iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James King @jamesking.io · 15h

Great interview with Tristan Buckmaster about getting scooped by Open AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzbt...

youtube.com

The Buckmaster Interview (Navier-Stokes) - Numberphile

YouTube video by Numberphile

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Benjamin @benjaminschneider.ch · 24/09/2026

don't ask claude to set an alarm for you

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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/eate...

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James King @jamesking.io · 23/09/2026

Thank you, great thread. Is there a place where people in the Yes / Yes camp are convening?

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James King @jamesking.io · 23/09/2026

48 likes… just saying!

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James King @jamesking.io · 18/09/2026

Just updated this to work with the newly launched @observablehq.com.

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James King @jamesking.io · 14/09/2026

Gah, its been a long while since I used them. Thanks for the tip.

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James King @jamesking.io · 14/09/2026

Yes. But it is important to realise that models are getting larger and deeper to the point that its a legitimate to be concerned about their internal “thoughts” and not just the text they output. Vid explains why really well.

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James King @jamesking.io · 14/09/2026

I find Robert Miles really helpful as a navigator of AI safety issues. This video in particular is good. He acknowledges that we can anthropomorphise LLMs too much, but it is still helpful to think of them as “thinking” rather than just generating language. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuHd...

youtube.com

The AI Language We Can't Read: Neuralese ft. Rob Miles - Computerphile

YouTube video by Computerphile

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 07/09/2026

observable's community is just stacked with talent

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James King @jamesking.io · 05/09/2026

It _feels like_ Astra remembered choices it made at lower reasoning levels (assuming those ran first) or Astra just makes more consistent artistic choices when approaching the task from scratch.

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James King @jamesking.io · 05/09/2026

FYI: Link to pelican transcript in your post is missing. Observation: Pelicans for Astra are more consistent in the drawing choices from low->high. Arbitrary details like position of the sun, number of tail-feathers, shape of wing/arm is the same, but for other models no consistency between levels.

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James King @jamesking.io · 03/09/2026

Congrats! Been following your video reports on Audacity’s progress. Great to see it come to fruition.

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Observable @observablehq.com · 01/09/2026

For more than a year, we’ve been quietly building an all-new Observable. Today, that new Observable is live on observablehq.com. Read Mike @ocks.org’s announcement: observablehq.com/@observableh...

A screenshot of the new Observable interface, showing a notebook visualizing “Bollinger bands”. Several interface elements are labeled. Along the top: workspace menu, new notebook button, user menu. Along the right side: file attachments, dependencies, comments, settings, enable tinkering, show AI. In the interior: cell inserter, cell menu, cell toolbar.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Nick Hanauer on how the ergodicity problem in economics informs his thinking about inequality. youtube.com/shorts/cOhbe...

youtube.com

Monopoly Economy: Why Markets Aren't Ergodic #shorts

YouTube video by Blackbook Protocol

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James King @jamesking.io · 04/08/2026

Oops - I made a small mistake in the gif above - the notebook that I download is new.observablehq.com/@nxrix/binar..., but the one I then open in Observable Desktop is a remix: new.observablehq.com/d/cca8d2013f... which I downloaded earlier.

new.observablehq.com

Binary Black Holes

An Observable notebook by nxrix

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Observable @observablehq.com · 04/08/2026

We’ve been rebuilding the editor atop the foundation of Notebook Kit and portable files in an open format. You can’t necessarily tell yet, since there’s no button… but thanks to James for seeing it! See also @nxrix.bsky.social’s remarkable depicted notebook: new.observablehq.com/@nxrix/binar...

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James King @jamesking.io · 03/08/2026

I am sure that @observablehq.com will add this feature soon, but until then… I made a tool that exports Observable Notebooks 2.0 documents from the new Observable site. Useful for editing locally in Observable Desktop. tools.jamesking.io/observable-n...

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I just checked, and you can get the book for EUR 5.17 at the moment: www.kennys.ie/shop/fortune...

kennys.ie

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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com. Inspired by recent news about the SpudCell. NS subscribers can read about it here: www.newscientist.com/article/2532...

Title: The artificial cell's diary

Panel 1: An oval green cell with a face opens its eyes.
Caption: Woke up to the scientists discussing whether I was alive or just exhibiting some of the symptoms.

Panel 2: The cell looks thoughtful
Caption: A bit heavy for first thing in the morning.

Panel 3: The cell eats some little dots in the liquid around it.
Caption: Had a swim, then ate some of the molecule soup that I live in. My day is pretty much all soup-based.

Panels 4: The cell looks uncomfortable
Caption: Then I began to feel rather odd.

Panel 5 and 6: the cell hseems to be splitting in two
Caption: But, I saved the big news for last:

Panel 7: The cell smiles. A new, smaller cell smiles back.
Caption: I made a new friend!

