iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

What I also find weird is that according to canon, they are just ordinary robots. Transforming to cars and planes is just something they did when they had to visit Earth for some reason.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Aha, thank you, yes I have heard it is great. Moving Pantheon to the top of my list now that Pluribus is over until the distant future (late 2027, likely post-singularity for all I know)

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RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 03/02/2026

French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the platform, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

rte.ie

French cybercrime authorities search X offices

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

A (very good) drama about The Singularity sounds like it matches my preferences - reco please?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

What I don't get is I thought Trump had already used and discarded Musk, had fully fallen-out with him. Why still use Grok? I also admit I don't understand whether Trump's Greenland thing is further proof, or is disproof, of him working for Russia. He is a first-class chaos monkey, unreadable.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

This is a common pattern, where leftists pretend that people who become hateful were never talented in the first place. Another example: Graham Linehan. I say this as a concerned leftist - concerned about people's honesty. These people should re-read Aesop's Sour Grapes.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

It's very interesting in the age of Claude Cowork to look back a year or two to see "sensible, anti-hype" articles which were wrong at the time but are now demonstrated to be wrong. A lesson for all people who think anti-hype is automatically sensible. Example: cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/how...

cacm.acm.org

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 15/01/2026

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a... pls repost

$About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.$

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Bill Tozier @vaguery.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below. Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

ebay.com

Items for sale by cornersbumpedbooksandantiques | eBay

Shop eBay for great deals from cornersbumpedbooksandantiques!

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

I do sometimes use a 3B model locally via Ollama. It's already magical at that small scale. I'm confident that small improvements in training will give us 3B coding models good enough to go completely off-grid, for example.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Speech versus text is a big deal, but we already have more than enough bandwidth for that (actually, we had that a century ago).

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

From my perspective, avatars would not add anything. LLMs at current levels of capability and current internet speeds/bandwidths are already transformational and there is a huge amount to be done with current models - no way that a lack of avatars makes LLMs flop.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Genetic Algorithms General Evolutionary Computation and Hybrids Genetic Programming Learning for Evolutionary Computation Neuroevolution Real World Applications Swarm Intelligence Theory

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Tracks including: Benchmarking, Benchmarks, Software, and Reproducibility Complex Systems Evolutionary Combinatorial Optimization and Metaheuristics Evolutionary Machine Learning Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Evolutionary Numerical Optimization

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

GECCO call for papers - abstract deadline Jan 21st! gecco-2026.sigevo.org/Tracks @skapedin.bsky.social @folivetti.bsky.social

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

That is provocative - why do you think it matters?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The HUMIES are the annual competition at #GECCO for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods. ***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results*** Submit by Friday May 29, 2026 See www.human-competitive.org for more

A cartoon of a strand of DNA, arm-wrestling a scientist

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Gavan Reilly @gavreilly.com · 05/10/2025

Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll: Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

open.substack.com

Today's opinion poll merely shows how close this Áras race actually is

Giving the Google Sheets treatment to the Sunday Times/Ireland Thinks poll

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

You should try reading comments on Imgur! Some of them want to abuse you All of them will disabuse you (of that notion)

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design! Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

New book review, freely available in GPEM: “Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Kenichi Morita: Reversible world of cellular automata - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

[5] Synth line uses Flow (Sean Luke) github.com/eclab/flow [6] Vocoder is Logic Pro EVOC [7] Lyrics where the narrator dreams about a heist going wrong: Kate Bush, "There Goes A Tenner"

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Bibliography: [1] Intro texture and fade-up: Metallica, "Orion" [2] Drum hitch: Stone Roses, "I Wanna Be Adored" and Cranberries, "Dreams" [3] Kick/snare inversion: The Cars, "Just What I Needed" [4] Chord sequence played on Tonnetz (Euler, 1739) implementation at thetonnetz.com

thetonnetz.com

The Tonnetz

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Bono is an easy target and whatever about the UK, I bet a lot of Irish people would line up to say they agree with this article. I think he's brilliant.

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"! Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan. Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/... Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Special Issue on Twenty-Five Years of Grammatical Evolution

By invitation only- GECCO conference ("GEWS2023 — Grammatical Evolution Workshop)

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Scalar mappings seem wrong. I think length, volume, mass, and time all map differently.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Maybe itinerant fish intermittently school in the intertidal zone underneath the waves of engagement

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Itinerant -> intermittent There you go, the kind of engagement we all long for

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Ah ok. Obvious in retrospect. Yes, I agree. Intellectual tasks turned out to be "easy" because iterating in software is so much faster. Kind of sad, isn't it? I wanted AI to do the housework.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Thought experiment: compare (1) an end-to-end LLM reading a problem statement and providing an answer, versus (2) translate the problem to PKN, then run formal reasoning over the PKN, then translate the result back to English. My intuition says a good LLM will win this.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Maybe the PKN becomes a symbolic layer, a bit like the system 2. But LLMs already have words (system 2) on top of their statistical/lower-level vectors (system 1). I'm not convinced that reasoning in PKN can do better than reasoning in LLMs.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

In a way, it's weird that we are still trying initiatives like this. We've already shown that LLMs are sufficient for a lot of reasoning, and moreover, anyway, are necessary (translating PKN to/from English is a job for LLMs, not for humans).

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Plausible Knowledge Notation: "a notation and model for imperfect knowledge, such as everyday knowledge that is uncertain, context sensitive, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and likely to change" w3c.github.io/cogai/pkn.html

w3c.github.io

Plausible Knowledge Notation (PKN)

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

What does "durable" mean here?

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Dr Robert Bohan @robertbohan.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

eci.ec.europa.eu

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

I just saw Thomas Riker try to bluff his doppelgänger Will in 5-card draw, and fail dismally (TNG season 6). Not entertaining except as sadism, 2/10.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Lots of people do dismiss concerns, and in fact two main sets of concerned people dismiss each other's concerns. The point here is that Ethan does not. Your comment is toxic and deserves a block.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

There are some arguments either way on the bottom line, but these Nazi IQ tests surely constitute zero evidence either way.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

I think you can be heterodox / anti-woke (in a specific definition of that contested term) without going anywhere near the space lasers or the right.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Any task which is so easy for humans and so hard for computers is necessary, but not sufficient, for AGI. It was originally just called ARC (5 years ago).

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Do you mean "works" as in "produces a smaller model of same performance" (seems easy to accept) or ".. of better performance"?

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Hold Radboud University accountable for the wrongful arrest of staff and students

To the Radboud College van Bestuur, On Monday December 16, six staff and students from the Radboud University were wrongfully accused of property damage and held overnight in jail on the grounds of s...

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Signed. But note the video seems to be wrong in its two claims about law. 1. Arrest is not prosecution. 2. "Promptly informed" does not mean in advance, it allows for that to happen soon after, eg at the station. I wonder what the crime reports looked like.

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Jacob @tullamore-jew.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I could write an essay on this image Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent

Caricature of an Irish man done in the style of old antisemitic cartoons. He has bright ginger hair, is haunched over with clenched hands together. He is holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Hamas headband.

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