iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 09/10/2026

My top 9 movies 1. The English Patient 2. Agent Zero 3. Chunnel! 4. Chapter Two 5. Death Blow 6. Prognosis Negative 7. Rochelle, Rochelle 8. The Pain and the Yearning 9. Cry, Cry Again

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Old UP joke about a milkman who was notorious for watering down milk. Indra took pity on him & came to earth Indra: look you don't need to cheat to save money. I grant you a whole lake of milk. Milkman: you are the greatest. One more boon? Indra: name it Milkman: can I also get 2 lakes of water

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 12/09/2026

They were told to wait at the gate for him to be born and die and then they have to debate him to get in

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 09/09/2026

Witnesses report a number of juvenile individuals leaping, and allegedly gyrating. Single file lines have given way to utter circles

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Sen. Pumpkin Gogurt @ugarles.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

i held up the twin towers for as long as i could so firemen could escape but eventually mayor mamdani demanded that i evacuate the area. there is blood on his hands but mine are clean. so was my suit. many firemen were saying thank you, sir, they'd never seen anyone so clean.

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

who cares if bug spray is "not food," it's in the grocery store

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

it’s very validating that there’s no one who’s extremely pro-Israel but then otherwise a normal, kind person. it’s all guys who are disgusted by children’s hospitals.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 02/09/2026

All chess players feel this way too. A computer can do it better and the most valuable person in the world said it's stupid because you can't shoot the king with a laser. They should have taken up hooting a jug, computers can't touch that.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 14/07/2026

Alarmed at the prospect of public safety,

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charles @libraryofbabel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Fearing for public safety, he decided to discharge his weapon at a member of the public

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Sam @mardiroos.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Author name jumpscare

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/06/2026

The above demo is an X-shaped rigid body being pushed by steam which is created by boiling water at a heat element and rising due to buoyancy. Gases and solids can overlap with liquids but not each other, so the gas can push on the solid and apply torque, and the solid, in turn, pushes the gas.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/06/2026

This simulation project has been quite a journey so far, with plenty of fixes and features ahead, but what a great feeling to see these little phenomena emerge from a careful, systems-driven design.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 29/05/2026

By the sticks of an undetermined State, a one house in the final town which can be called a Hamlet, a father reads to his child. The book is titled "The 𝑱𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓 Finds Purchase"

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 29/05/2026

Experts Warn that Fostering the Juster May Hasten Global Folly Experts Will Be Consumed in The Folly

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/05/2026

If it ends up moving funds out of the NYPD budget because they're paying too many cops to stand around recording gameplay footage for mobile ads, it'll be a net positive even if the branding is a faceplant

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 22/05/2026

Who knows, you could even get a referral bonus!

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Emma the Sewer Socialist @mayorseidel.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

They know what their class interest is. It's to use prejudice, patriarchy, and property to prevent the emergence of a diverse meritocracy. That would redound to the benefit of people from all backgrounds who find their opportunities in the city. "Can't make it anywhere, but I can make it here."

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Emma the Sewer Socialist @mayorseidel.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Notice how he's not saying "this is the fault of Parisian Sans-Culottes for being condescending to those poor peasants who would only support them if they knew that they shared a class interest." They don't share a class interest! These people *are a different class* that is *hostile to our class*.

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Emma the Sewer Socialist @mayorseidel.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

There was a Trump in the 19th century too, you know. A demagogue with a famous name who won an election and centralized power around himself with the uncritical support of smallholding rural morons. Marx explained all of this in real time a century and a half ago. www.marxists.org/archive/marx...

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. The state machinery has so strengthened itself vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head – an adventurer dropped in from abroad, raised on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whisky and sausages and to which he has to keep throwing more sausages. Hence the low-spirited despair, the feeling of monstrous humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her gasp. She feels dishonored.

And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants.

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them.

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Chet Faliszek @chetsucks.com · 11/05/2026

I just pissed myself... this is the movie he is mad that people are calling slop... I demand you watch with the sound on... it is so much worse than you think it is going to be...

