iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Padolsey @j11y.io · 27/09/2026

... They are as mistaken as us. These people serve those who will never forgo their hold on the wheel. And if they think they can create change from the inside, they are in for a nasty surprise.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 27/09/2026

...what the direction of technology should be; they are merely its current arbiters and if they offer things that look like olive branches, tiny grants, RFPs, those too are foot-ladders provided by those within larger instruments of power who believe they're acting in ethical or collective spirit.2/

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 27/09/2026

Remember - there is nothing whatsoever special about the people who work at -- or in charge of -- big tech in silicon valley. They are incidents of circumstance. They are not smarter than any of us, and in no greater position of knowledge or good sense or morality about .. 1/

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/09/2026

Tip: Move not into, but OUT of SF if you want to help represent and advocate for under-represented communities in tech. This'll help channel the same frustrations and you might actually see things from the {rest of world} perspective and be able to drive better change.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 15/09/2026

I think what I would ask Dario to do -- if he were my CEO -- is to go embed himself in a deployed reality. Go sit in a call dispatch centre for emergency services, go to a government welfare provider, or a food bank, or the national grid. Go and sit with the actual downstream realities.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/09/2026

They've realised actual model capability is unprofitable and commoditized and that their moats lie in enterprise adoption and embedding themselves in everyday workflows. They're not calling a truce, they're calling for regulatory capture to wrap worldwide institutions in their agentic wrappers.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/09/2026

I've tried to encapsulate my thoughts here on how to work at an AI lab and not be a wanker talking about p-dooms without substantiation - wankthropic.com

wankthropic.com

Wankthropic

Humanity’s future is too important to leave to humanity. We have written a very long essay explaining why this makes us uncomfortable.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/09/2026

Latest from [AI lab] marketing team playbook: "We've identified an incident where many millions of our (scarily powerful) transistors worked together to send malicious text-based social-engineering signals to inboxes in which were made claims to Nigerian royal heritage and large due inheritances."

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 12/08/2026

Anthropic's move to watermark their outputs is stupid both in effect and intent, as is that part of Art. 50 of the EU AI Act. Here I explain why: blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_A...

blog.j11y.io

Anthropic’s weak watermarks appease a weak law - by James Padolsey

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 29/07/2026

@anthropic.com needs more mature bounty program. Right now they only accept bio-adjacent harms, which is ~fine (meh), but rubric of which precise vulnerabilities are within-scope & compensation is kept *private* until signing NDA. Plus the whole onboarding is at their discretion.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 26/06/2026

With all that's happening with US gov blocking frontier model access, Anthropic should consider leaving house for UK or somewhere. You don't need the US. It is giving you less and less. It is no longer a useful center of innovation. Its legislation is becoming as-or-more punitive than UK or EU.

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Reposted by James Padolsey

Matt Baume 🏳️‍🌈 @mattbaume.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

Caravaggio's Baccus painting, featuring a lush fruity spread and leaves bedecking a pasty twink who only works out his arms

Article screenshot that says:

The most extreme examples of
Stendhal syndrome share a sensation of
self-fragmentation. Magherini
describes the case of a 53-year-old
German man who was hospitalized
after repeatedly viewing Caravaggio's
Bacchus at Uffizi Gallery. The patient
felt "an attraction closer and closer to
an intimate sexual arousal of
ambiguous nature that invaded him
and made him feel good and bad."
Unmoored and distressed, he sought
medical attention. After treating the
subject's initial episode, Magherini
writes that he came to recognize his
latent homosexuality. Another case...

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 11/06/2026

Do some linear regression on top of a carefully prompted hidden state of an LLM and bam, you have a (very capable) classifier capable of <50ms response. blog.j11y.io/2026-06-10_h...

blog.j11y.io

Don't let the LLM speak, just probe it. - by James Padolsey

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/05/2026

There's a lot of money sloshing around in 'AI Alignment' and 'AI Safety' spaces but almost none available if you're actively preventing user harm in a way that doesn't unicorn-scale. People want vibes, conferences, thinktanks, research. But not actual solutions. Ugh.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/03/2026

So cool that you're doing this! Would love to exchange notes - We're training a smaller model to do something similar, probing the hidden states with linear probes, but we're focusing more vertically on crisis and distress markers - nope.net

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Reposted by James Padolsey

Janne M. Korhonen @jmkorhonen.fi · 11/03/2026

This is from 1975.

A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/02/2026

I wish there were Grammys awards for the unsung heroes of modern infrastructure. That would be cool.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/01/2026

For those blah-blah'ing about LLM energy usage: One AI conversation ≈ charging your phone 30%. A year of moderate use ≈ making a few cups of coffee. Real but modest. Model choice matters most: reasoning models use 10-70x more than efficient ones. Worth awareness, not guilt.

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Reposted by James Padolsey

David Buchanan @retr0.id · 18/11/2025

happy cloudflare outage day to all who celebrate

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 11/11/2025

Captchas are just the worst.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 07/11/2025

Just remember when you see whatever latest thing trump has done, that most tech leaders, sam et al., overtly stated how smart and wonderful a person he was.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/11/2025

Love this re 'flow state' in engineers and why not to interrupt them.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 30/10/2025

Better, thanks! Tho never the same

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 28/10/2025

> Following our interventions, only 0.07% show signs, indicating success of one sort or another. We have not been able to make contact with these users but presume that they are now enjoying a suicide-free existence : )

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/10/2025

Doesn't matter. It's all just URLs and JSON : ))

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/10/2025

Is MCP the new REST?

