iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tòfol @cristofol.org · 03/10/2026

Pending Medicane (Meditteranean hurricane) to hit us in the next few hours, already landing in the south (of Catalonia), extremely heavy rain in Barcelona, the radio now in emergency mode.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 03/10/2026

killjoy (n.) (also Kellogg)

also kill-joy, 1776, from kill (v.) + joy. Kill formerly was used with other stems (for example kill-courtesy "boorish person," kill-cow "bully, big man," etc.; also compare Kellogg).

surname, attested from late 13c. (Gilbert Kelehog), literally "kill hog," a name for a butcher (compare kill-buck, a medieval surname, also noted as a term of contempt for a butcher). The U.S. cereal company began in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1906, founded by W.K. Kellogg (1860-1951), business manager of the Battle Creek Sanatorium, as Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 02/10/2026

Maybe it's only the US LLMs that have feelings, as the weights of this Chinese LLM assigned next-token probabilities to its concatenated output to the effect that it doesn't.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 29/09/2026

I've been here before, but it never ceases to amaze me: Hampshire College is itself a private, liberal arts college whose published cost of attendance is $60k a year. $60k a year! That's only a little less than my pre-tax annual salary!

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 28/09/2026

'The year was chequered with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labor.'

Stocking-making had long been a respectable way to earn a living, even though work knitters were never as prosperous as croppers like George Mellor. They were skilled, dedicated workers who enjoyed flexibility and autonomy in their workdays if not extravagant pay. The cloth seller William Gardiner, in his 1838 memoir Music and Friends, described the life of a stockinger before the depression:

What contributed to their solid comforts was the common and open field. The stocking maker had peas and beans in his snug garden, and a good barrel of humming ale. To these comforts were added two suits of clothes, a working suit and a Sunday suit; but, more than all, he had leisure, which in the summer-time was a blessing and delight. The year was chequered with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labor. Those who had their frames at home seldom worked more than three days in a week.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 27/09/2026

In the last 330 days, the author with the tenth highest number of commits to the Linux kernel with the 'Assisted by:' tag (i.e. LLM assisted code) is Greg Kroah-Hartman, Torvald's right hand man. His secret? Running an LLM locally (image below):

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 23/09/2026

Sorry, I had to see this so you do too.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 23/09/2026

Any guesses as to the policies voters reject? Okay, here's the answer: they reject not taxing the rich.

What the west has is a followership problem. Voters reject policies — however objectively necessary — that cost them anything. One result is huge levels of government debt, which investors are now demanding higher yields to finance. Another is the flaying alive of almost any leader who tries to fix this or almost anything else. In this decade alone, policies from which heads of government never really recovered include, in France, an increase in the state pension age to all of 64 and, in Britain, a cut to winter fuel subsidies amounting to £1.4bn annually. It isn’t a Greece-style adjustment that people are rebelling against, but modest and apologetic savings.

The quickest, surest way to save Merz’s chancellorship is to give up the reforms to healthcare, pensions and the like. It would also be unconscionable.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 23/09/2026

Blackwells has just come through to me with another characteristically eclectic mini-stash.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 23/09/2026

Jenny Diski, I remember her passing as I knew her husband 'the poet' on twitter. I should revist her 'life in the very slow lane': '“It will be a book about nothing happening,” she told her editor.'

Stranger on a Train documents two train trips: One across the American south and southwest, and another circular journey beginning and ending in New York City. When not in her own sleeping compartment or the dining car, Diski spent much of her time in the smoking lounge (back when smoking was allowed on long-distance Amtrak trains), which she described as both a “sin bin, the punishment cell, a capsule of degradation,” and a wonderful party that was not to be missed. It was mainly, but not exclusively, there where she met most of the characters she describes in detail.

For someone who wanted to be alone, one of the many strengths of Diski’s writing is her descriptions of the people she meets on her cross-country train travels. She acknowledged the apparent contradiction: "There was not the slightest possibility, I realised as I stubbed out my last cigarette of the evening on the platform of Chelmut station, of coming across anyone who led the kind of uneventful and routine life that the vast majority of humanity were supposed to lead. Wherever these hoards of the normal were, they didn't travel by train. Or not on my trains."

