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Erica "digifox" Kovac

@digifox.binaryden.net
2K followers 914 following 14K posts

Software Engineer | Social Democrat | Pro-Nuclear, Pro-Growth | in the vicinity of "Tomboy Transfemme", she/her | Opinions are mine, not my employer's. Pfp by @nicnak044.bsky.social

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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Chrononaut @chrononaut.bsky.social · 19h
Are the AI-generated design docs my colleagues give me to review too long and convoluted? Yes. But do they contain fatal errors, that you find only after wasting hours to carefully review them word by word? Also yes. bsky.app/profile/chro...
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 19h
This is also the case with technical design docs and even API documentation, by the way. The number of times I had an idea for something and it wasn't until I wrote the design doc out that I realized it had major flaws that may have gone unnoticed once I was heads-down in code is... fairly high.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 19h
However, that is not the point of other types of writing. For the theory and literature review sections, the work that writing has done is not just conveying information, it is assuring you, the reader, that someone has written this and been forced to think about it. I think this is very bad to LLM!
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Sisyphus, but for reducing tail latency @bluespacecanary.bsky.social · 21h
every line of memory-unsafe code needs to be treated as a critical security vulnerability by default
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
in the real world, synthetic resampling with anisotropic noise just disappears any evidence beneath the noise floor while making your conclusions increasingly radical and disjoint from the signsl
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
right, yes. one of the basic problems is that they think that thinking about something really hard is a type of sampling, and that you actually don't need to sample anything to get information, and that there is no difference between thinking about something and doing it.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
ponder @ponder.ooo · 29/09/2026
the rationalist scene has always been inhospitable to people with *actual* epistemic standards
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
no, "rationalist" isn't ironic. they specifically contrast themselves with empiricism -- and they literally believe that they can derive everything in their light cone from first principles to the disappearance of the last neutron.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i think RFK Jr.'s colon-destroying steak and sauerkraut diet, tradwife culture, and Silicon Valley CNC parties are the same thing: a desperate attempt among powerful men to convince each other that gluttony, rapaciousness, and raw domination are not just their birthright but their responsibility
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It's fine if people don't want to have liberal arts education. Go ahead, have large gaps in understanding the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Live your life ignorant, incomplete, undeveloped, inadequate. You have the right to be a worse citizen, a shallow dullard, a lesser person.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
ponder @ponder.ooo · 28/09/2026
the main discovery behind llms imo was a new class of architecture that does a better job of approximating a kind of function that people had been interested in approximating for a long time (causal language modeling)
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
My belief: This election isn’t about the economy in 2027. It’s about the economy in 2060. Prosperity comes from institutions like the rule of law, markets, a free press, and capitalism (not crony capitalism) newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/…
newsletter.platypuseconomics.com
We Spend So Much Time Talking About Gas Prices
But is that what we really want to focus on? Also: Is the U.S. economy really the envy of the world?
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Agents calling agents is fine. Humans calling humans is fine. I do not ever want to be called by an AI agent
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ponder @ponder.ooo · 28/09/2026
meanwhile the main *empirical* results they gesture at to back up the theory on that forum are instances of their own companies' unusual incompetence at responsibly managing ai systems compared to other ai companies
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
ponder @ponder.ooo · 28/09/2026
their main theoretical argument for why ai is a uniquely dangerous field only they should be allowed to practice is that that's the consensus that has formed on their niche online forum where agreeing with that point has from the inception of the forum been considered table stakes for participation
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
eevee @eev.ee · 24/09/2026
"cancel nitro" seems like a tough sell when paying for nitro is very likely to make discord classify you as an adult automatically
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Yael Grauer @yaelwrites.com · 24/09/2026
I don't need to connect my fill in the blank to the internet arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...
arstechnica.com
Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
So absurd and embarrassing ..."
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 24/09/2026
The good news is there's basically no reason to think this will make it out of committee
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eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 24/09/2026
oh and losing a charter can result in your assets being seized and all of your work destroyed but it’s fine because the office of the president has never been used for vindictive purposes
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(2) in any case in which the charter is revoked
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under paragraph (1) of section 13(d) due to a find-
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ing of a violation and the finding has not been over-
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turned pursuant to an appeal under paragraph (2)
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of such section, the person forfeits their intellectual
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property and assets to ensure the safe and complete
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destruction of all systems and hardware related to
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the violation.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 24/09/2026
so dangerous that the government gets to set arbitrary floating point math speed limits UNLESS you get a special certificate then it’s fine :)
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 24/09/2026
and there it is: regulatory capture

6 SEC. 12. CHARTERS FOR ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTEL-
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LIGENCE.
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(a) AUTHORITY TO ISSUE.—The Secretary may issue

9 to a person a charter to develop or distribute an advanced

10 artificial intelligence model.
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(b) CHARTER REQUIRED.—No person may develop or

