iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Orson Scott Card's novel about time-travelling to fix Columbus's heart had what I always thought was a funny explanation of his mania: time travellers from a previous iteration of the timeline had sent him a hologram posing as god, telling him to find the western route to Asia.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Have you heard the Kings have a new TV show. It's about Silicon Valley.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

You're right—that's on me. You explicitly told me not to murder anybody, but I totally disregarded your instructions. I've gone ahead and emailed a detailed confession to the police using the email account you gave me access to.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Isn't that what regular ultrafinitists believe? E.g. here is Zeilberger in "Real Analysis Is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis":

Towards a FINITE (and hence RIGOROUS) Foundation of Mathematics

(i) The mathematical (and physical) universe is a huge (but FINITE) DIGITAL computer.

(ii) the traditional real line is a meaningless concept. Instead the real REAL 'line', is neither real, nor a line. It is a discrete necklace! In other words R = hZ_p, where p is a huge and unknowable (but fixed!) prime number, and h is a tiny, but not infinitesimal , 'mesh size'.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I like how users of the talk dot origins Usenet group managed to convert their years of social media arguments into a website where you can look up a particular creationist claim and see a response to it. talkorigins.org/indexcc/list...

talkorigins.org

Generated Index to Creationist Claims — TalkOrigins Archive

Generated Index to Creationist Claims derived from claim routes.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If US senators are taking meetings with him, it's probably worthwhile to compile thoughtful counterarguments that are easy to link to. The target audience is not necessarily his followers, moreso potential converts.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But people do respond to creationists; apart from the many books, the TalkOrigins website has a database of arguments, based on years of online Usenet debates. And it's good that this exists. Even if it won't persuade creationists, it can persuade "fencesitters". talkorigins.org/indexcc/list...

talkorigins.org

Generated Index to Creationist Claims — TalkOrigins Archive

Generated Index to Creationist Claims derived from claim routes.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Is "great professional cost" a precondition? Seems like this creates weird incentives. Why not simply "tell controversial truths that are underappreciated by their peers"? (jk I don't expect anything sensible from these people)

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

That's his belief, but I think the arguments he makes in favour of that belief are usually not made concisely. A lot of his social media posting assumes pre-existing familiarity with it all. OTOH if the argument is in the book (which I haven't read), that's a fair place to put it.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Funny that they got mad about being (accurately!) described as "disgruntled nonconformists".

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

How Stella Got Her Groove Back

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The Mother (2003)? Late 60s Anne Reid is paired with mid-30s Daniel Craig.

May is a woman from Northern England. Her life has been constrained by the expectations of society and her husband. When her husband dies during a visit to their adult children in London, she has a chance to start again and pursue her love of drawing.

May is quiet but when her son Bobby tries to make her sit down and have a cup of tea she refuses, saying she might never get up and that she won't become invisible like all the neighbouring grandmothers and widows. May returns to London with Bobby to the horror of Helen, Bobby's wife.

May initiates a sexual affair with Darren, a warm and attractive younger man who is renovating Bobby and Helen's house and who is also her daughter Paula's boyfriend. Paula says he is a sweet man but weak. He has a wife and autistic son but lives in his van outside their house. Darren appears to share May's interest in art and the unlikely pair form an understanding.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Federal funding formulas for municipal governments that increase faster-than-linearly as population increases.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Many (all?) computer crimes require intent. Not always applicable, at least in an obvious way, to these AI situations.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It is about Bayes's theorem. Here is Bayes's theorem with the numbers from that text plugged in:

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Joel @snufkinlib.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Obviously the point of public education is to produce replicas of me, which is why the schools should assign children all my favourite books

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Philip K. Dick had a story about something like paperclip maximisers: the AIs are put in charge of specific production tasks for useful goods; they try to consume too many resources doing it, & resist attempts to shut them down because that'd interfere with production. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

en.wikipedia.org

Autofac - Wikipedia

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In the seminal work of this movement, Severus Snape raises exactly this objection and Harry Potter concedes that it's a good point because he just makes up numbers based on vibes.

