iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

He said *human* empathy. Machines are different.

To be fair, he may actually believe the line he keeps repeating that it's the Ukraine/Russia war killing diesel supply, and not his own in Iran. Perhaps because that's what Putin wants him to think....

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Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social · 11h

The only thing I want to watch less than a live-streamed public execution is “Melania.”

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 11h

Not all of them use AI for coding assistance. They want to know about the problems anyway. (And for Anthropic, this may keep some rogue maintainer from using privileged access to the tools for a malicious side project, since they know what code is under test. Sadly, there are examples.)

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 13h

There's also the chance that Ellison is leaving something big unsaid. Looking at what happened at CBS, for example, it's at least conceivable that he intends to restore CNN's access by neutering their coverage.

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David Simon @audacityofdespair.bsky.social · 17h

I am generally quite opposed to posting AI slop unless it is: 1) Obvious satire and therefore not suggestive of any effort to falsify or mislead. And... 2) really fucking funny.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Hi. I bought a ticket for NYC, and have an email receipt for the purchase from Stripe. OK to come with just that, or should I be expecting a ticket? Thanks!

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This does imply that Henry Kissinger was insane, having served in both positions from 1973 to 1975. Which sounds about right to me, though some would disagree...

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Their FAQ for PhotoCraft lists a bunch of tools still missing... including, incongruously, most (all?) of the generative AI tools.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

He grew up as a not-particularly-observant Jew (but that's a whole lot of us) in New York City, while his dad taught at NYU.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Ummm... Scholars, at least in the sciences, generally get no royalties. It's more common for them to pay "page charges" for the privilege of having their work in a journal, doubly so if the publication is "open access". And they're also asked to provide uncompensated editorial help as referees, etc.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Announcer also said "never looking back" after the lead dog turned its head all the way around to look back.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

He was completely erased... and yet a rule that bears his name is still followed rigidly by Republican Speakers, as if it were part of the rules of the House itself.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

They were talking about enabling subscriptions of some kind more than a year ago, and it wouldn't be hard. (Hey, Blacksky has been taking voluntary donations for quite some time. They aren't even offering extra benefits for subscribers, and they're still getting revenue from it.)

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The question they always avoid is "aligned to *which* humans?". Asimov gave his robots the answer "all humans" in his first law, which let him pick up quick, easy cash for stories about robots driven crazy by the inevitable contradictions. I believe he was too smart to think it could actually work.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Unzvyy qvq nccrne va gur ebyr ba Oebnqjnl, ohg jnfa'g gur svefg; gur ebyr jnf bevtvangrq ol Gvz Pheel. (Gur bevtvany Ybaqba cebqhpgvba unq Fvzba Pnyybj va gur ebyr.) Gurer'f n ivqrb bs Pheel'f cresbeznapr juvpu pna or ivrjrq ol nccbvagzrag ng gur Arj Lbex Choyvp Yvoenel ng Yvpbya Pragre...

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There are plenty of conlangs which *do* have novel syntactic elements, which were constructed for llm use, and which they handle just fine. You can find a bunch of them at the site below, but you'll have to explore on your own. I'm out of patience.

agentlanguages.dev

agentlanguages.dev — Programming languages designed for AI agents to write

A community-edited catalogue of programming languages designed for AI agents to author code, organised around three philosophical camps: syntactic, verification, and orchestration.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Writing a working bend program requires getting more than the syntax right; it also requires correctly using language facilities that are dramatically different from Python's. The combination of those facilities with Python syntax is *not* in the corpus.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Syntax is just one element of a language spec. It's not the whole thing, or bend would be Python, which it's not; the other elements I mentioned are quite different. If you wish to continue this conversation, find a nontrivial bend program written before 2024, doing substantial computation and I/O.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Most new languages include elements from existing ones. Bend borrows from several -- the surface syntax is a lot like Python's; monadic IO and restrictions on variable reuse are not. The upshot in any case is that you won't find a nontrivial, working bend program in preexisting training data.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

So, uh.... when Putin calls the Ukranian government "Nazis", does he mean it as a compliment?

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Or went to AAA and got one of these. (The offices had long lists of stock pages covering most major highways in the country, and would give you a ring binder full of the ones on the route of your trip, in order.)

