iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Reading a review on serotonin by Peter Dayan and Quentin J.M. Huys from 2009. It's an increasingly rare experience in this LLM-blighted era to read a paper with good prose.

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

nyti.ms

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 27/09/2026

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

Ann Pierce
@itsannpierce
20h
I am disheartened by this as well. I already lost a bunch of followers for agreeing with @tautologer, but it's saddening to see local nerdy women being caricatured as Karen-like outsiders and getting pushed out of the scene. This is exactly why you hear so few concrete, names-attached stories of sexual harrassment and assault. I'm told there is a history of discrediting these because the "slut normalization" thing is top priority and these stories get inconveniently in the way of spreading this ideology.
I got roped into attending last year's Saturday Slutcon party because so many local and out-of-town friends were there (to echo sentiments @tautologer expressed about "slut events becoming central to the larger scenes). Mostly I hung out with people I knew and that was great. But in the course of my 3-ish hours there, there were 2 times my "no" was not accepted by a man I didn't know, and I was physically pushing a huge guy off of me who was rubbing his penis on me, who continued to do it despite my physical force against him, and after I finally wriggled away from him, told him I wanted to dance alone etc., he came back and did it again.
This was scary and bad, but it didn't even cross my mind to report this because one of the other people who didn't accept my "no" earlier in the night was the bartender (an officially sanctioned authority at the event), and I knew the event was organized exclusively by women into CNC (who are vocal about how rapey behavior turns them on), so I figured this sort of thing would just get me laughed at. And anyway, I heard there were a lot of other incidents like it. Later though, someone encouraged me to report this story to the organizers, and despite my embarrassment I did, so *they know* that this and other incidents happened. This is why they cut the Saturday night party this year and created a larger training program for the flirt girls - *because* of things like this last year. Yet the narrative bein…

People who haven't been to Slutcon are saying "it's just group therapy," "it's just innocent flirting." But the environment is much like a sex party in that many people are nude, there is making out and sex acts happening out in the open. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect that every nerdy girl who likes rationalist bloggers or is into EA/AI safety should automatically be comfortable with this! That if she's not, there's something wrong with her, we don't want her in our scenes, etc.
Not to mention, it's explictly an event *for men*, where men are the clients and the "flirt girls" are the product. Last year I overheard an exchange where a man felt "led on" by a flirt girl and was trying to get her punished/kicked out. (A dynamic that seems inevitable in this context!)
Anyway- it does sound like they've upped their consent education a lot this year, are more organized, and that's good! As I've told my friends who are attending: I hope they have fun!
I heard several accounts last year of women who had no problems and really enjoyed the event. That's great!
Just... can we live in reality about this? There are real reasons why male-female sexual dynamics are tricky.
Encouraging autistic men who can't yet read body language to go around asking to see womens' boobs is maybe a bit ill-advised. Maybe not everyone should be/identify as a slut; maybe it's not for everyone.
And yeah, filtering the Bay Area Al safety scene down to only women who are super comfy with this eliminates *most* women - including many of the really smart, nerdy, weird women who've been in the larger scenes for years. What a loss for humanity.
I absolutely understand why people with a minority sexuality would want to create belonging, would want to create spaces for people like themselves. But why do it like this/at this cost?

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Trying to learn a bit about the AAV (adeno-associated virus) technique. As is usually my experience, the complexity of intracellular processes boggles the mind.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"Our findings motivate a shift from asking whether a model has a world model to mechanistically studying its world modeling: the interacting capacities through which it represents its environment and uses those representations to guide behavior." Wittgenstein's meaning-as-usage, #AI edition. :P

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A forgotten machine future. What an album.

Front cover of the album 'Ralf & Florian' by Kraftwerk

Back cover of the album 'Ralf & Florian' by Kraftwerk

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"... cingulate theta power was equally and non-specifically predictive of outcome with either an antidepressant or placebo." Perhaps one day there will be biomarkers for susceptibility (receptivity?) to different types of placebo. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Brain regulation of emotional conflict predicts antidepressant treatment response for depression - Nature Human Behaviour

Fonzo et al. found that brain activity during a form of emotional regulation predicted how well individuals with depression would respond to a common antidepressant. Brain function assays may herald a...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"We found strong evidence that pupil diameters were larger when the depth illusion was that of a hole (funnel) than of a bump (cone)." This sort of finding aligns nicely with an 'embodied perception' framing*. __ * sans the irrelevant anti-representation verbiage, of course. :P

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This performance by Marisa Anderson is pretty special. Cosmic rumblings from they electric guitar. Shall have to check out the album, "The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music". youtu.be/rix14jBM03I?...

youtu.be

Marisa Anderson - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

YouTube video by KEXP

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Recent news items about AI remind me of "kayfabe"... which led here. "The territory, real AI research with genuine but limited capabilities, has been almost entirely obscured by the map, a hyperreal landscape of predictions, narratives, and branded futures." www.stephendiehl.com/posts/ai_kay...

stephendiehl.com

AGI Discourse as Kayfabe - Stephen Diehl

Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"With AI music, however, it’s this constant hustle, a never-ending “can you tell this was made by a machine?” shell game. By design, it has no character or animating ethos, except for subterfuge." This point by @stevenhyden.bsky.social really nails it. stevenhyden.substack.com/p/im-obligat...

stevenhyden.substack.com

I’m Obligated To Have An Opinion On AI Music So Here It Is (It Bores Me To Tears)

Also: Reviews of new music by Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country and The Bures Band

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Dun Jun @clustertuck.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

RIP Dolly Parton ❤️ Here's a lovely Dolly story: We worked together on "Transamerica." She told me that the bible passage that used to puzzle her the most was, "the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." She said, "How the heck do you sin against the Holy Ghost, and-

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Jill Lightner @jilllightner.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Street art in her honor from SE Seattle

A glittery tinsel-fringed illustrated portrait of Dolly Parton on a telephone pole. There's a cartoon voice bubble with a quote from her that says "find out who you are and do it on purpose."

