iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Longtime followers will be aware of the many Latin American Alex* Hern*s who think my email address is theirs but a new one has just popped up who is REALLY persistent

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i'm sorry i'm just imagining a data centre with a MASSIVE label on the side

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the counterpoint here, of course, is that as with newspapers, if you _do_ want to serve this traffic, you can potentially become pretty rich pretty fast, especially if you give up on the quality metrics the old guard obsessed over

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what would the second order impacts be of an immigration policy that says "if your employer gives you a PAYE salary of more than £100,000, you automatically get a work visa"

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One of those things you don’t notice until it’s pointed out

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It’s just 53 toilets Michael how much could it cost, £6m?

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Mental that we all spent 18 months locked in our houses and it basically never comes up in conversation. Am I the only one who remembers the terrible reign of Hagath the Mind Eater or something

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Fun example of moral hazard in the wild: I’ve got the fancy “we will replace your screen if you smash it” AppleCare for the first time for my phone, and as such am using my phone without a case for the first time in a decade

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Increasingly think the UK row over dangerous dogs is one of the better lenses to unpack questions of AI safety. “No such thing as a bad dog, only a bad owner” maps quite neatly on to “don’t attribute agency to AI - there’s always a person who made the decisions to blame”.

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Reposted by Alex Hern

cafkafk @cafkafk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

there is something cosmically comedic about the idea that you send requests to a box that gives you numbers. "like how did you get those number" just requested numbers from the number box, it just spits them out! "how?" idk. It just does.

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social twelve one-word responses to twelve theses and one two-word response to one thesis: no, eh?, yes, yes, YES, maybe, yes, yes, unfortunately–, great point, yes, no, yes

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This week I covered the reasons why it feels like everyone in AI suddenly thinks we’re doomed and where the reasons to hope they’re wrong lie economist.com/internationa...

economist.com

Agreeing to make AI safer may be impossible

It is technically feasible, but American labs and the American authorities are at odds, as are America and China

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

on a similar note, this is far more important than a 'joe rogan of the left' for actually improving society

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

don't have to give orson scott card credit for much but "the rise of the internet will eventually give political power to people purely on the basis of them being good at posting, and it will _suck_" was a pretty good call

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Subscribe to The Economist

it's not true, i sincerely believe if you do not take out a subscription (free for the first month www.economist.com/subscribe) and watch Inside Tech (www.economist.com/insider) then the world faces a 10-25% chance of doom

economist.com

Subscribe to The Economist for full access to articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters and more.

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i can't keep posting "even if you completely dismiss the 'escape' side of the hugging face incident, the 'hacking' side of the hugging face incident is real-world proof of the rapid and dangerous growth in capability" but I guess i have to

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had someone off bluesky round for tea today

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The end of the world is AI? An existential threat | The Intelligence from The Economist

I've been asked, in various ways, "should we be scared about AI" for some years now, and no-one ever seems particularly happy when I don't answer the question with a reassuring laugh. shows.acast.com/theintellige...

shows.acast.com

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Reposted by Alex Hern

Ant Breach @antbreach.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Our new report does the numbers on fiscal devolution. By letting the metro mayors keep around 7% of their local income tax (2% in London) and 2% of their local corporation tax (1% in London), we can replace grants in a growth-positive, cost-neutral way for HMT and the mayors:

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[DELISTED] I Found Evidence Of My House Spinning | U&U Forums (LibreCrawl archive 2026-09-03)

suricrasia.online/unfiction/sp... extremely good short story. Make sure to click on the September update at the bottom of the page.

suricrasia.online

A Technology Anomaly Tragicomedy

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was really struck by a Stratechery point, that the single best thing America could do to improve its chances against China is legalise distillation on-shore. Currently only Chinese labs get to distill, which means America has the juddering behemoths but none of the startup dynamism

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AI score funny here. don't know what to read in to it.

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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 14/09/2026

it remains fascinating that google, regularly purveyor of the world's best AI, insists on putting its worst model in front of exactly the people who are hardest to convince AI can help them

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Reposted by Alex Hern

i don't think it's a weird coincidence that the vibes here are getting worse as the vibes for the anti-maga coalition in the actual world are getting better.

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

continually maddening that people blame "the water companies" for hosepipe bans when "the water companies" have been begging to build new reservoirs but a few retired QCs in Oxfordshire have used the entire weight of the british planning system to prevent it www.theguardian.com/business/202...

theguardian.com

Thames Water redraws mega-reservoir plan amid local opposition

A new public consultation has opened on the 150bn-litre above-ground White Horse project in Abingdon, Oxfordshire

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Quite funny to look at this and realise this is a lament for a student graduating into the best job market for graduates in the past 21 years

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I’ve flipped on this in recent years. Inheritance tax is so unpopular that almost anything you could replace it with would be seen as a vote-winner, so it’s a perfect opportunity to load £9bn of taxation on a bad thing you want to limit. Personally I’d do an annual property tax

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So many people with aviation psychosis claiming that the Wrights’ invention is going to reshape global geography when it can’t even go more than 25 yards

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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The semantic drift of “AI psychosis” from “break with reality exacerbated or caused by sycophantic chatbots” to “person with strong feelings about AI which are not the same as the strong feelings of AI held by the speaker” is bad

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Don’t say “an OpenAI agent swarm autonomously hacked HuggingFace”. Once you say “OpenAI built a ‘hack any company’ machine and accidentally pointed it at HuggingFace, where it performed exactly as designed”, you’ll see that there’s nothing to be alarmed about

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well that's a bleak linkedin subject

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my daughter's year one curriculum has just been emailed to me, and one of the goals for this year is to "explore how to use a computer safely". finally i understand the calls for abstinence-only education

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MEANWHILE ON 6 DIMENSIONAL HYPERBLUESKY: “Hey zorpulon, look, I’ve networked the emulated human connectomes together and taught them to pretend they’re in early 21st century earth”

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