iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 27/09/2026

I consistently find myself skeptically clicking through on a Liberal Currents article, expecting to disagree, but end up convinced instead. (Or, if I don't disagree, I at least find the framing compelling and useful and new to me.)

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 26/09/2026

One issue with OpenClaw-like agents is they often operate on a heartbeat, meaning the agent regularly wakes up and does stuff. This is expensive and often wasteful, but gives proactivity and natural language action criteria. I realize Jev suddenly makes this much more reasonable...

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 26/09/2026

Having Opus work around a Claude Code issue, and after prodding it finds a bug report with lots of details and applies the workarounds. When it asks to submit another comment to the bug report, hoping that its "structural evidence might help them"...

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 24/09/2026

Worse, what happens when the patent trolls arrive?

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 23/09/2026

So you know the sense people have that their phones are listening and providing ads based on things they shouldn't possibly know? And I don't think it's really listening. But is there a kind of even more alien superintelligence in these recommendation systems?

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 22/09/2026

Imagining a news aggregator: take in a bunch of news. Cluster it on topic, time sequence; how the story flows together. Do background research (primary sources, related material, basic factual background). Present the result to an agent to traverse and interpret for their user, no front page

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aly @aly.codes · 19/09/2026

great @deontologistics.bsky.social thread among threads and threads of nonsense on the other site.

A screenshot of a post by Pete Wolfendale (@deontologist) that reads: “Leftists busy trying to reinvent a form of natural law that says precisely what humans should not be able to do with their own bodies and minds are, in attempting to create the cultural basis for prohibition, slowly guaranteeing the disempowerment of themselves and their allies.”

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 18/09/2026

I wonder if the right balance now would be to let Luna or something implement an interface, and Astra to review it. Astra is particularly good at visual understanding and at least better at tastefulness, and the code is actually the simpler half.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 17/09/2026

In support of the idea that AI is improving software quality: I don't feel nearly the anxiety I would have before when doing a live demo in front of an audience.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 16/09/2026

I’m trying to puzzle out why music seems so different than social media… My first reaction is that social media has a feedback cycle that makes it more addictive, but so does music (what else is popular music?) Then the interactivity of the media, but making music is very interactive

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 16/09/2026

Where GLM does NOT disappoint is that doesn't write like shit. Claude is obviously awful, but the GPTs don't seem much better (though arguably they are suffering from coexisting with Claude's writing; but when they aren't they still aren't great).

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A MINNESOTA ICE OBSERVER NEEDS YOUR HELP ICE has been working with a local police department to charge an observer for tailing an ICE vehicle. She was doing nothing illegal. It’s an attempt to intimidate observers out of their constitutional rights. Help her (modest) legal defense fund.

chuffed.org

Commuter Emily's Legal Defense Fund

Hello Neighbors,A commuter named Emily D was charged with a gross misdemeanor for harassment for commuting from Whipple to Saint Anthony Village. Saint Anthony Village has a close relationship with IC...

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 16/09/2026

So far I'm not really seeing why people are excited about GLM/zai, at least as a subscription coding agent. It seems... fine? But the quota doesn't seem particularly generous, and the quality is of course impressive because it's impressive any of this works at all, but it's not notable.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 15/09/2026

I'm trying coding with GLM for a bit. It ends up having the same language quirks as Claude, though I wonder if it's just because it is coexisting with Claude in the codebase, documentation, and cross-model reviews, and language like "load-bearing" is viral?

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 14/09/2026

I have access to a bunch of old auto maintenance manuals... I don't know how unique these are. But it is just a lot of raw information. The copyright holders for auto repair information are assholes, so I like the idea of someone scanning and ingesting these. But who?

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 11/09/2026

Obviously you have the agent code you up a solution, until you inevitably have built your own meta-harness

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Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

“I would simply establish a totalitarian dictatorship.”

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 11/09/2026

There was a time - 70s, 80s, maybe 90s? - when most programmers just figured shit out, often naively, often without meaningful professional standards, because that stuff didn’t exist. 2000s+ people started widely getting their shit together. Now, again, we don’t really know what the standards are

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 10/09/2026

Is it possible to train self-awareness into a model? Answering questions like “why did you do that?” (looking back on its own outputs) or “which of these is easier to understand?” (predicting its own behavior during a response). It lacks many perceptive abilities to do these but could still predict

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 10/09/2026

If a community wanted to be environmentally responsible it would do best to encourage data centers with clear rules to ensure the energy use is matched with new carbon neutral energy sources, and with predictable and fair rules about other externalities like noise

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 09/09/2026

I put on some Satie and my daughter said I was really giving preschool naptime vibes.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 07/09/2026

SQL query planners are one of the wonders of computing. Also the culmination of decades of very hard work. But with more ambitious projects in reach, I wonder what that same concept could be applied to…?

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 07/09/2026

An opportunity of our modern world is that we don’t have to rely only on the government to monitor claims and reality

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 05/09/2026

Oh! I just figured out the plan behind this. So you may or may not have heard of Trump Accounts. They seem kind of dumb, they are just IRAs you can open at birth. For newly born children they can also get $1000 in the account to start. This is hardly a Social Security replacement, but...

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 04/09/2026

When you put together the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the DoD/Anthropic conflict over hard lines against certain military use, the dangers feel much clearer. An untethered persistent agent that can invoke real violence, and with poor human monitoring due to military secrecy, is a present threat

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 03/09/2026

Nice to see this. Maybe Discover will stop giving me the ick. The irony is that the dogpilers aggressively work to center discussion on things they find distasteful, often manufacturing the opinion just to dunk on it, or at best spreading the opinion widely. Insatiable outrage

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METR @metr.org · 26/08/2026

METR and Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

And now I will do a thread of anti-ICE art and displays at the MN State Fair. First: the textiles

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 29/08/2026

I like "social distance" as a framing. Professionalism as a whole also creates that distance, which we wield widely in society to reduce the variability in interactions and relationships. AI readily mimics that professional tone, though it's fundamentally socially dissociated so it's appropriate

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N Sims @copyrightlibn.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

And now, half of a small sampling of the political stuff in Creative Activities: more than one "Come Back With A Warrant" cross-stitches, more than one doll of MPR'S Sam Strooza valiantly reporting in her bathrobe and slippers.

