iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

This article by Simon Tam (of Matal v. Tam) is an amazing practical deconstruction of public epistemology and should be taught in political philosophy classes. These questions are going to be ever more important. www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/tam.…

010 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

@valkyrie.hacker.gf TFW Republicans notice the endgame of socialized medicine can be monopoly authoritarian biopolitics and start tripping over each other to join the Jacobin crowd... (...who will still be crying "no such thing as horseshoe theory....")

021 2

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

@thomasjwebb Selfishly, I've always wanted a pet trilobite. So cute! But depending on if "recently" is millions or merely thousands of years, I'd love to revive silphium if only to undo one of the tiny number of cases of a plant going extinct from overharvesting. But also just to know the genetics.

100 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

My current working hypothesis: * The reason we're going to be living with LLM code generators for a long time is not that they write good code but that most of the world is made of bad code, and most demand for new code is for bad code. * The demand for bad code is nearly limitless, and it makes […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

@thomasjwebb I work in a research lab, so... yeah, familiar situation :-)

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

@thomasjwebb I love what I've done with Rust, but I also help maintain a couple of C++ codebases orders of magnitude larger than those projects, and I have no idea how Rust's cognitive demands would scale. Rust porting (esp. for things like python bindings where memory management gets […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

100 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

@thomasjwebb An absolutely enormous number IMO -- 80% easily. Modern C++ with its smart pointers and good RAII scoping patterns is hugely better. I couldn't write the sort of bugs I wrote in 1999 if I tried. But there's also a lot more code today than there was in 1999; that remaining 20% is […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

100 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

@futurebird Some models at least have one of the all time best power buttons. Just a big chunky raised button that screams "This is a button for your feet! This is the only button you will ever need!"

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

@grammargirl Big talk from the industry that gave us Plaid, aka "plaintext username and password as a service".

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

The actions of a state cannot morally authorize the killing of "its" people. The alternative is monstrous.

010 1

Reposted by Grant Gould

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

By all means let's talk about economics, jobs, the journal system, human ability to understand, what the point of math is, etc. But let's start by believing what's in front of our own eyes!

91622 162

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

I guess Bluesky has at last achieved its final form and blocked every last user. Internet accomplished.

A bluesky error message, "Unable to resolve handle"

093 9

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

So um that bluesky "composable moderation" thing doesn't seem to be going so hot does it?

000 0

Reposted by Grant Gould

SpookJ 👻 @snoopj.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Happy "Charles Darwin is poorly today" Day to those who celebrate 165 years ago today, Charles Darwin was having a rough one

Photo of Charles Darwin's hand-written journal entry from 1 Oct 1861 and digitized text of same

"But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."

02896 96

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

@jacobtlevy.bsky.social This piece, for all its many virtues, misses anti-democracy's best argument: The word "accountability" appears here just once, and in the context of the classical versus the modern. Democracy effectively places the deciders -- the electoral victors -- beyond […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

I can hate nearly everything about the bay area but I cannot hate these perfect blue morning skies. Y'all got that bit right.

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

No city in this world can hide the smell when people have no private place to shit.

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

@aaronrosspowell.com I think immediately of how often the AI agents I am benchmarking, quite capable of writing the code I requested, given the chance will raid my archives to find answers from other AI agents I benchmarked previously and post those instead. Build the perfect predator, get the […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

100 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

I hate New York City and I hate that I love New York City and I love New York City so much. This place is a huge beautiful monster. A huge amazing work of human art made entirely out of panic attacks. You beautiful beautiful people; I yearn to escape you all.

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social 5%, 80%, 5%, and 80%. I coauthored a statistics textbook for biologists, and some of the commonplace techniques used in the field were _wild_. Probably much better today, but I think the overwhelming majority of papers have at least one "we picked the wrong ANOVA" […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

@emptywheel.bsky.social I'm dealing with all of that this week. My Mom's principal login method is the "forgot password" link and she interprets phone 2FA requests as something like spam ("I only use [whatever site] on my computer -- why are they on my phone now? [block&report]."). To say that […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social ... this, in a nutshell, is why I remain bullish on fediverse.

000 0

Reposted by Grant Gould

Aaron Ross Powell @aaronrosspowell.com · 07/09/2026

Physical spaces do real cognitive work for us. You don’t need a monk's equanimity to ride the metro, because the nature of the space and the unspoken contract of civil inattention keep the press of strangers from feeling like an intolerable boundary violation.

241 4

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social ... and this is why you should add oats to your cookies. Also, the Bob's Red Mill extra-thick rolled oats are stupendous for this, and for everything else.

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

@heidilifeldman Pretty soon people are going to notice the same thing about the House of Representatives.