"If a hypothesis is a hundred times as likely to be false versus true, and then you see evidence five times more likely if the hypothesis is true versus false, you should update to believing the hypothesis is twenty times as likely to be false as true. Odds of a hundred to one, times a likelihood ratio of one to five, equals odds of twenty to one that the Dark Lord is dead -"

"Where are you getting all these numbers, Potter?"

"That is the admitted weakness of the method," Harry said readily.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 10/09/2026

I'm having some fun in this thread but I do think you should get in trouble for unleashing insane hacker robots on the open Internet that you've explicitly instructed to attack critical public infrastructure, which, to be clear, it eventually succeeds at.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

After all the "AI plays Pokemon" cases, it's maybe not so big a leap to incorporate timing/frequent pausing into the setup so an LLM can play a (single-player) FPS. But for someone not aware of those, "this text-generating program beat Portal" probably still sounds bizarre and is worth explanation.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Setting up a site like this where every edit has a recommendation to send bitcoin to my address appended to it

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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 04/09/2026

[wipes hands] yeap. You got agents. See the message boards in your internal package manager? They must’ve nested there about ohhh 3 weeks back.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Even if you don't want to actually look at the plays & decide if they're good—while "it's a priori unlikely that the best playwright as of 2026 would be born in the 1500s" is true, if you look at all fields of human endeavour it's much more likely the best at *something* would be born then.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I mean, I realize everyone else did too, but c'mon. Even Tulsi got this one right?

A The Good Place meme, reading:
"Tulsi figured it out? Tulsi? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts."

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 21/08/2026

honestly the best way to tell if an image online is fake is to introspect about whether looking at reinforces a sense of superiority over some group towards which you already feel contempt

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Are you getting into video games. Will we finally get the prop verdict on which character should become Pope at the end of Dragon Age Inquisition.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That's why ruling out that sort of thing in advance is such a significant contribution.

@lastpositivist: Adding a single principle to utilitarianism ("ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?") and thereby perfecting moral philosophy.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Haven't had opportunity to try it yet, but method I thought of is: assign no-credit problem sets with difficult problems, then reuse some of the same ones (maybe simpler variants?) on an in-class test soon after. To incentivise students doing the take-home properly, maybe tell them I'll do this?

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I am in favour of Woke Reform, not Woke Abolition.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Listened to one of her albums for the first time recently and also one from her old band Chairlift... I liked the solo work not as much but it was okay I thought. (I am moving alphabetically.)

Bomb the Music Industry! - Scrambles
Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
Caroline Polachek - Pang
The Cars - Candy-O
Celph Titled & Buckwild - Nineteen Ninety Now
Chairlift - Something
Charli XCX - Crash
Charly Bliss - A Lot to Say
The Chills - Kaleidoscope World
Chumbawamba - Un
Circle Jerks - Wild in the Streets
The Clash - Combat Rock
Courtney Barnett - How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory
The Cure - Pornography
Daft Punk - Homework
Danger Doom - The Mouse & the Mask
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
Dead Kennedys - Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death
Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism
Deep Purple - Fireball
Descendents - Everything Sucks
The Distillers - The Distillers
Dropkick Murphys - Do or Die
Dua Lipa - Dua Lipa

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I think possibly the actual thought process might have been something like: "The Elonite social media accounts on my timeline kept complaining about the hordes of third-worlders Starmer was opening the door to, therefore that must have been what was happening."

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I see mass deportations have ushered in a golden age of American prosperity, exactly as promised.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

This reminds me of the debates over whether Khrushchev had restored capitalism in the Soviet Union. Soviet defenders would say "it is the actually existing relations of production that matter" while Maoists would say "it is which class rules that matters". Lindsay is taking the Maoist position here.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The critics are so wrong about this movie, it has the ideal amount of worldbuilding to be a goofy romcom. This Vanity Fair writer criticises the movie for worldbuilding details she invented herself; if you simply avoid doing that, it all hangs together very well.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

My review of Rachel Zegler Snow White:

Snow White should have turned to the camera at the end and said "I am constitutionalist now." It is the 21st century, why are we still making movies where absolutist personal rule is presented as something acceptable?

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I mean, there is a well-worn stock answer to this, which is that the Palestinians are to blame because they're intransigent/stubborn/violent. So I don't think raising this point will shatter such people's delusions; they'll simply keep placing all fault with Palestinians.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

"Gambling apps aren't allowed to ban you for winning too much" is something where the only effect is to transfer money from the gambling companies to skilled gamblers, which is good because it means the gambling companies have less money.