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James King @jamesking.io · 29/07/2026

Poundstone is really good at exposition of mathematical concepts. I really like this description of ergodicity (pic, with alt text included). The book is chock full of efficient explanations like this. Do read the book!

FORTUNE'S FORMULA

Like that other formidable E word, entropy, ergodicity is a term from thermodynamics. Nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann used it to describe atoms. A system is ergodic if the fate of each individual atom over time is representative of a large group of atoms.

That is best introduced with an analogy. Suppose I work in quality control at a dice company. It's my job to make sure the dice are fair. One way to test the fairness of dice is to pick a die off the production line and roll it many, many times. I can tally how often each face lands up (the tallies should be close to equal) and compute an average of the numbers rolled. It should be close to (I+2+3+4+ 5+ 6) / 6, or 3.5.

That's a lot of work for a plastic cube that's going to retail for pennies. Here's a quicker test. I scoop a big basket of dice off the production line and heave them all onto the factory floor at once.

Then I tally and average the results.
The first test involves a time average because I'm looking at an individual die's outcomes over time. The second test uses an ensemble average, for I'm using a group of dice's outcomes at a single moment in time.
Customers care about how the dice they buy will behave over time (and not so much about the other dice they didn't buy). The time average is more directly relevant. But the ensemble average is easier to use when there are truckloads of dice to inspect. It would be nice if the time average and the ensemble average were the same.
Well, there's a word for that, and it's the word you may have just learned: ergodic. Fair dice can be considered ergodic, meaning that time and ensemble averages are the same.

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James King @jamesking.io · 29/07/2026

The book tells the story of the Kelly Criterion, an application of information theory to the domains of gambling and economics. It is enormously entertaining! The contents page gives a flavour: long-running intellectual feuds interwoven with gambling schemes. It would make a great movie.

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James King @jamesking.io · 29/07/2026

Just finished reading the 20th anniversary edition of Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone. It is such a good book. The new edition has an extra part, titled Ergodicity, which covers the work of Ole Peters and others.

The cover of William Poundstone’s book, Fortune’s Formula, 20th Anniversary edition.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

If you’re interested in — I was going to say ergodicity, then I thought ‘decisions theory’, and now I’m settling on — life?, have a look at the 20th anniversary edition of William Poundstone’s classic Fortune’s Formula. It has a brand new part about the rise of ergodicity economics.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Interesting exercise: use ergodicity economics to determine the conditions under which the answers are rational.

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Observable @observablehq.com · 13/07/2026

Here @fil.rezo.net reproduces @climatecasino.net’s chart, using warped gridlines to represent both the absolute temperature and the deviation from the historical mean for each day of the year. new.observablehq.com/@fil/godzill...

A line chart with an x-axis showing days of the year, from start of January to end of December; a left y-axis showing temperature, from 22 to 31 ºC; and a right axis showing deviation, from -3σ to 4σ. An orange line shows the mean, starting the year around 26.3 ºC and peaking in May around 27.8 ºC. Faint blue lines show a huge amount of historical data. A bold red line representing 2026 begins the year below the mean, just below 26 ºC, and continues to present day far above the mean, 29.4 ºC. Gray gridlines get “pinched” in the middle, representing narrower summer deviations, highlighting that the current temperature is almost 3.5σ above the mean.

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

At the end, his talk touches on his best video (well, my favourite), which you should definitely watch if you have not already. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxF...

youtube.com

How (and why) to take a logarithm of an image

YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

Enjoyed Grant Sanderson's Config talk on "Designing Math". Its an overview of his approach to exposition and teaching. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLSL...

youtube.com

Designing Math ft. Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) I Config 2026

YouTube video by Figma

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

This is a speculative video I made in 2010 about the difference between living and non-living things. Inspired by today's news of the SpudCell from Adamala et al., I've upscaled the video to 4K and I'm reposting it to YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRoI...

youtube.com

Cellularity

YouTube video by James King

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

The ideas were developed in conversation with researchers Cameron Alexander, Natalio Krasnogor, Lee Cronin and Ben Davis, who at the time were building "chemical cells" as part of their artificial-life research.

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

At the same time, the work of developing these synthetic cells would be slow and iterative. No single lightning strike would transform inanimate matter into a living organism. So our understanding of life would also be gradual: a scale, not a threshold.

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

If we are able to make a living cell from scratch out of simpler building blocks, then we would be able to understand the important transitions between non-living and living matter.

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

In it, I imagine a "cellularity scale" – five functional milestones on the path towards developing synthetic living cells. At each step, these synthetic cells become more and more alive, until they can finally be classed as living.

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James King @jamesking.io · 02/07/2026

youtube.com

Cellularity

YouTube video by James King

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James King @jamesking.io · 01/07/2026

The recent Dwarkesh & Grant Sanderson discussion on this is very good. Grant poses three ways that LLMs will help create new maths: 1. mountain building, 2. connecting ideas between fields and 3. raw hustle. The german prof. was doing #2. The other ways are also possible.

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