iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

At least now the whole world shares my ire for academics who only use tertiary sources

>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Went to see Ghost in the Shell (1995) the other week because it was doing a theatrical screening and maybe it was the big screen or the company I was keeping but the horniness of the camera really intruded on the experience. Male gaze tragedy

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The end of that hit me like a truck

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The dominant use-case right now seems to be furry chat servers. A bit marginal. So Palmer Lucky is now of course making killer drone swarms orchestrated by NixOS in between Hitler salutes. Maybe he'll show us how we're living in the future again with this one

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I thought VR was silly early on until a friend of mine let me use their headset, and I admit it's a compelling experience, but mass adoption seems gated less by the readiness of the technology (it's been pretty good for a while) and more by whether it can find a use-case.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Is it a hot take to hold that torturing insects and inanimate objects is still not ok? Because it really doesn't seem ok. Knowing cruelty seems bad irrespective of whether one credibly believes its object is capable of morally important suffering.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hey not to be a cop but this strikes me as being in pretty poor taste...

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Then besides this there's the activist sensibility of the left that seems to revile developing a good grasp for economics or accounting, which does them few favours and enables the party right even though they're really no better

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I wonder how far left-yimbyism can actually go when the main constituencies of the social democratic party remain upper-middle-class degree havers and unions that have a vested interest in defending the retirement savings their members have entrusted to Black Rock

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

But a discomfort of mine is that, though the left parties are starting to acknowledge that high ground rents create unaffordability and homelessness, the role of the CLC within the NDP (I say this as a fairly devoted trade unionist) makes them too defensive of unions' actively managed pension funds

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The Canadian left seems to be slowly moving away from its rigid anti-developer stance, which is good because the left position has generally been to further discipline developers to the point of restricting housing supply, while never putting up enough money to grow the public housing stock

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Why does a sincere desire need a reason beyond its sincerity? idk if it makes sense to ground that in some separate Objective Reality. A cis woman sincerely desires to be a woman; does she need anything else to justify it? She can have a hysterectomy, her womanhood remains in all its sincerity

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Considering also none of the American company care to economize at the software level to within even within two orders of magnitude as DeepSeek, I have a low confidence that low power chips would have a very wide uptake right now

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Neuromorphics don't even really have standard units at the level of an electronic circuit that any old foundry can just print in great quantity to the requisite tolerance, in the same way that digital circuits have logic gates that are made up of configurations of transistors

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Assuming the former problem is harder to solve, getting power savings at inference is all well and good, but we care about the relationship between watts, model accuracy, and throughput. Good as we may be, can fixed point be beaten? I'm not sure I have the answer, even if napkin math says probably

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There are two sort of longstanding hurdles: one is that neuromorphics tend to be imprecise, but SGD performs badly when you decrease precision, and the other is that there's no dominant general-purpose neuromorphic architecture that is performant for a wide variety of network architectures

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm not a very famous chip guy but I know a couple things about neuromorphics. An open and yet unanswered question is whether some architectures hewing closer to the conventional (like TPUs) get you most of the way without the difficulty of analogue circuit design

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Funny how Palantir thinks it can control everyone's lives with algorithms and right wing figures think you can run the state with algorithms and Altman thinks you can replace every worker with algorithms and Black Rock wants to allocate capital with algorithms but oh economic planning is impossible

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This one actually makes more sense because Ögedei was famously an alcoholic

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

omg you actually transliterate his name "Poutine" over there

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Partly tho I think the issue here is an artifact of the poverty of process models of affect in the computational cogsci and phil of mind literature. We have some idea of what we'd want representations and intentionality to look like, but accounts of pain involve a lot of "something something qualia"

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I see what you're saying but I think it's weaker than you're intuiting. Weaker coactivation of embodied pain phrases may naturally arise from a paucity of data about embodied behaviour, irrespective of any internal properties the model may have. I don't think there's a need to reference self-concept

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

But I've been saying that putting these things in the torment nexus is questionable in at least the same sense as torturing ants is since "I have been a good Bing". I wouldn't agree they're morally equivalent to a human or animal but like... why would you even want to play like that, ygm?