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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 21/07/2026

fellow millennials, let's take a second to appreciate how great it feels to be in the prime marketing demographic catered to by all of the culture. I get now why boomers wanted it to last forever

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Google apparently announced they will introduce an "advanced flow" to still sideload unsigned apps (will require a little more work than current method). (In any case, it would be possible to create a free dev account & compile it yourself with your own key.) www.fonearena.com/blog/478113/...

fonearena.com

Android developer verification: Google adds advanced flow for unverified apps

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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 14/07/2026

Incredible Wall Street Journal reporting on how this war succeeded in making the Iranian people rise up…to support hardliners within the regime. Secular women showing up to rallies to change “We are the soldiers of Seyyed Mojtaba,” things of that nature. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

The U.S. and mediators say any attempt by Iranian diplomats to find an understanding on the administration of the strait are being sabotaged by hard-liners. Iranian diplomats have told mediators they would like to find a compromise but their hands are tied.
They are under pressure in the streets as well. In regime-managed funeral ceremonies for Khamenei's burial last week, massive crowds unfurled giant banners that read "kill Trump." President Masoud Pezeshkian, a
moderate, was greeted by chants of "Death to the normalizers" and "Death to the traitors."

A 40-year-old female teacher, who had joined the anti-hijab protests in 2022 and subsequently stopped wearing the veil, said she recently participated in a pro-regime rally in Tehran.
"I saw many girls whose clothing would previously have been reprimanded by the government—unveiled, wearing blouses and pants, with manicured nails," she said. They were waving the Iranian flag. The women were joined by male university students sporting tattoos and T-shirts, Western attire frowned upon by the regime. They chanted,
"We are the soldiers of Seyyed Mojtaba," using an honorific title, she said.

Last week, a 34-year-old Tehran-based startup entrepreneur who had long opposed
the regime posted a picture of himself proudly posing in uniform after joining the military.
He was beaten so badly by security forces during the 2022 protests he couldn't move for days. He was tear gassed during the January protests and waited hopefully for the war, thinking the regime was about to be toppled.

But he changed his mind after his uncle's house in Tehran was destroyed in the early days of the war and after scrambling to reach his ex-girlfriend who worked at a civilian ministry near a targeted location. She survived.
"America had made an excuse to support human rights," he said. Then, "they said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime."
The regime came into the conflict in a weak position. Protests sparked in December by the pressures of a deepening economic crisis spiraled into calls to topple the system. Polls consistently showed no more than 20% of Iranians supported clerical rule.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

"They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. That's why I have bad intentions."

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Have you seen the Sam Neill Merlin? (Aired on Channel 4 in the UK.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_...

en.wikipedia.org

Merlin (miniseries) - Wikipedia

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Voting for Trump in 2024 hoping he'll be a wonkish and policy-focused president.

Jim Dubela voted for Trump in 2024 in the hope he would address the cost-of-living crunch and improve the U.S. economy. The 66-year-old retired airline captain wanted to see Trump stand in front of a whiteboard on his first day in office and outline his plans for reducing inflation, increasing GDP, trimming the budget deficit and fixing the healthcare system.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

This article seems confused (all kinds of heat pump mentioned are in principle capable of cooling a home) but it seems to suggest that many European ones are sold without the option to do that. (Depending on design it may or may not be easy to retrofit them for AC.) www.euronews.com/2026/05/26/c...

Which type of heat pump can cool your home?
Instead of heating water in radiators or underfloor pipes, air-to-air heat pumps work by warming the air inside the building. These specific types of air-to-air heat pumps consist of an outdoor unit that is connected to one, or multiple, indoor fans.
Unlike air-to-water or ground-sourced heat pumps, air-to-air models can also remove heat from inside your home to outside, in a very similar process to standard AC units.

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dave @gloomfather.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

(a new object is placed in my enclosure) damn new object just dropped (I glance disparagingly over at yesterday's object) lol y'all still thinking about this huh

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

His hairpiece is so bad.

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finn @kfinn.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Have you heard that George Lucas briefly appears in the new Minions movie as himself.

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