iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Gates @gregat.es · 29/09/2026

Pretty hard to deny that for this sort of use case, "AI" really is a vast improvement over what we had before

A screenshot of a chat with Claude. The prompt is: "Sometimes on my pixel 7, it gets confused and thinks I want to take a picture of a region of my screen to show to Gemini. I never want to do that. Is it possible to disable whatever gesture I am accidentally making?"

The answer is truncated, but starts with: "It's most likely Circle to Search, which triggers when you long-press the navigation handle (the bar at the bottom of the screen) or the home button. You can turn it off:
Open Settings → System → Navigation mode.
Turn off Circle to Search "

Greg Gates @gregat.es · 22/09/2026

If this is a hot take what does that make me? nothing could be more obvious to the sadly small cohort that has watched deadwood

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Brett Karlan @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

People just think there is no such thing as expertise in philosophy. "There's this feeling that you can only talk about the mechanics of cancer cells if you are a Professor of Physiology" I mean probably, yeah

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 22/09/2026

tough time to be named Al

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 20/09/2026

Lots of axiomatic commitment to functional reductionism on blue sky, I am learning.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 15/09/2026

I'd put this differently: LLMs are still just outputting the most likely completion of a prompt based on their weights ("intuition"). But most products marketed as AI, such as ChatGPT and Claude, are doing a lot more than that, by orchestrating repeated calls to LLMs and other tools.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 13/09/2026

The thing that really gets me about the current anti-Stancil pile-on is the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit "the only leverage we have is our vote (in general elections for the federal legislature, once every two years)." That's not how politics works!

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 08/09/2026

When I was 12 years old I spent a grueling summer tearing the reproductive bits off of corn stalks.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Force the entire Republican Party to die on the hill of “The president is a king and should be allowed to defy the law to build himself a golden palace.” Talk about it nonstop. No issue so succinctly captures the battle lines: on one side, an authoritarian personalist cult, on the other, democracy.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 20/08/2026

At Row Zero, we had a scientist upload a whole genome to a spreadsheet! I couldn't imagine why, laughed at the idea of ctrl-Fing for "T" or something. But I am sure they had a good reason.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 17/08/2026

I agree the bad answer is bad. But isn't it bad because the correct one is "The Democratic party welcomes everyone! We believe in democracy. Don't like the platform? Join the party and work to change it. We're the only major party left in America that believes the people should have a voice."

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 13/08/2026

Counterpoint: many of us have done the work, we've read Hegel, and just concluded it wasn't worth the effort. (This is a friendly counterpoint, I am broadly sympathetic, but I am partial to analytic philosophy.)

defector.com

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 10/08/2026

Really drives home how badly the Stranger has failed as a guide for progressive voters. No one should rely on it.

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kamaumau.bsky.social @kamaumau.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

not to take anything away from Kelabe, who is a phenomenal candidate & has run a great campaign, but this result does show the influence of The Stranger when you look at the 43rd and 46th LDs. The results in those races could have been very different if they had followed their progressive reputation

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 10/08/2026

The first rule of Socratic dialogue is "say what you believe." It sounds simple, but it's actually somewhat radical. Distinguishing what you believe from what you're supposed to say or your audience wants to hear is hard and is the beginning of wisdom.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 10/08/2026

oh this is just how todo lists work for me

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 09/08/2026

historical rationalist vs empiricist dichotomy still holding up today

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 05/08/2026

for the good of Seattle, we must tell everyone we know that the Stranger can no longer be trusted

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 05/08/2026

This is such a shame. The Stranger's endorsements are trash now (if you're a progressive voter), but way too many people still trust them.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 03/08/2026

I'm sorry but who in their right minds publishes a ranked list as a MAP

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 03/08/2026

Downplay a book or movie: E.T. (this is a reference to Alien)

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 03/08/2026

what are the truth conditions for sentences of the form: "A group of X is called Y"? Given that a group of X is never called Y except in this sentence, it's either self-affirming or false. "Did you know a group of flamingos is called a ballet?" How many utterances would make that true?

