iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 27/09/2026

This is not to argue that one “gets with the program”, rather it begs the question what state of affairs are we actually in, and what do we wish to do about it?

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 27/09/2026

There's always been a disconnect between the now and the idea of now we embody (McLuhan posited a 50 year lag), arguing that our world has compressed that, there's still the claim to be made that we generally suffer from "tech-lag" on the whole (jetlag-like disorientation at perception vs. reality)

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 26/09/2026

The more I sit with it, the more 'sensemaking' as both a practice (and as a means of describing why much of my work involves instrumentation) seems ever more resonant.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 26/09/2026

amen to that. it's also the only way of engaging with the world as-is: to be messily in it (imho). purity doesn't put your finger on the pulse of much anything.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 26/09/2026

"There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious." samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is...

samkriss.substack.com

Reading is magic

What will happen in our second peasanthood

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 25/09/2026

awake, caffeinated, thinking about when exactly does information transition into memetic form. Is it upon its initial "publication", or upon dissemination? Must it be replicated by others (hosts) before it qualifies?

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Is practicing gardening* the only way through? * a prolonged process & practice of maintenance, preparation and nurture (i.e. slow, delayed rewards and anticipatory long-term thinking)

process snap from one of this summer's many explorations into artificial life.

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The downside of a new Peter Watts book right now is I'm frightfully busy, but also heck yes, and I shall carve time for 'Fold Catastrophes' asap.

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It's easy to be negative in the face of what seems like a turbulent, uncertain future. That said I think we should fight to nurture wonder and a sense of openness about what our futures could embody, from there it might not be easier, but it sure is more motivating.d

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I say "currently used" not as a hint that there are better uses, but rather that our mental model of it is as bad as the tech itself, and until we shift out of this local maximum, we are boned.

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This. A pet peeve of mine is if we want to reach new horizons we need to leave behind what brought us here, and find new tools to take us further. AI is basically an entropy accelerator that can in the short term give us some local benefits, but will ultimately lead to stagnation as currently used.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 23/09/2026

quite. luckily for me I've been quietly training a lot of local shoggoths lately, so we should be able to ensure more eldritch thunderdomes in the nearer future.

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where's the thunderdome of thought when you need it?

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 22/09/2026

this also might be the fall of Rome as documented by Roman scholars all over again, which, if heralded by Italian Brainrot ... well, you couldn't make it up if you tried.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 22/09/2026

The last couple of years I've been obsessing over exploring (especially ML) algorithms at their most minimal, where compression bleeds into noise. nathan.rs/posts/gzip-lm/ underlines in a very tangible way just how fascinating the edge between compression and information can be.

nathan.rs

Can gzip be a language model?

A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 21/09/2026

what daemons watch the daemon watcher?

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 20/09/2026

Is it a truly a Sunday if you haven't made something so cursed god would weep?

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 17/09/2026

Impressed beyond measure, and a little slack-jawed over the most recent chapter.

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 17/09/2026

We need to bring friction back to our computational substrates.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 16/09/2026

Now, more than ever, nurturing community (especially physically) is more important than ever in order to have a foundation resistant to whatever fresh virtual shoggoth emerges with curious gifts and experiences.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 16/09/2026

Being in the countryside is a continuous reminder of just how eldritch reality used to be.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 15/09/2026

There’s a lovely kind of full circle moment today when I realised that for the first time in 15 years I’m collaborating with a dear, old friend … once again on video (me) and sound (him) in a former, converted grain silo

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 15/09/2026

One of the (many) things I'm immensely grateful as an artist is those moments that offer the opportunity to imagine something slightly different, and then bring that into being. It's akin to adding a line of verse to an epic poem: the story of the space/site as a common weave we might add to.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/t... by @bcantrill.bsky.social highlights the crisis we are in: "the claims (...) are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims". Tech almost always ends up problematic, this is a human issue.

bcantrill.dtrace.org

The contagion of fear | The Observation Deck

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

trying to make a (pet) shoggoth only nibble lightly, send grimoires

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 14/09/2026

Finally understanding why I've been obsessing over certain themes/topics the last year, thank goodness it's actually making sense.

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 13/09/2026

This is why we are now teaching computers to be more people-y

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Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 12/09/2026

Mostly former, but more and more the latter.

Feileacan McCormick @feileacan.net · 12/09/2026

Struggling with how to better format (and present) research that springs from artistic processes. Not everything is "under" the resulting work itself, yet, nor can it entirely be disentangled from it. Does on capitulate and just do something akin to blogpost braindumps?

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even if I work natively in a digital mediums, a lot of time goes to make it a process enriched by frictions and contact surfaces for serendipity, this is part craft, part necessity if the resulting works are to have a hope of achieving resonance.

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One issue I have with content generators ("AI") is them being attempts, within the dominant interface paradigms, at optimising the process of production. This neglects the emotional nature of creative work, and the importance of connection with the process and the outcome in interaction with others.

this is akin to making marks on paper, something internal made external so as to allow for (re)consideration. The medium is irrelevant so long as it pushes a new response forth, which in turn generates a sense of connection with the outcome.

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awake, caffeinated, and thinking about feedback loops in creative process: most of my work involves in some way building a process/system, this in turn needs to act as a an externalisation, as well as a feeedback loop that provides both a contact surface for intuition, as well as useful frictions.

getting up early and enjoying a good cup of coffee, just to realise you brewed decaf.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026

This summer has left me reeling like a man mugged in a meadow, which if nothing else, is at least seasonally on brand.

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Reposted by Feileacan McCormick

Some folks will claim that this is hyperbolic, but what I wish people would understand is that tech initiatives like this serve as a means of eroding consent and lower the barrier for the persistent capture of people’s image, voice, data, or whatever else a gadget can glean.

pcmag.com

Apple's New Siri Recap Turns Every Apple Watch Into a Mass Surveillance Nightmare

Apple's always-listening AI feature promises neat summaries of your daily conversations, but it forces everyone around you into a nonconsensual recording experiment.

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come for the rambling, semi-lucid takes, stay for the promise it'll never turn into a ted talk.

as always with memetic properties, my hunch is we can't see the forest for the case studies, but we must persevere somehow in trying to understand what our tools are doing to us.

shower thought: is democratisation (of tools/lowered bar to speciously "HQ" content production) a simultaneous expansion of the contact surface for memetic contagion? This whole fly business wouldn't nearly be the meme bit it is if it weren't so much easier as we can just point an LLM at the data.

Is there a coined "law" for the experience of when the more you write, the more flustered you become?

My "take all tech reporting with a massive pinch of salt" is sorely tested by my experience that humanity's baseline is closer to Florida man than anything else.