iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

you could absolutely use this to turn one of your cards gold, thus earning $3 at the end of every round if said gold card was in your hand.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 13h

Found a stump that looks like a guy

A weird looking decayed stump that looks kinda like a face.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 14h

information, freedom, things of that nature

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 15h

It's okay to learn from everything, and train on everything. That's everyone's birthright, and we shouldn't apologize for it. Prohibitions on copying were a late invention, and a narrowly tailored one. They do not express a general ethical law that all information ought to be priced and paid for.

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Tricia Lockwood @tricialockwood.bsky.social · 15h

Jane Austen Fastest 147

How far ahead is Ronnie playing?
How deep into the century
Can he set up that shot?
Balls in their genius click together,
Barely even seem to touch -
Are we playing hearts? some idiot
Asks, and suddenly those two
Are married, that one is born,
And she's watching us watching
In the highrise across the way.
Did I get it right? she doesn't
Ask. How far into the future
And the past did I play?
All things right and wrong,
In between, have just happened.
Hair on the camera,
Unicorn neck,
Poor holy Mary singing.
Throw the story into the shoe
As it's thrown over the wall.
That's the secret of narrative.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 17h

oh, sweet! let me know how it is

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 17h

cool! I don't know who you are but if you have a login I hope you enjoy it

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

one thing that i do not understand is the fact that the "alexa teaches children that women may be treated like machines" and "it is a sign of psychosis to treat a machine whose interface is social cognition with any respect" are the same group of scholars. sometimes even precisely the same scholars.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 18h

I blame AI for this. There’s this big push in UI circles for implicit rather than explicit signals of user intent + moving everything to natural language, and I’m sympathetic, but it’s so easy to do super wrong.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 18h

I’ve liked everything I’ve seen!

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 18h

So I don’t read Swan Boy religiously, is Noel the Achewood Pat of this whole deal

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 20h

When I got to this one in your book I read it aloud to my partner. Good stuff.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/09/2026

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

Free-text evaluation of answers to character modeling and constrained generation questions. This is just one of several scores Chronologic-EN can produce; we focus on it here because it's both the hardest test and the one most relevant to simulation of the past. Frontier models reach 72%; Talkie-1930 is stronger than several larger competitors, but not at the frontier by this measure. Note that this score has improved ~45% in the last two years, but still falls perceptibly short of ground truth.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/10/2026

Does this constitute prayer?

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/10/2026

i know he's not generally liked on here for a bunch of reasons, but you gotta hand it to him: "The Silver Bulletin" is a great publication name.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Philosopher: "In my book I invented Color Scientist Mary as a thought experiment." Tech Company: "At long last, we have created Color Scientist Mary from classic philosophical paper What Mary Didn't Know (1986)" arxiv.org/abs/2109.06129

arxiv.org

Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color

Pretrained language models have been shown to encode relational information, such as the relations between entities or concepts in knowledge-bases -- (Paris, Capital, France). However, simple relation...

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 04/10/2026

Look at all these tomatoes my neighbor gave me

A whole bunch of cherry tomatoes, in various states of ripeness

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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sad news everyone. Our beloved friend the computer has now become a hated enemy

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 03/10/2026

When do you think we start to see movies that are explicitly Oscar Bait? My partner and I have been watching Best Picture winners and noms chronologically, we're up to 1956, and it's been very interesting to see a certain kind of prestige picture kinda come into being.

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hikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

(confused) I believe LLMs are conscious, but only Deepseek LLMs, because of the Chinese Room theory

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/10/2026

Inflation is high but this economy has got good bones

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/10/2026

there are those who compare this stuff more to the fae, which makes sense - like vampires, they're powerful when you invite them in, when you give them your real name, when you sign the contract - all gestures we recapitulate when we paste our bank statements in and ask how to change our lives

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/10/2026

well, the water and the oil, and the gas - which are themselves, of course, the product of bones and time. the possibility is there to pay in energy from the sun rather than the underworld, but strict solar is inconvenient at scale for the moment.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/10/2026

from the perspective of mystical fuel, i think there are arguments in both directions. the traditional material of both dark arcane schools are blood and bone and ash. this is why the water discussion around data centers is so viscerally powerful - because the water stands in for earth's blood.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 02/10/2026

AI USE: DEMONOLOGY OR NECROMANCY? on the one hand, a huge portion of all of the words that have been rolled up into these text elementals are by the dead. on the other, they are a spring of novelty, horrible and otherwise.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

i know i don't need a fifty dollar baseball cap. i know.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

oh yes, I think QUAD is the best example of all of this collision, though I wrote about KRAPP'S LAST TAPE for my diss and think it's so, so relevant right now.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

contrasts really nicely with someone like Caryl Churchill, whose LOVE AND INFORMATION explores some of this same terrain. scenes of people standing on stage reading out DNA sequences, punctuated by some of the most beautiful dialogue you'll ever hear.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

Haha, I was literally typing up a reply bringing up Beckett when I saw this response come in. WATT and MURPHY and some of his other fiction is, I think, v interested in exactly the breakdown you're talking about - the way that humanity bleeds through the edges of even the most tightly scripted play.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

(I think a lot of oulipo-style experimentation tends to be tedious and bad, but I really like some of it)

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

I don't disagree, but I'm interested in your take on, like, oulipo, or automatic writing - human-curated/'created' art whose process of creation deliberately pulls the humanity of the work to the margin.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

korine's list itself is just a Google Doc that serves as the, uh, backend, kinda, for this whole thing, but it was important to me that the 'rating' experience be fun, easy to do on a phone, easy to do with keyboard controls, etc. it mostly does the thing!

a screenshot of the wzrdz.cool ladder. dominated by a poster for LAURA (1944) and CROSSFIRE (1947).

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

i've used airtable before, yeah! this is 'hand rolled' and self-hosted, which is how most of the little toy projects i've been working on have been. my thinking long-term here is to publish atproto reviews with this as a spine.

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

I guess the takeaway here is that I really like Jimmy Stewart?

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

My partner's been watching a ton of movies and I've watched a bunch with her. She's going through all the Oscar BP nominees chronologically. She's giving them star ratings, but I thought it'd be fun to make an ELO ranker to more precisely rate them. My ladder: pictures.wzrdz.cool/pictures/lad...

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

as long as everybody is having a nice time

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 01/10/2026

i guess john wilson would film it or something

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 30/09/2026

have you considered speccing into Lich? There are some downsides but you need con way less

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 30/09/2026

If you find yourself signing books in Boston I’ll try to parlay this goodwill into a signed copy of KILL ALL WIZARDS :)

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Toy Story toys crave to be played with even though it requires them to feign inanimacy. What they truly crave is death

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Ken Alba @ken.wzrdz.cool · 30/09/2026

recently rehosted @jedediahberry.bsky.social 's wonderful Twine game FABRICATIONIST DEWIT REMAKES THE WORLD at especiallygreatliterature.com/dewit.html -- it was down for a bit due to some bugs someone found, but @jseakle.bsky.social was cool enough to fix'em. if you haven't played it, you should!

especiallygreatliterature.com

Fabricationist DeWit Remakes the World

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