iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

“It will perhaps one day be necessary to forbid actually doing what today science fiction is limited to dreaming about. But have not dreams always transgressed into the realm of the forbidden? So let us dream along with Parfit. …

131

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Making casarecce con le sarde tonight, paired (appropriately) with a Sardinian white wine.

170

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I find the "digestion" metaphor (i.e., mathematicians "digesting" AI-generated proofs) vulgar and off-putting. It's a sign of the times, genuine intellectuals like Yuri Manin are being replaced by a new generation whose identity is shaped by narrow professionalization and impoverished imagination.

3160

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

this week’s Negroni proposition 1oz Roku gin 1oz Oka Kura sweet Japanese Bermutto sake vermouth 1oz Select Aperitivo

1130

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

absolute banger arxiv.org/abs/2609.28591

080

Reposted by Maxim Raginsky

tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 25/09/2026

here is a succinct thing I can say: "alignment"-style AI safety risks DO NOT EXIST or need remediation with LLMs as such (there are lots of other problems) and OpenAI and Anthropic are in the business of TRYING TO MAKE THEM EXIST so that they can remediate them.

718348

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“established … by a number of savants (mostly from the Soviet Union)” — LaSalle and Lefschetz, “Stability by Liapunov’s Direct Method,” 1961

050

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I see Bluesky is now speedrunning the intentional stance and multiple realizability. Okay then, carry on.

070

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

No one should be taken seriously when they say things like “update my priors” unless they can explain how to derive the Kalman filter. Desperate times call for desperate measures, people!

0303

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I’m finally doing what I should have done long ago: read Middlemarch and The Recognitions before the year ends.

2100

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

If you turn something into a benchmark with quantifiable rewards and progress metrics, don’t be surprised when the machines achieve dominance there. At that point it will be too late to gesture at intrinsic non-economic values, you’ve made them illegible (in Scott’s sense) to any outside observer.

6636

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

realizable.substack.com/p/how-to-do-...

Biological evolution has endowed us with incredible capacity for doing things with natural signs. Language is just a small part of it, and there is now a great deal of work using Transformer-like architectures on suitably tokenized nonlinguistic data (vision, motion, etc.). In fact, according to the “throwing hypothesis” put forward by the neuroscientist William Calvin, our ability to “compute” with language could have emerged by recruiting existing neuronal architectures that had evolved for better control of motion sequences, including timing, planning, and the use of forward predictive models with token-like information interfaces. If that’s the case, then “computing with words” is just a special case of “computing with signs,” the architectures for which were already present in hominid brains.

160

Reposted by Maxim Raginsky

Max Read @maxread.info · 15/09/2026

i don't like that i feel like we're all getting dragged against our will into an all-media all-the-time LessWrong thread, an insanely annoying and disorienting experience that most people do not have sufficient experience or mental preparations to deal with

18756108

Reposted by Maxim Raginsky

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Some thoughts on what Hermann Weyl's dialectic of the infinite in science and mathematics has to say about the age of AI: realizable.substack.com/p/games-with...

realizable.substack.com

Games Without Frontiers

Hermann Weyl's dialectic of the infinite in the age of AI.

3101

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A modest proposal for reorganizing the production and reproduction of mathematical knowledge, courtesy of Asimov's Second Foundation:

"If I may interrupt, Speaker - How is a change made?"
"Through the agency of the Radiant. You will find in your own case, for instance, that your mathematics will be checked rigorously by five different boards; and that you will be required to defend it against a concerted and merciless attack. Two years will then pass, and your development will be reviewed again. It has happened more than once that a seemingly perfect piece of work has uncovered its fallacies only after an induction period of months or years. Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.
"If, after two years, another examination, not less detailed than the first, still passes it, and - better still - if in the interim the young scientist has brought to light additional details, subsidiary evidence, the contribution will be added to the Plan. It was the climax of my career; it will be the climax of yours.
"The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all corrections and additions can be made through mental rapport.
There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition is yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no person-alization. It is rather a creation of all of us together. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Speaker!"
"Then, enough of that."

1162

Reposted by Maxim Raginsky

Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The Navier-Stokes fight is a perfect encapsulation of where AI development is right now: this should be really cool and exciting, and instead because of Silicon Valley egos it's become a fight over cheating, surveillance, and companies trying to get one up over the other

749682

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.” (that's me re-reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion)

060

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Some thoughts on the tension between control and AI, based on the short position talk I gave last week via Zoom at the 2026 IFAC World Congress forum dedicated to this question: realizable.substack.com/p/control-an...

realizable.substack.com

Control and AI: Looking Back to Look Forward

Toward a new control science, 2026 edition.

