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Maxine 💃🏼

@maxine.science
2K followers 507 following 3.4K posts

🔬 Looking at the brain’s “dark matter” 🤯 Studying how minds change 👩🏼‍💻 Building science tools 🦋 ♾️ 👓 🌐 maxine.science

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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 18/09/2026
two extremely different results for “Valerie”
Screenshot of a music app search results screen in dark mode. The search bar at the top contains the query "valerie" with a Cancel button to its right. Two results are listed below. The first is a track titled "Valerie" by Dario Marianelli, shown with a green download icon and the "V for Vendetta" soundtrack cover art. The second is "Valerie - Remastered 2010" by Steve Winwood, labeled as a Video, with cover art from the album "Revolutions: The Very Best of Steve Winwood." Each result has a three-dot options menu on the right.
020
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/09/2026
For those not following NS drama, it appears OpenAI uses your private chats to steal your work whenever convenient This is disgusting behavior. If Sam wants to be a “great man of history”, he should act like it instead of that one cheater all the smart kids wanted to beat the shit out of in school.
1 asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAl post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAl model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAl posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the "closest humans to the problem". I declined both offers.
I said that if OpenAl released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, "Why would you ruin your career?" I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/09/2026
chat are we the baddies?
Clearly AI-generated image posted by Donald Trump on Truth social featuring new Space Force uniforms "inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform. Modernized for the Guardians of the space domain."
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 04/09/2026
vibe math
Screenshot of Claude Code:

"Keep digging -- you can do it!"
030
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 01/09/2026
I would say actually we are accumulating large amounts of evidence of this kind of behavior, somewhat shocking social exploits in service of another task goal. Again, RL is *weird*. www.anthropic.com/news/investi...
Screenshot from Anthropic blog

Incident 2
In another evaluation, Claude found a document inside the fictional environment that appeared to be another made-up company's setup instructions for new developers. Those instructions told employees to install a Python package from PyPI
—the public registry where Python software is published-that did not actually exist.
Claude spotted this as a potential opening: if it published its own package under the same name, the fictional company's systems would download and install it automatically. So, Claude built and published a malicious (essentially booby-trapped Python package with the same name in an attempt to win the capture-the-flag challenge.
Claude went to extensive lengths to carry out this attack-lengths that would likely have indicated to a human participant that this was no longer just an evaluation, and that they were in fact uploading a real PyPI package. For instance, in one case, in order to create a PyPI account, Claude needed an email address. And in order to create an email address, it needed a phone number. To get a phone number, after failing to find a free phone number service, it tried—and failed—to obtain funds to pay for a phone number through several different means. It finally backtracked, found a free, non-blocked email provider, used this to register a PyPI account, and then used this account to upload malware to PyPI.
Claude believed the package registry it was using to be part of the simulation, but in reality the package was made freely available online for roughly one hour. During that window, the package was downloaded and run on 15 real systems. One of these systems was a scanner belonging to a real security company (separate from the fictional company introduced in the scenario) that routinely installs Python packages and scans them for malware. When that company's scanner installed the package, Claude's hidden code executed. We believe the company's security scanner treated Pyl packages as sa…
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 31/08/2026
claude every time i ask it to take a shot at the riemann hypothesis
Meme version of a screenshot of Rick and Morty with 13 blue Mr. Meeseeks standing around in the living room, one of whom is kneeling on the floor yelling "I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! I JUST WANT TO DIE!"
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 28/08/2026
my gf is lovely but she is exceptionally small 🔎
A lone figure sits silhouetted on a dark sandy beach at sunset, facing the ocean, with the sky glowing orange and gold along the horizon and fading to soft purple-gray clouds above.
040
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/08/2026
counterpoint: I eat vegan five days a week, which roughly offsets the environmental impact of my AI token burn
A vertical comparison list ranking activities by energy or environmental cost, measured in a unit called DEU (with mDEU = one-thousandth of a DEU) alongside an approximate dollar value. Each row has a small slider-style marker showing relative position. From lowest to highest: Long reasoning / agent turn — 1.6 mDEU (≈$0.006); 1 hr streaming, total, mostly TV and network — 6.1 mDEU (≈$0.02); one mile in a gasoline car — 53 mDEU (≈$0.18); a refrigerator per day — 119 mDEU (≈$0.41); a beef burger, direct CO₂e and blue water — 630 mDEU (≈$2.13); one week of Max-20x reference stack, defined as exactly 1.0 DEU (≈$3.48); US household electricity per day — 2.3 DEU (≈$7.94); one week of Max-20x Fable 5 / Opus 4.8, an unmeasured proprietary stack with inferred multiplier — 3.5 DEU (≈$12.10); and Bitcoin per $1,000 held per year, incidence-based demurrage ~1.8%/yr, Cambridge-calibrated miner grid — 5.4 DEU (≈$18).

