iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The problem with the claim "AI is/could be conscious" is that it's not very precise... for the same reason "humans are conscious" isn't precise. What is "humans"? The whole set? Human DNA? Is every human conscious? What part is necessary? Is a human brain in a vat conscious... and human?

100

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Every time I watch Firefly, I wonder if Joss Whedon knows what a galaxy is.

000

Reposted by Ori Vandewalle

CJ Fogler @cjzero.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

dumbest football team in the league

721434194

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Commanders deciding to tie instead of win was an odd choice.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Data Archivist: There's no gap. Just poor metadata. Didn't you read the documentation?

0102

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

lol jason kelce is fun to listen to

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Ruin a book by adding a word: Ender's Game Theory

010

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I'm desperately lonely and would absolutely seek comfort in an AI girlfriend if I thought it would fill the void. Alas, having had real flesh and blood girlfriends, I know there's no way the virtual variety could compare to an actual human with interiority and a life beyond me.

020

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Watching Firefly and getting a real western-but-in-space vibe. Anyone else notice this before?

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

One of the things I like about diplomacy in Civ7 is that it gets away from the fanciful notion of heads of state buying 3 oil from each other... but then irl we've got Trump out here doing just that.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I don't think LLMs feel pain, but the pain axis study from a couple weeks ago does exactly this by looking at the model's response to activation of a "pain axis" (rather than its response to text input like "you're in pain").

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A said a stupid thing. B, which explicitly exists in opposition to A at least partly because of the stupid things A says and does, said something unrelated and different (which I will now lie about for rhetorical effect). Clearly this means B also said the stupid thing.

010

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"Human bodies? Granted," said the genie.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Something I've thought about before but never really put into words: when I'm learning a new subject, I'm thinking about how best to explain it to my parents. Ultimately I suspect this derives from how dinnertime conversation worked in our house growing up.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Ian Malcolm: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. AI Researchers: oh lol we definitely shouldn't Ian Malcolm: ... AI Researchers: ... Ian Malcolm: ... AI Researchers: anyway yeah we're doing it lmao

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

TIL Karl Marx wrote HPMOR. Really, Stewart, you think alienation as a concept was just invented in the LW forums and has no precedence in history or the real world? Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnLD...

Jacob Coxon: I think this crisis of meaning we're talking about... again from a personal experience it does feel like a lot of life has already been stripmined of meaning. And I guess for many of the people working on the tech, they feel like they're part of the... an inexorable march of technology, this is the natural kind of final stage of the last 200 years of--or longer--of loss of meaning, along with better life quality. So they see it rather as a continuation of a process that we've already kind of accepted, already walked into as a society.

John Stewart: So what I would say is that is an industry that lives in a bubble of its own making, and that they should really get out and hug some people. Because in the real world, that's not reality. They may have read a manifesto by some guy that, you know, buried it as a Harry Potter parody or whatever it was.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

watching the wicker man (1973) for the first time. did not realize it was a musical.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

vertical video with shaking person talking over background images is the worst format

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

i don't know why but salad fingers remains one of the most viscerally unsettling things i've ever encountered and just seeing that one still frame turns my stomach

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Arachnophobia, of course, a movie that could not possibly have a more apt title.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Good thing Washington's football team is called the Commanders and not the Lieutenants. That would be awkward today.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Would really like to know what "Anthropic thinks Claude is conscious" means because Anthropic is not conscious and can't think.

100

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One more attempt at self-promotion this week. This piece isn't really about rats. The rats are a mEtApHoR. I promise the next thing I write won't be about rats, metaphorically or otherwise. orivandewalle.substack.com/p/the-rat-di...

orivandewalle.substack.com

The Rat Dialogues

Regale Us, Rats

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

TIL that 25 years ago, when Xi Jinping was governor of Fujian province and Barack Obama was a state senator in Illinois, they visited the White House together. Isn't that nice?

Screenshot with text that reads:

I took the White House and made it beautiful again. Okay, and people look at it. People came up. President Xi looked at it two days ago. He said, "This is beautiful. Much better than I…" He was here 25 years ago with Obama. Think Obama knows it? Obama would not. He doesn't know if something's dirty or clean.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Example a billion of why, despite thinking a lot of LW takes on AI are broadly correct, I have never wanted to be involved with the community.