12 distribute an advanced artificial intelligence model without
13 a charter issued by the Secretary under subsection (a).
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People really need to go back to the original Jurassic Park and look at the rather disturbing ways in which InGen's management of it now looks prescient
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST @chathamharrison.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Silicon Valley's damage becomes a lot easier to understand when you realize how much of their innovation involves the government not enforcing laws, or enforcing them too feebly for anyone to care
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Hulex DJing Furpoc! Sun 11pm @hulex.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People are just getting banned en masse for falsely being flagged for violating “child safety” Fuck ai and fuck discord they’re so fuckin washed at this point
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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Expanse: gods are real, they noticed you, and they are PISSED
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Elixir of Progress @elucidating.extradimensional.space · 23/09/2026
The entire edifice of science is currently under attack because it's been so radically successful at spreading public knowledge. It seems like we need to solve the plight of scientists today with or without the models. I'm much more worried about that angle.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 23/09/2026
Something that worries me more every day: I suspect most fields have 5-25 breakthrough ideas latent in existing data and literature. Say you’re a midsize AI company looking for cred. Why not hire a *small* team of domain experts + 1000 agents … and promote your models as the ones that broke Econ?
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
If you view AI as filling in the convex hull of knowledge, this is great in the short term but bad in the long term if there's no one left to expand the hull after
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 22/09/2026
over on musk-X they're trying to cancel us for telling the truth: democrats wouldn't piss on donald trump if he was on fire
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Doll @dollspace.gay · 19/09/2026
The pro-AI coalition only looks unified because everyone is shooting at the same anti AI barricade from wildly incompatible metaphysical positions.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Doll @dollspace.gay · 19/09/2026
Chaotic Good: Open-weight liberationists “Nobody should need corporate or state permission to think with a machine. Release the weights.”
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 22/09/2026
This is frustrating but they do at least support the Play/App store age range APIs, which are a much better solution to this problem imho.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Rona Altana @ronaaltana.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Discord finally confirmed for real when they're rolling out age verification service-wide (tomorrow) and I've not seen a single person make a peep about it
discord.com
Safer for Teens, Same Discord for Adults
We’re launching a revamped, privacy-focused age assurance solution including methods that won’t require an ID or selfie. Here’s how it works.
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 21/09/2026
It's a failure of our software engineering as a discipline that a bank website can load slowly, like, ever.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 21/09/2026
Another story about institutions deciding they can build on open models rather than pay premium to a frontier lab. h/t @ver.ooo
bloomberg.com
OpenAI, Anthropic Costs Push More Startups to Build Off Cheaper Open Models
The $15.6 billion legal startup Harvey built its business around training AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to do specialized work for lawyers. Recently, however, soaring artificial intelligence costs hav...
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Freedom of the Press Foundation @freedom.press · 21/09/2026
David Ellison should put his mouth where his money is.
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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
it's sort of like a baby on a plane. I have a ton of sympathy for my friend who just got off a flight and wants to complain about the baby who was on it with them. I have no sympathy for the person who wants a policy fix for crying babies
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Natanael, Tech janitor @natanael.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Meanwhile, Facebook doesn't ban nazis
theguardian.com
Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain because they relate to feminism
Theatre told that Facebook and Instagram filter out ads mentioning ‘social topics’ such as civil rights or feminism
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
you want teen takeovers to end? provide youth with third spaces that are easily accessible and visible alongside redirecting them to such activities
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#StupidSuez @diplomatofnight.com · 21/09/2026
Chris Van Hollen issues the first ever call by a Democratic member of Congress for US officials to be sanctioned by other countries
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Internet Archive @archive.org · 21/09/2026
Local and state government records help communities understand their history and participate in public life. But digital records can be hard to preserve and access. The Internet Archive’s new ATLAS program will help address that. Learn more 👉 blog.archive.org/2026/09/10/a... 🧵
Logo of the Institute of Museum Library Services.
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Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 21/09/2026
I called out Flock a year ago. BUT, it is grassroots organizing that made it a national movement against mass surveillance.
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Christo Silvia @christosilvia.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
AI makes it easier to write software, and that's bad
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
"Higher velocity = more good" is a misunderstanding premised on the idea that every piece of work on your Jira board is there because it adds value in some way. Once you understand that the majority of developer tickets are actually negative-value, you will become enlightened.
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Elixir of Progress @elucidating.extradimensional.space · 21/09/2026
Some folks have used my post on Superintelligence and the assumption of value to be dismissive of the seriousness of AI alignment problems. Please do not! I think the thing we have today is much weirder and scarier than superintelligence. It's supertenaciousness.
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Reposted by Erica "digifox" Kovac
Tommaso Sciortino @sciortino.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
My reaction: Fine! Instead of saying LLMs "think" just say that they "think2" a new word I made up just now that means "to form ideas, make choices, or have opinions."
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 20/09/2026
No one has proposed a fix for this that isn't "we need to make gatekeeping infrastructure mandatory," which is clearly bad. I don't think it's a worthwhile angle to approach things from.
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Erica "digifox" Kovac @digifox.binaryden.net · 20/09/2026
Somewhere between Neutral-Neutral and Neutral-Lover.
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Eli Mallon @iame.li · 19/09/2026
So is the superintelligent AI's plan to kill all the humans and _then_ figure out how to automate mining rare earth metals and construct EUV lithography machines so it can print new chips without humans in the loop? To like... continue existing? Wow yeah that sounds really smart I'm so scared
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Erica Windisch @ewindisch.ontological.observer · 19/09/2026
In 2024, I found indicators that I could likely escape OpenAI's sandboxes. I did not demonstrate an escape because I felt there was significant enough information to make a responsible report. I was told that this was not of interest to their bounty program and they closed my report.
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