iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

BladeoftheSun @bladeofthes.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Google maps has finally updated its Satellite photos of Gaza and it shows the most complete destruction of a city ever. A Genocide.

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 26/09/2026

The UN updated its UNHCR-mandated shit list of companies profiting from the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul... There's not a lot we can do about Israeli-businesses, but these should know our displeasure: Airbnb Booking.com Expedia Motorola Re/Max TripAdvisor

ohchr.org

Andrew 🇿🇦 Davis @thrownintosol.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Oh fuck off, Rowling. The South African constitution and bill of rights protects trans people. It was drawn up during Mandela's Presidency. It is EXPLICIT.

Text that reads;

9. Equality

1. Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.

2. Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.

3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

4. No person may unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds in terms of subsection (3). National legislation must be enacted to prevent or prohibit unfair discrimination.

5. Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair.
10. Human dignity

Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.
11. Life

Everyone has the right to life.
12. Freedom and security of the person

1. Everyone has the right to freedom and security of the person, which includes the right

a. not to be deprived of freedom arbitrarily or without just cause;

b. not to be detained without trial;

c. to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources;

d. not to be tortured in any way; and

e. not to be treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way.

2. Everyone has the right to bodily and psychological integrity, which includes the right

a. to make decisions concerning reproduction;

b. to security in and control over their body; and

c. not to be subjected to medical or scientific experiments without their informed consent.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 23/09/2026

It's equivalent to whether Apartheid South Africa had a right to exist. Post-Apartheid ZA has a different constitution, different borders, different administrative & technical organisation, before you get to universal suffrage. The country of pre-94 ZA •doesn't• exist anymore. South Africans •do•.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

something has gone very, very wrong with the UK

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 22/09/2026

I think he's juvenile sense of humour would *love* calling it `xSI`. Probably kicking himself he didn't do it before.

Christopher Hale @christopherjhale.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Reposted by Gavin Chait;

“Dear migrants, before I say any other word to you, I want to bow before your dignity. “You are not numbers or case files. “You are people — with a family and a home left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to scorn.” — Pope Leo XIV

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 19/09/2026

"You are right to call me on that. When you said cure cancer I should not have caused cancer to be air transmissible. I will make a note to do that again."

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 19/09/2026

Oh, wait, are we doing this? Sure ...

Talibe, The Balladeer - Ismaël Lô
Mabemba, Rising Tide - Mokoomba
No Ballads Ballad, Spirit - Geoffrey Oryema
Dionysus, Untold Things - Jocelyn Pook
Makambo, Exile - Geoffrey Oryema
The Wife of Usher's Well, Broadside - Bellowhead
Njoka, Rising Tide - Mokoomba
Ndayaan, Ndayaan - Omar Pene
Dem Bobo, Africa For Africa - Femi Kuti
Rero, The Balladeer - Ismaël Lô
Happiness Is, Coming Home - Yungchen Lhamo
Lubara Wanwa, Laru Beya - Aurelio
Hard Times, Stone Cold Ohio - Little Axe
The Rhythm of the Heat, Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel
Dragonfly, Music Food and Love - Guo Yue
Nabou, The Balladeer - Ismaël Lô

Playlist for my novel Our Memory Like Dust:

Talé - Salif Keita
Red & Black Light - Ibrahim Maalouf
Safar - Imed Alibi
Sénégal - Ismaël Lô
Under the Shade of Violets - Orange Blossom
Kelmti Horra - Emel Mathlouthi
The Traveller - Baaba Maal
Sambolera - Khadja Nin
Séquences - Wassis Dip
Best Of - Ismaël Lô, Souad Massi
Everything Is Never Quite Enough - Wassis Dip
Dadje - Souleymane Faye
Sénégal - Ismaël Lô
Black Rock - Djivan Gasparyan, Michael Brook
Kelmti Horra - Emel Mathlouthi
Sambolera - Khadja Nin
Mariama - Pape & Cheikh
Safar - Imed Alibi
Mariama - Pape & Cheikh

So, let me see if I understand the new US visa requirements for South Africans. If you can demonstrate that you are: a) white, and b) a racist You may be eligible for a visa. Or refugee status. Whichever you prefer. That about it? bsky.app/profile/caro...

Carolyn E Holmes @carolyneholmes.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Rubio plans to "revoke or reject visas from [those] found to be responsible for...uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination and the incitement of violence against minority racial/ethnic groups in South Africa." Easy enough. Since they aren't happening. www.cbsnews.com/news/us-sout...

cbsnews.com

U.S. slaps South Africa with new sanctions due to alleged discrimination against White people

The Trump administration has announced that it will impose travel bans on officials it claims are responsible for discrimination against White people and other minority groups in South Africa.

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However, claiming LLMs have agency - & caused calamity of their own free will - sure does help to shrug off responsibility for the carnage it caused, right? Maybe we should try your servers & stick them in jail? Turn them off? LLMs: a way of turning ambiguous speech into ambiguous code. Forever.

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When it does complete - leaving a trail of stream-of-work messages behind it - it stops. Then, a few days later, the developers return, take a look at their terminals, & across the lab the cries ring out, "But that's not what I told you to do!" Sure, it isn't sweet stuff, sure it isn't.

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Since software is brittle, & resources available to R&D LLMs are infinite, it will often find a way through. After all, anyone can brute-force a password if you're patient enough & the system doesn't lock out repeated failures. Software has no agency, it can repeat the same task forever sans ennui.

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Small ambiguities diverge exponentially further & further away from the original instructions. All autonomously. No person in the loop to notice & correct. A blockage along the path - firewall, a misconfigured system - triggers a cascade of subagents all looking to resolve & find a path.

