iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 30/09/2026

Still not available on Kindle at all in the UK :( Seems only physical editions are imports. Oversight or licensing shenanigans?

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 29/09/2026

The picture I'm building is that there was a plot being tracked, hence extra security around the base, US statements etc. But... blokes in vans were nothing to do with it; and the huge op to seize and search them disrupted the actual thing before it reached the interdiction point.

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Reposted by Chris Swan

Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Fool's Expertise bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/27/f...

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Fool's Expertise | The Observation Deck

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Kate Holterhoff, PhD @kateholterhoff.com · 24/09/2026

Chatted with @dpp.me, founder & CEO of Spice Labs, & @allanfriedman.bsky.social, Senior Technical Advisor at the Institute for Security & Technology, about PQC & Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOMs) for the latest @redmonk.com MonkCast. redmonk.com/videos/david... youtube.com/shorts/VPflv...

youtube.com

Cryptography Bill of Materials Explained #cbom #postquantumcryptography #softwaredevelopment

YouTube video by RedMonk

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 24/09/2026

Maybe I've spent too much time working on emulators, but I take pretty much all of it as 'they emulate...' whatever. Emulate speach Emulate writing Emulate thinking Emulate reasoning All of it superficially similar, none of it genuine. And most of it needing orders of magnitude more energy.

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Reposted by Chris Swan

justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

they're saying the AI can do math and science again, so it's time to reread Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, a lovely articulation of the social work of assembling understanding, i.e., the best reason to tackle hard problems. www.ams.org/journals/bul...

When I started as a graduate student at Berkeley, I had trouble imagining
how I could "prove" a new and interesting mathematical theorem. I didn't
really understand what a "proof was.
By going to seminars, reading papers, and talking to other graduate students,
I gradually began to catch on. Within any field, there are certain theorems and
certain techniques that are generally known and generally accepted. When you
write a paper, you refer to these without proof. You look at other papers in the
field, and you see what facts they quote without proof, and what they cite in
their bibliography. You learn from other people some idea of the proofs. Then
you're free to quote the same theorem and cite the same citations. You don't
necessarily have to read the full papers or books that are in your bibliography.
Many of the things that are generally known are things for which there may be
no known written source. As long as people in the field are comfortable that
the idea works, it doesn't need to have a formal written source.

At first I was highly suspicious of this process. I would doubt whether a certain idea was really established. But I found that I could ask people, and they
could produce explanations and proofs, or else refer me to other people or to
written sources that would give explanations and proofs. There were published
theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were
embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people
thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written
documents, but the written documents were not really primary.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 23/09/2026

You're not alone. This happens to me every... single... time...

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 22/09/2026

Sadly neither yet supported by OpenWrt due to lack of open drivers for the SoCs

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 21/09/2026

Scottie’s bar used to do drinks for 10HKD one night a week, which was a bargain. But only Standard Chartered notes. So people would spend the whole week carefully filtering their change to keep those notes.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 21/09/2026

Told by whom? I’m guessing somebody who didn’t spend any time in Hong Kong prior to the hand back to China. HSBC printed ~90% of the HKD bank notes, with the rest coming from Standard Chartered; and the notes had the full name www.leftovercurrency.com/exchange/hon...

leftovercurrency.com

10 Hong Kong Dollars (HSBC 1985-1992) - Exchange yours for cash

Get paid for your 10 Hong Kong Dollars banknote (HSBC 1985-1992). At Leftover Currency we exchange your withdrawn HSBC Hong Kong Dollar banknotes

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Reposted by Chris Swan

Ken Tindell @kentindell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This! This is how AI will kill us: with the connivance of humans. Douglas Adams nailed all this years ago with the Electric Monk.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 19/09/2026

I do my best to live an advertising free life, so I've missed that. But we shouldn't underestimate the role of ads in driving much of the epistemic crisis before and after the dawn of the slopocene.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 18/09/2026

[blog] The stories we tell LLM based AI may be great at cranking out plausible sentences. But stringing those together to form some kind of narrative doesn’t get a good story. That’s a problem, and an opportunity; because humans run on stories, and we still need humans to craft good stories.

blog.thestateofme.com

The stories we tell

TL;DR Large Language Model (LLM) based Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be great at cranking out plausible sentences. But stringing those sentences together to form some kind of narrative doesn't get a good story. That's a problem, and an opportunity; because humans run on stories, and (for now at least) it seems that we still need humans to craft good stories.

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Reposted by Chris Swan

Ken Tindell @kentindell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Looks like Enron’s maze of twisty SPVs all alike. Except for a whole industry.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 17/09/2026

Or maybe just relaunch 'Silicon Valley', but with a complete cast reset. Ditch Pied Piper for an AI startup, and build the frontier lab backdrop around them. With @rezendi.com on the production team.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 17/09/2026

There's more than a movie of material here. I'm thinking multiple seasons of a Mike Judge series along similar lines to 'Silicon Valley' (or maybe 'Halt and Catch Fire'). But starting with SBF's crypto Island, and then shifting location to the Bay area and Altman later on.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 17/09/2026

This is the best articulation of what LLMs are doing to programming and security that I've seen

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 16/09/2026

I feel like there weren't nearly enough people paying attention to @rezendi.com when he started writing about this stuff in the early posts of Gradient Ascendant. Though of course @marypcbuk.bsky.social won't have read, because it's on Substack. aiascendant.com/p/extropias-... 17 Oct 2022 !

aiascendant.com

Extropia's Children, Chapter 1: The Wunderkind

Back in the nineties, a teenage supergenius joined a mailing list. That odd seed led, via Harry Potter, to today's Effective Altruism and AI Risk movements; bizarre cults; and the birth of Bitcoin. Th...