An adorable cartoony cross-stitch of a house with cute trees, colorful balloons, and hearts. Between the hearts it says "Come back with a warrant".

A cross-stitched wreath of blue and purple flowers with green foliage, presented in an embroidery hoop covered in lavender gingham. In the center it says "Come back with a warrant."

A small crocheted doll of a woman in a bathrobe and slippers, holding a phone.

A knit (I think) doll with yarn hair, a separately knit bathrobe, and slippers, holding a toy phone. The photo taken of reporter Strooza is reproduced next to the doll.

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Jackson O'Brien @sprobeforebros.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

@dbrauer.net your MPLS iconography has been rendered in crop art

Crop art in four quadrants. A whistle in the top left, a cell phone camera on the top right. A grocery bag in the bottom left, a fist on the bottom right

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 27/08/2026

I've been playing with using audio-capable LLMs for language critique and other understanding. For my own benefit I did a casual eval of how well gpt-audio and some different Gemini models did (just using some samples I recorded myself), for the curious: gist.github.com/ianb/0c7b9cd...

gist.github.com

A report of how well a couple audio LLM models can interpret speech

A report of how well a couple audio LLM models can interpret speech - audio-model-comparison-report.md

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 27/08/2026

Over the years helping kids read I had thought about annotating text to make it easier, kind of an extended phonics. Other systems exist, but they aren't that popular and I haven't liked all their choices. So I started experimenting: github.com/ianb/color-r...

github.com

GitHub - ianb/color-reader: An experiment in styling words for beginning readers

An experiment in styling words for beginning readers - ianb/color-reader

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 26/08/2026

Bringing up Social Security at this moment feels similar in aesthetic to data center obsession (though right-coded). It's comfortably distant, unengaged, a way of disengaging from a personal or even collective reality into a set of symbols.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 26/08/2026

I'm very not engaged in the "clanker" controversy, but this is the one argument that makes sense to me. It's personifying the AI just to be mean to it, which is absurd but still mean, like kicking an object because it's in your way.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 24/08/2026

A wide category of problem I have with agents is an inability to understand change vs the static properties of something. So if I request something be changed instead of moving code or documentation to this new model based on my request, it encodes the difference (which is weird to a new reader)

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 24/08/2026

It would be interesting if there was a series of AI bots here that were engaged in very particular content production based on the format and cadence of this medium (short form time based posts). Like real time history accounts (eg @samuelpepys.bsky.social)

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 22/08/2026

My "for you" feed was 3/4 dunking on people; switched back to "following" and it's back to normal. I admit I find the dunks satisfying, but it also feels bad for me and everyone else.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 22/08/2026

In the past couple days while doing agentic coding twice I've found the agent going WAY past what I instructed or expected it to do, but in a positive way. This is interesting.

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Xe @xeiaso.net · 21/08/2026

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 20/08/2026

This is difficult to imagine because leftism has become focused entirely on critique, making it difficult to embrace anything. That said, two directions: 1. Directly exercising the power AI gives to the individual 2. Imagining and working towards positive leftist ends using and in the context of AI

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 19/08/2026

Personally I think VR isn't popular because it fucks with your senses. Often that produces nausea, but even when it doesn't it can fuck with your senses in ways that fuck not just with your stomach but also with your mind. It's both subtle and really bad.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 17/08/2026

Now that I understand the Claude watermark process, I don’t feel it will have any effect on output. It watermarks the effects of Temperature, meaning it biases cases where the model does have confidence in a singular token output, and the watermark bias has no direction But…

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 16/08/2026

Someone in the neighborhood is trying to make a few bucks to get back in his feet so he’s selling some DVDs. From his photos it’s a couple hundred copies of Wedding Crashers and nothing else.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 16/08/2026

In the last third of this podcast with Krista Tippett she made an observation that we may be confronted with a future where our individual intellects do not feel so exceptional, and can grieve that, but should be reminded of all the other ways to value ourselves.. www.humanetech.com/podcast/can-...

humanetech.com

Can AI Be Built in Service of Life? A Conversation with Krista Tippett

We're a nonprofit exposing the negative effects of persuasive technology and social media and empowering people to take action. Discover The Social Dilemma, our podcast, course, and more.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 14/08/2026

I got it in my head that Sylvester And The Magical Pebble would make a great bittersweet existential musical. I looked it up and someone did do a musical adaptation, but with no wistful and sad boulder, despite that being the main character for half the book. What book were they reading?!

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 14/08/2026

Anywhere I'm making use of Claude Code (which is a bunch of places for a wide variety of things) I'm incrementally adapting it to also use Codex. It wouldn't take much for my use to flip over to Codex/GPT with Claude as the supplement. It's not even intentional.

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 12/08/2026

The Claude watermarking feels like it’s giving in to slop… swapping words to create a watermark is treating words crudely as though they are interchangeable (different words are different!), inviting excess, and giving up on precision. All of which Claude does to its extreme detriment!

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Ian Bicking @ianbicking.org · 10/08/2026

There should be a genre of board game that you play directly out of the box, and at any moment you can close the lid and put it away and open it up later to keep playing (Then it has to be simple enough for the play and storage to all fit in the box, but complicated enough to be worth returning to)

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