iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 11h

This remains one of my favorite satirical projects of all time

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 28/09/2026

Cool!! I'll be heading to work momentarily, but let's talk about the details sometime soon!

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 28/09/2026

Probably Vampire! If it's still available!

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

His posts are generic follow farming bot network stuff.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I have a new follower in @paulquin.com , whose handle _does_ point to a real website, but it looks like it was obviously made completely without care. (black text on a black background) and refers to him as Mark.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

To see it in Python, trigger shutdown_async_gens from an async generator that's not stopped at an await point.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

It failed to fail, but it failed to fail successfully. So it failed.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Today I got Python to throw an exception representing that it could not throw an exception. The exception was thrown successfully.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

So this to me is the thing where -- _even if everything else were somehow shown to be bad and counterfeit_ -- I would never turn it off. I think a lot of people's problems are like this (albeit probably less significant) and those people should definitely try AI.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

The thing is, nothing smaller than an LLM can do a good job on this. We're totally locked into using one. If the task is done badly, or not done at all, a person may die.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

It's too complex for something other than an LLM to accomplish, but not by a huge margin. Even weak LLMs do a serviceable job -- it's one of the first things we started doing, and at the time we used Claude 3 Sonnet. Claude 3 Sonnet performed great.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

To be specific, there's a specific recurring task at my work that I kind of just use as the indicator for this. Think of it as reading a dashboard and sending a summary of what the dashboard says.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I appreciate this! I've occasionally had to tiptoe around this subject. I kind of wish people would see me as "wrong" rather than "The Enemy." I try not to post enough info about myself to be doxxed, but my use of AI has saved several lives at this point, so I'm very much in "no turning back" mode.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I hope it's never necessary for _your_ line of work and I hope the frankly insulting attempts to force you to use it against your consent will eventually stop.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

If your position is "Okay, but I just don't want to hear about or interact with any of this," that was my opinion basically until it became professionally necessary to use LLMs to do work that otherwise would have been impossible for me.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Even if you imagine me to be a delusional person who is completely wrong, I seriously ask you to evaluate what kind of position you're putting me in conversationally -- is it just blackmail? Don't blackmail me.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

... Which is a problem for me, because generally when I talk about AI the first response from at least one person will be a demand that I tell them they are right. (Usually before telling me what they actually believe.)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I do not require people to agree with me but I suppose I require some respect for my position and some nuance. If your comments on the situation are a cliche from 2024, I just don't think the odds that you have thoughts of value on this topic are very high.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

At least one of my bipolar episodes was triggered by the fucking existence of OpenClaw.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Beyond that, I have broad annoyance about a lot of the big trends -- classifiers and recommender systems are exciting and increasingly easy to build; long-horizon agents have mostly delivered Disasters and Misery; for some reason everyone wants to deliver long-horizon agents.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I could rant about this a lot more and at greater volume, but a huge amount of it is just "the fact that idiots have access to %thing, and presently control %thing, is not, for me, a reason to have antipathy towards %thing."

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

It feels like the output of a smart but deeply self-hating person who has been yoked to the biggest idiot you know.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Most of this has become increasing frustration with capitalism (someone was _paid_ to do this stupid thing that fucks up my life) and human stupidity. (because I know from experience that the model wouldn't have independently come up with the idea to create this slop)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Keep in mind I'm saying this as a person who has _also_ been repeatedly put in the situation of "help, some idiot has dumped slop on me and I want it to go away." I can find something incredibly useful while observing that other people have used it mostly to generate misery for me.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Unfortunately, insisting that the tool is just spicy autocomplete or that its output is direct plagiarism does not help me. (and for that matter reflects a really myopic view of how training works. Seriously, the level of _basic technical inaccuracy_ in AI hate is fucking infuriating to me.)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I think coding without a Socratic partner is difficult and while the ideal solution is universal pair programming, this as an economic way to onboard people quickly and get external design review has been incredibly valuable for me.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I became able to feel great confidence in my ability to work with people who have no background in common with me, because I knew that I could throw them blind into a problem with our code and they would be able to engage in the hours of hypothesis testing needed to genuinely understand it.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