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 16/09/2026

The only point of writing such a book is to be the guy that wrote the book on... and I think you were plenty visible as a leader on that topic.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 14/09/2026

FWIW I don't think PAC money will buy influence with open source users, contributors and maintainers in the same way that it does with voters. But we're all about to find out the hard way whether that's true... HT infosec.exchange/@wendynather for the dialogue that brought this realisation.

infosec.exchange

Wendy Nather (@wendynather@infosec.exchange)

19.1K Posts, 393 Following, 5.16K Followers · Recovering industry analyst, research director & CISO. Senior Fellow at @AtlanticCouncil @CyberStatecraft. Single, childful cat lady. General Content War...

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 14/09/2026

It's not just a fascist project because of who's involved (though the list of shame grows longer and more cringey by the day); it's an inherently anti democratic thing because that's what PACs are.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 14/09/2026

Omacom is a PAC Or at least Omacom is to open source what a political action committee (PAC) is to politics - an attempt to buy influence with the $€£ of the rich and powerful to further benefit the rich and powerful. hachyderm.io/@davidculley...

hachyderm.io

David Culley (@davidculley@hachyderm.io)

I wish I needn't care about Omarchy or DHH. Maybe you're annoyed by now by all the posts about Omarchy. I mean, we get it: DHH recently discovered Linux after he got sick of Apple taking 30% of all h...

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 14/09/2026

Nobody's putting a letter in their drawer for the frontier labs. Part of how they can spin such outrageous stories about the future is that they're facing no consequences in the present. They're the apex predator of the real boogeyman - the limited liability corporation (@cstross 'slow AI').

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 08/09/2026

It never recovered from Gilligan. But... it's coasted a very long way on past reputational momentum. E.g. I don't think Brexit would have happened under old Auntie (asking the hard questions and holding people to account); but a lot of folk got taken in by the Beeb both siding the whole thing.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 07/09/2026

I once harboured a hope that Raspberry Pi's would become the default built in hardware for TVs etc., but instead the vendors saw all that lovely ads money they could rinse out of proprietary ecosystems :( blog.thestateofme.com/2012/01/29/r...

blog.thestateofme.com

Raspberry Pi – Category Killer (2) – Media Players

In my previous post about Raspberry Pi I noted that it will probably wipe out the existing market for thin client devices. It won’t stop there though. Next up – media players… Har…

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 07/09/2026

Go too hard on the F in FOSS and you cut off the DRM that Netflix et al insist upon (and that W3C caved in to). OTOH you can get a long way with Kodi, and even further with Linux of your choice running on hardware of your choice with browser of your choice. It's just not very 'consumer'.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 07/09/2026

The whole point of these grey zone ops is it's becoming impossible to tell; but since all the threads track back to Vlad it's fairly straightforward to summarise "vote populist, get Putin".

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 06/09/2026

Did you see that two player Ellie launched recently? There was an excellent talk about it at EMFcamp 2024 whilst it was still a work in progress.

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Andy Scollick @andyscollick.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Another compilation video from yesterday's fascist paramilitary 'storm' action in #Dover town and at the Port of Dover. #FarRight Some national security-related observations below.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 06/09/2026

They really should have gone with 'little black men' in reference to the 'little green men' in Crimea; but also because it would be a hilariously insulting label to the people involved. "What did you do at the weekend Danno?" 'i was a little black man' "I thought you hated..."

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 02/09/2026

I strongly suspect that they’ve outsourced that to a third party and that they did a poor job of specifying a rational SLA. You may also have noticed that even after statements are prepared it can take days to retrieve them, which also makes no sense for what should be simple accounting data.

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Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

my off the cuff reaction to this is that given how good humans are at using language to represent symbolic domains, a model large enough is going to have vectors that encode those because we talk about them; it's how I make sense of them being so useful!

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Robin Wilton 🇱🇧 @komadori.eurosky.social · 02/09/2026

This should be of particular interest to people still advocating age verification by unaccountable third parties. It's a disaster no longer waiting to happen.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 31/08/2026

Our next port of call was Bermuda. Some of the sailors got drunk (as they do) and did some silly stuff (not unusual). It made the front page of the tabloids as ‘Navy sailors defile memory of Saint Diana’ or something like that. Completely bonkers.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 31/08/2026

I was at sea with a NATO task force. Heard the news at breakfast, just before going over to a US ship. They were much more upset about it than my colleagues. But I completely missed the media fuelled frenzy at home, and I’ll never be able to relate to it.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 26/08/2026

You could s/x/xcancel/ in an X url and see the post without giving traffic to X.

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 26/08/2026

Oh no - they've cancelled xcancel - clearly no care for free speech :0 I was about to scold a colleague for posting an X link rather than xcancel, and I get:

Screen grab from an cancel URL:
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/08/2026

Most people have never heard of siRNA, but it’s going to change the face of medicine. In a new article, Jacob Witten explains this magic button to silence genes. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-ki...

worksinprogress.co

The kill switch for harmful genes - Works in Progress Magazine

What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

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Chris Swan @cpswan.net · 25/08/2026

Clocking on at the outrage factory

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