iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Some of this is a little glib, but I don't disagree with a word of it.

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Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

I think there are a lot of interesting things going on in systems neuroscience that AI is not particularly informative about. In addition to the small sample issue Eli mentioned, metabolism is turning out to be really interesting. E.g. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.org

Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling - Volume 49

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Reposted by Larry Hunter

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

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David Colaço @davidcolaco.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The complete version of @phaueis.eurosky.social and my BBS target article, "Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling," is now available. It includes 32 commentaries and our response. Please share #philsci #philsky #cogsci

cambridge.org

Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Metabolic considerations for cognitive modeling - Volume 49

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Richard Kadrey @richardkadrey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. — Kurt Vonnegut

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Yes, brainstem, etc. are necessary, but I still hold bodies are an integral part of the construction of consciousness. Folks with high spinal cord injuries have largely functional physiology and interoception (otherwise they'd be dead). Interoception is mostly not spinal.

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Glad you agree body matters. No theory offers much in the way of an answer about what "constitutes" consciousness. But we can scientifically identify factors that demonstrably influence the human experience of it.

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Agree on physicalist emergence, just want to localize it correctly. I might argue our specific sort of consciousness has to include our social environment. E.g., constructivist theories of emotion suggest strong influences from early caregivers. Neural activity is necessary but not sufficient.

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Sad that this outdated and naive idea is so prevalent. Contemporary neuroscience demonstrates that the entire body is involved. It's not just your brain, or even just your neurons. Your muscles, gut, immune system, and other body systems all contribute to constructing your conscious experience.

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The "brain in a vat" idea is so outdated & naive. It's not just electrical activity a brain processes. Contemporary neuroscience is clear that the entire body constructs our experience in manifold ways.

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Looks like I will have most of a day free in Seattle next week. Any suggestions about things I might do with it? Staying at the Hyatt Place Seattle/Downtown... I'm into contemporary art, live jazz, weird food, etc.

Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Reposted by Larry Hunter

This is an excellent article by Leif Wetherby - why AI is a cultural technology not a collection of human-like agents (citing our work on this). And why the anthropomorphism is a distraction from the very real risks and dangers and the way to deal with them. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Stop Talking About A.I. Like a Human (Gift Article)

If we want to figure out the proper way to control A.I. models, we need to recognize what they really are.

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Johnnie Jae @johnniejae.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For the THIRD YEAR in a Row, Native honorees are among the MacArthur Fellows. Congrats to poet Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) and historian Elizabeth Ellis (Peoria), two of this year's MacArthur Fellows! redpopnews.com/layli-long-s...

redpopnews.com

Layli Long Soldier and Elizabeth Ellis Among the 2026 MacArthur Fellows

When the MacArthur Foundation unveiled its 2026 class of fellows this week, two of the names belonged to Native women who work with old documents to say something urgent about the present. Layli Long ...

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Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A searchable mapping between NIH study sections and program officers that doesn't suck. (Claude one-shot) sashagusev.github.io/po-study-sec...

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Finally! A just use of civil forfeiture. Who knew such a. thing existed?

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Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker.com · 30/09/2026

The Pentagon is notifying millions of current and former U.S. military servicemembers and staff that hackers stole their *unencrypted* personal information during a months-long data breach. The agency that had the breach also handles ID and login/credential access to U.S. military systems and bases.

techcrunch.com

Hackers stole millions of US military personnel records during months-long data breach | TechCrunch

The Department of Defense notified millions of current and former U.S. military personnel that their personal information had been stolen in a months-long breach.

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You've inspired me! I just set up new B&W 707s (with a sub) today, and have been having a blast listening to favorite cuts. Going to put that on next!

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Drop of 2 million *visitors*. Graph is *visits* (some people, especially in Mexico and Canada used to "visit" a lot)

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That is fun. Here's the white pizza with spinach cream sauce and artichoke hearts I made today.

A list of the species in the pizza: cattle, baker's yeast, black pepper, spinach, garlic, bread wheat, artichoke, chili pepper, olive in two different phylogentic tree views, with information about divergence dates, percent of the edible tree's branch length, that the total branch length spanning the meal is 6,326 million years, etc.

Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Rage now leavened with a little laughter. Billionaire *incompetence* is legendary, yet it seems only to have consequences for the rest of us, never them.

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It's gotten to the point where even just the signatures of our billionaire overlords fills me with rage.

The signatures of Donald Trump, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang.

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Reposted by Larry Hunter

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

cls-lab.com

CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder

The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.

