iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

joao @joao.omg.lol · 15/08/2026

LLMs/chatbots/agents are destroying so many paths people had to learn and "be noticed", and now having more money beats hard work even more than before. Genuinely don't know if there's a way back, even if the bubble pops there's a bunch of really capable Open Weight Models out there

A screenshot from a nitter/Twitter by user @Sirius_ (every second letter is replaced by a number) saying:
"i talked to a lot of people who played the defcon ctf finals to understand how llms affected them, both professionally and mentally.

i went in hoping to learn that human intuition still mattered. instead, ctfs in their current form as everyone saying is dead, players are forced to operate slot machines because anyone who refuses to token-max loses to those who do.

almost everything i learned, including how to learn, came from grinding ctfs. but the pipeline for developing that kind of skill and expertise now seems broken, juniors are rewarded for token-maxxing rather than going through the process of actually understanding things which is quiet sad and ctfs might not produce high quality security researchers any more.

this also has serious implications for people who can’t afford tokens. five years ago, i wouldn’t have been able to afford access to something like gpt-5.6, and I would have been locked out of the very competitions that helped me build my career.

anyway these are questions i asked if interesting for anyone:

did they have fun?
almost everyone was unhappy. it has largely become slot-machine operating, if they refuse to use llms, they lose to teams that do. it is not there is no fun at all, playing with friends and competing was all fun just process of solving which is main part and it isn't fun.(please let me know if you had fun)"

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 08/08/2026

For whatever it's worth, I don't even think it was trained on copyrighted data, or at the very least it wasn't trained on books, so it was also a much less malicious technology

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 19/07/2026

This is the kind of thing I'm replying to, comparing what Zeynep wrote to what Claude wrote and saying that its output is twofold better, when it has all the problems I laid above *is* the issue to me

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 11/02/2026

I'm almost as biased as one can be, but are you really doing an AI for Science event without: 1. Anyone from AlphaFold, GDM Weather, or other DeepMind teams who have deployed the most succesful examples of AI for Science? 2. No academic who has worked on AI for Science?

A promotional banner for an event titled "AI for Science: Kickoff 2026," held on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, at the UCLA Campus. The banner features a dark reddish-brown background and displays headshots of eight prominent speakers arranged in a row, each framed within a light-colored triangle. From left to right, the speakers are: Terence Tao (UCLA), Barry Barish (Nobel Laureate), Richard Sutton (OpenMind Research Institute), Miguel García-Garibay (UCLA), Erran Li (Amazon AWS), Hoifung Poon (Microsoft Research), Jiantao Jiao (NVIDIA/UC Berkeley), and Sebastian Bubeck (OpenAI).

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 23/09/2025

The news can't help but be dystopic

Screenshot of a news article saying "Oracle will oversee the security of Americans' data and monitor changes and updates to TikTok's recommendation technology under a new deal. "

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 22/09/2025

I still don't understand why Labour thinks people voted for them as Reform-lite, you're supposed to be leftwing for goodness sake

BBC article quote:
"Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the suggested savings "have no basis in reality" and the government were already looking at restricting migrants' welfare access."

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 21/06/2025

Didn't they basically guarantee that the studies they're analysing would be susceptible to the Hawthorne Effect with this selection criteria?

An excerpt of the paper that reads: To ensure the rigor of the research
findings, permissible interventions for the control group were
limited to traditional tools such as pen and paper, PowerPoint,
and essential learning materials required for the course (e.g.,
computers in programming courses). Studies whose control
groups used emerging technologies with intelligent features, such
as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), metaverse, digital
twins, holographic displays, or domain-specific intelligent tools,
were also excluded

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 17/05/2025

All online newspapers should have the option to pay per article like @rascalnews.bsky.social

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 15/05/2025

Dark days are coming

A graph of monthly active users (MAU) of ChatGPT and Wikipedia, showing that around the first quarter of 2024 the number of ChatGPT MAUs passed Wikipedia's.
It's worth noting that Wikipedia's MAUs seem to have been steadily going down since end of 2020 at least

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 09/04/2025

Trump's economic policy seems to be Dril's tweet but with tariffs (and racism too, but not sure if that counts as his economic policy)

Dril tweet that reads, "turning a big dial taht says 'Racism' on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right."

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 25/01/2025

4. Travelling! Seeing new places, eating new food, learning about different worldviews, the change of scenery in general, plus the controlled change of routine. When I was younger I would get happy as soon as I breathed in the airport smell

A light rail in Germany going through a snowy landscape

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 25/01/2025

3. Animation! The freedom to depict scenes, characters, technology, magic that's just unparalled, also the craft involved in making each frame a painting, in moving stop-motion characters, and in combining styles

Multiple claymotion characters from Aardman Studio and the text "Evolution of Aardman Animations"

Multiple aesthetic styles from Across the Spider-verse

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 25/01/2025

Books! Both the abstract thing that can transport you to other places, teach you new things, and make you feel understood, but also the physical artifact, how pretty it can be, how strange one can make it (cent mille milliards de poèmes, House of Leaves), and how one can make a book your own

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 20/01/2025

The evil version of this picture

An image of a capybara lounging with guinea pigs

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 30/12/2024

Seriously, it seems everything around LLMs works by messing up the social contract, it's outright predatory towards things like the small web and people who just wan to share the neat things they learn or do Source: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254...

Hacker news comment with the following text:
One of my websites was absolutely destroyed by Meta's AI bot: Meta-ExternalAgent https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-...
It seems a bit naive for some reason and doesn't do performance back-off the way I would expect from Google Bot. It just kept repeatedly requesting more and more until my server crashed, then it would back off for a minute and then request more again.

My solution was to add a Cloudflare rule to block requests from their User-Agent. I also added more nofollow rules to links and a robots.txt but those are just suggestions and some bots seem to ignore them.

Cloudflare also has a feature to block known AI bots and even suspected AI bots: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... As much as I dislike Cloudflare centralization, this was a super convenient feature.

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 06/12/2024

Redacted birthday picture

Me wearing the shirt Vicki posted about. 5 people's faces have been redacted

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 20/11/2024

For the second question: There's this interpretation with a "triangle" with one side being the unit hyperbola

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 15/11/2024

My Obsidian is so pretty now 😊 (Now I just need to start taking notes consistently)

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 11/11/2024

If you see this, I invite you to post an image from your device with no explanation

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 31/10/2024

Stop! If you see this, you must post 4 of your favorite characters from 4 different series! Pass it on!

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 11/10/2024

I don't get that 🧐

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 01/10/2024

Since 2008 Cuba has been quite ahead of most capitalist countries no? I mean it looks like it was pretty bad before, but many capitalist countries were denying healthcare too right? I feel more like the whole world was shitty, than that communism is especially bad when it comes to trans rights

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joao @joao.omg.lol · 16/09/2024

Nice, relatively early adopter

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