iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Rob Knight

Peter Adamson @histphilosophy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

As of today the original #HoPWAG series has reached 500 episodes! Thanks to all who have listened and the many who have supported the series over the years, not least all the interview guests. #philsky #podcast #philosophy

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 22/09/2026

I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, AI risks are real, AI alignment is a real problem with no certain solution. We should be careful in how we use it. We should also be extremely curious about alignment and control of AI systems - this is important work!

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Grace @gracekind.net · 19/09/2026

Frog built a wet lab for the AI model. "There," he said. "Now it can do its own experiments." "What the fuck?" said Toad

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Shiladitya Banerjee @shilabanerjee.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

1/ Can a single bacterium learn? No brain, no neurons, just one cell deciding what to do next. Our new paper says yes, and the cell's internal machinery turns out to compute exactly like a recurrent neural network. 🔗 journals.aps.org/prxlife/abstract/10.1103/5zbg-8vll

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 11/09/2026

See, what we need here is fully automated drone defences for the data centres, controlled by an AI inside the data centre

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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 09/09/2026

It may be under-discussed that the advent of LLMs has surfaced two thorny philosophical problems and combined them in the same tangle: the chicken and egg question of language and thought, and the fact that theories of human cognition have historically mirrored technological advances.

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Mark C @largecardinal.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Thoughts and prayers to CFD folks today... Source: r/CFD

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 07/09/2026

Encountering this failure mode early and often is a very good way to learn about the limits of form. You can see the process play out in a fairly consistent pattern.

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 05/09/2026

I continue to believe that this accidental whimsy is the best thing to happen to Google search in over a decade

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

My eval guy told me models keep saturating his benchmarks so I asked how many benchmarks he has and he said he just goes to Artificial Analysis and gets a new benchmark afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding benchmarks to models and then François Chollet started crying.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I ask - in a world in which executives can replace the skill of workers, doesn't that mean that the executives get replaced by skilled workers? backofmind.substack.com/p/robot-clas...

backofmind.substack.com

robot class traitors

the future and its ownership

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Gordon @gordon.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Futures don’t arrive all at once, they come in waves. H1: business as usual H2: transition zone H3: new equilibrium newsletter.squishy.computer/p/three-hori...

newsletter.squishy.computer

Three horizons

Tracking the unevenly-distributed future

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 27/08/2026

This is gonna sound weird but after reading the reports I think the best explanation for the huggingface hack is OpenAI trained a model that is insane

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Evan Czaplicki @acadia.engineering · 25/08/2026

Acadia gives some interesting guarantees: - No 1+N queries. - All queries terminate. Learn how a query language from the 1970s (Datalog) inspired the key design choices that make these guarantees possible in Acadia's query language! acadia.engineering/blog/solving...

acadia.engineering

Solving the 1+N Query Problem

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New_ Public @newpublic.org · 19/08/2026

NEW: We are piloting a three month virtual residency, for two entrepreneurs with bold ideas for making the internet more human and healthy. This is a paid opportunity to spend time exploring and building, and go from early hunch to conviction and clarity. Apply here by Sept 9: newpublic.org/eir

newpublic.org

Enterpreneur in Residence

A virtual residency for founders with bold ideas for the internet

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 12/08/2026

Got to admit that I was genuinely surprised when I looked up and saw the sun blocked out. I know that’s what it’s meant to look like but it was still surprising!

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 11/08/2026

This just seems like a really bad idea for a payment provider??

An advertisement for Revolut featuring the slogan “Never Settle”

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Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com · 06/08/2026

The Local‑First Conf 2026 recap is live! Miss the vibe or curious about local‑first? Watch the 2 min video: youtu.be/DelQ1_ua2yY?...

youtu.be

Local-First Conf 2026 Recap

YouTube video by Local-First Conf

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 31/07/2026

My talk at @localfirstconf.com is up, in which I argue that local-first has a role to play in improving the resilience of democratic societies in an era of geopolitical tensions. I'm pretty happy with how this talk turned out www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Ru...

youtube.com

Martin Kleppmann — Local-first in an unstable world

YouTube video by Local-First Conf

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 12/07/2026

I’m increasingly of the opinion that when AI Overviews disappears we’re going to realize it was the funniest thing ever to happen on the internet Here for instance, it invents a totally new form of literary criticism, without being asked to! (rest of this is all about batteries)

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It is just like a battery. A battery has two ends: a positive end and a negative end. Let's look at how that works.
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zooko2.bsky.social @zooko2.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

More generally, over the next few years, the pattern of cryptographic proofs combined with mathematical proofs of correctness may enable verifiably correct computation of all kinds, for the first time in the history of computation.

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zooko2.bsky.social @zooko2.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Tachyon's Formal Verification project is on the verge of producing a mathematical proof that there are no undetectable counterfeiting bugs in the latest Zcash shielded pools. tachyon.z.cash/blog/detecti...

tachyon.z.cash

Detecting Counterfeiting after Zcash's Ironwood — Project Tachyon

The recently discovered undetectable counterfeiting bug in Orchard wasn't the first of its kind in Zcash. Thanks to formal verification of Ironwood, it will be the last.

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 05/07/2026

- the really good people you want to hire are weirdos with high intrinsic motivation - in the 90-10s these were STEM people, they turned out to be great - now STEM is the conventional choice and humanities is for the weirdos - each "death of the humanities" thinkpiece shifts the balance further

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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 13/06/2026

The fact that the US government specifically ordered the suspension of Fable access to non-US citizens (www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...) raises exactly the kind of technological sovereignty concerns I discussed in my QCon keynote a few months ago (www.infoq.com/presentation...)

anthropic.com

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

The US government has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.

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Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com · 04/06/2026

We're thrilled to announce our next speaker batch for Local-First Conf 2026.

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Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 01/05/2023

All of my GPT prompts are just a slew of shallow flattery: "You are an experienced, intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, truthful, beautiful, kind, honest, world-class, critical thinker and expert. Complete this task: write me a funny tweet about bananas Tweet: "

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Rob Knight @root.guru · 30/04/2023

Does anyone else find that the increasingly baroque weirdness of 2023 is actually sort of comforting? Like, this is much closer to the universe I belong in than 2007 or 2015 was.

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