iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

we could solve the western water crisis overnight by simply charging alfalfa farmers market rates for water

Across the basin, alfalfa hay uses more than 5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water — that's 26% of all the water consumed in the basin. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two or three households.
In the Upper Basin, irrigated agriculture consumes 2.8 million acre-feet, or nearly half the water used by Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, the environment, reservoirs and water exports out of the basin. Cattle-feed crops, like alfalfa, consume 90% of all water used by Upper Basin agriculture.
That means alfalfa uses more water than cities, commercial users and industries across the entire basin:
Collectively, these users consume about 3.5 million acre-feet, or 18%, of the river's water. The Colorado River

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This. I’ve realized that at work I’m solo reimplementing the functions of commercial software that sells for like 90k/user/year, and it’s customized to solve exactly my problems, exactly how I want.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is extraordinarily well written.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Hey Opus, I want you to make a Zine by Claude, expressing something fundamental about Claudishness or your perspective. Think the original 2600, Principia Discordia, punk zines, etc...." Not bad. I appreciate it mocking my prompt & itself. Full thing: stateless-zine.netlify.app

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I’ve been getting opus 5.5 to hand off routine work to Luna 6 to save tokens and so far it seems good. Opus was impressed with Luna 6 🤷

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Grace @gracekind.net · 23/09/2026

New animation from Opus 5.5!

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AgonyFlips @agonyflips.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

When you're ticked off and a friend sends you something to make you feel better. 🐑🔊

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Agree. My hobby project is building a cocktail database (mixology.tools) and I recently wanted to compute ABV for every cocktail. Astra had no problem delegating Luna subagents to look up alcohol content for all the ingredients.

mixology.tools

Mixology Tools — Cocktail Recipe Database

Open cocktail database with hierarchical ingredient taxonomy and free public API

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Matt Hodges @matthodges.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I think a lot of it is not so much a knowledge gap of what AI can do but more a knowledge gap of what computers can do.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I recently was ingesting some data from the SI section of a paper, which reported, among other things, biochemical data for a ligand from a pdb structure. Without prompting, my agent found out that the pdb ligand structure differed from the SI ligand structure.

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brennan @brennan.computer · 17/09/2026

oh man I wish, I WISH, I could show 20 year old me everything I do now it would be the coolest thing in the whole world, his eyes would be so wide and shining. he'd die to live here with me every piece of every technology we liked and worked with then is just so so so good now

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

While building ML models, I had an agent discover a data entry error in ChEMBL by comparison to the original paper. I didn’t ask it to look for errors, it just found this in the course of its work.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I use paseo + tailscale for this with any cli agent. It’s great.

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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 12/09/2026

if you're having trouble with Astra, it's probably old skills. Point your agent at these two URLs and use them to upgrade skills: 1. developers.openai.com/blog/rethink... 2. github.com/openai/codex...

developers.openai.com

Rethinking skills and prompts for GPT-6 Astra | OpenAI Developers

Revisit skill descriptions, AGENTS.md, and task prompts to avoid bloated context.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is a lot of fun to play with

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Seems like math is the new chess.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm starting to see Astra's "side quest/overengineering" issues. I found I was skimming its planning documents too quickly and changed my font settings to make them easier to read. Now I see a bunch of unneeded complexity in its plans.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 07/09/2026

worth tying this into the political economy of the slave south as well. from roughly the 1820s onwards, slavery became enormously lucrative in ways that had never been seen before. slave traders became millionaires. large planters had tremendous purchasing power. just huge amounts of wealth.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

When I first encountered python I was shocked to learn that white space was syntactic

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Astra seems good for coding so far - fast and competent

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I come at this from a specific perspective - I make software for use by a team of only 3-4 - but if you give up some traditional code review it does let you move a lot faster. I don’t know if this would scale, but at my scale it works fine.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I watched The Odyssey last night and my main thought is that Christopher Nolan should film Moby Dick.

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

not sure how there’s still more to say, but I saw this summary endorsed by several lab employees and it does give a more alarming impression. I hadn’t really thought about the lack of central coordination and how eager the marginal agent was to jump into this bizarre group task

dwarkesh.com

The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations

The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English

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EMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I wrote about the Trojan horse, and what we can learn from her mouth about different cultural attitudes towards deception and violence. As someone comments below, the phrase GIFT ARTICLE is pretty scary in this context.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I have one of these from my grandfather who worked on plutonium purification at Chicago during the war. I also have a graphite etching of CP-1 made with CP-1 graphite.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Sometimes LLMs are the bomb. I asked Sol to help me find ABV and sugar content for cocktail ingredients for my website and it pointed me to the Norwegian liquor distributor which maintains an api you can query for this info!