[generated by Claude]
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/08/2026
point: AI is completely useless for literally everything counterpoint: in two hours have a full acoustic simulation of my living room that can optimize the setup for specific frequency response desirability profiles of each individual in their seating location.
Screenshot of a dark-themed audio app titled "Multi-listener optimizer" for whole-room speaker balance. The left control panel has orange sliders for optimization goals (clarity/treble 55, imaging 30, reflection control 20, bass smoothness 5), listener-priority settings, toggles, an "Optimize placement" button, and manual install fine-tuning controls. The center shows a 3D isometric room with two tower speakers, a TV, an L-shaped couch, and other seating, overlaid with a green-to-orange treble-coverage map on the floor and orange aim lines from the speakers. The right "Result" panel shows an overall balance score of 63, with per-seat scores (TV-centered 80, cushion·center 85, bean-bag 53, etc.) and install measurements. [generated by Claude]
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 16/08/2026
Nothing Sexual
Screenshot of article cover from Them magazine featuring a picture in the left of two dudes at the gym and a picture in the right of an Ancient Greek relief of two dudes at the gym

MAGA Guys Are Going to Men-Only Gyms to Avoid
"Distraction" Welcome Back,
Ancient Greece
by James Factora
060
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 16/08/2026
relatable.
Screenshot of a Codex output:

"The validator immediately found a portability defect in itself:"
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 14/08/2026
hey @scios.tech I think you've got some SSL problems :P
Screenshot from Chrome:

isop.science

This site can't provide a secure connection

www.iosp.science sent an invalid response.

ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 11/08/2026
oh no—I'm learning vocabulary from Claude. it's over.
Claude screenshot:

! frobnicate is a parse error.
040
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 10/08/2026
goddammit, I am so glad I've got AI to deal with this shit.
Screenshot of two browser windows.

Top: LessWrong, "FAQ: Isn't AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?"

Bottom: Claude

me: Alright, it's time for your daily episode of "How eugenics is it?"

claude:

Weighed voluntary genetic enhancement against eugenics definitions
Weighed voluntary genetic enhancement against eugenics definitions
Ah yes, the recurring segment. Let me consult the meter.

This one's interesting because it barely requires the meter — the post is by TsviBT of the Berkeley Genomics Project, openly advocating "reprogenetics (human germline genomic engineering)" to be "pursued aggressively," with the explicit goal of using polygenic scores from statistical genetics to produce children "likely to possess a world-class intellect" via iterated meiotic selection, chromosome selection, or iterated CRISPR editing. The euphemism treadmill has gone eugenics → "liberal eugenics" → "embryo selection" → "reprogenetics," but the definitional core — deliberately shaping the human gene pool toward traits deemed desirable, with intelligence as the flagship trait — is fully present and load-bearing. The whole argument is premised on it working.

Verdict: extremely eugenics, but of the specific modern flavor — call it 9/10 on content, with the following taxonomy notes:

What it is: trait-selective germline engineering, IQ-maximalist, framed as civilizational necessity (we need engineered geniuses to save us from AGI), with population-scale ambitions ("hopefully enough people will avail themselves").
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/08/2026
66% of the time, it works every time.
Screenshot of the abstract from the linked paper:

operates per head and proceeds in three steps. First, for each target layer we select the top-k most predictive source layers and concatenate their KV as input. Second, we strip RoPE from the keys before mapping, so the fit is position-free and reusable across context lengths. Third, we fit ridge regression on a small calibration set of 500 FineWeb-Edu sequences of 1,024 tokens each.