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James Petruzzi @hawaiianimages.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So, who wants to come work with us at the summit of Haleakala? Good with altitude? 20/20 (corrected is fine) vision? Some computer and astronomy experience? We are hiring folks! One position for a Laser Ranging Safety Tech: www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=1...

indeed.com

LASER RANGING SAFETY TECHNICIAN – ID# 226372 - Pukalani, HI 96788 - Indeed.com

Apply for the LASER RANGING SAFETY TECHNICIAN – ID# 226372 job in Pukalani, HI! Learn more about the job description, salary, and job details to see if you qualify on Indeed today.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"When we invented and deployed our Critical-Infrastructure War-Crime Leopard, it never occurred to me that the Critical-Infrastructure War Crime Leopard would blow the head off my own teenage son" "Yeah, sure, dad, go on crying, we're fretful about the price-of-diesel over here" #modernity

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

i hope that men notice how whenever a rape story gets widespread coverage, women use it as an opportunity to vent about how fucking disgusting we think many of you are and how many have made our lives measurably worse, and take a few moments to deeply process that.

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I hope we can reasonably differ on what matters. I think the *whole* of patriarchy's effect matters, including its awful (not equally awful! not trying to compare traumas!) effects on men. Dembroff's book is an interesting take on the whole system of domination and its far reaching consequences

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Both are true. Patriarchy is a system of domination. It's terrible for women--and it's also terrible for children, most men, even animals. See, for example, robindembroff.com/real-men-on-...

Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality
by Robin Dembroff

A revelatory new lens on patriarchy-as a force that governs how we see the world, live in our bodies, and imagine our futuresIn Real Men on Top, Robin Dembroff shows us that we don't just live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that patriarchy taught us to see. Patriarchy is not simply a system where men dominate women, Dembroff argues. It is a deeper reality-shaping force that legitimizes economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty by dividing all of us into the rigid categories of Man, Woman, Animal, and Child.These categories are presented as natural truths, but Dembroff reveals them as man-made myths—ones that construct a reality in which being characterized as Woman, Animal, or Child marks moral degradation. By no coincidence, feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are the very degradations used to make a man 'less of a man'.But this book is more than critique; it's also a guide to transformation especially for those grappling with what it means to be a man under patriarchy. Patriarchy's myths celebrate the identity Man, but these myths are no friend to most men. Promising strength and superiority, they instead fuel isolation, emotional repression, and relentless pressure to prove oneself while propping up systems that enrich the powerful few. Rather than deliver freedom and prosperity, these myths entrap and impoverish. Real Men on Top invites readers to see through them and, in so doing, to find new possibilities for living, relating, and becoming human. Sharp, daring, and deeply felt, Real Men on Top is a book for anyone who senses that something is deeply wrong with the way we live and wants to understand how we got here, and where we might begin the work of remaking reality.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The way America pays for healthcare is fundamentally broken. Every "efficiency" adopted by hospital administrators or insurers in their endless billing war will make patients' life worse or more expensive -- after all, that's where the money is. This one is not really AI's fault.

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Reposted by Larry Hunter

"The big problem with AI is that Grandma, Dad, Sis and the dog are not upbeat enough about our nerve-shredding wails of pain next to our titanic Moloch" *The AI Age is growing old just like the Space Age and the Atomic Age. How do you off-the-wall weirdos expect this situation to play out

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Looks like humanity may have invented beer before bread. 🤣

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Amazing to me that the Catholic Church is one of the few institutions in this country that has remained steadfast and undaunted in the face of Trump

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Andrea Lathrop @cabernet.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My moment came when the famous prof of my complex analysis course said of the final exam I was so proud of that my proofs were ugly, and I had no future in mathematics. Only time I cried in college. Which set my life on a much happier and more productive course than being a mediocre mathematician.

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Reposted by Larry Hunter

It's so absurd that we've created a society that has no choice but to be dragged into the whims of whatever insanely rich people choose to throw piles of money at.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The problem isn't rogue #AI models, it's *negligent companies*. If a biomedical firm put their product in public water supply because they wanted to test it 'in the real world', they'd be treated as criminal at corporate & individual level. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

theguardian.com

OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue

Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways

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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”

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Enforcing the legal accountability of chatbot owners works.

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For comparison, NIH spends ~$50B a year. Teslo's idea is good. But I worry about overall governance "Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet, potentially sitting on $250 billion in stock value."

Last year Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials, posted an idea for supercharging medical AI systems: Use data from failed biotech companies.

By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data—types of information usually considered trade secrets. She called these documents “biotech’s lost archive” and said they could be used to help train AIs that would act as powerful copilots in the often opaque drug approval process.

Today the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI, said it would fund her idea as part of a new effort it calls Public Data for Health, which aims to help artificial intelligence make big leaps in

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Of the many things I love about the University of Chicago is that there are staff whose job it is to wrestle with Concur for faculty. I send an email with what I did and whatever receipts I have, then money appears. Sounds like a small thing, but it has made my life noticeably better.

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End Times Fascism – Naomi Klein

True. What's also different this time around is how the tech millenarianism aligned with the longer-standing religious millenarianism and the nihilistic Trumpists. The new Naomi Klein book is really interesting about this convergence. naomiklein.org/end-times-fa...

naomiklein.org