iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

But but where could I find one of these "gyms for my brain"??? It's not like there's a building that has little cuboids filled with sheets of paper with words on them and I can point my eyes at them and exercise my brain by viewing them sequentially.

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A good article, but the GOP committing to defense of democracy won't happen. We must create disincentives for lawlessness and collaboration with fascists, and that means punishment. Either we impose consequences or we allow the GOP to keep making things worse as it has continually done since Nixon.

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Reposted by Max Kennerly

I was so excited to contribute to this. with so many wonderful friends and colleagues. My ?, at #99 "Is humanity doomed by our nature to inequality and war?" www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/s...

nytimes.com

What Are the Biggest Questions in Science Today? 100 Scientists Weigh In.

We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.

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It's because they experience less gravity, DUH!* * I have no training or experience in any field related to this issue, I'm not even that good at birding.

23. Why do animals that fly live longer?
Elinor Karlsson, vertebrate geneticist, UMass Chan Medical School and Broad Institute

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It was already obvious that Alito himself leaked it, and this is just more evidence. There is no way that he suddenly thought, for the very first time, SCOTUS Justices could be targets, and that such threats were limited solely to those in the majority in Dobbs and only prior to its formal release.

"It was quite a shock," Alito said. "But within a relatively short period of time, the thought occurred to me, and I think to the others in the majority, that this would endanger us. And it made us targets for assassination."

Security, Alito said, ramped up immediately. A month later, in June of 2022, the world would know why. In the middle of the night, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family slept in their Maryland home, a would-be assassin approached their backyard with a bag containing a gun and rounds of ammunition, a knife and nail punch, duct tape, zip ties, a crowbar and other burglary tools, including special shoes to silence his footsteps.

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I love seeing *sports* as the example for how talent renders hard work irrelevant. Yup, Steph Curry just walks onto the court and sinks 3s. It's all "natural talent," pay no attention to how he has practiced it for hours every day for years and still practices it constantly.

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Every billionaire believes this because they all see themselves in the role. None have the depth to think about what any dictator would necessarily have to do to be "efficient" in governance and "benevolent" for the people: seize billionaires' assets and nationalize their industries.

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Reposted by Max Kennerly

Just a reminder: Tillis persuaded the woman Hegseth allegedly raped to come forward with her story, and told her that if she did, it would sink the nomination. She did. At great risk to herself. Tillis then cast the deciding vote for Hegseth. Because he’s a goddamned coward.

ms.now

Outgoing Sen. Tillis regrets pivotal vote for Hegseth: ‘He’s an actor. He’s not a manager’

Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis spoke to MS NOW about regretting his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth and his strained relationship with Trump.

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Interesting ongoing experiment: can frontier LLMs improve their ability at chess by building whatever harness / memory / etc they want? Answer is "not really." They can't reach expert-level, they're stuck around competent club level play. ailearningchess.ai-learning-chess.workers.dev#/

Peter Gostev

@petergostev
I have a Continuous Learning benchmark where models attempt to learn to play chess. They are given a /goal of learning and improving playing against a Stockfish opponent in 200 games. They can choose the difficulty, take notes, whatever they like - except cheating (e.g. using a chess engine) of course.

So far the improvement in Elo has been negative for Astra. Tiny bit positive for Opus, but could also be random. I've started Astra off sooner, so it finished its 200 games already, Opus is still playing.

Site here to watch how they are doing: https://ai-learning-to-play-chess.surge.sh/#/

The reason why this is interesting is that while we obviously don't have continuous learning, at the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe models can simulate it through self-scaffolding. Turns out not so much at least in this context. Perhaps it's a solvable problem and we don't need 'true' self-learning for models to learn in some way.

Graph of Elo progress across 200 games against Stockfish. None are expert level (Elo > 2000), Astra got worse over time, Opus 5.5 improved but then stalled out and regressed a bit. Others ongoing.

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Hey, but Jeremy O. Harris (sensible guy on the left) has an MFA from Yale! (Now to quickly mute this thread before anyone mentions other Yale grads with last names like "Vance" and "DeSantis.")

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

My upcoming book, SCARCITY, lays out a roadmap for Dem electoral success by tailoring policy to punish both groups. I'd say I'm joking but honestly we've tried catering to them for decades and look where that got us. Going forward: no more carrots, only sticks.

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Incredible how the editors at @nytimes.com still don't understand how embarrassing it is to do this, and how it undermines the credibility of the paper and its journalists. It's like a toddler covering their face to play hide and seek. We see you but it's not cute, you look like an asshole.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Pour one out for a real one. His oral history at USHMM talks about the youth movements finding places for Jews to hide and bringing them food, and becoming masters at forging Nazi documentation so pristine that the national French Resistance used them too. collections.ushmm.org/search/catal...

how the youth movements were the first to recognize the imminent peril and initiated rescue operations to save and arm the Jews; how during the mass arrests the youth movements provided food on a daily basis for those in hiding, identified host families or institutions for Jewish children, and produced forged documents; recalls the various techniques to produce forged documents and the evolving coded vocabulary: "les bifs" for the more artisanal identity cards and "les synthés" (les synthétiques) for the more perfect forgeries; how the youth movements' forgery laboratories were so proficient that the national French Resistance used their services and, in particular, the expertise of Maurice Loebenberg (Cachoud);

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Best part of this muddled article by one of Bloomberg's money guys is that two of the charts make a compelling case that knee-jerk opposition to AI is wholly justified because technological progress doesn't increase productivity, it just enables greater income extraction by capital. Oops!