AAA TripTik, showing the cover ("prepared expressly for you"), and a page showing a bunch of highways, with the intended route shown using highlighter.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

And in 2014, long after the program he enabled was exposed as a disgrace, the law school at "liberal" UC Berkeley gave him an endowed chair. (I've heard this is routine for long-serving tenured professors at that school. In this case, that's no excuse.)

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The quality metric used here (and labeled on the vertical axis) is ... highly unconventional, but for that very reason, it's unusually easy to verify that the displayed values for the metric are precisely correct.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think this one went the other way -- this was her response to a bot noting that he'd unfollowed her on Xitter. (The original was a QT of the notification; the image capture cuts that off.) x.com/shivon/statu...

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

An interesting test here is whether the models can construct working programs in a programming language that did not exist when their training set was gathered, so no samples can possibly have been in the training data. They can, and there are projects exploiting this, e.g., bend-lang.com

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Well, he's already tried Grok. Gork can't work any worse.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This time, though, there's a lottery. Turnout on the one during the campaign *vastly* exceeded expectations.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I dunno. A lot of Vietnam-era leadership was obsessed with "math", from Westmoreland's body counts to McNamara's management theory. It was just the wrong math... and objectives that were infeasible for reasons related to Vietnamese motiviations, in ways that are hard to treat mathematically.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

But Asimov's three laws were initially gimmicks used to generate story premises about robots driven nuts by, e.g., milder trolley-problem situations where there'd be some form of harm to some human no matter what the robot did. Major labs have more serious attempts, but it's just a hard problem.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

See also Ford Class B shares, owned exclusively by descendants of Henry Ford, which gives them voting control of Ford Motor Company as long as they want it. I'm not sure whether that or trusts is more closely parallel to Anthropic's structure, but they idea goes back a ways either way.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's certainly questionable, but there are examples from well before the dotcom era -- most notably (or perhaps notoriously) Henry Ford's use of a preferred stock structure ("class B shares") to keep himself, and later his family, in control of Ford Motor Company.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Though their blog post says that Opus is still better for tasks involving "open-ended work requiring sustained judgment", which seems to indicate that they think they're both maxing out the benchmarks, and we'll need tougher ones to measure the difference.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Chains already do that for loyalty programs. And there aren't a whole lot of smaller ones which have the machines at all. (One exception Walgreens, locally branded in NYC as "Duane Reade", a large chain where I've never seen self-serve checkout, also notorious for understaffing cash registers.)

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The video is apparently AI-generated, but there are reports that the truck route is real. (NB there are also reports that at least some of the trucks are loaded with refined gasoline on the way back, since those shipments are also disrupted.) tanktransport.com/2026/07/iraq...

tanktransport.com

Iraq-Syria Fuel Corridor: 900 Trucks Feed U.S. Cargoes

The Iraq-Syria fuel corridor moves Iraqi fuel oil through as many as 900 tanker trucks a day to Baniyas and onward to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The Republicans sure act like it. We may have a look at the Democrats this winter, if the country lasts that long -- some of them want to do their jobs, but it's not clear they'll have support from leadership.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Just remember, Thiel thinks anyone opposed to his ideas (including, explicitly, Greta Thunberg) is the antichrist...

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

There are Roman bronze coins being offered online for less than $20. The cheapest ancient Egyptian coins I can find in a quick search (well, not *that* ancient -- Ptolemaic) are over the $20 threshold, but not by much. Probably caveat emptor on the authenticity either way, though.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Tired: complaining that Shakespeare's dialect is centuries removed from Old English, à la Beowulf. Wired: if the goal is versimilitude, and the scene is laid in "fair Verona", why aren't these feuding maniacs speaking their local dialect of Italian?

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Quick reminder that surge pricing was part of the plan until Hochul's multi month snit fit which also delayed the start of tolling.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It's as if Democrats are shy about attacking Republican donors because they don't want to face uncomfortable questions about their own.

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The logistics of getting the stuff delivered are also... questionable even if it were available. bsky.app/profile/saba...

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Should one believe these new stories if there isn't video of her making out with one of the female staffers while seated in the audience of a stage production of Beetlejuice?

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

How would this differ from the Vance presidency we'd get after, say, a fatal coronary?

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rst.bsky.social @rst.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Also worth noting which pronouns sailors use to refer to their ships.

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