I was naive. I apologize. It won't happen again.

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

In the future, 99% of communications that aren’t ads are from businesses saying “we value your feedback [but not your time or attention span], please fill out a survey”

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

I’m looking forward to buying an H100 or two after the AI bubble pops. Lots of cool things to do with them after the bullshitters lose interest

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Anil Kalhan @akalhan.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

@nytimes.com expands its antitruth campaign

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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 21/10/2025

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

thecrimson.com

Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 17/10/2025

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

anildash.com

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

the president using the office to punish americans that didnt vote for him should really be one of the biggest scandals in americas history

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

The worst misfeature in all of software is how Instagram monitors your volume control and unmutes videos if you press a volume button when you have it open. I’m lying next to a sleeping baby and trying to make sure some loud reel doesn’t wake him up -> Instagram plays it out loud 🤬

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Two songs I know of, La Solitude by Barbara in French, and Vivo Per Lei by Bocelli in Italian, have similar structure: use ambiguous gendered pronouns throughout the song and at end reveal the subject to be solitude (not a cat) or music (not a woman), respectively. I’d love to find other examples

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

These days I try to stave off my despair for society by trying to bend LLMs to my will

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

“Prompt engineering” is like trying to write an algorithm for a CPU that will unpredictably ignore instructions or get lost in a loop and ignore the rest of your code. Even if you get a prompt that tickles the model just right, the next (major? minor? what’s that?) version of the model will break it

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 21/07/2025

ln(😅) = 💧ln(😄)

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Turns out the risk-free rate isn’t as risk-free as everyone hoped

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Given a dictionary and a wordle, is there an optimal strategy for guessing?

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Dan P @copumpkin.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

In related news, Pol Pot executed “a wholesale transformation” of Cambodia

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