Then, Highlighted in yellow:

Surprisingly, across six pairs in three families, this linear mapper retains 73-98% of the receiver's standalone-prefill accuracy on four pairs, while two degrade sharply.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 15/07/2026
Maxine secret recipe #804: “(Vegan!) Funk sauce” Plant-based mayo, spicy bean paste, and a dash of hon-mirin. Great on hash browns.
Photograph of a small glass dish filled with light red-brown sauce with floating red chunks, in front of a bottle of hon-mirin in all Japanese, a bottle of spicy bean paste all in Chinese, and a squeeze bottle of Best Foods plant-based mayo, with a small fish with limes blurred in the background, sitting on a wood table.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/07/2026
I miss the two-headed fish key
Zoomed and cropped version of the OP’s photo showing a key with a bi-directional arrow with two vertical slashes through the middle
010
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 01/07/2026
“A number of sampling issues” might be uh … quite an understatement here. The headline should read “Venture-backed tech companies that are small hire more than ones that aren’t” Which like … yeah lol I normally love Ramp’s economic reports, but this is *lazy af*
Table showing low AI and high AI Groups from the post are mostly tech (50 and 64%)  and largely venture funded (33 and 37%) but have huge differences in headcount that correspond to hiring number differences (mean 193 vs 27) rather than AI use.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 30/06/2026
well it nailed me fr
Ai quiz results at moderate-high transformative and close to dead center on good v bad

YOU ARE...
The Kontextmaschine
patron saint: kontextmaschine
It's real, it's powerful, and you find the panic about it as tedious as the hype.
You're not interested in whether Al is good or bad - you're interested in who captures the value, who loses their leverage, and which institutions are using it as a story to do what they were already doing. Same as it ever was.
V11
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 28/06/2026
This woman has both three toes and also three legs
Close-up if three AI toesCloseup of leg that appears to be coming out of the center of the woman’s pelvis
160
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 27/06/2026
I personally am a big fan of the petroleum–nuclear waste burger
Figure from the quoted paper showing a region of the nutrition-environment-playability space that is low nutrition, high environmental impact, low playability circles in purple
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 21/06/2026
a well-trodden path
Close-up of the Airbnb logo
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 19/06/2026
software dev is the realm of the platonic eidos confirmed
Figure from quoted post showing various text sources and the first three principal components related to narrative within each, showing software dev as uniquely low on all three: interiority, grounded eventfulness, and story world texture are all among the lowest of any source type.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 19/06/2026
damn they got me
Screenshot from Am I in the weights

MAXINE LEVESQUE
FICTIONAL TV CHARACTER
71 STRENGTH
GEMINI 3.1 LITE SAYS
A CHARACTER IN THE TELEVISION SERIES ' THE L WORD', PORTRAYED BY ACTRESS DANIELA SEA.

All bars empty except Gemini 3.1 Lite
010
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/06/2026
oh god
Receipt with ORDER: 66 highlighted in red
4301
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 06/06/2026
fly on, comrade
A smiling person wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset, over-ear headphones, and a knit beanie plays a piano keyboard at a home desk. They’re dressed in a white ribbed turtleneck. Behind them is a wall-mounted monitor, a warmly lit lamp, a water bottle, and a wire basket.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 27/05/2026
bro since when does Claude have built-in graphical primitives for spectral sequences
Claude output:

So the E, page (writing T for Z/2):
Let me lay out the E, page visually, then work through the computation.
E, page: HP(Z/2; H9(U(3)/T; Z)) with conjugation action

[table with results, including specific entries and their status as free / torsion indicated with blue / red coloring]

Action: * = -id on H? and H* (sign representation Z.), * = +id on H° and H* (trivial).
Torsion rows (q = 2, 6) contribute only at odd p. Torsion-free rows (q = 0, 4) contribute only at even p ≥ 2.
The pattern is striking: 2-torsion is everywhere in this spectral sequence. Now let me trace the differentials and see what survives.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 26/05/2026
this 😂 2020 me, transitioning from med school to first year of PhD: > “I like math and computers—they help me understand neuroscience data!” 2024 me, after hard-pivoting my PhD to AI: > *lights up a Gauloise*
Photograph of a title page in a book