1153

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I was making a related argument here: realizable.substack.com/p/seeming-li...

Cautious observers will be wary of reifying the state, i.e., raising it from the status of a theoretical entity introduced only order to save the phenomena to something that is real in the sense of Ian Hacking, i.e., an entity with causal powers that we can manipulate. This sounds somewhat like behaviorism, but behaviorists like B.F. Skinner were simply hedging their bets: All talk of neural correlates of external behavior has to wait until we have made sufficient progress in neurophysiology.

1275

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Just made a Select Negroni. It’s good, but now I need to compare extensively against the one with Campari.

030

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

So, apparently IR and political science have their own version of the Lucas critique / Milton Friedman's thermostat: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Deterrence: The Elusive Dependent Variable | World Politics | Cambridge Core

Deterrence: The Elusive Dependent Variable - Volume 42 Issue 3

011

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I’m sitting here, re-reading Feynman’s lectures on physics instead of doing whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing before the start of the new semester.

1170

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

New essay by @lioneltrolling.bsky.social: “We need to have a robust public debate and understanding of just how and where we apply AI technology. Not “smash the machines” and not “let it rip” either. Is that likely to happen? Well, no, but that’s what should happen.”

unpopularfront.news

Marx, Keynes, and A.I.

Coercive Competition and the Future of Work

0111

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The Bullshit Job (my riff on The Desk Job cocktail from Cure in Rochester, NY) 3/4oz Cardamaro 3/4oz Cynar 3/4oz Plantation OFTD overproof rum 3/4oz Ron Zacapa 23

0110

Reposted by Maxim Raginsky

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

One of my favorite references to petty academic feuds in the Renaissance, from Anthony Grafton's introduction to NYRB edition of Cardano's _The Book of My Life_:

"His troubles began to arrive in battalion strength, more-over, just when his career reached its peak. He moved to the ancient university of Bologna in 1562, hoping to find a haven from his colleagues' plots and attacks. But in Bologna too, his colleagues criticized him in public and undermined him in private. His enemies advised his students to study with others, assigned his favorite lecture times to rival teachers,"

"and then complained about his courses' low enrollments. His eldest son, whom he adored and saw as endowed with immense promise, was arrested, condemned, and executed for poisoning his wife, and Cardano found himself forced to expel his younger son from his house as a thief."

191

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

An excellent essay on taste by @celinenguyen.bsky.social, framing it as an ongoing process of selective exposure, a perpetual interaction between one’s evolving internal values and a flow of external cues, suggestions, recommendations, chance encounters, and human relationships.

asteriskmag.com

Why We Like Things

What Silicon Valley gets wrong about taste.

2121

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

“Human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.” nautil.us/what-makes-h...

nautil.us

What Makes Humans Stupid

What Makes Humans Stupid: It takes intelligence to get things spectacularly wrong. An essay on our undoing.

0141

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Listening to early Teenage Fanclub makes me sad. The goof kind of sad, but still.

010

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Cynar Spritz with a couple of dashes of Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse:

1180

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

cold summer borscht + a dirty gin martini

070

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Stanislaw Lem, _His Master's Voice_:

"Not for a minute did I put stock in any of the conjectures
about the signal. The telegraphed individual, the blueprint of
the “great brain,” of the plasmic “informational machine,” of
the synthetic “ruler” who was to conquer Earth— all this was
borrowed from the poverty- stricken repertoire of ideas which
civilization, in its current technological form, had at its disposal.
These imaginings were a reflection— much like the themes of
science- fiction novels— of society, and of society primarily in its
American version, whose export outside the States prospered
around the middle of the century. They were either fashion-
able novelties or else conceptions built on the game principle
“it’s them or us”— and never did the insipidity of invention, its
enchainment to Earth in the narrow channel of historical time,
appear more obvious to me than when I heard these theories,
seemingly bold but in reality pathetically naïve."

1154

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I’ve been watching the Last Meal series on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel, and so I got to thinking: what would I want for my last meal on Earth? Here goes: * extra dry gin martini with three olives and the trio of snacks from Bemelmans * traditional Greek salad

120

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

So apparently my soon-to-be-12yo daughter can do the prefect bene gesserit voice. Achievement unlocked, I guess?

1170

Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I was in the Bay Area over the weekend, and Alyosha Efros twisted my arm to give a talk in his weekly research group meeting and to "keep it entertaining." I took this as an opportunity to think of five philosophy papers everyone working on AI/ML should read. realizable.substack.com/p/five-philo...

realizable.substack.com

Five Philosophy Papers Everyone* Should Read

*in AI/ML

3477