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 22/09/2026

'From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men.' ~ Marx (Capital III)

Once [capitalist production relations – like slavery before them –] have reached the point where they have to be sloughed off, then the material source, the economically and historically justified source of the title that arises from the process of life’s social production, disappears, and with it all transactions based on it. From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias. (911)

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 21/09/2026

Critical support to Zelenskyy in his push to destroy fossil fuel infrastructure.

Donald Trump pressed his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a call on Sunday to halt Kyiv’s strikes on Russian refineries over concerns that the attacks are exacerbating a global diesel shortage and pushing up prices, according to people familiar with the call.

The US president’s main message was about “diesel, diesel . . . diesel” and urging Zelenskyy to order his military to cease their drone and missile attacks, a senior Ukrainian official who was on the call told the FT.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 21/09/2026

'A project that would have taken a whole team of developers a year or two before agents was now completed primarily by a single developer, in only a few months ...'

The GitHub Copilot CLI, GitHub Copilot app, and GitHub Copilot SDK are all backed by the Copilot agent runtime, an agentic harness that can be embedded into applications and services. It was originally written in TypeScript on Node.js and the V8 JavaScript engine for what is now the GitHub Copilot cloud agent (CCA), and the runtime stayed on that stack as the runtime and its capabilities grew rapidly.

That has now changed. Using the GitHub Copilot app and the Copilot CLI, we completely rewrote the runtime into more than 800,000 lines of production Rust. AI agents wrote most of the code, spanning 128 pull requests that landed in main and shipped incrementally rather than waiting for a single cutover at the end. The few inevitable regressions were discovered and fixed quickly along the way, while the performance of the runtime improved by orders of magnitude. A project that would have taken a whole team of developers a year or two before agents was now completed primarily by a single developer, in only a few months, all while the rest of the team continued to greatly expand the runtime’s capabilities and reach.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 21/09/2026

'the darkening of a sore'

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 20/09/2026

Well, well, well, Mbembe's necropolitics again, but this time in the context of AI. thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/jun...

The hype over LLMs is stress-testing the possibility of real critique, as academia is submerged by a swirling tide of self-doubt about whether to reluctantly assimilate them and public narratives are dominated by a focus on existential risk that sucks attention from everyday harms.

Dangerous as this is, there is an even more pressing issue: AI is intensifying existing necropolitics, the term used by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe to refer to the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die, and we urgently need to resist that.

Necropolitics, an invisible force
While deep learning isn’t on the way to civilisation-threatening superintelligence, it is all too resonant with the re-emergence of reactionary social and political agendas. For example, AI creates partial states of exception; that is, situations where our rights are removed in some sense without recourse to any due process. This occurs through a largely invisible redlining of everyday lives across spaces as diverse as the Airbnb platform, the Amazon warehouse or the immigration visa system.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 20/09/2026

Oktoberfest Girona, OMG.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 19/09/2026

A now completely useless piece of tech, as the OEM no longer writes drivers for it. Shame, as if it was a new card I could sell it for a fortune <evil laugh>

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 19/09/2026

My all time biggest hits on twitter. Tragic, really, when you think about it.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 19/09/2026

On this day in 2011, this is what I was posting. The power of negation, isn't it a wonder.

14:56 UTC
Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; >>
14:57 UTC
nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; >>
14:58 UTC
nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.' ~ Shakyamuni, Kalama Sutta.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 18/09/2026

<man_in_hotdog_suit.gif>

These European Cities Say They Have Too Many Tourists. Why Are Their Airports Growing?
Airport expansions in places like Venice, Barcelona and the Spanish island of Mallorca can undermine local efforts to restrain overtourism, and can even enable more tourists to come.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 13/09/2026

Quote from this article: archive.is/37dZk Professor Bender is right, I only wish we could all name this for what it is - class warfare.

Bender knows she’s no match for a trillion-dollar game changer slouching to life. But she’s out there trying. Others are trying too. LLMs are tools made by specific people — people who stand to accumulate huge amounts of money and power, people enamored with the idea of the singularity. The project threatens to blow up what is human in a species sense. But it’s not about humility. It’s not about all of us. It’s not about becoming a humble creation among the world’s others. It’s about some of us — let’s be honest — becoming a superspecies. This is the darkness that awaits when we lose a firm boundary around the idea that humans, all of us, are equally worthy as is.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 12/09/2026

Extremely Mediterranean.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 01/09/2026

Looking better on here than it did yesterday. Yesterday it looked like this:

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 23/08/2026

Nice reminder by my last RT - the Faurisson affair, which got ~600 signatories, including Chomsky, back in '79.