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 14/05/2026

Consider the art of conversation. Wallace Shawn could easily be replaced by a phone in My Dinner with Andre. We could have two My Dinners with Andre for the price of one.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 14/05/2026

I would love to have been in the room when the editor put a giant picture of a greasy cheeseburger after he said "you need meat for a healthy diet"

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 14/05/2026

Enjoying my last matcha before The Event

Foreground: glass of iced matcha out of focus
Background in focus: theories on a whiteboard of what The Event will be. They include Every Vessel Emits Noxious Tetanus, toilets stop working, sleeper cells that make you sleepy, all spoons become slotted, computer virus with charm, ocean baddies, and no more Arbor Day

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 20/04/2026

So you really have to ask why you care, because that will most likely anchor the debate to an area that's far more practical to settle than this flighty yearning for Ultimate Truth.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 20/04/2026

The desire for sweeping conclusions, I think, has robbed the debate of easily settled grounds. It's a lot easier to show that a class of systems isn't or won't be like a person with feelings, than it is to show that a broader class of systems can never exhibit interiority or self-aware experience.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 20/04/2026

The paper I review announces that there are physical conditions necessary for consciousness to arise, but never indicates what they are. To make their argument's basis so tangible would expose it to scrutiny. The conditions are defined recursively as whatever chips in data centers don't have.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 20/04/2026

"Consciousness" is a topic where people have specific thoughts and hide them behind generalities, almost guaranteeing that opponents will talk past each other. It smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 17/04/2026

Going to a fancy restaurant with a monkey chef called like "Out on a Limb" and they're serving peanuts on the half shell. The waiter is swinging his arms above his head as he walks and spilling water everywhere. They've been in business for 2 years

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 16/04/2026

The sample population is men who report having sex in the past 2 years, reporting about strategies used in the past 4 years, the most common being "Told her whatever she wanted to hear," "Asked her repeatedly to have sex," and "Had a [wingman] help you get what you want."

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 09/04/2026

"Has anyone ever told you you look like Bo Burnham?" No, not even once. Yet strangely I've been asked this exact question dozens of times.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 04/04/2026

My younger self who memorized Alt+0151 would be shocked and appalled that I now resort to typing a wee hyphen twice to protect my integrity

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 02/03/2026

A military intervention is a surprise party for countries who have regimes. And you get in their face, and you explode at them and you make them feel really upset about all the people you killed. And then they stop.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 17/02/2026

Reflecting on this, I am reminded of Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Where an aberration is marked by disconnection from normal society, an Eichmann so fears disconnection that they will not face reality.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 17/02/2026

Arendt wanted to highlight how his path of turpitude, as a microcosm of the German public, was largely a path of least resistance built on distraction and self-congratulation. A thousand little bromides and "winged words" to keep the evils of his accomplishments from crystallizing in the mind.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 17/02/2026

While it's now common to call anyone we judge morally repugnant a monster, it historically describes an aberration of form or substance, something apart from humanity that is, in some sense, unaccountable. See early monster movies. Eichmann was no aberration, but a subject of usual mental vices.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 17/01/2026

The Constitution even calls it "petition the government for redress of grievances"

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 29/12/2025

Speed and Politics by Paul Virilio, introduction to the 2006 edition

This is also the Cruz of the wonderment and awe provoked by the event of catastrophic failure. It is not only horrific, it is mesmerizing, and because it is, the accident is also a critical source of solidarity, a binding exception that is the real condition of acceptance. The carnival of accidents is revealed as technology's own exceptional bacchanalia, staged at our expense and on our behalf.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/12/2025

as a lead-in to show the motivation for lifetime annotations. I think it still requires a level of intellectual maturity to ask good questions and follow up with your own points of confusion during the process, but this is something that I'd wager most people can't get out of a book on their own.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/12/2025

This seems to be the key, active engagement and friction. I had a good experience of that when using Gemini's "guided learning" mode to understand Rust's paradigms and borrow checker as a C++ developer. It gave me an example code snippet and asked *me* to explain the dangling reference problem,

Why did the use of LLMs appear to diminish learning? One of the most fundamental principles of skill development is that people learn best when they are actively engaged with the material they are trying to learn.

When we learn about a topic through Google search, we face much more “friction”: We must navigate different web links, read informational sources, and interpret and synthesize them ourselves.

While more challenging, this friction leads to the development of a deeper, more original mental representation of the topic at hand.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/12/2025

The way he unflinchingly brings this energy throughout

Steven Crowder meme where he's sitting at a table with a banner that says "I'm not wasting your time—change my mind"

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 21/12/2025

You're in the danger zone

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 20/12/2025

1) it's a side mirror 2) where things *are closer than* they appear

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 19/12/2025

For Ohio I find up to 8 inches irrigation cited, so at ~1630 gallons per acre foot per bushel it would be just over a thousand gallons share.google/1xFprupdLKcX...

share.google

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 19/12/2025

Colorado, Idaho, most of the Southeastern US, to name a few. Parts of Nebraska are in the 1500-2000 gallon range

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