iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The current level of freak out over inflation is weird but it's fundamentally not reasonable to expect voters to express consistent opinions over a 50 year timespan. It's a completely new electorate!

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Effective altruism, like every other philosophical theory, works only with a strict No Funny Stuff rule.

There would be plenty of downsides that would give people pause but the emotional pull of unification would just be too strong. It would be like West Germany telling the East to get lost in 1990 - for all the obvious costs it would be unthinkable in the end to say no.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

There would need to be a specific plan for unification prior to any referendum and a lot of legwork needs to be done there. When it comes down to it though isn't really plausible that unification would be voted down in the Republic if it looked like the North was going to go for it.

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Everything above the level of electrons is a metaphor anyway. It's not clear that the "one computer program" metaphor is either more accurate or more useful than the "agents" metaphor for most purposes.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

What about when Opus "spins up" a Sonnet sub-agent? Would you still say that's in some sense part of the same LLM, despite being a different model entirely? Or is "LLM" here shorthand for a wider system rather than literally referring to a specific large language model?

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

What is "one LLM" exactly? Is there just one LLM called Opus 5.1 in the world? Or one Opus 5.1 on each physically distinct piece of hardware running the model? One for each user?

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Not hallucinating isn't the same as not making any mistakes at all. Also all of those come with different models, some of which are far more error-prone than others.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The model used for Google search results is bad and single-handedly responsible for a lot of people's perception of AI being a lot less capable than it really is. It's true that the good models don't hallucinate much but that isn't what most people see.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The correct answer obviously is that YouTube stopped being good as soon as it became predominantly filled with custom made content instead of random old clips someone uploaded. So like 2010 at the latest.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

These are the kind of insights that get you quoted in The Economist as a serious critic of Nobel laureates apparently.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The skeleton key is realising that the four seasons are not of equal length

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

To be fair, the volume of sweets five Irish punts could buy in 1998 was enormous and very possibly life-threatening

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

One time when I was like 8 an elderly neighbour gave me £5 and fondly told me not to spend it all in one shop and I immediately went and spent it all at once on sweets and she found out and got really upset that I had spent it all in one shop, in violation of her express wishes

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

See also but even moreso: films about filmmakers.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Setting public transport directions to "fewer transfers" does actually help with this a bit but ultimately this is still an app built by Americans

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

(3) can end up shading into (1) over time as the proportion of shared funds/assets approaches 100%

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The wider point that they had much easier circumstances is clearly true. My point that war damage has more or less nothing to do with it in the specific Dutch case is essentially pedantic, though it is true.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

There still wasn't much lasting damage to physical infrastructure. Overall you'd be hard pressed to see much impact of the war today, obviously with the significant exception of Rotterdam.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The Netherlands wasn't actually shelled at all in WW1 (which it didn't participate in) and also didn't suffer a much war damage in WW2 outside of Rotterdam. It was admittedly plenty flat to stay with though, shelling or not.

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Yeah there absolutely is stigma attached but the people posting slop don't realise because they have no self-awareness and nobody wants to criticise them publicly.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The closest thing I can think of to a counterexample is bizarrely Bill Kristol who supposedly is an anti-Trump rightwinger but who actually just posts resistlib content all day.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This was clearly visible. Tuchel obviously didn't *initiate* the tactical change but I assumed that he would use the water break to demand the players keep playing and stop dropping back. But he apparently decided to indulge that instinct rather than challenge it.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The market just isn't growing very much and companies invested heavily during covid on the assumption that it would.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Neither of these things have anything to do with it. AI isn't (yet at least) making any meaningful contribution to job losses and hardware price increases have hit too recently for any impact to be felt yet.

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The very first thing I said is that he's being taken out of context. If you're not willing to take my word for what the context is you can read the book.

OK well it's a few years since I read the book so go ahead and point me to the part where he says otherwise.

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No that's not his point but if you just want to get angry about your own misinterpretation feel free

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He's talking about risks that could cause the literal extinction of the human race or returning humanity to the stone age. That's an just extremely high bar and some incredibly bad things can fail to reach it.

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MacAskill is being taken out of context here. He's not arguing that this wouldn't be a big deal, only that it wouldn't lead to the total and irreversible collapse of all civilization on Earth - a distinction he's drawing because his topic is existential risk, not to minimise climate change.

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Irish people are almost comically unaccustomed to heat, though it has actually hit 30 in some parts of the country over the last week which by Irish standards is genuinely astonishing

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Once a month is a large underestimate of how frequently he writes that article

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Also easier to say than to stick to the rule when the getting rid of the dickheads is costly. Both of which the All Blacks themselves have amply demonstrated.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

There's an extremely jarring shift in game mechanics from 1 to 2 (and to a much lesser but still noticeable extent from 2 to 3), and character progression completely resets with each game. So no.

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It is and anyway I just don't buy that what he achieved in that period exceeds anything Messi has done.

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Longevity yes but also literally everything else. His peak is way higher as well as being sustained for way longer. Fundamentally Maradona's legacy rests mostly on a single 7 game tournament, while Messi is miles ahead on every conceivable metric: titles, individual stats, analytics, everything.

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I mean it very much is his fault that he's won far more! He was hardly peripheral to the success of those teams. When it comes down to it, he's performed at an extremely high level for a much longer time. Maradona's peak barely lasted 5 years. Messi's been playing at a world class level for 20.

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The Messi v Maradona argument also resolved as soon as Messi won the World Cup. Messi's achievements were already vastly greater in every respect except having dragged Argentina to a World Cup and then he did that too. Nothing left to debate.

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Why are so many of the early kick offs on the west coast??? It makes no sense!

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I was assuming for a while that it was time zone driven and that the kick offs must at least be consistent in local time. Which wouldn't make a ton of sense but turns out nope, even that isn't true.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

All signs suggest that the Belgians are in fact being good utilitarians per your standard and I for one applaud them

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Worth knowing that there's a toggle to choose which model you want to use. Gemini nudges you towards using the cheaper Flash model but it's well worth setting it to Pro, which is a lot more capable unless you really need an answer inside 10 seconds.

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Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Using the Flash or Pro model? Would be typical of Flash which does this kind of thing constantly, though I wouldn't exactly be stunned to see Pro doing it.

Liam Deane @liamdeane.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Very unfair characterisation. There was a good 15, maybe even 16, years between the too many houses crisis and the not enough houses crisis.