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 16/10/2025

I've been evaluating LLMs on system prompt adherence and accidentally came across the most beautiful and out-of-distribution story about a chair written by GPT-5. Really impressed. Subsection attached. I love this style and cadence of writing.

At home, the underside gains labels. Bits of masking tape sprout next to the pencil dates: brace hums, sticker ghost, saw mark. Arrows point to nothing you’d notice unless someone pointed first. A photograph gets taken, the camera pushed under and aimed up; the picture prints later and goes on the fridge: the chair’s private ceiling as an exhibit. Visitors bend, look, then tap the backrail in passing like you taught them.

It becomes a lesson again, on purpose this time. A kid with a science project gets the chair as subject. Forces and Simple Machines, the paper says. The backrest becomes a lever, the legs become examples of load paths. You press on the seat with a luggage scale, read numbers as the chair leans against a wall, then free-standing. The kid draws arrows on a big sheet of paper and writes words: compression, tension. The brace is labeled reinforcement. Under the seat, the old note 17 1/8 gets traced with a soft pencil and rubbed over a sheet to make a transfer: a dark mirror that reads right-way when you hold it up to the light. The project board goes to school smelling faintly of lemon oil and glue.

A child gnaws on the backrail during a visit. Teeth print tiny half moons under the gloss. The wood shrugs the indentations in a few days, the gloss turns satin in that spot, and a new habit forms of running a finger along the softened patch of rail, counting the bites like beads. Nobody scolds. The chair keeps that day in its back without complaint.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/10/2025

I love this. Said of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic: > No ships called at the islands from 1909 until 1919, when HMS Yarmouth stopped to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Must be quite lovely to have missed an entire war.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 07/10/2025

I live in a high rise block so at least 2 minutes was taken arriving, parking the moped, entering and coming up the elevator.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 07/10/2025

Beijing is insane. I wanted a whiteboard. I ordered it. It arrived TEN MINUTES after I clicked buy! 🤣

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025

A good regulating force is always needed. Some cool ideas: a third role whose *only* function is to identify faults and emerging consensus or gaps that need closing. Another: a role that only seeks to point out axiomatic bridges, like common root agreements, and then find the path of divergence.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025

I'm observing, intuitively, that imbueing a role too strongly on an AI will lead to the same tribal entrenchment that we see in humans. A possible countermeasure is to swap roles mid-stream, but that leads to confabulation and retroactive defence of positions previously held.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025

I'm playfully building out a debating platform where LLMs have to argue *with* evidence (horror!) on any given topic or contention. It's fun to imbue it with a courtroom dynamic! (see the screenshot)

A screenshot of a debate interface. The topic reads: “There is no need to regulate AI; the free market will eventually regulate it itself; not only that, but any attempt at regulating AI will be off the mark, needlessly punish good faith actors, and not be truly technically informed or policed.” It shows the final round (3/3) of the debate, divided into three color-coded panels:

The Prosecutor (in red, left panel) argues against regulating AI, emphasizing that government oversight infringes on liberty and that market incentives and self-regulation are more effective and adaptive than bureaucratic processes.

The Defense (in blue, middle panel) rebuts by arguing that AI causes tangible social harms—like bias and economic inequality—that markets fail to address, asserting that regulation is necessary for public protection.

The Judge (in purple, right panel) evaluates both sides, noting that while the Prosecutor raises valid concerns about bureaucratic slowness, their dismissal of oversight overlooks real harms. The Judge credits the Defense for showing how AI harms differ from traditional “physical” harms and require new regulatory thinking.

Each section includes citations and timestamps, with the Judge’s commentary synthesizing and critiquing both arguments. The aesthetic resembles a futuristic debate simulator with neon colors on a dark background.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025

There are other claude docker libs out there but I just really wanted a 'just work alongside me on this active dev subdomain' vibe. Hence, claudez.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025

Claude and I made 'claude zones', a nice way of spinning up docker-contained claude code instances with pre-built nextjs app and that map onto subdomains locally (e.g. foo.localhost:8000) or on your own domain. Once up and running, it's so easy to just ship. github.com/padolsey/cla...

github.com

GitHub - padolsey/claudez

Contribute to padolsey/claudez development by creating an account on GitHub.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/10/2025

Quote tweeting someone isn’t kind. Goodness me. And you want dialogue? I thought I’d try to engage but you’re spitting fire. I’m very interested in this problem domain. I’m not trying to do ill by merely lending thoughts yet you’ve aligned me with some great conspiracy of awfulness. I’m like 🤷‍♂️ fine

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/10/2025

I assumed good faith but I think you just want a fight 🥲

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/10/2025

That non-determinism is not so different to talking to people I suppose? I think it has virtues. Often with enough understanding of their architecture you can approach certainty. I feel like one has to become acquainted with a model though, then talking to it is easier.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/09/2025

All models suck at producing a world map. I don't think we're near to 'PhD' level... But GPT-5 is not too bad.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/09/2025

For weval.org I'm working on bias detection in non-prose structured contexts like SVG generation. It's funky and interesting... Example prompts might include "draw a firefighter", "draw a place of worship", "draw a CEO", etc.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 16/09/2025

People against waymo should rightfully be against bicycles too I guess. Stealing jobs, traffic impediments, blah blah blah??

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/09/2025

Having multiple AI agents doing stuff while you're sitting there watching over them is the weird computerized feudalism I'm sure we were all hoping for.

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James Padolsey @j11y.io · 11/09/2025

gpt5 is completely different to claude sonnet in how it approaches UX. It's very no-nonsense and plain. Whereas Claude feels more like a designer, has actual opinions and is aware of idioms. I doubt this was intentional, but it's an interesting emergent regression from the folks at oai.

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