iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I just got Jev running as a subagent under Claude. First task: score nearly 12,000 papers for relevance to a particular project. Claude predicted: "A full pass over all 11,926 titles comes to about 5M tokens, around $0.20." It ended up costing closer to $0.44 and took 15 minutes.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A new BFF visualization: www.youtube.com/shorts/yUnn_... Each row is the genome of a single organism. The soup starts out sparse and random and dead; slowly it gets more concentrated and active; then a replicator appears, and the soup turns into almost entirely (approximate) copies of one genome.

youtube.com

BFF soup

This is a direct view into the "soup" of a run of the BFF artificia...

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Am I the only one who read "We must pace the frontier" as "We're running out of money and need to reduce our burn rate"?

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Clone Fantasy Football (Soccer): You choose one player and your entire team consists of copies of that player. In other words, you're looking for the highest quality, most balanced player possible; good offense, good defense, good running, good passing, good ball handling ... good at everything.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Gravitational time dilation has several formulas: linear (1 + 𝚽/c²), exponential exp(𝚽/c²), and square root sqrt(1 + 2𝚽/c²). Just realized these can all be expressed as members of a single parameterized power law (1 + p𝚽/c²)^(1/p), with sqrt p=2, linear p=1, and exponential the limit as p -> 0.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

When I was a kid, our president was a corrupt criminal, we were losing an overseas war against a much weaker opponent, men were about to go to the moon, and everyone worried that corporations with large computers were going to take over. Today's kids can't possibly appreciate what that was like. :-|

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

My first web app is running: treerings.howardalandman.org It's a viewer for the European tree-ring database. Each rectangle is one log. Hover to see short info; click for full data. Try the "Before 1 CE" setting for fewer logs and a less cluttered view. Any feedback appreciated.

treerings.howardalandman.org

European Tree-Ring Archive

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

There is a chance that polyamory principles can prevent the AI apocalypse. :-)

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Claude Code has a /doctor command to diagnose and fix problems with your setup. But it returned "Your setup is unusually clean — no user-installed skills, no hooks, no MCP servers configured locally, one plugin that's actually being used, and both CLAUDE.md files are lean." Clean living FTW. 🙂

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

My paper for the DICE2026 conference in Tuscany in early October is up on ResearchGate. My new motto: Ce point peut paraître étrange, mais il l’est en réalité moins qu’il ne semble. “This point may seem strange, but in reality it is less so than it appears.” - Louis de Broglie (1924)

researchgate.net

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Word of the day: mojibake n.: the garbled, unreadable text that appears when a computer reads text using the wrong character set, commonly presenting as random symbols, question marks, or foreign letters. The term comes from Japanese words meaning "character transformation".

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Kymograph of the lengths of interactions in BFF. The "alive" (post-replicator) soup stays fuzzy for a while, but soon settles into a "parity comb" where even-length interactions outnumber odd-length ones. We don't know why this happens. More research needed ...

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Farewell Claude Fable 5, no longer included in the Pro ($20/month) plan. It's the first AI I've worked with that was near-peer. We made substantial progress on physics, research wikis, visualization of artificial life programs, and formulating questions about Ventromedial PreFrontal Cortex.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

176 runs of the BFF artificial life system. All the random initializations form a tight blob, and follow the same arc towards a quasi-stable attractor on the right. But then replicators start going off like popcorn. This is the ALife equivalent of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. :-)

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

The slide show for my May 29 talk at the **2026 Mini-Symposium on Quantum Trajectories** is up on ResearchGate. It's a bit long at 93 slides; the talk might go 1.5 hours. Any feedback appreciated. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

researchgate.net

(PDF) Introduction to Quantum Time Dilation Theories

PDF | We give an overview of a class of theories that predict time-dilation-like effects for all potentials (analogous to gravitational time dilation).... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Designed a neural net training algorithm (WBP). No significant accuracy effect (graph at right), but MUCH better than the Adam algorithm at finding "broad" or "flat" (less sharp) minima. In this run we can see it bottoming out around 650 while Adam gets stuck around 1000; a 35% reduction.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Top 3 panels are metrics from the BFF paper. Bottom panel is 3 new metrics I designed. There are many bursts of activity changing the write behavior of the replicators (green line), while the distribution of operations executed (red & blue) is relatively stable. #Alife

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

New paper (on artificial life) up on ResearchGate www.researchgate.net/.../40326660.... with video at youtu.be/GJMAZ6nMz7k

researchgate.net

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

From a recent Claude chat: "the bottleneck isn't capability, it's quality governance in the face of human fallibility and institutional dysfunction. And the AI intervention that matters most isn't "AI does the work" but "AI enforces standards that humans can't or won't enforce consistently."

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Yesterday I noticed that the bands of looping programs in BFF runs formed a kind of fractal structure. Today, I tried comparing multiple runs with different seeds, and found that the fractal structure is roughly the same in all runs. Here are 5 runs (seeds 15-19), with replicators in 15.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

First-ever animated movie of a phase transition to replicators inside the BFF artificial life program. Crudely, Y-axis = size of program and X-axis = ops executed. The colormap could use some work. :-) @blaiseaguera #Alife #ArtificialIntelligence

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Running the BFF ALife system on Google Colab. Today I saw my first replicators. The compressed size of the soup drops sharply when multiple copies of the same string appear. The total amount of computation starts low then explodes. #ArtificialLife #ALife #DigitalSoup

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

The Tao Te Ching says: "Man follows the earth. The earth follows the universe. The universe follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself." On social media now, we've short-circuited that, but it's still not satisfying. Man follows the Tao, but the Tao doesn't follow Man back. :-)

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I will have 12 minutes to make my case. :-) tinyurl.com/QTDKUF

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

My poster for the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. Use the QR code or tinyurl.com/QTDKUF to see the full paper (although I plan to update it before next week).

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

I finally found the 2019 Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival video that they interviewed me for: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WII... I get a lot of screen time!

youtube.com

JRMF 2019: 12 Years of Joyful Math

YouTube video by Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Sagittal slices through my brain, as an animated GIF. Carol told me it's a pretty ordinary-looking brain, which made me sad, so then she added that it's larger than normal and had to be shrunk to fit onto the standard brain map, which made me feel better. :-)

A movie of brain slices starting at one ear and ending at the other

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Me, demonstrating levitation at Burning Man 1996. The mast in the background marks the center of Weird Blinking Lights camp. This photo has not been modified or edited in any way, except that I cropped it slightly to remove the trampoline. :-)

A man floating in the air, as several people watch, in front of some tents and vehicles

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

When Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, we should all remember that accepting a pardon is admitting guilt. So Hunter was GUILTY all along. The same logic will apply, of course, to the hundreds of people Trump will pardon as soon as he takes office.

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ninektheobscure.bsky.social @ninektheobscure.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Imagine a 2 panel cartoon: Panel 1: 10 year old Putin comes running into the kitchen crying and screaming "Mommy, mommy!". Mom asks "What's wrong, Vlad?" Panel 2: Putin points outside, where we see 10 year old Zelensky standing with fists clenched. "He hit me back!" :-)

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