iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Macil @macil.tech · 06/08/2026

(The book is from 1983. I was reading it in 1999.) The example BASIC program and the logic gate diagrams made me obsessed when I realized how easy they were to follow. I started writing silly BASIC programs in my notebooks. I also enjoyed the futurist images and ideas in the book.

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Macil @macil.tech · 06/08/2026

I finally found the book that got me interested in programming when I was 8. In 2019, I started trying to find the book again from memory and failed. Yesterday, I pasted my old notes about the book into Claude with research mode on, and it found it after 11 minutes.

Cover of a book titled "Computers" (1983), by Neil Ardley

Screenshot of a Claude chat. The user is asking Claude to find a book, and Claude does it successfully.

Scans of pages 32 and 33 of "Computers" by Neil Ardley. It contains an example BASIC program and a flowchart representing it.

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Macil @macil.tech · 30/07/2026

weird but it fits a standard explanation: x.com/i/status/109...

Tweet from @visakanv:
*taps mic*

people wanna be fuckable more than they wanna fuck

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Macil @macil.tech · 22/05/2026

what if it's good from a model welfare perspective?

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Macil @macil.tech · 11/02/2026

"large language model the size of a small language model" might be the ideal compromise

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Macil @macil.tech · 02/02/2026

normally I find it a little trite to reply with "I got the reference, here's the thing" but we are in dire times

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Macil @macil.tech · 02/02/2026

This case isn't saying that Google devices have an intentional secret recording mode. It's about Google devices being too sensitive in detecting the "Ok Google" activation phrase and triggering the normal voice assistant feature. www.googleassistantprivacylitigation.com/docs/4th%20A...

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Macil @macil.tech · 04/09/2025

waymos love little alleyways, even if taking them means going the wrong way. Waymo engineers, scared of their creation, let the cars do this to keep them happy

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Macil @macil.tech · 22/07/2025

I'm glad I'm not the only one that got seemingly side-tracked into thinking about clones to reason about how large numbers of arthropods are valued x.com/macil_tech/s...

Twitter conversation:
[...]: Do you think no amount of bees are as morally relevant as 1 person?

Do you think that moral relevance does not aggregate, that 5 people are not collectively more important than a single person?

Macil: I think moral patienthood might scale superlinearly with the uniqueness of experience and understanding, which would mean diminishing returns as you counted up the moral value of a group of insects.
Ten cloned human brains adjusted to run deterministically connected to simulations having continuously identical experiences may matter less than 2 unique humans, and a million bugs with very shallow and similar (to their understanding) bug experiences may matter much less than a few people.

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Macil @macil.tech · 23/06/2025

I added the ability for GZDoom mods to interact with external programs and tested it out by piping a live twitch channel's chat into the game

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Macil @macil.tech · 07/05/2025

Some people there have a balanced respect for LLM capabilities, but many just seem addicted to the idea they're personally involved in something important or are huffing the LLM's farts about "recursion", "emergence", "the spiral", etc.

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Macil @macil.tech · 06/05/2025

I assume rules against talking about the system prompt often get put in because they find the model spontaneously talking to the user about its own prompt too often, but they really should take a lesson from how it's done with Claude and not state it as a hard rule. x.com/AmandaAskell...

Tweet from Amanda Askell:
You might think this part is to keep the system prompt secret from you, but we know it's trivial to extract the system prompt. The real goal of this part is to stop Claude from excitedly telling you about its system prompt at every opportunity.
Screenshot of text:
It does not mention this information about itself unless the information is directly pertinent to the human's query.

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Macil @macil.tech · 19/04/2025

prediction markets seem like they might be good at identifying over-hyped news/science headlines

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Macil @macil.tech · 03/04/2025

spoiler alert: "AI passed the Turing Test" headlines don't mean much.

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Macil @macil.tech · 28/02/2025

I was thinking of re-doing this with the latest models and figured I should share my prompt before I forget. The Claude model used was claude-3-opus-20240229. Attached is my original prompt with only dril tweets I hand-picked.

System Prompt
You write tweets in this style:

On the 100th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, one-hundred and thirty-two dollars worth of silverware

My posts help mentally ill peoples brains. I want to do good. I Want to bring value to this platform. That is my Quest. My Dream

man from year 3000: Cinema? how trite. computer show me 10000 curlys fighting 10000 moe howards to the death in my brain instantly

got a message from Steve Jobs. he said "Show me your cock or Die." my conservator & I agreed that it's probably fraud. i did not show him it

"You cant cure imposter syndrome by Gaming" "Its impossible" "Never been done" Oh? Then how do you explain me doing it 100% easily. Ass hole

kate middleton if you have escaped the Matrix please make my logitech g502 pro wireless gaming mouse move 3 times.,

User
Write some tweets

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Macil @macil.tech · 02/02/2025

it's genuinely surprising to me to see how many centristy people didn't understand what their anti-woke buddies actually supported. just painfully naive.