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 25/08/2026

everybody is (rightfully) remembering her incredible charity work, the 300 million books and counting for kids, the moderna vaccine, all of it she also wrote 'I Will Always Love You' and 'Jolene' on the same dang day. absolutely peerless

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Every few weeks I think about how there are plenty of people alive today who were too old to be in the target audience of 1950s rock and roll.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Super excited to announce that I've joined Neuroblox as a Research Staff Scientist! We're building a multi-scale comp neuro platform for mechanistic modeling of cognition, behavior and mood. www.neuroblox.ai

neuroblox.ai

Neuroblox | In Silico Neural Circuit Modeling for Neurotherapeutic Design

Neuroblox provides the first multiscale and mechanistic neural circuit simulation platform built to elicit cognition, mood, and behavior for designing neurotherapeutics.

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In Medias Malone @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I’m dimly aware that LLMs are now solving hard math problems and every announcement is like “🚨 Claude Fabulist 6.7 has now DISPROVEN Flunkelmann’s Conjecture about manifolds in tetrahedral slurps—the solution is soft in K-dimensional toroids!”

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Prathyush @prathyvsh.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Now that we all can have a magic genie one-shot our ideas, there seems to be this thinking that we have elevated to a new level. This needs to be balanced by understanding that this leverage doesn’t guarantee the composability of these one-shotted ideas. x.com/psswordprote...

x.com

J (@psswordprotectd) on X

the power of "one-shot ideas", insights that become available in a moments notice, is that if sufficiently chunked can percolate into a much bigger abstraction, a whole that captures the essence of th...

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

"Writing may gradually edge toward performance. Maybe poets will resort to composing their verse in glass boxes in the public square, the way chess players are now forced to play in controlled environments." lareviewofbooks.org/article/fake...

lareviewofbooks.org

Fakes of the Future | Los Angeles Review of Books

Literary credibility in the age of AI.

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Jeff Yoshimi @jyoshimi.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Hubert Dreyfus on common sense knowledge circa 1992. I think it's held up well!

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Not sure I can fully explain this, but it strikes me that the experience of using LLM-based AI somehow resonates with @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social's Southern Reach series... and also 'Scavengers Reign'.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

We've had evidence to question the 'encoding' metaphor of the genome (at least for high level traits) for quite a while. Wrote a series about this a few years ago. Here's the conclusion: 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

3quarksdaily.com

How informative is the concept of biological information? - 3 Quarks Daily

by Yohan J. John

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Does this mean that bird genomes still encode an entire "dinosaur program" if given the right prompts? No; I think it means we should stop thinking about the genome as "encoding" a morphology at all. www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...

quantamagazine.org

Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta Magazine

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

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elisa freschi @elisafreschi.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

In contrast, I think we should #ReadMore. Time is (possibly) beginningless and it is often the case that what we think is a new idea has already been thought or said before. #books

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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

An essay on sincerity and embarassment and cliché, inspired by a not-very-good documentary about the Counting Crows watched on a flight. jessicahullman.substack.com/p/embarrass-...

jessicahullman.substack.com

Embarrass the sky

What’s the value of sincerity?

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Ureterocele @ureterocele.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

A certain Japanese novelist once said, “Not understanding something is a valid response in itself, so it’s a shame not to read a book simply because you find its content difficult to grasp.” That came as a bolt from the blue to me. (1/4)

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Benjamin Angerer @benniangerer.eurosky.social · 10/07/2026

Tracing the participants' idiosyncratic trajectories, I could observe how imagistic and gestural representations were slowly supplanted by more verbal and abstract forms. Crucially, spontaneously produced metaphors precipitated many of these representational changes. 5/13

A figure depicting a pair of participants engaging in joint gesturing. They are depicting some aspects of the nested side of the 4th cross-fold by using their fingers to represent open and closed edges, depending on their relative direction

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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 09/07/2026

The only reason why this interview even happened was because I came across a Wikipedia 25 anniversary ad while scrolling on Instagram, and promptly flagged Dr. Hussain's work to our Managing Editor. Inspiration for stories can come from anywhere as long as you are curious about the world!

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Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

cambridge.org

Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

"... there is no small, stable, non-conflicting set of detectable signals of good science that will find the good stuff and reject the bad." statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/06/24/t...

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Treating AI review like the contentious policy design problem it is | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Andrés Diplotti @diplotti.com · 06/07/2026

¿Folarin Bolagun no es un elfo del Silmarillion?

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Goal of the tournament? Just wow.

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

"With the evening sun melting away across the pitch extra time arrived like one of life’s inevitabilities, like New York traffic, aimless possession, tactical Paraguayan fouls, death." Good sports writing is underrated. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

theguardian.com

Canale and Gill the heroes as Paraguay hand Germany first World Cup shootout defeat

Germany lost their first World Cup penalty shootout in dramatic fashion after a tense 1-1 draw after extra time

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Yohan J John @dryohanjohn.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

"... the apparent convergence reported by global spectral measures largely disappears after calibration, while local neighborhood similarity, but not local distances, retains significant agreement across different modalities." arxiv.org/abs/2602.14486

arxiv.org

Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that representations from neural networks are converging to a common statistical model of reality. We show that the existing metrics used to measure rep...

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Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

"as AI gets better than knowledge workers at answering small questions...people are likely to focus on big ones. Large language models may commoditise expert knowledge. But that makes knowing how to think, which is the main skill drummed into philosophy students, all the more valuable." #philsky

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