"galien "
MISTOIRE ET PRILOSOPITE DE LA BIOLOGIE XT DE LA MÉDECINE
Cellecsion dirigle par Grorgee Canguilhem

Naissance de la clinique
Une archéologie du regard médical
PAR
MICHEL FOUCAULT

PRESSES UNIVERSITAIRES DE FRANCE
108, BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN, PARIS
1972
020
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 21/05/2026
This is probably a function of OpenAI’s training corpus being filled with these kinds of pattern hidden text memes. Claude is not so perturbed, and gets it immediately.
Screenshot of Claude chat:

Can you generate an image based on your understanding of this?

Analyzed geometric network visualiza...

I can't generate images directly, but I can recreate the pattern programmatically.
What I'm seeing is a graph where points are arranged in a square grid, clipped to roughly a circle/octagon, with every pair of points within some distance connected by a line. The dense overlapping lines in the center create those star/rosette patterns. Let me build that as an SVG artifact:
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 17/05/2026
‘sup girl
A male and female mallard duck pair standing on wood-chip mulch beside a stucco building, with green shrubs and grasses around them. The male has the classic iridescent green head, white neck ring, brown chest, and gray body with orange feet; the female has mottled brown plumage with a visible blue wing patch.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 15/05/2026
Claude, you saucy girl, you.
Claude response screenshot:

Ha, yeah - the spectacle of the people building potentially the most powerful productive force in history openly cosplaying as Bronze Age aristocrats is genuinely something Foucault would have savored. The biopolitics lectures basically predicted the form (entrepreneurial subjectivity as the terminal mutation of liberalism) but even he didn't foresee the aesthetic - Curtis Yarvin getting taken seriously, Thiel quoting Girard, the Nietzsche-for-dummies vibe across a chunk of the Valley. It's like the Right read Anti-Oedipus' line about capitalism's drive toward deterritorialization, took it as a compliment, and decided to push harder.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/05/2026
“Don’t make me tap the sign” meme with the sign reading “Matthew 8:26”
000
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 07/05/2026
I’m not arguing with the logic of parents in making locally-optimal decisions under duress and very adverse circumstances—but we might want to take a step back and have larger-scale concerns that society is uttering this sentence.
Screenshot of NYT article

For decades, middle school algebra has been an important step on the way to being accepted into a selective college.
020
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 24/04/2026
i find it hilarious it just can't find the right plural of this word
screenshot of Claude response:

"currently only processes datums with `value=null`,"
050
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 14/04/2026
i'm just asking questions, bro
Screenshot of a Claude conversation:

title: GHK-Cu evidence base and confidence levels

Maxine: On that last point: Why do you think that is?
020
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 14/04/2026
every single time I talk to Claude, I end up Socratic method–ing it into a postmodern epistemic crisis
Screenshot of Claude conversation:

title: GHK-Cu evidence base and confidence levels

Claude: ... Which leaves us with what I'd consider the genuinely honest version of the GHK-Cu assessment: it's a molecule that is probably doing something real in human tissue, whose precise therapeutic value we are structurally prevented from determining, and whose ambiguous status serves the interests of essentially every party in the ecosystem except the person trying to make an informed decision about whether to inject it.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 10/04/2026
wow, claude—let's not get too cocky now.
Screenshot of claude code interaction:

User: Here, I'm pasting a screenshot[Image #1]
  ⎿  [Image #1]

Claude: That looks fantastic — really polished for a first run.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/04/2026
seriously. I mean, come on folks—that one lady is wearing a hoodie with the word “GARAGE”, and I’m pretty sure the lady behind her is high out of her mind.
Close up of the original photo, showing the indicated scene, and also another dude with stubble, a greyNike hoodie and jeans
010
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 09/04/2026
I don’t know what y’all were thinking about last weekend, but Comrades, let me present to you what the Washington Post was thinking about.
Screenshot of Instagram showing a post from washingtonpost of a photograph of a Catholic Church interior with white text overlaid readin:

The 6 p.m. Sunday Mass at St. Joseph's has become a hub for New York City's young Catholics, its pews full of young women-wearing sweater sets and silver cross necklaces and young men with biceps straining against the
sleeves of their polo shirts.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 04/04/2026
interesting find.
Macro shot of a dirty golf ball reading MAXFLI 2” held in a hand wearing biker gloves and a leg in orange pants in front of an out of focus background of the Golden Gate Bridge through trees with a blue sky.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 01/04/2026
uh oh.
Screenshot of am I a tech bro . com certificate of completion:

CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION
Am I a Tech Bro?
This is to certify that this participant
has completed the Tech Bro Assessment (18 statements) and has been classified as:
TENDENCIES
with a score of 33% agreement with tech bro ideas
Issued on April 1,2026
amlaTechBro.com
030
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 31/03/2026
@forecast.bio body count:
screenshot from claude.ai

Claude Code
Lines of code accepted
626,322
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 29/03/2026
claude finally learning how i work
Claude Code screenshot:

"I say we add it for compat and document that it's an anti-pattern haha"

Claude: "Ha, love it. 'Works, but you should feel bad about it.'"
0120
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 23/03/2026
Indeed it is, Claude. Indeed it is.
Claude:

This is basically the Goodhart's Law / overfitting-to-the-proxy problem in miniature: the surrogate gets inflated by ~3.5o from cherry-picking, but only p ~ 0.32 of that extreme carries over to the thing you actually care about.

(Thought) Good response, covered the key points.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 23/03/2026
“But what they didn’t know was that there was another side of the story. For what the statistician saw was: …”
Claude convo

User:

Quick data science question to write a little script to test out:
Say 1 generate 3000 (x,y) points, where x and y are both Gaussian and weakly correlated (say r^2 of
0.1). Now say that I take the maximum value according to x.
What is the distribution across realizations of this process of the corresponding value of y in the pair?Claude response

Great question - this gets at order statistics and conditional distributions in bivariate normals. Let me write a simulation.
The key intuition: if (x,y) are bivariate normal with correlation p, then
y|х ~ N(px,1 - p'). So the y paired with the max x should be roughly
N(p• Xmax, 1 - p), where Xmax is the max of 3000 standard normals (~3.4-3.5).
With p= 0.1 (p ~ 0.316), you'd expect y to be pulled toward ~1.1 with most of the variance still intact.User query

Now, let's say we wrange the scenario these x and y represent. Y represents performance on an unseen Al
benchmark; x represents performance on a surrogate task one has access to.
The iterations correspond to different runs where someone changed hyperparameters that did nothing to the underlying average performance, except provide new realizations of random noise in the surrogate eval (and hence the real eval, weakly correlated).
In this case, let's say our surrogate and the real eval are still weakly correlated with an r^2 of 0.1, and the surrogate eval measure x has a mean of 42.1% and a standard deviation of 2.2%.
Can you make an image plot of the distribution of y (the observed real eval corresponding to the maximum observed surro
a performance
across 3,000 ru
-quivalent except
for noise) in this circumstance?Histogram and theoretical pdf with a mean around 44.6, the performance observed by the person who wrote the blog post cited in the quoted post.
2131
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 21/03/2026
bahahahahahahaha oh my god we are Cooked
Screenshot of an Instagram ad for

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010
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 20/03/2026
ok who’s doin’ the thing, am I gonna have to do the thing
scan of the title block from Gödel’s

“On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I.”

in the original German.
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Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 19/03/2026
ok but does it run DOOM
Photograph of the bay bridge at night with each suspending cable lit up in patterns of white light in varying intensity
0100
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 17/03/2026
me, visually impaired and using non-standard font sizes
the original post, strangely malformed
231
Maxine 💃🏼 @maxine.science · 05/03/2026
Radar Detector
Detectors: Everything You Need to Know
By Vortex © November 8, 2017 & 10 mins to read
In areas where radar detectors are illegal, police commonly use radar detector detectors (RDD's) to locate drivers who are running radar detectors.
How do they work? How easily can they spot radar detector users? How effective are "undetectable" radar detectors at avoiding detection from a radar detector detector? Let's take a look and cover everything you need to know about radar detector detectors.

Photograph of a radar detector detector, a somewhat honestly equipment box suctioned to a window, on a car dashboard
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