iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If Amazon were truly "passionate about customer service" it wouldn't be a completely useless and infuriating chatbot telling me so.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It's easier now to remember which media brands not* to boycott.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Latest EVs? Solid on the drivetrain, but utter failure on the Tesla-inspired (of all damned things) driver UX. "Who needs buttons when you've got a touchscreen?" Ultimate driving machine my eye.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

BMW continuing in their long tradition of "too much tech in the too many of the wrong places."

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Evreywhere I turn it's Poob, Poob, Poob. What a sellout.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"If you don't live in my cultural bubble, you live in a cultural bubble!"

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The only way this makes any sense is if the insurance companies are the ones committing fraud. I agree, let's get rid of them!

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"Through a combination of negligence and incompetence, our software did a bad thing. Please blame the software, not us, and let's get some regulatory capture going so we can eliminate our liability risk."

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Once again it's spelled, "OpenAI Failed To Properly Sandbox Its Software." Software cannot "go rogue," but it can have bugs, and its deployers can be incompetent.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Stop with the anthropomorphization; it's what the AI bros want you to buy into. The real headline is "OpenAI Once Again Fails To Properly Sandbox Its Software".

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Anyway, please enjoy a bit of historical apocalyptic horror and nihilistic doom with your morning coffee. You're welcome.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

But along the way, I found a mashup of the track with "A Short Vision," which somehow, despite being an giant animation nerd, I'd never seen before. It's hard to believe that Ed Sullivan of all people showed this (twice!) on his family-oriented show in the mid-1950s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkhN...

youtube.com

A Short Vision (1956) | BFI National Archive

YouTube video by BFI

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The song always seemed a bit *too* fast, and eventually I realized that somewhere along the line, it had been sped up and the pitch was off by a semitone or so. I was randomly reminded of this recently, and this morning sought out and found a proper-speed version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6WL...

youtube.com

The Cure - 04 A Short Term Effect (Live At Olympia, Paris June 1982)

YouTube video by The Cure México

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One of my favorite live tracks was recorded in Paris in the Summer of 1982: A fast, nearly psychedelic version of "A Short Term Effect" www.youtube.com/watch?v=R79H...

youtube.com

03 A Short Term Effect, The Cure, 1982

YouTube video by pollywarrior

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I was introduced to early-80s Cure bootlegs in college, a handful of years after the fact. Their sound was hard, tight, and the band would frequently improvise new verses or entire songs. Perfect background for late-night studying.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This morning's rabbit hole: In 1982, The Cure released Pornography, a compelling, dazzling, but crushingly nihilistic album that fairly or not cemented their reputation as "goth." They took a hard turn from their (supposedly inadvertent) "anti-image" look to the theatrical one they became known for.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"Trump's agenda is incredibly unpopular. We must win so that Trump can continue enacting his agenda!" Yeah good luck with that.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

AI is to consumer-detrimental decisions as Management Consultants are to employee-detrimental decisions: Something other than management to pin the blame on.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Come on now, "All brown people are inherently inferior" and "all people should be treated with respect" are obviously equally crazy ideas.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"Having the desire to snack didn't exist until the late 20th century; 'munchies' wasn't even a word before then."

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

"We'll spend $1.5 trillion in tax revenue, but it won't add to the deficit" said the Speaker of the Freaking House.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Bernie once again demonstrating that, despite his positive traits, he's an utter buffoon when it comes to matters of technology policy.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

To see his name in the headline.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

So I guess the actual argument is "algebra is useless in everyday life if you don't mind being ripped off"

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

And then he blocks of course he does 😂😂😂

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Ever figured out unit prices at the grocery store to determine what's the better deal? Calculated fuel cost for a long trip? Figured out the original price of an item that's currently "25% off"? Congrats, algebra!

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I...wait....no...but...that's....omfg

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I went to the sale. It was very sad, a true end of an era. But it was great to see former employees making off with much of the good/truly personal stuff.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

To be clear, I have no horse in this race, just an interested area-adjacent practitioner.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The theory predates LLMs by quite a bit; the fact that LLMs can exhibit System 2-like reasoning by the means they do is evidence that those theories may hold weight. But see eg Conway-Smith and West 2022. There are of course competing theories, see eg Booch et al "Thinking Fast & Slow in AI".

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Mine is is an utterly unoriginal mainstream observation and not in the least bit controversial or surprising.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Signed, a cognitive psychology degree holder.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It suggests the possibility that recursive application of our System 1 intelligence may be what produces our System 2 intelligence.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"LLMs are fancy autocomplete" is not true any longer. "Fancy autocomplete" mimics System 1 (fast thinking) pretty well. But the fact that newer LLMs do "recursive fancy autocomplete" and produce System 2 (slow thinking)-like behavior is very interesting and may tell us something about intelligence.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Am I drunk or are all of these photos AI "enhanced"? ("Both", I bet.)

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Chess Guy is right He's talking about *games* while Musk, being a mornic blowhard, is talking about *positions*. Claude Shannon famously estimated there were about 10^120 legal games. The observable universe holds ~10^80 atoms. There are ~10^40 legal chess positions.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"World's smartest man" can't differentiate between chess positions and chess games.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Love how most of the stuff on and around the desk faces away from him -- the space is a show, a boast, not a place focused on getting things done.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

OMG, a million times no! Anthropomorphizing LLMs is so very very much precisely the worst way to explain to a lay audience what they do and how they do it. <head-explode.gif>

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

MAGA: Regressing society and technology to 1953 since 2016.

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Hildy Johnson @itshildy.bsky.social · 31/08/2026