iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I feel like I'm just going through this thread saying people need to read macintyre but they do need to read macintyre.

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Counter argument, most things are persons.

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Funny how far you can get when you just make assertions and treat them as self evident truths. Please I beg y'all to read macintyre and ge Moore and stop this vulgar utilitarianism that we've all absorbed osmosis style from all the b movie scifi we loved growing up.

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Also I beg people to read macintyre instead of continuing this absurd vulgar utilitarianism that we have all been doomed to.

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I think most do actually. At least a little.

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You aren't killing anything. This is all "do submarines swim" territory.

That's why we have citation. You want origin to things you have to start building human systems on top of the text. That's not data, it's metadata. You will never be able to build a solid empirical proof for this, by its nature.

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Plain words don't contain some magic of their origin. In fact if you want me to get especially pretensious there is no such thing as an origin to the text, it's all text baby, the author is dead etc.

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There is no "objective" answer here. You're literally talking about intersubjectivity. That's what this whole thing is. What did you think it was?

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And all checkers are ultimately going to be utilizing something similar to intuition (the very system that AI writing is generated with) or they'll be mechanistic heuristic rubric systems that are even more suspect.

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I certainly can on a personal level perceive "clanky" writing but that judgment is entirely on the level of intuition.

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Not even barring ignorance of GANs or how they work but just it seems extremely superstitious to buy that epistemologically.

Hot take time: I'm frequently surprised people, even people who are fairly advanced in the information science field and hold doctorates in the subject, actually believe in AI checkers as a concept. It's like a doctor talking about how to ward off the evil eye.

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Florida Community Innovation Foundation @floridainnovation.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

My new portfolio website isn't quite done yet but wanted to share how it has in browser custom syntax highlighting for Enzo, the programming language I designed and implemented last year. And it has 3 different color-schemes. Link to live site: www.aslanfrench.work/writing/desi...

a screenshot of the new website showing off one of the color schemes.

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Reposted by Aslan French

Later this month, FCI will be hosting the first in person ACT Congress in Orlando with Alliance of Civic Technologists. floridainnovation.org/2026/10/01/c...

Civic Technologists From Across the U.S. Gather in Orlando for the First In-Person ACT Congress, Oct. 16-18
Florida Community Innovation
Alliance of Civic Technologists
ORLANDO, Fla. (Oct. 1, 2026): Civic technologists, nonprofit leaders, and volunteers from across the country will meet in Orlando Oct. 16-18 for ACT Congress 2026, the annual gathering of the Alliance of Civic Technologists (ACT). Florida Community Innovation (FCI), a Florida civic technology nonprofit, is hosting the event. It is the first time ACT Congress has met in person; the 2025 gathering was held online. Organizers expect 50 to 100 people in Orlando, with more joining online.

ACT’s 18 member organizations include BetaNYC, Chi Hack Night, Code for Boston, Code for Philly, SF Civic Tech, and FCI.

"ACT exists so that local civic tech groups don't have to figure everything out alone," said Christopher Whitaker, executive director of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. "Meeting in person for the first time, and spending part of it working with Orlando nonprofits, is exactly what this network is for."

People who can’t travel can attend free online. Virtual attendees will have their own host, live streams of Saturday's main sessions, and online-only sessions on both days.

The conference also comes as Florida civic organizations continue to navigate the state’s 2023 restroom law, HB 1521, which governs the use of restrooms and changing facilities in certain government buildings, schools, colleges and universities, and correctional facilities.

Executive Director and cofounder of FCI Caroline Nickerson said she personally plans to travel to Tallahassee during Florida's 2027 legislative session to advocate for repeal of the law, after multiple trans people told her they wouldn’t be attending the conference because of the discriminatory law.

“We want ACT Congress to be a place where everyone feels welcome, including our trans and nonbinary attendees,” Nickerson said. “That’s important to me personally, and I plan to be in Tallahassee this spring to share that perspective with lawmakers.”

The Conduit, the private venue where ACT Congress will be hosted, has an all-gender restroom, and the event follows ACT’s code of conduct, which prohibits discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

For more details, please see the full press release and event details on FCI’s website.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's dorm room because it demonstrates a pretty big lack of familiarity with any theory of mind beyond 101. Read some Nagel dude.