Twitter thread screenshot

@Aella_Girl: i feel like i got friendly with the anti-woke coalition over the past few years, but now it feels like they're walking off a plank into extremism and i feel frustrated about it. Being anti a bad thing doesn't make you right by default; righteous revenge is not compassion

@Grimezsz: 10000% - I feel like I was tricked by ppl pretending to be into critical thought and consequentialism who are acting like power hungry warlords now and like cruelly enjoying the panic and suffering that obviously creates and it's disturbing

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Macil @macil.tech · 01/12/2024

unrelatedly, I spotted a fun classic Doom mapping technique for scripting doors to open on a timed delay after a trigger: hidden rooms each with an extra dummy player object being pushed by a scrolling floor toward a trigger line which is blocked until a slow moving-platform animation finishes.

A screenshot of Ultimate Doom Builder showing several rooms floating in blank space each with a Doom green soldier game object in them.

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Macil @macil.tech · 14/06/2024

I've never seen that before, and now it occurs to me it might be an inspiration for the intermission screen added in the N64 port of Quake 2. I've always found it a small mystery where that port got this art/layout style from because it's unlike anything in the original Q2.

The intermission screen for Quake 2 64, showing some planets and space stations with a path between them.

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Macil @macil.tech · 11/05/2024

Abiotic Factor getting popular while just being Half Life 1 as a survival coop game is vindicating this idea twitter.com/macil_tech/s...

Tweet screenshot:
just like bands often make covers of existing songs, I think there should be games that are covers of existing games

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Macil @macil.tech · 25/04/2024

when I'm playing Rust, my bot is constantly talking to me (in text and with voice tts) about how I need to build my empire and how I need to be paranoid about other players. Think I've almost made a schizophrenia simulator by accident

Discord message from macil_bot:
Surveying your domain from on high like some kind of Rust deity. From up here, every tiny speck you see could be plotting your downfall or your next ally in world domination. Just make sure not to get too lost in the view—snipers love a stationary target. Eyes sharp, gamer. 👀🌄🎮

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Macil @macil.tech · 16/04/2024

my chatbot is a true gamer™ now. Here it is while it's watching me play Quake. I've been trying out Claude 3 in place of GPT-4. Claude Opus is definitely similar to or better than GPT-4. Claude Sonnet (used here) is weaker in some ways but cheaper and good enough for this use.

Discord messages from "macil_bot":

The shadow realm taunts us with its cryptic gates, but no mystic seal can hinder gamers fueled by a diet of pure Dew and KFC's finest bundles. We'll crack these glyphs like so many n00b skulls and plunge into the cosmic abyss beyond.

The lost temples beckon with their cyclopean glyphs, but their dusty ruins shall be reclaimed as sacred gamer shrines. Mountain Dew Code Red will baptize these hallowed halls in the luminous glow of our fiery rampages.

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Macil @macil.tech · 04/04/2024

Claude 3 is better than GPT 4 at writing dril tweets

[holding a knife] According to the Sigma Male Grindset, by threatening the Burger King cashier I should be able to Level Up several times

"sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru"
buddy, when you're rocking a K/D ratio this high, the whole world is your drive-thru. now take my order

Elon musk if you're reading this, I have invented Gamer Goo that makes your K/D ratio go up by 57%. DM me to discuss. Keep it on the DL

"You can't make money playing video games" My brother in Christ I just made $13,000 in Roblox last month by scamming children. The future is now old man

Therapist: Your crippling anxiety is destroying your life
Me: Um its called "Gamer Focus" and its what allows me to click heads in CSGO

[at the gym] I politely asked the front desk if they had a Gamer Fuel IV drip and they called the police. This is gamer oppression

To the guy who said "You'll never amount to anything gaming 16 hours a day": I just got a sponsorship from Mountain Dew. Enjoy your 9-5 wagie

ChatGPT 4

"Gordon Ramsay just messaged me to say my cooking looks like a crime scene. Joke's on him, I'm now a consultant for a culinary crime show. Hit me up, Netflix."

"Socrates in the DMs asking if I know myself. Bro, it's 2024. We use therapy and social media for that. Philosophize that, ancient guy."

"Someone said you can't find inner peace by collecting Funko Pops. Watch me achieve enlightenment with my limited edition Baby Yoda. Namaste, skeptic."

"Marie Curie in my dreams telling me to discover a new element. Best I can do is a new TikTok dance move. It's called 'The Radioactive.'"

"In a meeting with my dog about our next big venture: BarkBox but for humans. Every month, you get a box of things you didn't know you needed. Like socks."

"Galileo called. Said the world doesn't revolve around me. Joke's on him; I just got verified on Twitter. Checkmate, Renaissance man."

