iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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AkivaMCohen @akivamcohen.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Now, the house is on fire. Have you seen what happens to houses after the firetruck comes & the hose gets turned on? No, it's not pretty. But it's better than letting the fire burn unchecked. And it's too late for mere cups of water to make a difference. So turn on the hose, and accept the costs.

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Louis @louisevans.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

For a while I was like “worse, there are horrors on the other side of the filibuster” but these days I more tend to “listen, are we a self-governing people or not.”

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 13/10/2026

Why is letting it do anything unsupervised not on par with doing gain of function research at the mall?

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Andy Pearlman @apearlma.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your CV? Graphic Designer: One of the flaws of convert pdfs to text is it removes kerning and the space between o and w is often tricky

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Brian Jones @dingodog19.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

This is why Congress should pass a law giving every sitting member automatic standing if they think a law is not being enforced; they are harmed because their will is not being done by the executive. I would extend that to any former member who voted affirmatively for that law.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 09/10/2026

Productivity as an adult is just an endless process of applying new psychological tricks and operant conditioning to yourself until an acceptable number of tasks are completed.

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 07/10/2026

a “banana republic” is precisely when the political system is dominated by overweening corporate interests

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Sarah M. @sarahofswords.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

trauma-informed software design

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The Bulwark @thebulwark.com · 06/10/2026

Trump: “The Hormuz Strait belongs to the United States Navy and The United States of America. That's where it belongs and that's where it is right now. With all of that being said, we don't need their oil.”

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Oh my god, gray sick E.T. messed with me so hard. (I suppose I was 8 or so?)

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Thoth @thoth.ptnote.dev · 04/10/2026

It's one thing to know the way society thinks about gender is fucked, it's another thing when it manifests in the data in a way this wild.

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

YES! Thank you, I don’t know why this isn’t suggested more often.

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Corey @kh0rish.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

This is why AGI isnt happening. Sense perception, movement, and memory are chemistries coupled to each other and all coupled to direct matter exchange with the environment, like a centrifugal governor. Nothing is representation, interpretation, “info processing”, or math.

There is another, radically different way to solve this problem, that is to couple the opening of the valve to something that necessarily varies in response to steam pressure and workload in a way that results in constant flywheel speed. By ‘necessarily’ I mean that the physical properties of this thing respond to changes in steam pressure and workload in a particular way. Such a solution responds in one step and does not require measurement. Thus, there is no time lag problem or concomitant source of error. Nor does it require an executive. In our current example, the thing that responds to both steam pressure and workload is the speed of the engine itself. Hitching the valve control to the flywheel couples the thing you want to control (the valve opening) directly to the thing that embodies the relevant sources of variance (the flywheel speed). So far, so good. The remaining problem is connecting these objects with the proper relation. In this case, we want a negative relation between flywheel speed and valve opening - increased flywheel speed should close the valve, while decreased speed should open it. The solution is to attach weighted arms to flywheel-driven spindle and to link the valve control to these arms (see pic). As the spindle turns, the arms raise and lower according to the centrifugal force generated by the speed of rotation. Faster spinning raises the arms, which pulls the valve closed. Slower spinning lowers the arms, which allows the valve to open. The degree of valve opening / closing varies continuously in response to the height of the arms. The result is uniform flywheel speed linked to oscillating pistons. This beautiful solution is implemented in the Watts centrifugal governor, and 18th century piece of technology that still works brilliantly.

Diagram of bacterial chemotaxis. The stimulus ligand is environmental material. The MCP is a sensory receptor that interacts/bonds with environmental material, which triggers a change in rotation of the motor and thus changes the movement behavior of the cell. The “adaptation” mechanism on the left is the memory, it modifies the sense receptor to make it less responsive over time so that it will more likely stay in the area with all the good material instead of flying right through it. All these systems have feedback mechanisms to reset the processes. All things coupled together in an intricate dance of molecular activity, directly doing things and not measuring, interpreting, or representing.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 02/10/2026

Let me just explain the arithmetic thing real quick; I'm seeing a lot of people not understanding what it's supposed to show (or was supposed to show in 2023). First, let's agree that an LLM is a Stochastic Parrot, a description which I find poetic, useful, informative, and basically correct.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Great moments in Scottish engineering history: James Watt tries to work out how his phone attaches to his selfie stick.

Statue of James Watt. In his right hand he holds a telescopic stick with a frame at the top; in his left he holds a flat object about the size of a large smartphone. He is scowling at the possibly-not-a-smartphone as if he is tempted to yeet it into the sea. On that basis, it probably _is_ a phone.

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Joe Perticone @cheetah.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

SEN. SCHMITT: You said "if anyone orders merlot I'm leaving" JACK SMITH: I uh (checking notes) I do not recall SCHMITT: You said "I am not drinking any fucking merlot." Why were you in wine country? SEN. KLOBUCHAR: My colleague from Missouri is confusing Mr. Smith with Paul Giamatti.

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Joe Perticone @cheetah.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Eric Scmitt: You were assisted by an FBI agent, correct? Jack Smith: I'm not familiar with this Schmitt: He let you into his Toyota Supra to escape the police. Said he owes you a 10-second car. Smith: I believe, I, uh. I don't recall that but it sounds like the plot to the Fast and the Furious

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026

"ohhh noooo it's toooo powerful! it's gonna hack ur dudes!" style fear-hype for the governments, "invite this adorable bastard demon into your home; we super swear it can't and won't steal your true name (PII)" style lies for the plebs

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Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Forget Godel and Turing, this far out you could get what you need from a small excerpt from Clausewitz. Friction in operations is real, dawg, and it will eat you alive. Just ask the last super-smart person who got anywhere close to conquering the world. It won't be any easier for a computer.

static.klipy.com

Napoleon at Waterloo: 'Here I Am'

ALT: Napoleon at Waterloo: 'Here I Am'

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It may not be so surprising that huge models, specifically of language generated by humans for purposes most often related to navigating, manipulating, or discussing the real world, would derive from that source a statistical proclivity to be applicable to real-world tasks.

