iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 13h

"why should I not be able to do XYZ without AI if I've spent my life learning other skills? Why not use AI if I don't have time to learn" Welcome to priorities. Things I value? I do. Things I don't value? I don't. I don't have every skill ever because time is finite! No one's entitled to output.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 14h

Look at the paramount-warner merger, between them and Disney, they can literally stop any small creative website gaining a foothold with ease. Not even getting into the possibility of suppressing their presence in a search engine/LLM indexing...just 'legal' ddosing.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 14h

Genuinely, is there any hope of an independent web at all in the age of genAI? Every major company now has the resources to DDOS any small competitor and defend it under the guise of "model training" or just an oopsie. And why would they choose to not do that?

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 17h

Tech... Reinventing from first principles without first having principles.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 17h

I don't yuck people's yums, but I have learned over the years that many people also don't like you yumming their yums.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 17h

Reminiscing on my funniest block. Mark Lamarr: My favourite country singer is X, his music influenced the genre so much. Me: He is excellent, also a huge fan of Y, I think he might have had more influence in terms of music. ML: I mean in terms of voice. Me: I know! Agreed. ML: wasting my time.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 21h

...but .. why? I see similar genre boundaries in music and man, in both music and literature I really struggle to know what any genres is or what it is of stuff I read. Why does it matter lol. I barely know the genre of any of the books I read. What do people gain from this haha

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Me playing Ace Combat 8 - Boy I sure am glad I fixed that Tonitrus Spear problem, that could really have come back to bite us in the ass. Every 3 missions following: 🫨

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Sorry yes... "Ace Combat-esque (laudatory)"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

*Suprise actually last mission* - A surviving member of the original badguys, not the rebels, found out that the rebels had a wonder weapon and has commandeered the wonder weapon".

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

*Last Mission* - "Omg, the rebels found one of the old wonder weapons and are launching it to try and wipe out everything"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

ace combat esque. "You destroyed the wonder weapon, but there was another wonder weapon!" "You destroyed two wonder weapons, but they had a secret backup wonder weapon! The other was a decoy" "So, uh.... the first one? Yeah wasn't fully destroyed"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

So fed up of "data driven" and "reproducibility first" essentially just being "we didn't want to sit down for an afternoon and thrash out the theory and the stats". Feels like a lot of folk want to do science as if they're just statisticians... But also, they don't wanna dive into stats??!?

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I feel I'm in groundhog day with "we don't test data, we test models. So we're not in the business of statistical power, we're in the business of paramter estimation". "Oh but I want to know if my post hocs are sufficiently separable!!" I think it's more important to know if you asked a question.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You can watch bob Hopkins in the 1980s talk about the death of British culture due to homogenisation and deathless pursuit of profit above all else. Long before any of the migration people blame. But if there is one thing remaining in British identity it's never ever taking responsibility.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There have always been more than enough "native Brits" to keep all aspects of British culture alive, to keep the nations "identity" static. But if you don't give it any bloody money or attention, then it's Britain's fault. If no migrant ever stepped foot in the UK, it would be the same.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Brits stopped going to seaside towns for holidays, instead going to Ibiza. What migrant stopped you going to Dover or Blackpool for a trip? "Oh those towns suck" yeah cos you all stoped going to them so their economies died and no British will ever vote for enhancing British culture.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Whit British people stopped going to pubs that don't serve food. Now everything is a gastropub. Migration did nothing to that. Brits voted for government after government to defund cultural aspects of Britain. No migrant stopped British culture. You did though.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Oh who gives a toss about a Nations self image? It's not migrants, it's you. It's Brits. Cockles and welks didn't die out because of someone called Muhammed ate a falafel. Dave from the Garage stopped eating them. You stopped eating them. Every bit of British identity that's lost is cos Brits stop

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Reposted by Huw Swanborough

Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Surely the entire white male community have collective guilt for this guy?? /s

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Agreed though there's a difference between "can we make a conscious artificial being" and "is Claude opus conscious?" Because in the latter, people aren't even thinking "ok what constitutes consciousness" and more "ok, how can I map (rationalise) consciousness onto this thing after the fact".

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hoping somewhere there's a like... Turducken curse, where a curse word is inserted into another.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"take AI consciousness seriously" No. It's not a serious question unless we go "look, imagine we invent an entirely new model totally different to anything we have now". Which you could also have asked in 1986, so... No, I won't treat it seriously. It doesn't deserve it on any merits.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This literally evoked New York counterpoint in my head.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean this in the most respectful, impressed, positive way. WTF?!

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I would like all memes, comics, bluesky posts, and general jokes about fading youth and losing relevance to stop having my exact age in them please. Thank you.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think that's actually one body with two heads, so wouldn't that be instead.... Hydradization?

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"I'll remember what this means when I open it"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Never forget the time the revolutionary blue coats lost a battle to their avian foe. Muskets are nothing against an agile target.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sounds like someone got "Ace Combat 7's Protaginist'ed"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"honey, there's a moving void again... No it looks kinda soft actually... Yeah, yeah I know, no staring"

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So uh, wiring lights in the new flat and I have this hydra of wires. Anyone know what this might mean in Switzerland? These don't match the colours of any other wires in my flat lol.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Corrupting the youth of science by showing them how to simulate studies with assumed effects, allowing them to understand power in a realistic way, and being responsible statisticians and experiment designers. Mwuhahahaha

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

the massive downside is the amount of people gone through rote education in healthcare settings who view everything as knowable parameters, thus treating anything that can't be listed objectively as inherently untrustworthy. We can do without them in healthcare.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

and despite it's horror, it's still pretty much the best way we have of figuring it out. It's both wild and strangely beautiful to me how utterly systematically terrible we are at parameterising subjective states. (I will say, a root canal without anaesthesia very quickly gave me reference of 10)

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I hit send and realise that's Leon The Professional....

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Pitch idea: hitman movie where he has an intern and thus it is not competency porn.

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Huw Swanborough @huwroscience.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I love when people act like they've discovered ways of thinking for the first time and this discovery alone means they don't have to think any further. Like, ok cool he's discovered dualism so he's enlightened... Maybe he could read more into it the work that, somehow, predates his discovery.

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