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Like, just emulating human behaviour will get you to acting to relieve the harm-state, whether or not that state has any valence in a sense we would find meaningful. That doesn't mean there must be none, it just means that it doesn't add anything over and above what the harm representation indicates

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Ok so while I would recommend a precautionary principle, "representation", depending on how the term is interpreted, can be a trivial property, while acting to relieve harm is a behaviour that doesn't necessarily systematically relate to affective states, so this may be a deficient definitions thing

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I guess the hot take is rights campaigning isn't just about being loud enough with the correct message until everyone's brow-beaten into having the correct ontological foundations (though that is necessary), it involves making the minority struggle legible, both on a personal and intellectual basis

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So, given the intuition that biology comes in natural kinds is deeply engrained, how do you suppose communication should change, and change such that it's not so easily brushed off as academic word salad, as in the attitude summarized in the cinematography of that one overplayed Matt Walsh clip?

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

It works differently than sex as people are taught everything evolved in school, so despite not understanding how it happened, most take it on faith that it did, except for creationists. However, the intuition that the flagellum is a discrete kind rather than a post-hoc label on a fuzzy blob remains

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Somewhat tangential, but I'm taken by the series Stated Clearly did on the evolution of the flagellum. That organelles "appear" to be natural kinds causes people without a college education in biology to, sometimes, balk at the idea that they might have evolved in an (almost) continuous process

m.youtube.com

How did bacterial flagella evolve? 01: Here's what we know

YouTube video by Stated Clearly

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

... hearing the truth that biological kinds are an imperfect labelling convention at best is just confusing, even among people who don't subscribe to the theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The dominant intuition is that men and women have essential innate cognitive differences

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Queers and people literate enough to parse feminist literature understand this ok but when biology is taught from grade 1 as this very categorical thing whose main role in society is classifying all the animals and all the organs of the body and so on...

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I agree with you on the ontological count but I wonder about the practicalities. Most people don't know shit about biology. If you explain that sex isn't a natural category to begin with, because biology doesn't have natural categories, you can see the little apple spinny wheel hover over their head

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Ohhhhh that's what this is about... honestly idk the sincerity of that move, it's true capex is unsustainable but they've all already spent enough that it feels like they're locked into spending like it's AGI or bust, and slowing down would seem to add cost and risk cooling the hype

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I'm confused, what's the context?

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

coming soon: maximalist y2k girl internet desktop decoration designed by those two newgrounds terfs who feebly deny they're a couple with 8 million dollars of seed capital for some reason

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Knowing twitter tho this is 100% a pisstake

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Fun fact: ASPD is currently believed to be at least partly traumagenic in most cases. Weaponizing trauma to excuse immoral behaviour? In my pop mental illness discourse? It's more likely than you think.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The American Empire seems to persist throughout every adaptation (though I don't recall if it's referred to as such in the 1995 movie), amusingly even though its existence suggests the balkanization of the US.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Interesting oversight: they *didn't* alter references to Balochistan and Khorasan, despite the fact that they *are* real places, if not countries. But given Baloch separatism you'd think that would be more sensitive, not less. I wonder if the writers just didn't notice.

Panel from the Ghost in the Shell manga (ch. 6). Batou says to a man he's tied up, "during the war, you were a POW in either Khorassan or Baluchistan, weren't you!?". The English trade paperback features some weird and old timey transliterations, and some that are actually just mangled.

Same scene from the anime. Batou says, "During the war, you were held prisoner in Khorasan or Balochistan, am I right?"

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The MAG union is most likely a substitute for the USSR, though it may be that weird "Ameri-Soviet" rump state (contextually idt so but there have been some weird translations). Seems to me Volgarena/MAG union = Russia/Soviet Union, based on context. Refs to the American Empire are preserved

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

People on the internet will just say whatever about us, huh.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

But what's it gonna change to say so? I couldn't tell you

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Man this app is knives out 24 hours a day

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Oh dear. I don't think I'm looking forward to this.

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Contextually that might have been a poor choice of words. I mean as a general policy I don't keep up to date on the going controversies of the foss community, because it gets very personal and ugly. Because I don't do that in general I didn't hear about this guy. I'm not a web developer so idk him

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Yea I saw this blog post he wrote that was shockingly racist, lowkey-but-not-lowkey supporting Tommy Robinson, and then I found out his script doesn't include a manual partition option, and for the life of me I can't decide which is worse. Either way, probably merits the death penalty

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Nah I try to keep an arm's length from foss community drama; usually serves me well

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I'd praise the whole sending money to hyprland bit but as evidenced by the fact that I don't know how to spell hyprland I am an xmonad user and will keep using my treasured slightly buggy abandonware until x11 is bumped into the aur

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>>= @noologist.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Ah you know just googling it does work sometimes. Man, this guy's a prick.

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