And these are brilliant researchers in several scientific fields! (Basically, our hiring protocol has been to find astrophysicists and get them really interested in our problem, and if that works, we throw money at them.)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I also can't infantilize my coworkers by implying that their real and serious progress in learning how to code is just "AI psychosis" or some other pejorative. They are genuinely becoming more thoughtful and more effective workers. It challenges their preconceptions much more than _I_ would.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I can eagerly build a bulleted list of "reasons they are still bad," but none of those reasons are beyond mitigation. My job is very important. I cannot afford to turn down help as a way of keeping my street cred. If I had to take on the task of teaching everyone how to code, I'd go insane.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Half the juniors at my company were non-programmers I poached from other departments -- they learned to program by interacting Socratically with language models. I can't engage in performative sneering -- LLMs are, at this point, not only amazing at programming, but also amazing at teaching.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

They TL;DR out like this: - Idealistic Pyrex thinks "I like LLMs and want more LLMs to be built." - Pessimistic Pyrex feels despair over the likely consequences. I feel despair over the obligation to blame a technology I love for, basically, the way it is abused by capitalism.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I added "I work in AI" to my description because lying about it feels worse. I don't want to be portrayed as an AI zealot, but I still fear that my opinions will be seen as unacceptable. I'm not really sure what to do -- keeping my unpopular opinions to myself feels like stringing people along.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Profile text redone! I may write a new "Greetings!" post shortly.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Hm, I feel like redoing my profile again -- the current iteration of the profile is clearly coming out of some mental health issues.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

Obviously zero of these are the stated rule, to be clear. I do not think sexual assault is verbally regarded as "okay," at least in public. I'm just trying to figure out why _this_ BDSM-adjacent nerd community seems so cis/hetero compared to base rate nerds.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

It _sounds_ like the actual rule might be "women are inferior" -- in which case bi dudes don't harass dudes and lesbian women don't harass women. When I have seen this I have sometimes seen the community develop a twink exception. (it's okay to harass effeminate men because probably they like it)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

It _sounds like_ there's a population that does the sexual assault (men) and a population that the sexual assault happens to (women) -- so if you're a man, the space is basically safe for you, so long as you're not emotionally attached to anyone female.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

A thing that puzzles me -- I get that the Rationalist scene is apparently (1) very horny (2) extremely bad at consent Is it primarily straight? The vast majority of these stories seem to be about objectification of women by men! (pinging @segyges.bsky.social who, perhaps, knows)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

There's a studied ignorance to the idea that people can design political systems that perpetuate themselves even though they produce outcomes that the electorate dislikes. I suspect people force this misconception as a way to justify believing that civilians in countries they dislike are evil.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

(This usually comes with some astronautics to explain why it was thinkable to _God_ -- because everything is thinkable to God -- but of course Jesus couldn't just come out and say it.)

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I see this a lot in Bible-adjacent conversations where it's observed that Jesus wasn't really opposed to slavery. Rather than taking away the lesson that Jesus was kind of a chode, they conclude that the progressive position was literally unthinkable because otherwise he would have thought that.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

In fairness to them, it's not explicitly based on a specific period of Europe. In un-fairness to them -- I don't think there was a society where slavery was common where slave revolts _weren't_ common? "Slavery was popular and everyone agreed with it" is just this weirdly common preconception.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I can't resist adding one more offensive statement: "Americans all love Trump." Is this true? Only sort of. A more accurate statement is that Trump wins a slight plurality according to the polling strategy that the American electoral system is designed to use. This commutes to quite a lot of power!

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

I see deep worldview similarity between assuming "fantasy Europeans all love slavery" and "Pakistanis all love fundamentalist Islam." I am not really cool with normalizing it, even if it does let me absolve myself of sexual guilt by saying my slave-oriented BDSM setting is sociologically plausible.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

TL;DR: I see a lot of people say "well, look, people in different cultures have different moral standards," then prove it by saying "In culture X, horrible crime Y is tolerated!" This just strikes me as xenophobic. Things you find horrible are usually super controversial in their original culture!

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

What I think they mean to say is something like this: > For IC purposes, the revolution is not close. Even many slaves believe in the system of slavery. > > For OOC purposes-- a lot of us love slavery RP. If you try to Robin Hood our characters out of servitude, we will be sad and annoyed.

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Pyrex, nightsworn alchemist @nyeog.me · 27/09/2026

You could probably also reconstruct that the level of hegemonic power set against us was significant, because of how bad the arguments are allowed to be. (in that sense this is _just_ like women's rights in Greece. Aristotle is at times quite an ogre.)

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