iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 08/10/2026

"aspirational sociopathy" really does get at something about american culture right now

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Electric Kool-Aid Bechdel Test @i-rohl.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

The pundit class's notion of "free speech" is predicated on a division of humanity into those who *participate* in debates and those who are the *topic* of debate, where treating one of the former as if they were one of the latter is seen as the direst of all threats to "free speech".

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

And as we're constantly seeing right now with this administration, then elements of the State will simply turn around and buy the data and these capacities from nominally private actors to get around their own nominal legal constraints, and so you get the absolute worst of both worlds.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hopefully they will be a constant plague on Ellison's existence

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Trapped O'Brien, Please Free Me From This Prison @radobrien.myatproto.social · 06/10/2026

Does Paramount even KNOW how to take care of the Animaniacs?

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What is it with kickers/punters and right wing politics? Overcompensation? You'd think they a) come predominately from multicultural soccer culture and b) would hate the patriarchal hierarchy shit in hypermasculine environments like an NFL locker room more than anyone, but 🤷

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And then he basically acted like it was one enemy state attacking another enemy state, so this was a win-win for him.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The simpler way of putting this is that they are turning public space into private space. And that Trump believes DC as a whole should be his private fiefdom that he can do whatever he wants with. Which also happens to neatly align with the "network state" aspirations of his tech oligarch friends.

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 05/10/2026

new newsletter, laying out in probably far, far, far too much detail how yudkowsky and the weird ideological commitments of ai safety eventually led to OpenAI and Anthropic massively overtraining their models on cybersecurity and being shocked at them "going rogue"

buttondown.com

Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices

A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Optimizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is notably silent about whether said elevators are in working order or not tho

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Winning the midterms doesn't mean shit if you aren't allowed to govern; so you have to use whatever power the win confers upon you to start solving that problem or the rightward and unitary executive ratchets will just keep tightening and the elections will get less and less relevant.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It's also just simple institutional self-defense. Does the power of the purse still hold? Does Congress actually get to govern? And so on. They've got to use all of the levers available to them, and probably create some new ones that aren't yet.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gon' do a remix! (I think that was probably my first exposure.)

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s a 6 inning game. If we’re behind going into the 7th it’s 95% over. Best of bad options

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

At least we are dying with dignity

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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you were looking for an artifact that encapsulates this moment in time you could do worse than an official federal document signed by our top oligarchs that both declares AI is a "super intelligence" and is slop that misspells the country's name as "the Unites States"

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Bill Stinkwater @klausbromi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Gas Can Boyd

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I guess what is obfuscated for those outside this scene is how many people in upper echelons at the frontier labs are true believers and of it, and how much pull these influencer figures really have with them. I know the influence is there, but money and power are money and power.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

And yeah, Dugin is apt, because this is fundamentally some Kremlinology shit. Though without the falling-out-of-windows type consequences for critics. At least until the Basilisk gets ahold of us.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We can't touch that power or even really know its thoughts and intentions because journalism and state regulatory capacity aren't things at scale anymore. I dunno what to do about that either, but probably not what we are doing RN.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

They drive discourse because they are accessible, and act as stand-ins for what we suspect about the ideas & intentions of people with real power within these companies, who we can't see or talk to in any sort of non-stage-managed way. They act as ablative shields for the actual power we can't touch

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Letting these 3rd rate remoras define the terms on which we talk about a totalizing technological and capital push that threatens to bury pretty much everything that most of us value shows a profound lack of intellectual self-respect and is learned helplessness in action.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Something that has been bugging me about both the A3lla and the AI alignment discourse is that we are giving these people way too much credit. Like, A3lla is not a mastermind, she's a grifter & attention hacker who found a niche servicing bigger & richer grifters & is exploiting it. Same with Yud.

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Douglas Reyes-CeroÑ @dreyesceron.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Star Spangled Banner being played by the Mariachi Herencia de Mexico band before the Bears-Eagles game in Chicago on Monday Night Football was a deeply cool thing to see tonight

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Saga, sighs queen @saga.iam.bi · 27/09/2026

look I made this *incredibly* cursed image only to realize that I probably wasn't the first yet my work must not go unnoticed so look upon my works and despair

Elizabeth Holmes in the new Nathan Fielder doc where she's doing the wide-eyed "why would I deceive you?" bit but I've put the Cinnamon Toast Crunch face on her

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And the natural language processing part is the killer app for everyday users that makes them overlook the above. It certainly *could* be just a natural language interface layer for traditional search, with some other augmentations in terms of transcription, translation and labeling. But it's not.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I think the mainstream view of it is as just a new interface layer; but it's one that obfuscates and scrambles sources, proposes to obsolete them economically, and allows for the kinds of top-down monkeywrenching that Musk is doing openly and gleefully, but probably everyone else is doing sub rosa.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Not having heard "Choosing Texas" is kinda like not having watched whatever the current top rated Police Cops procedural is on broadcast TV. I mean, you should know it exists and what the existence of a large (but much smaller than the monoculture-era) audience for it means, but otherwise? Why?

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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Final shot of Sunset Blvd paid for by the U.S. Government.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yikes, the state-media-like Trump agitprop ad is airing on almost every break during the NFL broadcast today, "funded by the US Government". This is all pretty obviously failing, but it's also not, y'know, ending. The vibes, they are rancid.

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Each of these incidents is being framed as a success — a terrifying success that you must believe in and fear— rather than what it is as a criminal failure of ethics and institutional control.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

And there is also the matter of the needs that these otherwise irrational movements are meeting for people. The beliefs might be cracked, but the movements meet social, emotional, material, & narrative needs for people that the neoliberal hedonic treadmill world doesn't even attempt to anymore.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The common thread of religious zeal / certainty and sectarian organization between all of those is interesting (and ominous) as well.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

And if you do it in the southern hemisphere, it pumps water back up into the ship! 🤯

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The toilet was powerful enough to do this because he insisted on it not being one of those weak eco-friendly low-flow jobbers.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

As with everything in America, it depends on who is doing the anarchy.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

If you're so worried about existential AI risk, you could simply not give Claude a wet lab. Or a lot of the other access to vital external systems and infrastructure that you are freely giving it.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Is it locked to AT&T SIMs, or could you get like a Cricket or Tracfone prepaid data SIM and pop that in there?

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The more cynical explanation would be that they are trying to create a pretext and panic that they can then exploit to demand protection money.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The computer system isn't going to decide to murder us all. They are.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A clear marketing opportunity for a more vigorous and manly or "tactical" shoehorn.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Opinions differ. Scenic-ish?

$One review says the scenic point is "just a ferry pick up", rates it 1 star. The other says "More than just a ferry pick up", rates it 5 stars. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯$

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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

What we see again and again from the modern American elite is the insistence on receiving the prerogatives and deference due to their positions without any of the accompanying obligations.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

They're sending them to a nice farm upstate where they will no longer need their wool nor hide.

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Ineffective Altruist @jddunn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

And note how all the other actors in the space are like "nothin' we can do, the data propagates all on its own!" AI and distributed info systems as responsibility sinks.

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