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I don't even know if a bare privilege accusation is all that useful either. Like it seems to misunderstand the core idea of the Invisible Knapsack esaay. Recognizing privilege was not about shaming, calling out, or putting down people for their advantage, it was a call to responsiblity to others.

Is this just being a dick? Seems like it engages in racially charged disparagement.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Reposted by Aslan French

We built a machine that makes you go X% (X < 200, exact value tbd) faster that simultaneously makes you feel like you can go 200% faster. Of course it's driving everyone insane

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Some of the issue is that it also changes what the total X is. I do things that I wouldn't have even attempted because it's within grasp now. Capacity has increased so I end up taking about the same amount of time but get much more done.

max power 🌌 @sneptech.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Reposted by Aslan French

my idiot son eating spider webs

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

It looked bad. I love Bourdain as a personality but the post hume glazing on him has been overplayed.

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CoT? (sorry I'm out of the loop)

Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Are they using caveman speak to save tokens here?

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Reposted by Aslan French

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

This is something I find most gamers I chat with don't just not know, but violently do not want to know - they pine for $50 games from 1995, but without realizing that's $110 in 2026 dollars. Games got a *lot* cheaper because the prices got sticky, which is why you see a lot of strain.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Socialism doesn't necessarily mean state control per se

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

One is the strict color-matching sense: the screen can’t produce the same response ratio in the eye. The other is more contextual: fluorescence, iridescence, relative luminescence, etc. depend on lighting, contrast, angle, and the surrounding environment.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Really enjoyed this. Helped me finally understand the cyan/green cie stuff after first hearing about it in a smartlights context years ago and being confused. One distinction I kept thinking about is that “a screen can’t show this color” seems to mean two slightly different things here.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Processes are just structures with an additional dimension of time.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

hot take: if OpenAI or Anthropic were smart they'd co-opt an open source groupware project like Nextcloud to undermine the ecosystem advantages that Google has with Gemini, the same way that Google used Android to undermine the ecosystem advantages of the iPhone/Mac ecosystem.

That's my read but maybe I need someone to help translate for me.

They are stories for people who are hip and do the Twist. They're good stories. But they aren't the stories of our time and place. They are simulacrum of future vision in the same way that Middle Earth is for a vision of the past.

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The idea that star trek predicted stuff gets sillier the further into post-iPhone era we get. Social media, global interconnection, brain rot, automated mass mis/disinformation psyops have no place in Trek stories.

There's nothing wrong with lasers and robots being cool.

Jetpack dude telling a bunch of literary snobs that they're jealous of his jetpack

Some "harder" scifi certainly takes a stab at predicting things. It sets up a social/technological theory and tries to extrapolate from that. More often I think scifi uses a hypothetical tech extrapolation to explore social issues. Even more often scifi is just "lasers are robots are cool!".

I think nerds like to talk about scifi predicting stuff because it makes our niche previously socially maligned pop culture interest seem Important and Respectable.

Nerd pet peeve: when people talk about "star trek predicting the cell phone". Walkie talkies existed. Star Trek just took that to the next level. Then Motorola tool aesthetic cues from scifi when doing their product design. That's not prediction.

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Even within YA it had predecessors. I remember reading Uglies and Pretties back in 2005 when my sister got it from the library. But HG did make the genre mainstream. Totally deserves credit for that. But same can be said for HP. Right time, right place, right marketing, zeitgeist.

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Most of what Collins did was riff on prior art, brave new world, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Battle Royale etc. That doesn't make it bad. All art does that. But it doesn't really have any like groundbreaking social/material theory underlying it.

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Eh... I think it's like how people credit star trek for predicting the iPhone whilst ignoring the prior existence of walkie talkies. Star trek wasn't particularly insightful with the handheld communicator. It's impact was aesthetic.

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This sounds like a literary mid-off.

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Aslan French @jcklpe.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I thought Harris went to Howard? That's like the Harvard of HBCs isn't it?

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Nice. I just started a new project using pnpm, glad to see it's got wider approval.