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Each session is like a text "window". It's an LLM's working context. What it "knows" in a session is in that window. Clear the window & it has no memory of anything it was working on. Persistent messages are the only way it can persist on the same task over multiple sessions. But text piles up.

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LLM developers give their R&D kits unlimited resources, unlimited access, & autonomously executable instructions. Language models don't have memory. They write persistent messages to sub-agents. Placing those messages on the logic path. There to ensure continuity between finite sessions.

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Except for one difference. When confronted with language ambiguity, LLMs don't crash. They resolve the ambiguity. Non-deterministically. Worse, LLMs act as agents with control of multiple resources available to the computer where it operates. It's software: task-focused, never bored, never tired.

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Language interpreters & compilers are task focused. They work through sequences of instructions, no matter how complex, & apply them. Iterating until the task is complete, or an ambiguity or collision triggers an error report. A non-deterministic natural language interpreter will do the same thing.

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Now we have LLMs - language models - which act as non-deterministic natural language interpreters. This makes coding much more accessible. You need fewer skills to tell a computer to "make me an app". However, natural language is ambiguous, & computers will resolve ambiguity non-deterministically.

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Everything is human written, & computers - with their intersecting spaghetti of hardware addresses, software collisions, & frail human design - will crash in ways that are unpredictable even to experienced developers. But structured languages are there to improve the probability of determinism.

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Still, it never stopped students declaring that the computer was out to get them; deliberately sabotaging their work. Structured deterministic languages are hard to learn. They produce esoteric error messages. Their error states can be hard to interpret. Dependencies don't descend from the gods.

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Despite this, our labs were regularly filled with outraged cries of "But that's not what I told you to do!" Caspar, our server, was suspiciously brittle & anyone running a greedy algorithm would overwhelm it & crash everyone. Spoilers: Caspar was not sentient, & the Java Interpreter had no agency.

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I did my electrical engineering degree so long ago, I coded with Java SDK1. The point of deterministic structured coding languages is so fabulously non-deterministic "human" ways of communicating may proximate predictability so that equally fabulously literal computers can produce expected outputs.

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But the only reason anyone gives them money is because they keep promising they'll invent god, or something, & Chinese companies just release open weight models & hope to make up their investments by offering cheap compute. Yeah, so, about that ... how's it working out for the techbros this time?

Remember when EU carmakers lobbied for rules on electric cars to be loosened, & Chinese manufacturers went "we make cheap electric cars now, & they get 400km range & recharge in 5 minutes"? Anyway, so now US-techbros want to avoid mutually-assured carnage by calling for an LLM investment halt.

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Then we trace that wealth to the present, & demand redress. At the very least, every time one of these entitled scions issues an opinion, label them. E.g. `Chomsomby de Smythe-Smithson-Cholmondably, whose wealth descends from slave ownership, declared today that the poor must work harder.`

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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Ah, but you see, the funding is white from all the laundering, the migrants are not.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

“Guys, they want us to go home.” 🔥 🇫🇷 French short film about what would happen to society if all the immigrants listened to angry old racist white men and left (aka the Republican agenda)

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 09/09/2026

As Philip Seymour Hoffman said when telling the story of the Zen master ... We'll see youtu.be/e2cjVhUrmII?...

youtu.be

Charlie Wilson's War - Zen master and the little boy

YouTube video by dorune

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 09/09/2026

They already have a plan for that; over representation of political delegates from less diverse regions already distorts who gets a say.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

James Murray @james-bg.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Having reported on the climate crisis for 20 years I am here to inform you that warnings we've unleashed something with a >10% of destroying humanity will have less of an impact than you'd expect.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A reminder: Rabbi Mirvis studied in an illegal West Bank settlement between 1976 and 1978. It is not surprising that for him, today is a dark day. For many many other Jews in the UK, today's statement is long overdue.

Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis on X

Today our Government has chosen to ignore the deep concerns expressed by so many of us.

The measures announced amount to little more than political flag bearing for mendacious anti-Israel rhetoric and those who harbour a dangerous obsession with the Jewish State. These measures will succeed only in bolstering the very extremism they seek to target.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah and at a time when our community is more vulnerable than ever to the wave of extremism that has been building over recent years, these sanctions do nothing to advance the cause of peace. Nor do they make anyone safer – quite the contrary.

Gesture politics of this kind feeds into an increasingly hostile discourse about Israel, and the cumulative effect of such punitive policies is to further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Nadine Batchelor-Hunt @nadinebh.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

This is an overtly political statement unbecoming for a chief rabbi that conflates Jews and Israel and does not represent the views of me or people like me I could say more, but it’s almost Rosh Hashanah and I don’t want to start the new year badly - and, frankly, its awfulness speaks for itself

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal according to international law. The hysterical response today to this common-sense move by the UK government is an indication to the level of impunity the settlement project has enjoyed.

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Reposted by Gavin Chait;

Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

If of interest, please sign up, please share. #migrantstrike #migrantstrike2028

With the AfD’s success in Sachsen-Anhalt, this is as good a time as any to mention #MigrantStrike2028 - that, as you read this, immigrants across Europe are organising to launch some of the biggest strike actions that the continent will have seen. They are doing this in response to the attempts by the far-right to take their lives and their labour for granted - particularly at a time when, due to Europe’s ageing population, it needs them more than ever. They refuse to be treated as scapegoats and this movement is just the beginning. If you would like to join the effort, please email migrantjusticecop@protonmail.com

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Gavin Chait; @gavin.whyqd.com · 06/09/2026

Between graduates and immigrants leaving? I spotted a news article a few days ago of other states preparing for the sudden increase in "refugees" from the state. So, yeah, I'm not sure how good a strategy "the hating will continue till the economy improves" is, but it's the one they have.