iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 9h

These friends are idiots 🤣 [Lovingly].

Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The guy openly ran his trial to ensure the death penalty to become a martyr. Let's roll him out there in his wheel chair and shoot him on live TV 🙄.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I'm thankful to be in one of the states that uses the Missouri Plan. Which, to paraphrase the old saying, "Is the worst system of selecting judges except all the other forms that have been tried."

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Seth Rogan tried to educate the public on this issue in Superbad. We didn't learn.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I got three quotes for a simple mini split install this summer. They told me the time estimate and labor came out to be 8-10X what I charge as a lawyer lol. I did it myself and it took me 3-4X as long, but now when friends come over we can look up at the unit and do King of the Hill grunts.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think that last part is the thing. I just looked back at the top 5 of the year for 2025. I've only heard #3 and #5. The monoculture is gone (and that's probably ok!) Also everyone on this website is 38, we used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" is!

static.klipy.com

Grampa Simpson's Stern Warning

ALT: Grampa Simpson's Stern Warning

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The person needs to provide the cougars constant IV fluids or they cease to exist. The fluids cost the person millions of dollars. This analogy is a little strained...

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yeah, it may have taken Walter until the finale to understand he was the villain, but the viewer should have seen him as an antihero at best by the second episode, and clearly as a villain by the end of S2. I mean he's listed as one of the examples of a villain protagonist on the wiki article!

en.wikipedia.org

Protagonist - Wikipedia

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

We're in a Country Music Renaissance and people are in the comments making Beer Truck Jeans Girl jokes like it's a peak 2015 Bro-Country Song.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Better do a once around the house to make sure all the gutters and downspouts are working right. Make time to pause, look up and say "mmhmmp."

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

go full Musk "we have created AI God" to explain.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I would very much agree that it's not important here! There's absolutely amazing work being done on this frontier more along the lines of "we built a superpowered pattern recognition tool that's connecting dots in human knowledge that no human has been able to connect" that doesn't require us to

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

First time and thinking there are tiny people inside.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It is clear: They're not doing logic gate calculations like a GPU is. Neurons have this wild analog thing going on. And the results of LLM outputs are completely explicable without consciousness! There's no need to add that layer, and doing so kind of feels like someone watching TV for the

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The mechanisms are so different that there should be a pretty incredible burden to show consciousness. I know I said this elsewhere in the thread, but the mechanism of a GPU is closer to a book or a door lock than it is a butterfly. We don't know exactly why neurons do what they do, but

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Of course it could arise elsewhere. But unlike consciousness that arises from neurons, we understand very well what GPUs are doing, and there's not really a more plausible explanation for how that could lead to consciousness than there is that a typewriter could if you could just type 10000x faster.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I wouldn't expect a book to become conscious even if it had more words than there are atoms in the galaxy.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I don't think you need a 'divine spark' to say organisms and computers are fundamentally different things, doing completely different things, with hardware that does different things. Like at a very fundamental level an LLM is closer to a really long choose your own adventure book than a honey bee.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Well then we're back here lol. Idk how something that isn't conscious could understand anything. If we're using "understand" not to mean "a mind that is thoroughly familiar with the character of X," but "incorporates X with other input to create Y," then... I guess the calculator does understand 2.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It can make a calculation that has never been made before. Which isn't quite the same thing as making a new number.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

a computer that's doing really amazing math.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A calculator can easily create a sum that's never been created before. I don't think there's any reason only humans would be capable of understanding. But "understanding" with its common use would imply consciousness, and consciousness (or understanding) doesn't seem relevant to

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

(Yes, this is simplified, but they're all math, which computers have done from the beginning) We can acknowledge that they can do incredible things without unnecessarily anthropomorphizing them.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I don't see how it follows from that that the computer now "understands" anything. Computers have been doing incomprehensibly complex math pretty much from the beginning. The heart of LLMs themselves is a randomized algorithm, just more incredibly complex math.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Why is that necessary? A calculator doesn't need to understand 2 to tell me 2+3=5. This whole thread might come down to "what are we using 'understand'" to mean here?

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Like, neurons and computer chips are just doing fundamentally different things, and all consciousness we've seen has come from neurons. Why are we assuming that logic gates doing math will make consciousness if the math gets complex enough? But I'm just some idiot, not a computer doctor.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The "is the software of an LLM sophisticated enough to be conscious?" question also often skips past the "Is the hardware computers run on sufficient to become conscious?" which kind of seems like the bigger question to me.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Ricketts is unpopular in Nebraska (10 points underwater the last I saw). He's been around state politics over a decade and got into the Senate through... Questionable means. He's a much better foil for the story Osborn's trying to tell than Fischer was, on top of the national environment.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

That was the crushing thing. It was a bourbon barrel aged breakfast stout. I make sure to carry a bottle opener on my keychain now out of respect.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I tried this once and ended up with half the beer on the floor. I'm not even a Manhattan lawyer!

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Mazda, too. Small screen for navigation, but audio and temperature is all buttons and knobs.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

A running joke in the Paradox community is when you have 1,000 hours in a game, you've completed the tutorial. I've played so so many hours in these games (HOI4 is my favorite, but Europa Universalis and Stellaris too) and I still learn new things every game.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

resources so the underlying data was accurate, and the formulas all worked.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The work one was straightforward enough it was pretty easy to check. Just tedious, rolling individual monthly data into group annual data. The hobby one was creating a homebrew beer recipe calculator that included databases of grain and hop stats. It pulled those from publicly available club

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The spreadsheet build angle is pretty neat. I had ideas for two massive spreadsheets in the back of my mind for a while, one for work, one for a hobby. I knew I could do them, but it would take hours of manual formula entry so I never started. Went from idea to final in about five minutes w claude.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Dear Theodosia made it into my work playlist once shortly after my first was born and my much too short paternity leave was over. "IT'S NOTHING JEANINE SHUT THE DOOR."

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Are you spending much resources to keep Africa, or is that a "we'll come back for that later" kind of thing?

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

"We don't need to do dumb socialist stuff." "Well were you aware that Trump does dumb socialist stuff?" This is not the burn you think it is 😂

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Personally my quick and dirty rule has been "are you asking it to replace your brain, or your fingers?" If it's the former, that's not gonna end well. The latter has a lot of upside. "Next gen word processor/search engine/ctrl+F," etc. Also building spreadsheets or simple Google Scripts.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Your state's Legal Aid probably has a renter's rights guide. Feed it that and it'll be less likely to tell you something silly!

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Is that any different from the one above? Profit maximizing is a premise of the laws of supply and demand.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

That's probably a little too much complexity for a calculator. Most of the options in the above calculator are actual congressional proposals that have been scored by the CBO.

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Can I be mean and ask you to make a more accurate definition of capitalism in the length of two to three skeets?

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Jeff of the Corn @nejeff.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I obviously understand all those things in depth, but in case someone else stumbles on this thread, is the takeaway "things are mostly fine?"

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