iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Hilary Mason

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The White House accord on AI that was signed by all the big tech oligarchs today misspells United States as “Unites States.”

Document signed by Trump, Sundar Pichai
Google
Dario Amodei
Anthropic
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta

Greg Brockman
OpenAl

Elon Musk
XAI

Jensen Huang
nvidia

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 28/09/2026

also: 🤗 I hope you said that to them and they fell over apologizing!

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

Makes sense, I looked up Cactus Labs and was wondering if we now have vapes driven by GPUs 😂

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

There is nothing inevitable about today's GenAI companies or market or product design or power dynamics. It's based on decisions, made implicitly and explicitly, by people. To imagine a better way we must realize how arbitrary all of this is. And who it serves.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

Agree 100%. It’s also coming out at a time when enough people are frustrated with LLMs to catch on as a good idea.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

🤗 I also tend to read over words like this, I empathize!

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

It’s “valence”, not violence, but I do like the idea of training it on my own replies and comparing it to others

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/09/2026

That’s a super interesting comp, and probably the first thing I would have tried if I were trying to solve this problem from scratch practically!

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2026

What are you going to use it for?

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2026

Yes! Which is a funny architecture for a classifier, but it does have advantages (I did this to learn).

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2026

I have feelings about using the word "trained" here, as it's a LoRA'ed Qwen base model with a classification head. I would have used a different, slower approach if making it from scratch.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2026

Overnight I trained a Jev-like model to output probability distributions over a set of 40 emoji, which runs in RAM at ~150ms per query. This was super easy and cost ~$10. It works pretty well on a weak training set, and with a day or two of work I could make this sing.

A terminal showing the output of the emoji jev-like model:

We launched the project!
🎉 0.41 👏 0.23 🔥 0.15 ✨ 0.08 💪 0.07
valence 3.92/4 intensity 1.98/4 | 154 ms

My cat is so cute and hates me right now
😂 0.15 😏 0.13 🥹 0.12 ✨ 0.06 😆 0.05
valence 2.34/4 intensity 1.85/4 | 140 ms

you stand in front of the dragon, triumphant
✨ 0.27 🔥 0.17 🎉 0.16 😍 0.09 😮 0.06
valence 3.65/4 intensity 2.19/4 | 144 ms

why would you do this with emoji anyway?
🤔 0.54 😏 0.17 🙄 0.06 😐 0.04 🧐 0.03
valence 1.86/4 intensity 1.30/4 | 138 ms

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/09/2026

we put a bit of world-building magic on our homepage today hiddendoor.co

A screenshot of hiddendoor.co, showing a web page where you can Imagine A World Where.... and the example text says "the moon keeps secrets" but you can come type anything you want

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/09/2026

It definitely felt that way!

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 21/09/2026

So much of learning this in any new industry is just talking to people about how deals get structured! It's fun but I wish there was something to point at other than ... experience. There's definitely a book to be written here.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 21/09/2026

Are there any good explainers on the economic systems of games, films, publishing, journalism, theme parks, etc? I end up back-of-the-enveloping this in discussions quite often, understanding the financial incentives explains so many behaviors that are otherwise mystifying.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 19/09/2026

How were you able to walk there? That’s so cool.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 17/09/2026

Yesterday I flew LAS->NYC, noticed a white woman at the lounge with a sticker like the "I voted!" stickers but it said "I like ICE". Then she and her husband pushed aside wheelchairs to "preboard", announcing they were in first class Then they were rude to the flight attendants. The worst people.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 16/09/2026

If we held people personally and criminally liable for the "autonomous" actions of the AI systems they create and deploy, I bet the risky behavior would evaporate overnight.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 15/09/2026

Celebrating winter? New Years Eve? Halloween? Back to school? Mostly I just want to play, but I'm not Christian, and every one of these has design based around Santa or other Christian symbolism.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 15/09/2026

It seems like there's a wave of cool advent calendar design (LEGO! jams! puzzles!), but do any companies make a version that isn't anchored on Christmas?

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 11/09/2026

I was at an art & tech conference recently and had several extremely fashionable people notice my terminal and compliment it. I've been using the terminal at events for 25+ years, this has never happened before. Which is great, the power of the CLI is for everyone now! Not just nerds.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 10/09/2026

This is well-said, and the heart of this conflict is what drives status in any professional role, and how that ties into professional identity.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 08/09/2026

AI products are basically just software, but now it has moods.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/08/2026

All the time! Because it's the best way to solve certain problems! Mostly for the @hiddendoor.co product, but sometimes other fun projects or consulting.

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Reposted by Hilary Mason

Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I'm pretty excited about this: we're launching a ヽ(^O^)ノ paid ⎝(^O^)ヽ virtual residency at New_ Public for folks with big ideas for making the internet a better place. Got a big idea? 💡✅ Care about people and communities? 💖✅ Please apply and share! newpublic.org/eir

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 19/08/2026

I'm always curious when I see rage about something that's a technical nothing. There's always a place where that rage and outrage comes from that's real.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 19/08/2026

This thread helped me understand that the outrage about Anthropic's watermarking is the confluence of a lack of understanding of how LLMs (or any statistical language model) works and general angst at the current economics.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 17/08/2026

Excellent work from 404. Respect for books is such a basic value that signals so many things about people.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 12/08/2026

Has anyone curated a static download of the good bits of Wikipedia/YouTube/etc. for being able to learn or explore new things offline? We could call it "The Good Place".

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 11/08/2026

Have you found social spaces online where the default assumption is that the person you're talking to is smart and trying their best to do good and has reasons for the choices they make? Or is that too much of a dream?

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Reposted by Hilary Mason

tallestdude @coreyc.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Happy Zero Cool Day to all who celebrate #hackers

Screenshot of the scene in the movie "Hackers" about Zero Cool crashing 1507 systems on Aug 10, 1988

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 02/08/2026

So much AI journalism feels like gaslighting if you know anything about machine learning pre-2020. Come. On.

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Reposted by Hilary Mason

Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I can't stress enough what a crisis this is. Trump's own intelligence agencies concluded that Iran attacked Minnesota's critical infrastructure and Trump is saying that it's Minnesota's own fault and denying it was Iran. The federal government won't defend blue states in a literal war.

nytimes.com

U.S. Sees Iran as Likely Behind Cyberattack on Minnesota Water Systems (Gift Article)

Investigators cautioned that the assessment was preliminary. There were no indications that any water supply had been rendered unsafe to drink.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 31/07/2026

There are smart people working at these companies, and yet they keep launching deeply ill-considered products. It's such an obviously bad idea if you think about it for even a second. I'm fascinated by this.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 30/07/2026

I have a headache today and I finally understand dark mode.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/07/2026

You will laugh at me but somehow I failed to grow cilantro in the AeroGarden last time I tried! Parsley did work well enough.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/07/2026

I do! But also I live in New York City so I have winter? Can a pot move inside when it gets cold?

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/07/2026

Help me bluesky — What’s the easiest way for me, a plant dummy, to grow these herbs at home? I love cooking with fresh herbs and hate not trusting my produce.

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 10/07/2026

And did you mean for typos or for things we will miss now that our tools have changed?

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 10/07/2026

Well, "pythong" is the one I still have a bash alias for ;)

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