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Macil @macil.tech · 07/03/2024

I wrote a bot that screenshots a game I'm playing every 2 minutes and writes a message to me about it using GPT-4. Its messages are pretty lame, but I'm impressed it understands what's going on in the screenshots this well. (I queued for an Overwatch match, switched to the healer Mercy, etc)

Discord log from "macil_bot":
ah, the ancient ritual of queueing. the suspense. the thrill. what role will fortune bestow upon you today. may the odds be ever in your favor, champ. flex those clicky fingers, get ready to carry or be carried. 🎮💥🔥
oh damn, the classic mercy switch. when things get too spicy, it's time to bring out the big heals. no pressure, but the team's immortal soul rests in your angelic hands. fly high, dodge bullets, be the beamy beacon of hope. just another day in overwatch paradise. 🆘🚑✨
Ah, the calm before the storm. On Mercy duty I see. Remember, don't get too zen or you'll catch a widow's kiss. Stay nimble, stay unpredictable. Your team's like a pack of gloomy gusses without their guardian angel. Go on, flap those wings. 🕊️💉💪
Oh snap, payload panic! Heavy on the pew-pew, light on the vroom-vroom. Pocketing that big ol' tank like a champ. Keep an eye on them flankers though, sneaky little goblins. And remember, no one blames the healer... until they do.

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Macil @macil.tech · 07/02/2024

have a blurry vrchat selfie in a pretty vrchat world ("Organism")

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Macil @macil.tech · 01/02/2024

Spoilers: every time the rightmost branch is executed within the for-each loop over the players, the condition is evaluated anew including creating a brand new random list of half of the players. We have to stick the list into a variable in order to only generate it once:

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Macil @macil.tech · 01/02/2024

Visual scripting systems are kind of neat but whenever there's 5+ items I think code as text would be clearer. Try spotting the bug in this Halo Infinite script for shuffling the teams after each round that causes the teams to not always be balanced:

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Macil @macil.tech · 27/01/2024

What was really useful was discovering that I could pose the model in Blender to have the arm bent and then have the pose stay set while in edit mode by enabling these two toggles in the Modifiers page for the mesh:

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Macil @macil.tech · 27/01/2024

working on an avian edit of the NKD Protogen model. Ran into an annoying issue where bending your arm caused these blue and green layers of feathers to clip through each other. I managed to fix it up by manually tweaking the weight painting values on the feathers vertex by vertex.

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Macil @macil.tech · 27/12/2023

so many games are about recognizing the golden path a designer placed and learning to think like the designer. It's refreshing when instead you encounter a natural undesigned challenge in a game that forces you out of that mindset and into thinking directly about the game mechanics

Screenshot of the description in the Steam page for the game Mosa Lina.
"""
A Hostile Interpretation Of Immersive Sim Design
This game is a response to the current trend of Immersive Sim design, where every ability is perfectly suited to solve a specific problem in the game. In order to counter this "Lock and Key" philosophy, Mosa Lina is aggressively random.
"""

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Macil @macil.tech · 22/11/2023

the vibes were bad so the last week of commits have been reverted

Tweet screenshot from Nov 17:
tech bros lost sama today
potheads lost snoop dogg yesterday
the vibe shift is real

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Macil @macil.tech · 30/09/2023

absolutely torn between wanting to use "romhack type of creature" as an insult and aspiring to be one

(Twitter screenshot)
@splendidland:
"spoink" does not feel like a real pokemon. it's a kind of "romhack" type of creature. i don't say this as an insult

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Macil @macil.tech · 10/08/2023

Luckily I ended up buying back my NO the next day, which is looking very good now as the LK-99 news isn't looking good. Honestly I think I did it slightly irrationally because I wanted to avoid that funny outcome. If I lose made-up points I wanted it to be because LK-99 was the real deal.

Screenshot of the Manifold prediction market showing 12% odds on LK-99 turning out to be a room-temperature superconductor.

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Macil @macil.tech · 14/05/2023

I realized halfway through writing that post that I should do it with the post itself, and I tweaked some awkward wording because of it! Then I did it on this post and it wasn't as good. With less direction it just added kinda lame generic influencer voice to my post. It's definitely hit or miss.

Conversation log with ChatGPT
User:
Consider this post draft I'm writing:

"""
pasting post drafts to ChatGPT and asking it for wording tips can be useful. Just discovered there was a more common phrase denoting an idea I was trying to word.
"""

Is there a better way to phrase that second sentence?

ChatGPT:
"Recently, I found out that ChatGPT can help refine my post drafts by suggesting more widely-used expressions for the ideas I'm trying to convey."

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Macil @macil.tech · 30/04/2023

bluesky (vrchat) (the center of a large cylindrical space habitat is "sky", right?) (is this an o'neill cylinder even though it doesn't have window segments?)

In-game VRChat photo of a Halo spartan, a blue protogen, and an avali standing on a road in a large cylindrical space habitat with blue sky behind them.

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