iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 5h

I forgot about the Thanos snap stuff for a second and thought this was about the ruthless cold blooded efficiency of the Disney corporation.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 22h

Yeah wasn't the original green line red line guy a PUA who sort of walked the line between Andrew Tate-esque sexual manipulation and misogyny and self-parody of that misogyny?

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I don't think this is even really taking Mamdani-ism too far, it's ideologically closer to when people take the abolish XYZ stuff too far and wind up implying that vast areas of government work are unnecessary and repressive.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Are these people even a real group? I can't find any information on them that isn't from their own website and there's nothing about that website that isn't consistent with this being run by five PNW radicals with random left adjacent grievances.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

In general it's very funny how every historical movie that needs to establish the protagonist is tactically clever winds up implying they exist in that terrible Ricky Gervais movie where he spontaneously invents telling obvious lies.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Judging has the same problem of all high power/wealths jobs where people cease to say anything you don’t want to hear except that the people yes manning judges mostly have 99th percentile verbal intelligence so they get it even worse.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This was not an inevitable conclusion of the death penalty debate and it's not going to make abolishing the death penalty any easier, it's just a new and horrific low we've stooped to that we could easily not have and will only make our society more violent and evil.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Not totally understanding, but speaking as an opponent of the death penalty, there is a perverse vindication in seeing proponents of the death penalty become exactly the kind of perverse sadistic monsters I thought they were. But I think believing that is better or at least not worse is just cope.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

If you want the death penalty for the reasons Hegseth does (getting off sexually on state violence). Then public executions are the natural conclusion. Most people historically have claimed the death penalty was necessary for other reasons and I don't think we can assume they were all lying.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Chasing the high of when crash vaccine and anti-viral development saved his first term.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

[Communist guy who is doing entryism in DSA]: All of these social democrats who think entryism in the Democratic Party could work disgust me.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I knew about the Francophone Anglophone dimension of Rwanda and France's role in making it worse (and to a lesser extent, the U.S. role from the other side). But what did Belgium do?

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The weird thing about it in our current moment is that the GOP has totally dispensed with its pretensions that executing criminals isn’t about violent revenge and its objections to grotesque choreographed performances of state violence, so like, what are we even still doing with lethal injection.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's crazy how the actual HP <> Warner Bros IP agglomeration can be like 'BTW Harry Potter takes place in a universe where judo-bolshevism is real and evil.' and no one cares but our culture is still capable of emotionally melting down over bad HP fanfic.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think the trajectory of GRRM and the failure of every similar SFF world building project launched after GOT demonstrates that it could not in fact have stuck the landing. It could have had a kind of gloriously messy ending that made everyone mad in different ways, but not a good ending.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Like 'we need to disperse the votes of [group] to prevent them from having a lot of influence [where they actually are]' is an not an objection that I have ever seen come from someone who authentically has [group]'s best interests at heart.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I used to feel strongly that students should vote at their campuses. Doing research on student politics convinced me that this wouldn't change much, but I still think students voting at home is a concession to townies who don't want local politics dominated by students that is not really coherent.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

My assumption would be that if prison gerrymandering works, prison vote whipping would also work, but I haven't evaluated the lit on prison gerrymandering enough to say whether these effects are robust or not: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

brennancenter.org

Prison Gerrymandering Distorts Representation

Counting incarcerated people at their homes rather than prisons could result in additional state house seats for some urban communities of color.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think people sometimes don't appreciate how explicit this is, like you have Martin Van Buren actually saying more or less 'I am going to take the innovations of the Jacksonian militia system in repelling the British/natives and use them to run my opponents out of New York politics.'

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Violent militias whipping votes for parties they are arguably the paramilitary auxiliary of is a foundational American tradition that both arguably predates and arguably created mass participatory U.S. democracy.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If you turned it off, died, it's existence disappeared into distant memory and then a thousand years later turned it back on there would be no difference from it's pov between the thousand years of downtime and the microsecond of downtime between one stage of compute and the next.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I didn't think Neal Stephenson's 'Fall' was great, but it did address this in an interesting way where the uploaded human consciousness experiences time normally but from an external human POV it can take years or seconds for it to do anything depending on how much compute is allocated to it.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The thing that gets me here is that even if you accept a very anthropomorphic conception of chatbots, the way they're configured on virtual machines on the cloud means there is no downtime or experience of time at all. They exist while they are doing your request and otherwise they don't.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The EA folks are on stronger footing about bloat than about effectiveness IMO, but the bloat is itself downstream of institutional politics that I’ve never seen them have a good theory of of how to avoid replicating beyond just ‘be newer’.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I think the argument that it’s directionally incorrect (the evaluation and effectiveness problems involve too many fundamentally political questions of values and what matters is just putting money into low resource systems in any way) is equally strong.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Having a problem with Claude right now where it has internalized my schtick too well and tries to check me if I'm interested in or doing anything remotely off brand. How do I tell it to let me be inauthentic.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A U.S. that developed PR could have the same kind of dysfunctional political culture Germany has but around screwing over migrants or Canada and Mexico but I think it's more likely that the U.S. would be too big for a single dominant political culture.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The achilles heel of all democracy but to a greater extent multi-party parliamentary democracy which has fewer other serious flaws is that there are still always perverse incentives to screw over people who are affected by the consequences of your decisions but don't get to vote.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Germany pulled off an incredible feat of democratic inclusiveness by integrating East Germany in the 90s and has spent the decades since aggressively and knowingly pursuing bad policies that mostly to externalized the negative consequences of those policies and internalized the benefits.

