iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam @samd.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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

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

I’ve also built a bunch of specialized hobby projects - a structured cocktail database; a UK canal boar routing app; a fantasy weapon creator.

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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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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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

This is extraordinarily well written.

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

I think it did it using the Pi CLI but I run them through paseo which has its own tools for one agent to invoke another. I didn’t worry about the details, I just told it to do it.

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

Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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

Yes, I was a judge for the video version a number of years back and it was a pretty informal process.

Grace @gracekind.net · 23/09/2026

Reposted by Kurt Thorn

New animation from Opus 5.5!

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Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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

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

Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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 · 21/09/2026

I’ve started using paseo+tailscale to do this in a model / harness-agnostic way. It works well.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This discussion, and many of the similar ones going on, make me feel like we should require everyone take a philosophy course or two. There’s a certain intellectual humility in learning by how hard it is to formalize and prove seemingly simple ideas.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I strongly suspect that wet lab is for making small molecule drugs based on some of their job postings - so I don’t think it will be doing a lot of biology engineering.

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I recently read Artifact Space and its sequel which might hit your sweet spot. Also the Vatta’s War series was pretty good.

Does asking for an ontology perform v better than just asking for an architecture design?

I can’t see this without thinking of Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition

So I asked it to re-refine the structure with both ligands - it did so, and then confirmed that the X-ray data can’t distinguish between them. This took a morning, in parallel with other work. AI not only lets you move faster, it lets you do things you would never have time to do otherwise.

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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.

brennan @brennan.computer · 17/09/2026

Reposted by Kurt Thorn

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 · 16/09/2026

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

Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Very specialized, but very interesting

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Kurt Thorn @kurtthorn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Appropriately, my son watched the veritasium video that features this and the LTEE last night and I got to say “I know the people who did that”!