iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

common German nationalism L

Reposted by diego@estupido.fyi

It is not only moral to pirate scientific articles, it's actually one of the best things you can do for science. The presses that produce them are utter parasites and anything that hastens their bankruptcy is a great service to the world.

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Michael McLean @michaelmclean.me · 9h

Holy shit. Big Meat dropping serious coin for Democrats?!?!

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Warren Wells, AICP @warrenjwells.bsky.social · 11h

At long last, the pedestrian hybrid beacon (PHB) at Shattuck/Russell in Berkeley is energized! ⚡⚡

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Brad Ewing @bradleyewing.bsky.social · 11h

The Median Voter

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 12h

Sam, I am so grateful to you for bringing us this lore. it brings me great joy to know that my enemies are miserable losers

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工an Monroe 🚰 @eean.dev · 21h

Berkeley never recovered from the Great Depression

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 13h

even american football needs a cpa from time to time...

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 14h

shhh let him buy the American Football house so I can crash in his basement and never leave

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Reposted by diego@estupido.fyi

franciscOOoOo👻 varela fan club @paleopragmatist.bsky.social · 16h

if 'ai uses too much energy and its not valuable' is a reason to oppose it, we should likewise be opposed to a large swath of recreational activities like fortnite or whatever, and whatever you think of fortnite deciding which activities are/are not 'worthwhile' is simply not a dog that will hunt

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

yeah I don't like how spammy they are but it's fun to throw a wrench in their gears sometimes because spambots are more ethically dubious than trash-talking them is

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

and yet, human agents are the only ones defining things in the first place, the whole reason training data exists at all. sucks to suck!

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

yeah I think "embodied cognition" is doing a lot of uncredited work for people's mental models here, and people should be willing to explore their intuitions for why electrical systems with neurotransmitters carry different ethical weight than systems with GPUs, precisely for the reasons you stated

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

see this is a great example @wowitschris.bsky.social , I'm perfectly happy with excluding bots that vomit out excruciatingly shitty Claude-ese

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

the good news about little humans is that, like Pokémon, they evolve into higher beings. the bad news is that, unlike Pokémon, they get less cute as they do so. you win some you lose some I guess

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

my point is, we're perfectly capable of ethical frameworks for how to treat other living organisms without gradations of consciousness getting involved. so why worry about models of consciousness that aren't self-referential? what do they accomplish that metacognition can't settle?

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I didn't say you were doing that, I said I have observed extremely sensitive ethical discussions around the treatment of infants around the world focus on things other than consciousness

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I have a schizophrenic family member who had some sort of fugue state at one point and was found over 200 miles away from her family home in Mexico... walking along a highway outside of Phoenix. IMO they deserve the best medical care possible and they probably weren't super conscious at the time

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I think we can agree that dolphins are marginally more conscious than dogs, no dispute there. we just like domesticated dogs more because dolphins can be such unethical bastards in the wild

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

so I agree that infants are an interesting case on this spectrum but it seems like ethical debates about certain erm, potentially painful traditions involving infants focus on long-term public health outcomes more than subjective experience... same with people in comas, i.e., unconscious people!

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I'm ok with erring toward a more narrow definition of consciousness because the idea of something being conscious without being self-aware is bananas to me, and seems unhelpful -- but it's not like I'd teach children that frying ants with a magnifying glass is acceptable on this basis

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I mean, 1-1 is maybe not the exact phrase I'd use, but let's suppose for a moment that I would - does it feel wrong to you to say that someone with schizophrenia or dementia suffers from some sort of diminishment of their consciousness? it doesn't feel overly reductive to me tbh

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

if it's wrong to cause pain, isn't wrong even if the organism can't reason about it? we don't need elaborate theories to condemn torturing braindead people, why lobsters? I'm not trying to make some cryptic vegan argument here, we can just admit animals hurt each other when they eat each other 🤷

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

I find such policies a distasteful and lazy evasion of the actual ethical stakes at hand, for the record

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

if metacognition isn't a good threshold for what we consider conscious, what exactly is the point of positing this unself-aware consciousness when we can address the ethical issues around other qualia directly?

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

still don't see why I or anyone else should care. when we say a good person "wouldn't hurt a fly" we seem to suggest that even pre-conscious organisms deserve some level of respect and dignity. so worrying about some "cognition" that can't even meta-cognate feels like a waste of time

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

this is a Mexican standoff Chris, we post when we post

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

*AS BEING CONSCIOUS, dammit

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

oh shit. wait that was just a typo lol sorry

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

no, fish are not conscious, they are pre conscious. I just said this

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

you already said it's a spectrum, but why should that spectrum start before self-awareness? I think sea creatures are pre-conscious, rats are barely conscious, chimpanzees much closer to us. why does this have to be an ethical quandary?

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

no you are just confused because I don't view fish and cephalopods as not being conscious, despite having precursors for consciousness like memory and sensations. to repeat, an easy definition is just metacognition. much less confusing

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

no, I told you already, it's metacognition

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

skill issue IMO, you can argue that it's wrong to cause animals to feel pain even if they aren't self-aware

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

you seem uncomfortable with the idea that some animals can form long-term memories but not really do introspection, I don't get why. I can save presets in my gameboy which also doesn't have a frontal lobe

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

ethicists and scientists who study primate brains may disagree on the implications, but I personally don't see a problem with a granular definition of consciousness by which chimpanzees are orders of magnitude more conscious than fish and rats. it's not a contest, who cares?

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

nobody has really tried to explain consciousness without explaining metacognition, studies of metacognition and self-awareness are pretty directly relevant in that way

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

recursive feedback loops made possible by dopamine receptors in the prefrontal cortex seem like the most plausible explanation out there. recent studies of schizophrenia and alzheimer's also find self-monitoring going awry in this part of the brain, and fish can't be schizophrenic either 🤷

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

easy, fish don't have a prefrontal cortex pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25627861/

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Checking your browser - reCAPTCHA

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

feels like saying adults are the engines of economic growth - maybe that's true but nobody has invented an adult factory that skips childhood yet

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

not gonna lie, I'm a lot less interested in visiting Spain than I used to be ... drinking water in Europe just sounds expensive as hell

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

Berkeley should elect this Ross Bernet guy to the District 1 city council seat, the dude clearly knows algebra www.berkeleyscanner.com/2026/09/24/e...

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

DJ Regime Accountant, of course

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

(must provide your own car, and coffee and food for me, of course)

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

on a related note, if anyone ever needs a designated driver to take you to wine country, I'm your guy -- for the past few years, I've been unable to have even a single glass of wine without debilitating headaches the next day. my tragedy can be your opportunity for a safe weekend outing!

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diego@estupido.fyi @estupido.fyi · 05/10/2026

don't forget cracking open an ice cold beer, life doesn't get much more meaningful than that

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