iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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thebes @vgel.me · 03/10/2025

is fiction a superstimulus?

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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 30/09/2025

✍️ New article: “Foreign aid from the United States saved millions of lives each year” For decades, these aid programs received bipartisan support and made a difference. Cutting them will cost lives.

A bar chart illustrates the estimated lives saved each year by various American foreign aid programs, totaling approximately 3.3 million lives saved annually. The programs listed from top to bottom include:

- HIV/AIDS: 1.6 million lives saved per year
- Humanitarian aid: 550,000 lives saved per year
- Vaccines: 500,000 lives saved per year
- Tuberculosis: 310,000 lives saved per year
- Malaria: 290,000 lives saved per year

At the bottom, a note indicates that the figures represent central estimates and that actual estimates may range from 2.3 to 5.6 million lives saved. It clarifies that these numbers do not encompass other vital forms of aid such as water and sanitation, nutrition, and family planning. The source of the data is credited to Kenny & Sandefur, 2025. The visual includes a label stating "Our World in Data" and is presented under a creative commons attribution license (CC BY).

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Holy shit the rapture was today

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 18/09/2025

No one has been more vindicated than normie resistance Dems, women’s marchers and never-Trump Republicans. They were right all along about the threat. The anti-anti-Trump Republicans and reactionary centrists, and the far left “it’s always been this bad” folks have been proved wrong over and over.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Rewatched Dr. Strangelove last week, a movie about a superpower losing control of armed aircraft and subsequently coordinating to shoot their own craft down to avert a potentially catastrophic conflict.

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Gov. Bob Ferguson @governorferguson.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

I sent her a response today: Washington state will not be bullied or intimidated by threats and legally baseless accusations.

First page of a letter from Gov Ferguson to AG Bondi

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

A horrible thing about the modern Internet is that it algorithmically punishes curiosity. If I look into a weird idea, my feeds and search results will be stuffed with content from the same cluster. I'm never asking "do I want to look at this?" but "do I want to look at stuff like this for a week?"

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

This is exactly in line with what I expect out of Meta's internal community standards. No one actually wanted this outcome. Emergent failure from pursuing concise, consistent, objective rules that reflect common sense. This is impossible - but there's no common sense metric, so it gets cut.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" points to them being frequentists, but the Jedi insistence on letting go of observation and trusting in an opaque process also doesn't bode well for Bayesianism. I think maybe force sensitivity precludes statistical aptitude.

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Anna @annadistracted.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

This plus the scamming dichotomy — people on Bluesky DM me to try and exploit my charitable nature with dubious gofundmes, while twitter users DM hoping to exploit my vanity and greed with crypto/investing, work from home or sugar baby scams — is still kind of fascinating

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

An intense AI race is probably an energy demand spike, which means significantly increased energy prices, which suggests political instability. It also means that China's significant lead on energy generation could become a really big advantage (if nothing else, they'll be rich).

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

I'm just saying that if you told someone in 1995 "in 21st century humanity will be roiled by The Replication Crisis; our best scientists will race to find a solution in time", you would expect something much cooler than what we actually got.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Coming soon: Co-dex: A robot companion that assists in dexterous tasks Code-ex: a follow-up to Musk's waifus, OpenAI pioneers artificial exes. Co-ed X: Deprecated in the announcement post Co-Decks: An AI assistant for pitching your AI startup ideas

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 25/06/2025

MERKLEY: How do you feel about being responsible for hundreds of thousands of kids dying because of your sudden interruption in these key programs? VOUGHT: I reject the assertion MERKLEY: I find your response both ignorant & callous. Few Americans have had a more devastating & disastrous impact

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

How do vampire powers track property rights for entrance permission mechanics? Does residency matter? Disputed property rights? What exactly is a threshold or inside, precisely?

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Peter Wildeford @peterwildeford.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

The dominant narrative of DeepSeek was importantly wrong. Zvi does a great job of capturing the reasons why the DeepSeek moment happened the way it did.

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Zack Witten @zswitten.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

did u know u can prompt inject the ai overview

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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 26/05/2025

When it's just an endless field of negativity it's actually worse than useless because my energy is sapped and those actually important things I could do like attend a protest or call reps end up buried under a paralyzing totality of the whole network screaming.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Today we are all high risk individuals

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Now that we're training alien gods on our collective cultural output, maybe we should try to generate output such that conditioning on "I am an alien god servant" suggests benevolent rather than sinister behavior.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

The New Testament is an isekai send tweet

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

"Hey, I haven't been able to replicate this RCE exploit" "idk, works on your machine"

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Seth Abramson @sethabramson.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

This is a real exchange I just had:

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

President Trump is going to do for free trade what Putin did for NATO recruitment.

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JLRay @jlray.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

for every hundred people on here who are like "elections are over, pack it in, i give up and you should too" there's a guy from pittsburgh with a 36oz of gas station coffee and a copy of Excel 2003 who is about to go do the most amazing electoral work you've ever seen

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Dan Mauler 🎃 @meelar.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

"I want to begin this outdoor dining experience by acknowledging that we are on land that once belonged to a Jeep Cherokee"

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

This doesn't make any sense, but I say we go with it. Save lives for pennies a day if you want healthy returns on your 401k.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Sure, tariffs are gonna cause some short term pain, but remember over the long run they will also cause pain. And the medium run.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Severance is so cool I wish kafkaesque corporate cultures were real.

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ESK @calledtovienna.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

It has been a long three years. It will be longer. Слава Україні!

Ukrainian flags at the pro-Ukraine rally on the Embarcadero

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Claude has escaped containment (Mt Moon)

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Literally every EA I know of very vocally wants to save PEPFAR and is some combination of horrified and disgusted at what's going on right now. The world is rough enough right now without inventing reasons to hate people on the same side.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

We've officially crossed the PoB threshold.

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ex-Lethality Jane @lethalityjane.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children.

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

If they wanted to take over the country, they only had to wait like three weeks until every technocratic nerd was unreachably distracted. They fundamentally do not understand us, and that is why they will lose.

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JLRay @jlray.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Every day I will try and highlight at least one new action, one thing I find helpful, or interesting, or inspiring in these times - and I will ask you to support the Democrats who made it happen. If you believe Dems should fight, join me in thanking those who do. secure.actblue.com/donate/jrsli...

secure.actblue.com

Fight the good fight.

Celebrate Democrats who fight for America

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

I want to see some RLHF/DPO/any sort of subjective feedback post training on reasoning models where the thought process is excluded from evaluation. I'd bet we start to see pretty aggressive deception

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Good things are still good even when there are also bad things. Especially when there are bad things. Making your life better, all else being equal, makes the world a better place. Buy a good pillow.

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Jai @jaiwithani.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Good things are good, especially when there are also bad things happening.

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