020

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Not going to listen, but, is he singing this?

100

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

ChatGPT would tell you why this is a very stupid idea.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Unless there was another poster we didn't see, I actually think the Hawks/Hawkeyes confusion was just conjecture on Klobuchar's part. I think Schmitt's staff figured it was the Hawks game based purely on timing. Maybe they were trying to imply Willis bought Smith's complicity with tickets?

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

OK but my Blood Angels specifically failed their 3+ power armor saves about 80% of the time.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Not necessarily my favorites, but probably the ones I poured the most time into. Like, a civ game should definitely be #1, but I picked others while mulling over which one it should be. Civ3 isn't my favorite, but it's the one that led me to the online civ community... from whence I never escaped.

image of 9 video game covers with the heading "My 9 Games. The 9 Games That Shaped Who I Am." The list is:
1. SimCity 2000
2. Metal Gear Solid
3. Vandal Hearts
4. Sid Meier's Civilization III
5. Command & Conquer: Red Alert
6. Space Quest III
7. Sonic the Hedgehog
8. Conflict
9. Disney's Aladdin

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Self-promotion is hard, bla bla bla. But here's something to entice you: it's not just about rats. It's also about bird shit.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Alright, I'm blogging again. I know it's all newsletters these days, but I don't care, I'm still calling it a blog. Anyway, here's a story about rats.

orivandewalle275661.substack.com

The Rat Dialogues

Regale Us, Rats

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If you think about this chart for more than 4 seconds, you realize it is significantly stupider than "pirates cause global warming."

110

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

but doctor i am selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Apart from this being gross, it's also just a lie. Of the 20 authors, the gender spread appears to be 9 men, 10 women, 1 nonbinary. Racially/ethnically, we've got: 8 white, 12 some variety of not. I'm not going to investigate their sexualities and politics; I assume Bret is just as wrong there, too.

1204

Reposted by Ori Vandewalle

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Personally, I think philosophy is stupid. It's obvious that <extremely mid philosophical stance with entire genres of counter-argument that has seeped into the general consciousness with all technicality and nuance removed> is true, and you don't need to be a philosopher to figure that out.

0143

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My take is that souls are real but archaea and bacteria were here first, so they got 'em. There are currently about 1.2e30 archaeal and bacterial cells, which is almost exactly 2^100. So... a single original soul split 100 times and that's it.

110

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My superpower is that I can tell whether the opening sequence in a Simpsons episode will be long or short just by watching it.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I see what you're trying to do, Disney, but it won't work. JOHNNY 5 IS A CLANKER 😭

Screenshot from Disney+'s "Recommended For You" row with a poster from the movie "Short Circuit."

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Re: Trump's AI poll, it reads like him lashing out after being embarrassed by a mistake. Like maybe he thought AI stood for "Applied Intelligence" or something, an advisor corrected him in front of others, he got angry, and now he's trying to disappear the term AI so that he's no longer wrong.

011

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

disappointed. whoopty fuckin' doo you managed to get a degree. and then you just got a job and an apartment and lived a boring ass life?

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I personally believe the threat from AI is quite significant, but I recognize it's entirely unprecedented and don't fault people for being skeptical. What does concern me is seeing the same kind of motivated reasoning you see from climate deniers...

100

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I think it's probably reasonable to ascribe a kind of cognitive capacity to LLMs, but not based on COT. They are not a representation of "inner thoughts," which you can see based on a simple thought experiment:

120

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Magic Doomer: That mouse is enchanting a broom. If he's not careful, something bad might happen. Magic Skeptic: Are you stupid? Brooms just sweep floors. *enchanted broom floods castle* Doomer: ... Skeptic: Of course brooms flood castles if you give them buckets. That doesn't mean they're enchanted.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

My hobby is watching shows like Breaking Bad or The Americans and just being disappointed each episode that the main characters aren't caught.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

But I was told that loudly proclaiming your product could kill all humans was good for business.

000

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Alternatively they just think it would be bad if everyone died.

100

Ori Vandewalle @orivandewalle.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My best friend growing up (in the 90s) was a Muslim kid from Tunisia. The father of another friend wouldn't let him come over.

000