iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"…there is something larger at stake here for the left. The failure to think clearly about the pacing proposal is downstream of the failure to think clearly about AI as a whole." — @bentarnoff.com, singing a welcome song bentarnoff.substack.com/p/on-the-pac...

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There’s been some agitation recently, esp. among people just tuning into the AI safety discussion, about the preponderance of EA/LessWrong types in AI research, and what that means for the safety and ethics proposals on offer.

The March of the Ten Thousand where "im not owned! im not owned!!" takes the place of "thalatta! thalatta!"

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 14/09/2026

Bluesky's reckoning with AI is shaping up to be as tortuous and torturous as its belated concession that it was a meaningful infirmity, and not a media conspiracy, that pushed Biden out of the 2024 election. Granted that I was tardy on the former point as well, it's still something to behold.

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Man do I feel this. Part of the problem is that good autofiction makes itself look easy, in a way good maximalist fiction does not. Also, though, I blame the dumb hype that made autofiction out to be something new, even radical, instead of a marketing term for what (some) fiction has always done.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 13/09/2026

But this isn't what's happening? Amodei et al argue: we're building bridges too fast w/o understanding how they work or how to prevent further collapses. Meanwhile, critics say: you're overhyping the dangers of collapsing bridges as a form of marketing, distraction, and/or anticompetitive collusion.

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Steve Baird @stevenkbaird.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The reasoning in this thread about AI strikes me as impeccable. His novel is really good too. (And no, we’re not related, although I have to admit he has a very fine name.)

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 13/09/2026

A shorter way to say what I'm saying below: I think AI is new in important material and conceptual ways. One consequence of that view is that I'm suspicious of claims that present it as something pre-cooked for comprehension, as though it needn't bother to exist for us to understand it.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 13/09/2026

When you’re young, it’s very easy to tell yourself that stuff you’re seeing in the world is new and unprecedented. It is to you, after all, and moreover what’s new and unprecedented carries a powerful emotional charge.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 12/09/2026

Chicago friends! I’ll be talking to Kathleen Rooney and Ann McGlinn today at 11 for the Printers Row Lit Fest. (On the second floor of Grace Place at 637 S. Dearborn.) If you’re at the festival, please stop by!

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 11/09/2026

Everyone (me included) is still trying to get a grip on the best way to think about what AI is and does. And I don’t want to dismiss the usefulness of analogies and as-if thinking. But it really helps a lot to remember that every llm is at root a computer program that generates outputs from inputs.

robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 11/09/2026

Twenty-five years ago I’d just moved to Chicago to start grad school. It was my first or second night in my new apartment. I was still sleeping on a blow-up mattress. Woke up to a panicked phone call from my mom in California, who told me what happened & was terrified that Chicago was next in line.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living, and one is not exempted by being a poet. —John Cheever, journal

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 09/09/2026

There’s a genuine credibility problem here, though: by holding the stochastic-parrots line so long, the left has trapped itself in a version of the old joke about small portions: AI is a scam, and plus it’s too powerful! No believes the left actually supports responsible AI development.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 09/09/2026

I endorse every word of this except "becomes"—we were born in that muddle!

Kirkdale Bookshop @kirkdalebooks.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Reposted by robert p. baird

Only connectome

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 04/09/2026

His eyes are staring…his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 25/08/2026

RIP, Dolly. One of the greats of our (or any) time.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 17/08/2026

"it is worth formulating a principle of not being a fucking mark"

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 14/08/2026

It‘s a lot more fun to read the coverline as a caption, and to imagine EW taking a break from her rambles to watch the movie in her motorhome on a bright summer day. She’s just inside the open door, shouting at her laptop screen loud enough for her trailer park-mates to wonder if all’s ok.

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 12/08/2026

Happy eclipse day to all who celebrate! If you're like me and can't find your way to totality today, here's the next best thing: home.ubalt.edu/ntygfit/ai_0...

home.ubalt.edu

gb19s title

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 10/08/2026

The retconning of Woke 1 is really depressing. I don‘t care how much Tema Okun and “White Fragility” and Pelosi in kente cloth annoyed and embarrassed you. It was the closest this country has come in my ~half-century on earth to reckoning honestly with the racism that founded and still sustains it.

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laura olin @lauraolin.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

But they will be

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robert p. baird @robertpbaird.com · 02/08/2026

Took me way too long to realize that the pied-a-terre tax is actually a “you should be paying NYC income tax” tax.

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Can This Man Stop the Mamdani Agenda?

I get that half of NY media loves this guy because they went to school/parties together, but it's incredible to see the Times ignore the fact that the MI's only meaningful policy success of the past decade is sponsoring C. Rufo's campaign to make racism great again. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/n...

nytimes.com

Reihan Salam loves New York. He loves the free market. And he’s very worried.

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stcaF Tenet Facts @tenet-facts.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

i think he referenced it directly in an interview

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Last bit of Odyssey-discoursin': is there any chance Nolan didn't have this scene somewhere in mind when deciding where he wanted his wooden horse to be found? The location and orientation seem too similar to be an accident.

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Nolan's more forgiving of Odysseus than Vergil was, but I don't think it's controversial in the slightest to say that his read on the Trojan War shares more with the Aeneid than it does with the Odyssey.