Productivity Growth Has Been Stuck Below Its Postwar Pace for 50 Years

Workers’ Slice Shrinks, Profits’ Slice Grows

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Reposted by Max Kennerly

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

If the lessons Democrats (& democrats) draw from DOGE is “right idea, wrong implementation,” we are doomed. Everyone involved in the unprecedented crime that was DOGE needs to go to jail forever, & Democrats need to rebuild all of the programs & agencies first, not do digital management consulting 🤦‍♂️

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Reposted by Max Kennerly

Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

These are not crimes

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Reposted by Max Kennerly

Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

As someone who does teach con law, the idea that the Republicans on the Roberts Court are just too committed to "originalism" is farcical. You will search the opinions in Shelby County or Trump v. US (inter many alia) in vain for even the slightest trace of it

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Most of the beltway shares the same ideology as university administrators/trustees: "my job is to justify the whims and abuses of the rich and powerful." That's why the five members of Cornell's "External Advisory Board" for their report included David Brooks and an AEI scumbag.

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Yep. The reality right now is that there aren't *any* actual debates over jurisprudence, interpretation, and so forth, because SCOTUS itself doesn't have any. The majority decides cases solely on personal preference and does not leave behind a consistent rationale for doing so.

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Yeah, my thought is: 1) If the story is actually good and worth following, you should allow dropping difficulty to the point where the player is essentially watching. 2) If the story isn't good enough to warrant that, then either make it better or recognize the game shouldn't have a story.

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LOL at "you're not an AI influencer." My dude, he's The Vicar of Christ, the job title is God's Chief Influencer.

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Reminds me of this from Bain & Co. By 2031, AI needs to be a $6 trillion annual market? And only $1.2-$1.8T of that can plausibly be consumer+enterprise, so over $4T of it is [insert innovation here]? Seems Anthropic needs that wet lab to be profitable ASAP! 🙃 www.bain.com/insights/new...

Together, the consumer and enterprise AI market could total between $1.2 trillion and $1.8 trillion, leaving about $4.2 trillion of new revenue to reach the $6 trillion market that we estimate will be necessary to fund the buildout (see Figure 2).

That revenue must come from new sources of economic value.

Search and advertising ($100 billion to $200 billion): By integrating ads into their chatbot products and encouraging the trend of using AI to replace a large portion of traditional Internet search, model providers could unlock $100 billion to $200 billion or more in revenue.
Autonomous everything ($400 billion): Using AI to autonomously operate automobiles, trucks, and drones, as well as other industrial automation initiatives, represent a $400 billion market opportunity by increasing equipment uptime while reducing training and operating costs. Autonomous vehicles could provide significant value as new cars and trucks for consumers, as robotaxi services, and by automating logistics services.
Physical AI ($900 billion): Advanced AI models can enable highly realistic simulations and digital twins of physical processes, helping companies improve productivity, test modifications, and accelerate the deployment of autonomous systems. Similarly, AI-powered robotics, including humanoid robots, can operate in unstructured environments, unlocking a wide range of new applications across the physical economy, from manufacturing to surgery. As a result, the physical economy could represent a $900 billion opportunity across priority sectors (including automotive, electronics, semiconductors, and aerospace and defense), assuming a 10% reduction in R&D and manufacturing costs from higher yields and faster factory ramps.
New product development: Beyond AI’s uses today, new applications could help close the gap. These could include AI-driven drug discovery that makes treatments for rare diseases economically viable, always-available mental health support that addresses billions of dollars in unmet demand, materials science breakthroughs that unlock next-generation batteries and semiconductors, and autonomous scientific research that accelerates progress in fields from neuroscience to fusion energy—all examples of new opportunities resulting from abundant intelligence.

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Yep. Twenty years prior to trial--so, what, do we really not have evidence he was behind 9/11? Or maybe we just weren't prioritizing this because 9/11 wasn't a big deal? There's no good answer to excuse "yeah we've held him for 20+ years but we still can't prove who did 9/11." The fuck.

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Trump's lawlessness is more pressing, but let's not forget: the GWBush admin was also overflowing with incompetent, corrupt Republicans who were pathologically hostile to the rule of law. None of this was necessary or helpful, but it made them feel manly and it was good money for gov't contractors.

“A detainee who is shackled, transported to a former C.I.A. black site, and intentionally kept ignorant of both his right to remain silent and the inadmissibility of his prior coerced confessions, cannot be said to be making an ‘essentially free and unconstrained choice,’” he wrote.

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"Feed a can of worms" is going into my mental drawer of mondegreens next to "punch a gift horse in the mouth."

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I love how The Atlantic exempts certain arguments from editors and fact checkers. "Boom for shop-class specialists" is, ahem, a stretch. Those fields are anemic except for construction, where it's at least been growing since early 2021 but nothing like the actual "booms" of the 1990s & 2010s.

Change in jobs by sector, Jan 2022 to present. From https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/business/economy/jobs-report-unemployment.html

Construction jobs, percent change over prior year, 1950 to present.

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😂😂😂 lmao nope there will never be a time anyone has to apologize to Michael Tracey

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I'd do the robot cage fight. If I'm going to die in an AI apocalypse, I'd rather go out on my feet than sitting at my desk.

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Hey @jevbot.bsky.social what's the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow?

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🎸 Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity To demonstrate the epistemology of ignorance across class and race Would you manifest it and look like a dick?

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JFC his phony claim to principle makes it worse, he doesn't admit "this wasn't the actual court system, there is no reason to believe the name I posted was accurate, do not rely on it." He's still pretending like it was genuine info!

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Fablemaxxing FTL. No biggie, just do your jobs with Jev, turn the whole place into one big JSON of probabilities.

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