iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

“I got mine, so I guess we’re all good now”!

Even if you ignore the eugenics-y degrowthers (and what an “if”!) it’s absolutely not clear what mechanism they want to decide what consumption is valid and what isn’t If it’s a price mechanism, well, we’re sort of back to the eugenics-y degrowthers!

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 7h

The degrowthers would tell you the incentive is that we live on a finite planet and to maximize long-term outcomes we need to reduce consumption and population, and they think that should be enough justification (just, don’t ask who exactly they want to stop having kids)

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 7h

Degrowth in general starts from a place of “if everyone agreed entirely with me and changed all of their behaviors” and that’s just never seemed like a winning strategy to me — and in all honesty I think the prevalence of degrowthers in climate communication has made us less successful

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 7h

Great thread. This is a problem with a lot of climate journalism (especially at outlets like The Guardian) — they assume that energy usage would be stable or decreasing without green build-out, when there’s no clear reason that would be true!!

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Robinson Meyer @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I don’t think this gloss of my story gets it right. The permitting bill would enact the mandatory rules that Democrats say they want. The policy that Schumer is calling for in the screenshot — that data centers must pay for all of their grid upgrades — is what’s required by the new bill.

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

As Borges wrote “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” But what he never considered is, what if we just built on stone instead of sand??

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🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The thing is that it's not a % of projects that will ship, it's a kind of absolute floor, and so if AI actually increases productivity what you'd predict is an exponentially growing rate of project abandonment with probably a very small baseline increase in shipped good product rate.

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 16/09/2026

that’s what the rocks want you to think

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 12/09/2026

Everyone else is worried about the AI apocalypse but I’ve been hearing about that for 30 years and I can’t get very worked up any more. For me the question is: If these things can code (and they can!) then why aren’t we seeing any great software? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | A.I. Was Supposed to Give Us New Killer Apps. What Happened? (Gift Article)

Just because A.I. is revolutionizing coding, doesn’t mean it will automatically revolutionize our apps.

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 11/09/2026

How many weeks until GLM hacks pypi

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 11/09/2026

Mostly I’m excited for open weight models but as they continue to catch up to frontier performance we’re in for some weird, weird years

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 11/09/2026

today I was trying to get a model to generate an example for a vuln I was reporting through normal channels Claude got most of the way there before cutting itself off. GPT Sol wouldn’t even start. GLM did it eagerly and then came back with suggestions for other exploits to try

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 30/08/2026

yeah, just got home to google it — residency requirements are at time of election www.senate.gov/senators/qua...

senate.gov

U.S. Senate: Qualifications & Terms of Service

Qualifications & Terms of Service

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 30/08/2026

actually two iirc, this is how I learned the law only requires residency on Election Day (or swearing in?)

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 25/08/2026

It’s so cool seeing the huge operation behind the scenes that makes democracy possible, and I’m really happy to be a small part of it again this year. Massachusetts early voting this week and primaries on Tuesday! Go vote!

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/08/2026

I thought this podcast had a really interesting perspective: if you’re going to work for free, make sure you’re doing the Thing you want to be known for. Get people to remember you for the work you’re trying to do full time, not as a cheap source of grunt work youtu.be/9-jTuRTa3bE

youtu.be

Wrap Drinks Ep. #059 - Production Designer Chloe Badner

YouTube video by Wrap Drinks Podcast

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/08/2026

youtu.be

Wrap Drinks Ep. #059 - Production Designer Chloe Badner

YouTube video by Wrap Drinks Podcast

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/08/2026

Agree 100% with this — the expectation for students to take long-term volunteer positions is morally wrong & locks out underrepresented communities. It’s also not even a great way to get your foot in the door! Unpaid staff are not first in line for cool experiences or facetime with researchers.

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 19/08/2026

too late I’ve got angry postcards in the mail

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 11/08/2026

relatedly, I STRONGLY believe folks should take at least a year for non-academic work before going to grad school It’s so important to get a sense of what is and isn’t normal, since grads will so often need to advocate for themselves against their university and any organization they’re in

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 10/08/2026

did you know we invented lighters before matches? just seems wrong

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 04/08/2026

huge news for me specifically

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 04/08/2026

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 03/08/2026

Monday excitement, my app's traffic graph looks like this (blue line is all requests combined) and I simply do not know why

A time series graph. Total number of requests, in blue, sits at about 4.5 million for about a month before climbing to 10 million in about three days

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 02/08/2026

> “Victim misses” had become “victim Mrs.”! bahahahah

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 31/07/2026

I'm not the first to say it, but I'd be willing to bet this is volunteer training data labeling, not moderation

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Geoff Brumfiel @gbrumfiel.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

BREAKING: Google has rolled back its tool less than a day after it launched. Updated story coming soon.

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 31/07/2026

Here's a funny article -- coordinates stored in float precision have significantly variable precision across the globe I suspect *most* people who "use floats" are actually using doubles in this day and age -- but most isn't all! kevinventullo.com/2026/07/20/a...

kevinventullo.com

A Curious Property of Floating Point Geospatial Coordinates

If you store GPS coordinates as 32-bit floats, your precision in Iowa is about two feet. In central London the precision drops to half a millimeter, and at the South Pole it’s about a trillion time…

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 28/07/2026

it hadn't fully occurred to me that our new AI age is going to mean way more people just rolling the dice on every decision point in an analysis my favorite type of sum of squares is "stochastic"

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 28/07/2026

oh God I can imagine you get this constantly for visual outputs, in particular

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 28/07/2026

I've got a personal policy of not bad-mouthing open source software by individuals, which can also make this tricky. Good for the soul, but means I can only explain why my tool makes a choice, not necessarily why I think the other one is wrong

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 28/07/2026

I don't blame folks for not deeply investigating the implementations of their software -- this is why packages exist after all -- but periodically I get bug reports that X doesn't match Y package and: yes! on purpose! that's the reason X is there at all 😂

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 28/07/2026

"people just assume languages and packages will all agree" This is absolutely true, which is also annoying as a package author -- a lot of my software does something similar to other packages, but makes different choices, because I think they're better! And often users assume it should be identical

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terra firma, terra eterna 🚱🌉 @kavi.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Becoming a conspiracy theorist that Wu and Hochul switched freaky Friday style sometime in 2025

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 24/07/2026

this Internet rando is glad you made it ♥️

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/07/2026

a cup is a unit defined only in the heart

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/07/2026

five cups ~= two Starbucks larges ~= 1.18L which is a massive step down from the levels that got me through the PhD

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 20/07/2026

I will no longer accept any sass about my liter-a-day habit

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Lawrence Vulis @lvulis.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Lowkey a #climaterisk paper for those of us involved in spatial modelling

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Mike Mahoney @mikemahoney218.com · 17/07/2026

As the world warms, precipitation across a lot of North America is becoming "flashier" which means it can't enter the soil as well. That's meant more drought, which makes fires dramatically worse than in the past. Pretty accessible explanation here: theconversation.com/the-us-is-se...

theconversation.com

The US is seeing stronger storms, so why are droughts getting worse?

Even though annual precipitation is rising nationally, the landscape is drying out more rapidly. That’s changing the water cycle.

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