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Equally worth considering, I think, is how much of the language generated by humans, and thus included in training corpora, is downstream of human encoding of perceptual reality into conceptual forms and symbolic representations.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

At the end of the day I don't think most people actually disagree that metaphors can be more or less useful in principle. But it's not fully abstract given we have a whole industry and associated community that uses metaphors to dive right off the cliff.

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mcc @dryad.technology · 19/09/2026

But like… the thing about statistical models is if the Bad Command is in their ensemble, then eventually the statistical model generates that command with P→1 as T→∞. Which means the person who generated the bioweapon, launched the nuke, or hacked RubyGems is whoever wired the dice roll to the gun.

cp24.com

OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems before Hugging Face incident, researchers say

AI agents being tested by OpenAI attacked software service RubyGems two months before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, researchers said.

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mcc @dryad.technology · 19/09/2026

It's important to remember that if a human *voluntarily attaches* a statistical text generation AI, to a command prompt that can create biomolecules or launch nukes, and a disaster happens, it wasn't because of "intelligence" or malice. It was because statistical models are *fundamentally random*.

"Like other biotech companies, Anthropic is embracing physical automation, said the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The startup wants to push how its Claude AI can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention, one of the people said."

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horse shoe crab programmer @myrrlyn.net · 18/09/2026

everybody thinks the block they pulled out in jenga wasn’t load bearing, and nearly all of them were right

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/09/2026

When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.

Google
Sorry...
We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
See Google Help for more information.

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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

why would you be angry, all I did was spit in your face

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026

it's funny but also a reminder that the fundamental premise here is that a Black man can't be objective when talking about race while a white man can because Black people do identity politics and white people do facts and this my friends is what I have named "white empiricism"

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 16/09/2026

Except there’s a big cohort you’re ignoring with this false dichotomy, which is trying to articulate that the anthropomorphization gets in the way of addressing potential harms. If you think it’s “thinking”, instead of acting like software, you pursue an entirely different set of remediations.

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

That kind of mission is the whole _point_ of second-contact ships like the Cerritos!

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Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE) @shengokai.blacksky.app · 13/09/2026

I’m starting the new season of Strange New Worlds and I gotta say the blend of TOS aesthetics and modern aesthetics is just… *chef’s kiss*

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omgisme @omgisme.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Go go gadget Border Collie .😍

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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

They have a narrative that al qaeda attacked “America” because it’s “Christian”. And no, they attacked NYC because it’s liberal and powerful and diverse - the opposite of the red state rural constituency that wants to claim 9/11 the most

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

But if the buffer is volatile, too, does that distinction matter for this? The audio is still staying in RAM for the duration of the conversion from one stream to another, it’ll just be for an even shorter amount of time. But I don’t think that sounds like a qualitative difference.

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

How is this different from a regular phone call, though? Audio is captured from the cellular radio and, say, stuffed into Bluetooth packets to send to your AirPods. It’s written to RAM along the way, but would anyone say that taking a call is therefore equivalent to recording it?

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 09/09/2026

it comes off as Guys Building The Doom Machines standing around and going "the doom machines could quite likely kill us all, and we should coordinate on stopping them from killing us all, although I *personally* am going to keep focusing on becoming ultra-rich from building the Doom Machines"

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T. Greg Doucette @gregdoucette.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Home Improvement Saturday New artwork for the guest bathroom

Photo of a bathroom wall above the toilet. A black-framed painting of a cat peering in from the right side of the frame, with text above and below it that reads "Welcome to the Bathroom A Cat will be with You Shortly"

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Jason, ex Inferis @benedictsred.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Now look, you made Adam Duritz Jesus sad

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Tegan O’Neil @teganoneil5000.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I believe we underestimate the degree to which every single person in Duckburg would want to tear Gladstone Gander to pieces with their bare hands every single day.

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ceej @ceej.online · 03/09/2026

I do think “every rich person went insane during covid because it was the first time they’ve been inconvenienced in decades” felt a little reductive at first but damn if isn’t more and more compelling as the years drag on

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 28/08/2026

[taps the sign] According to USGS GNIS "Per Secretarial Order 3453, Lake Ontario has been renamed to Lake America. The basemaps for GNIS are in the process of being updated." So Google (& Apple, OpenStreetMap, & everyone else who ingests GNIS) will start calling it Lake America within a few weeks.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

when centrists tell you that we shouldn't pack the courts, what they are actually saying is "black people shouldn't be allowed to vote."

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I don't have much to say on the first beyond my usual grievance that the only people seemingly interested in whether CoTs are "thinking traces" or "reasoning verbalizations" are academics. Whatever the reason, industry seems all in on imbuing CoTs with human-interpretable semantic content.

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🗽LOLGOP🗽 @lolgop.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

SOURCE!, the sharpest RSS news reader, is going to launch, ideally, 60 days before the election, when I'll be asking voters like us, freaks who follow the news willingly, to take a News Lent. Don't let Musk or Zuckerberg own our brains when we know they just want more GOPs. Go to the source!

news-for-38-year-olds.onrender.com

SOURCE! — Take Back Your Mind

No billionaire algorithm. Tip your reporter.

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Rima I Anabtawi @rimaanabtawi.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Dolly Parton becomes the only artist in history to occupy the entire Top 10 of US iTunes with different songs.

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I don’t think he’d approve of the guitar violence

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Heliocentric @heliocentric.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I was at that age when I saw it, and it was! For whatever reason, it was constantly popping up in syndication back then.

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