010 1

Reposted by Grant Gould

Andrea @valkyrie.hacker.gf · 02/09/2026

The alleged dark matter direct detection: indico-icehap.phys.s.chiba-u.ac.jp/event/3/cont...

152 5

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

This code is solidly SE(2) and yet using f'ing versor quaternions to do it. I dunno guys I think embedding material reality in SE(3) was a mistake.

000 0

Reposted by Grant Gould

Technology Connections @techconnectify.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I remember learning in kindergarten that HOMES was a useful acronym for remembering the five great lakes. A bit on the nose to change it to SHAME, isn't it?

401627265 1.6K

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

[Long post: Surprisingly good customer service; Eero (!)] I was all set here to post a very mean post about Eero here, but actually I am going to praise them instead. Eero, if you don't know, is the cargo shorts of wifi mesh APs, the thing for when you have given up on being cool and just […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social Also it allowed them to have the only actually funny April Fools jokes anywhere, because they were already limning the edge of plausibility.

140 4

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social Around here that's "New Haven style" pizza (or "apizza"), and highly sought-after from the approximately three places that do it well (i.e. with impossibly high heat ovens).

100 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

@darren www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/4930… "You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!"

000 0

Reposted by Grant Gould

Nicholas Sarwark @sarwark.org · 15/08/2026

Written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1973: “Corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles....Around the year 2023 the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” Impeach, remove, investigate, prosecute. #IRIP

“If the Nixon White House escapes the legal consequences of its illegal behavior, why will future Presidents and their associates not suppose themselves entitled to do what the Nixon White House has done? Only condign punishment will restore the popular faith in the presidency ans deter future Presidents from illegal conduct - so long, at least, as Watergate remains a vivid memory. Corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. That suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the presidency against its latent criminal impulse for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” -written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 1973

Original source: https://www.facebook.com/tim.harris.1447/posts/pfbid02F7oVGWc5cBcGtkrTe2CJ9wS8MHHLCg7UYpNB58APnTHdtxU3W8sJ1XMu3AUH1szLl

001 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social (A great way to encounter to this stuff -- especially the forgotten pulpy stuff history has left aside -- is to do distributed proofreading for Project Gutenberg.) And yes, you can set your watch by when the husband, fiancee, father, brothers, and an unlucky cousin […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

@0xabad1dea My mother who was a writer had a huge stash of Blackwing 602s with these glorious wide soft erasers that worked impossibly well. I stole pencil after pencil from that stash, blissfully unaware that that pencil was years out of production and these were a fossil resource from an […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social I think the hypothetical good case is that the tiny slice of the universe that is habitable to humans is nearly irrelevant in comparison to the much larger slice of the universe that is habitable to machine intelligences, and so they'll probably just fuck off and […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

010 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

Seems like you can equally read this as "air purifiers don't work WHEN people turn them off" or "air purifiers don't work BECAUSE people turn them off" depending on whom you consider to have more agency, researchers or patients.

000 0

Reposted by Grant Gould

abadidea @0xabad1dea.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

I'm now imagining a whole pantheon that you have to proactively invoke for different flaws that you know your code contains. Athena forgives this lack of wisdom. Thor forgives this waste of electricity. Shennong forgives this lack of test coverage

0184 18

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social The prerequisite for that is to actually _like_ the city. And NYC for whatever reason has very little tradition of mayors who like the city and want to be there.

010 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Sichuan peppercorn + Dr Pepper is an amazing flavor combination and the DrPepper people should buy this idea from me for infinity dollars.

010 1

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

[silly internet games] Okay, I had radically misunderstood how to score optimize this game. I get it a little better now.

010 1

Reposted by Grant Gould

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple.dmv.community.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026

🔌 Slate Auto's electric truck ships with no modem at all, and that's the privacy story. The startup's $24,950 EV pickup has no built-in cellular connection, so the company physically can't track your location, remote-access the car, or pull data from it. A phone app handles settings and […]

dmv.community

Original post on dmv.community

5639 39

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

Okay, I think I totally smushed it today.

A 474 point perfect game on today's daily smush

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

@quillmatiq.com Doesn't this amount to "if you get banned on bluesky you are banned from your phone"?

001 1

Reposted by Grant Gould

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The most interesting thing about automated theorem provers using machine learning is that whenever I'm trying to read a thread and realize it's gotten way too technical for me, I notice all the avatars are furries.

524535 245

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

My three worst transit takes: * Subway tokens were the only good fare collection system that ever existed; it's all expensive regression from there. * The old Penn Station is better than the new Penn Station (also "train hall" sounds like a mistranslation from Martian). * Inter-city bus lines […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

000 0

Grant Gould @nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

Who the fuck uses a fucking leafblower in fucking July?

000 0