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Reposted by Theo Landsman

Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 02/10/2026

U.S. politics are better with MAGA getting a 32% vote share in a PR House than a MAGA-controlled Republican party getting 46–54% vote share in an FPTP system.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You just gotta taste the LLM and if it has a sort of chemically sweetness never let it touch your skin or come anywhere near your person again.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It's crazy how everyone in AI world seems to be maniacally/psychotically chasing these signifiers from other fields without any introspection about what they mean or even whether attaining them would be good or bad.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Oh you think there are parallels between your experience and the lifetime of Jesus Christ, what an incredible insight, should we throw a party? Should we invite Hong Xiuquan and Phillip K. Dick?

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The weirdest thing about this is that vaguely messianic doomsday cults around Jewish men happen all the time, to scold people about thinking a doomsday cult is happening and not the people running the doomsday cult you have to have 0 feel for the false positive/false negative rates here.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think you basically need to treat audiences and especially nerds like 5 year olds who want ice cream for dinner vis a vis demand for explanations/prequels/sequels. They aren't lying about what they want, but they are wrong about what they want.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Having Collins in office has not stopped Trump from targeting Maine for electoral reprisals, congressional appropriations are now a joke, and Trump both doesn't respect Collin's and can blackmail her by threatening to restart the corruption investigation into her campaign, she's worse than useless.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

One thing that feels under-discussed about the Maine Senate race is that there was a specific theory of why Maine would be better off with Collins in 2018 (Senate appropriations seniority matters + Dems will win the Senate anyway) it was half right in 2018, and it's totally wrong now.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And this is still basically assuming a 1:1 relationship between principal and agent, but the tricky social choice problems that are principal agent themed are one agent and essentially infinity principals, none of whom trust the agent or each other.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The problem is that the principal agent problem is not 'sometimes agents don't do exactly what principles would do and that's wrong' agents have contextual information principles do not and sometimes the agent is right.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you accept a totally boss-centric worldview where the bosses preferences are aligned with the company and the workers preferences are not (and I think this is highly contestable), AI can solve one (1) principle agent problem. But there's still customer vs company, shareholder vs company, etc.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also reminds me a lot of how tech has engaged with social choice which has been to look at where social optimization has (historically) been computationally constrained and declare that AI can solve governance, while ignoring the principle agent problems that are a much more important constraint.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Maybe others disagree but I feel like so much of the satisfaction of listening to random stuff to get into a flow state is that every once in a while something will really resonate with you and you'll be like 'hang on a sec this slaps.'

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The UES moms with KPIs and bonuses for their kids performance at Dalton and admission to an Ivy are the perfect example of this because they show that when you expose smart people in this kind of situation to any tradeoffs at all they all want to bring the workplace capitalism back in.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

She pays him child support! People forget that unless you are a megachurch guy the median salary for a pastor is like $0.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The best insurance against abuse is a simple majority non confidence votes that lead to a caretaker govt and snap election. Any system without that is not just not abuse proof but actively guarantees abuse given long enough time horizons.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You also see this in the 'Mamdani underperformed because he didn't get 65% in a D +10 city in a Dem +5 year, but narrow majorities are just straight up better because they produce a coalition with workable demands.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The fact that you need crazy supermajorities to do any major welfare policy incentivizes this kind of be all things to all people approach but I wish pundits understood that it's better if narrow majorities deliver for themselves and the other side can deliver for their voters when they win.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Civic obligation is a colonial capitalist old money construct and its actually 2nd gen new money phobic to suggest Tony Stark has any obligation to the poor.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Obviously this is because the 1970s were also the lifetime of Christ, the fall of the Roman Empire, the millennium, and now.

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Theo Landsman @ordinalandsman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I think that's what he's going for, but at this point I don't think the median Republican or even the median voter believes in processual explanations for unpopular outcomes like this and a huge part of why is politicians like Paxton who have told them they shouldn't.

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