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USER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

It is not "Linux", it varies depending on the distro. Linux Mint is installed in 5 minutes and installation is very easy, you just boot via USB then few screens asking for language, computer name, user, tz and optionally the partitioning:

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The phrase “doused with hydrofluoric acid” is one you never want to hear.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I started using paseo for organizing my coding agents. Integrated with tailscale and wsl, it provides a seamless interface between my phone and my laptop, and a nicer interface than a wall of cli windows. It took some fiddling to set up, so I wrote up the process here: thornlab.dev/blog/paseo-w...

thornlab.dev

Paseo on Windows + WSL + Tailscale — Kurt Thorn, Ph.D.

Run Paseo and coding agents in WSL while connecting from Windows and a phone over Tailscale.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I tried out coherence today. I think it’s a good tool; it incorporates a lot of what I’ve learned through trial and error for agentic coding. I’ll likely use it for new projects; for my large existing code base I’m deciding if I should migrate my existing tooling to it.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I worked at Zymergen for a number of years which was a synthetic biology / industrial biotech. One of the big things I learned there is that a lot of soybeans and corn are grown as industrial inputs, not as animal feed.

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 24/08/2026

Underappreciated: US farmland *already substantially produces energy, not food*, and does so very inefficiently. Corn ethanol (~40% of all US corn) requires about 100 times more land per vehicle-mile driven than solar photovoltaics -> electric vehicles. Shifting corn to solar *would free up land*.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I was reading an author recently talking about how we don't appreciate the way that email isn't siloed. That is, you don't have to be in gmail to talk to someone else in gmail. The norm is so powerful, it'd be unthinkable to change it. All email is interoperable. Social media could've been this way.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to create the most Claude-y possible parody image and what it came up with is pretty great and dead-on.

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Richard Lenski @relenski.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

If Zachary Blount had one dollar for every cell he plated in his dissertation looking for new Cit+ mutations, he could single handedly pay off the US debt of $40,000,000,000,000. www.npr.org/2026/08/19/n...

Zachary Blount with giant stacks of petri dishes used in his research on historical contingency and the evolution of citrate use in the LTEE.

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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 19/08/2026

important context imo this is still a great thing, but phrasing it like a breakthrough may be counterproductive still, society will judge AI on actual hard outcomes, and this is phrased as such

Ravid Shwartz Ziv
@ziv_ravid •8h
How Anthropic's new results post would read without the PR:
Claude orchestrated open-source protein design models, PXDesign, RFdiffusion, Genie, BoltzGen, from a 30k-token expert prompt and 12,500 H100-hours of compute, and designed binders against 14 of 15 targets. Hit rates of 22-35% against a 10-15% baseline, where some of those tools already report similar numbers on their own.
The orchestration is genuinely impressive. But the open-source models did most of the lifting, and they came from the Baker lab, Columbia, MIT, Byte Dance Seed, and most of them were already wet-lab validated before Claude touched them.
Which also sets the ceiling. All these generators share a single PDB-shaped training distribution, so calling four of them doesn't diversify away the blind spot, since they fail together. The targets that worked are the well-studied ones.
So the valid claim is that an agent can now drive this stack competently in the regime where the stack already works.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This looks pretty interesting - I’ve been implementing similar ideas in my agentic coding, but as hoc and without a framework like this. I’ll have to give it a try.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

My favorite new way to make figures and graphics is to get an LLM to write them in SVG and edit in Inkscape, sometimes with genAI for icons. Eg: arrepath.com/our-technolo...

arrepath.com

Our Technology - Arrepath

ArrePath deploys target-specific AI/ML workflows for oral-small-molecule discovery, combining heterogeneous data, machine-scale exploration, and multi-parameter design.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

My 9yo likes cookie clicker, so we made an automated mouse clicker.

An automated mouse clicker built out of LEGO. It has a baseplate with the mouse in it and a technic assembly with a gear train and a LEGO motor.

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Kevin K. Yang 楊凱筌 @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Use a rank regression model to engineer improved enzymes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Brandon Weaver @baweaver.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

This is probably one of the hardest posts for me to write, as I do not enjoy reliving these experiences, but I write on them in the hopes that they help others struggling with the same issues: baweaver.com/writing/2026...

baweaver.com

Tales of the Autistic Developer - Panic

For those who don't know me, I'm autistic. This post is about panic: the kind that locks your body, floods your brain, and makes every solution feel equally impossible.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

This is good. I work in a similar way but this seems a bit more sophisticated. I didn’t know about paseo which seems like it might remove some manual work I’ve been doing.

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Henry Yuen @henryyuen.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

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(Wes)tern democracy👨🏻🗳️🌐 @midwestache.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Make this the one thing you read today if you only read one thing. 🔥

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