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 02/08/2026

"I love em dashes and will not give them up" is the Facebook Legal Notice of 2026

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 28/07/2026

how about we just go with a non-gendered conception of virtue

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 28/07/2026

If you moved Corruption up just above Cost of Living, this would be a pretty decent ranking of what our national priorities should be. (War is bad but wtf is "Wars/Terrorism")

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 23/07/2026

but I use @kagi.com, not google, anyway. i won't be sad to see this unfortunate bit of early-21st-century verbiage die

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 22/07/2026

It's well-known that American baby names have gotten more diverse over time. The last year in which any single name was given to more than 1% of the babies in the SSA baby names data set was 1997, in which 1.04% of babies were named Michael.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 21/07/2026

one way to tell if Claude got out on the wrong side of the bed this session is when it's like, "the build timed out, I can't verify that the code compiles", but the timeout was just some arbitrary threshold it picked for how long it would wait

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 19/07/2026

wonder how much the church of scientology paid for this

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Salmon Bay FC @salmonbayfc.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

NATIONAL CHAMPIONS 🏆⭐️ #SalmonBayFC | #FeelTheCurrent

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 18/07/2026

I have a fun reaction story to Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. I was working on the S3 storage team in AWS at the time. For years it was customary there to have a work outing to see any new Star Wars film.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 18/07/2026

I bought a car when I had a child, in Seattle. I hadn't had one for 2 decades. I don't regret it. We wanted to raise her bilingual. The Chinese language preschool isn't accessible from our home via bus or foot.

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Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Kettle's amendment FAILS 2-7, with Rivera voting with him. The renewal of the Seattle Transit Measure STAYS at a full 0.3%.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 16/07/2026

like 50% of my instructions to Claude these days are "delete that comment"

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Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The Seattle City Council's select committee on the city's transportation benefit district is kicking off now. This morning Katie Wilson's proposed Seattle Transit Measure renewal is getting amended before going to the voters. We're about to see how significantly.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 15/07/2026

Best World Cup ever? Not only did we get a perfect England elimination, we get to watch them lose a 2nd time to France!

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 14/07/2026

me to a coworker a couple years ago: "My dream is someday I'll be a senior distinguished principal architect, and my actual work will consist only of listening to other people talk about their work, then asking the right pointed question to get them on their way." [monkey's paw curls]

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 14/07/2026

the best case scenario for 2028 is constant conflict between "Pivot to kitchen table," "Consolidate power & take revenge," and "Defend democracy; bring back justice." we'll need a few more democracy defenders to counterbalance the mighty kitchen tablers

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 13/07/2026

A year ago I went to a meeting of WA's 36th LD Dems. After the disastrous 2024 election, I was looking for a non-futile way to get more involved in politics. I've attended protests, volunteered for campaigns, knocked on doors for candidates. Mostly, it hasn't felt like it made a difference.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 13/07/2026

Reiterating again that this is the truest thing about politics nobody wants to hear. "The party establishment" is literally your neighbors. And it can be you!

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 12/07/2026

I see England fans already making excuses for their loss to Argentina.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 06/07/2026

wait why don't we have a US cup where every state fields a team? obviously CA & TX would dominate, but WA & OR would be competitive, and sometimes a plains or midwest state would pull off a surprise dark horse run. NY is England in this scenario.

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Meredith 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @smoemeth.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

OMG Dude got a yellow card and injured himself AND HE WAS NEVER IN THE GAME. Legend.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 04/07/2026

guess everybody complaining about the expanded world cup field feels pretty foolish now, huh

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Erica C. Barnett @ericacbarnett.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

In conclusion, any Republican who takes months off to deal with a medical condition on the taxpayer's dime needs to switch parties and apologize to the American people or resign in shame.

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 24/06/2026

really hate the world cup convention of always showing standing tables during a match as if the current score were final. makes it easy to see one counterfactual scenario, but so much harder to reason about other possibilities

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 19/06/2026

the crayon factory episode of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood really holds up as well as I remembered!

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 18/06/2026

Man, ever notice how since AI, every thing you read is using the term "recency illusion"?

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Greg Gates @gregat.es · 16/06/2026

Egg. I have gotten over all my other childhood dislikes, but to this day the smell of cooked eggs makes me slightly nauseous.

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