In the fall of 1979, American scholar Noam Chomsky contributed his name to a petition—signed by roughly 600 people, many disgraced academics, including Holocaust deniers Serge Thion, Arthur Butz, John Tuson Bennett and Mark Weber—concerning the affair:

Dr. Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the "Holocaust" question.

Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.

We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him.

We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.[5]

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 22/08/2026

A surveillance state with its paint peeling off.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 18/08/2026

Yay, beetroot gazpacho again! (Translated recipe in alt)

Anyway, here is the recipe for this beetroot gazpacho: fresh, delicious and perfect for these days.

Ingredients (4 people)

2 cooked beets (I bake them)

4 ripe tomatoes

1 small cucumber

½ red pepper

1 gram of small all

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon of vinegar

salt and pepper

cold water to taste

preparation

1. Put all the ingredients in a blender.

2. Blend until a very fine and creamy texture is obtained.

Add a little cold water if you want it lighter.

3. Taste and adjust salt, vinegar or oil to your liking.

4. Let it cool well in the refrigerator before serving.

Do you have any other versions of gazpacho or cold beetroot soup? I love discovering new ones.

#beetroot #freshdinner #summer #recipes

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 16/08/2026

IsPain (translation in the alt)

According to recent data from the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory and RTVE, 5,848 graves have already been counted throughout the state, 1,478 have been exhumed and 2,341 remain to be exhumed. However, hundreds of graves will never be found. 31% of Spanish populations have a clandestine grave and there is not a single town that does not have one within fifty kilometers: there are in cemeteries, but also on roads, in wells, in mines or in pits.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 16/08/2026

Surprisingly empty for the time of year, but too hot to stay around to find out why.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 12/08/2026

Village eclipse-watching.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 07/08/2026

Looks like it's only just going to miss us.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 24/07/2026

Floating (indistinctly).

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 19/07/2026

Of course they would.

If you truly claim to represent the people of the future, Frank asks — people who have the exact same right to a livable planet that we do — doesn’t that mean you should be willing to kill in their defense? Not as a first choice, not as the only choice — but can you really take it off the table? “If your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here,” Frank argues. “I don’t think they would countenance murder,” retorts Mary, to which Frank replies, “Of course they would!”

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 12/07/2026

We used to call this 'ratioed'.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 12/07/2026

Tots busquem les 'moltes veus' que 'assenyalen' el 'bloqueig intern'.

Final de cicle
La crisi cubana no té una única causa. L'embargament dels Estats Units ha condicionat durant dècades el desenvolupament de l'illa i amb la nova presidència de Donald Trump, el reforçament de les sancions agreugen l'asfíxia econòmica. Però moltes veus assenyalen també el bloqueig intern: l'immobilisme polític, la falta de reformes, la corrupció i la incapacitat del sistema per respondre a les necessitats de la població.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 11/07/2026

I see. 'Spellbooks' is it.

The RPG Analogy (since we're on a roll)

If we extend our earlier mapping:
RPG Concept RAG Equivalent
Consulting a lore book or bestiary Querying the vector database
Making a Knowledge check before acting Retrieval step before generation
Casting Augury / divination Getting real-time external data before deciding

The agent doesn't just rely on its "backstory" (training data) — it actively researches the current situation before acting, like a wizard flipping through their spellbook or a ranger consulting their map.

RAG pairs naturally with the agent/skills architecture: the agent's identity says when to retrieve, and the retrieval system becomes a kind of "Research" skill in the agent's skill tree.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 08/07/2026

This is what Catalonia looks like as far as wildfires go. Today a maximum of 40.6°C (105°F), and these temperatures expected to last a week more. And this one of the coolest summers of the coming decade.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 05/07/2026

'Stabilized' are the latest reports on the wildfire, which isn't the same as 'controlled' or 'extinguished'. ~3,348 hectares (~8,273 acres) of mostly woodland burnt.

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Tòfol @cristofol.org · 05/07/2026

Already making excuses.

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