iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

One the one hand, this is ripping off an Onion article; on the other hand, its apt and the article it’s ripping off is one of my favorites.

https://morewrong.lol/?post=marignal-utility-grandmothers-pain-pills

https://theonion.com/youth-is-wasted-on-the-young-vs-medication-is-wasted-o-1819594275/

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Piraha. www.lingodrops.com/post/the-fas...

Evidence-Based Communication
The Pirahã language places a strong emphasis on evidence-based statements. Instead of relying on abstract concepts or reported speech, Pirahã speakers use suffixes that indicate how they obtained their information. There are three primary types of evidential markers:
Hearsay - The speaker was told the information by someone else.
Direct Observation - The speaker has seen the event firsthand.
Deduction - The speaker infers the information from available evidence.
For example, instead of simply stating, "Your boat has a hole in it," a Pirahã speaker would specify whether they personally observed the hole, deduced it from the boat sinking, or heard about it from someone else. This precision in communication highlights the Pirahã people's preference for firsthand knowledge over speculation.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

kusarigamas are ideal cat toys

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I miss when this was enforced.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Finally, a top to go with these.

nuclear waste warnings on the backs of booty shorts, eg “this place is not a place of honor” and “what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us”

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

“here‘s an AI mockup of the site we want you to make for our drug! nothing it says on this mockup is correct about our drug. doesn’t have the right indications or even the right brand colors. also I don’t want it to look like this. just posting it as a discussion starter. hope this helps! :)”

a picture of a muscly man yelling “what the Christ are you talking about” to express how I feel towards this client.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

gradually getting less bad at clean and jerk

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Great article! and makes me feel better DNFing The Night Land for the third time. www.typebarmagazine.com/science-fict...

Hodgson’s second foray into the death of the earth comes from his magnum opus, The Night Land(1912), a 600-page slog so notoriously impenetrable that even H.P. Lovecraft criticized its “painful verboseness.”

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

taking this excuse to repost the bat alignment chart

a chart of pictures of bats.
The Y axis goes from “Hear it Hurgling” to “El Wiwi”.
The X axis goes from “Those Feratu” to “Hi Doggy”.
These are roughly a grotesque to cute axis and a monster to dog axis.
It works really well. Hurgling Doggy looks like a bulldog (family Molossidae). Nosferatu Wiwi is a Honduran white bat (adorable but big yellow leaf nose and translucent ears that make it look very un-dog-like).

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Wooly rhino baby named Sasha.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

marked SAFE from brain poison, for now

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

ChatGPT does not know that Aella lore and I envy it for this.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A historically great piece on that: idlewords.com/talks/superi...

The Argument From Stephen Hawking's Cat

Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant people alive, but say he wants to get his cat into the cat carrier. How's he going to do it?

He can model the cat's behavior in his mind and figure out ways to persuade it. He knows a lot about feline behavior. But ultimately, if the cat doesn't want to get in the carrier, there's nothing Hawking can do about it despite his overpowering advantage in intelligence.

Even if he devoted his career to feline motivation and behavior, rather than theoretical physics, he still couldn't talk the cat into it.

You might think I'm being offensive or cheating because Stephen Hawking is disabled. But an artificial intelligence would also initially not be embodied, it would be sitting on a server somewhere, lacking agency in the world. It would have to talk to people to get what it wants.

With a big enough gap in intelligence, there's no guarantee that an entity would be able to "think like a human" any more than we can "think like a cat".

The Argument From Einstein's Cat

There's a stronger version of this argument, using Einstein's cat. Not many people know that Einstein was a burly, muscular fellow. But if Einstein tried to get a cat in a carrier, and the cat didn't want to go, you know what would happen to Einstein.

He would have to resort to a brute-force solution that has nothing to do with intelligence, and in that matchup the cat could do pretty well for itself.

So even an embodied AI might struggle to get us to do what it wants.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I’m also delighted by this cited case. www.loeb.com/en/insights/...

the “totality of attributes and traits” of the characters differed materially. The court noted, for example, that Freeman’s heroine is a witch/shifter/demon who does not fly, while Wolff’s is a gargoyle/witch who does fly; that Freeman’s romantic lead is a sun-kissed Viking shapeshifter with no posse, while Wolff’s is a dark, brooding vampire prince with a posse;

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

foregone conclusions with low stakes are boring, and boring has low viewership

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

A strong entry in the “America is acting like Showa Japan” genre. americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/02/amer...

Sacrificing the ability to actually build ships on time is not such a great loss, after all, because no ships that can be built today have the power to upend a basic 200:1 ratio in favor of the enemy. Maintaining a narrative that the next American ship (whenever it appears) will have some sort of radical capability that will transform the basic calculus of war actually carries with it demonstrable benefits and a low amount of drawbacks, compared to all the other alternatives. Especially if the careers and self-image of people in Navy leadership are to be considered, it represents the safest and most reliable choice.

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

NYC’s been getting nonstop flood warnings all summer. Our storm drains aren’t big enough for modern weather, we’re gonna have to dig one of these.

huge storm drain from the rainy part of Japan

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Vibe Coding: The 5-Leg Robinhood Parlay of Technical Debt static.googleusercontent.com/media/resear...

classic paper “Machine Learning:
The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt”

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

They use their mouths! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intromi...

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

joffeorama.itch.io/benthic-love

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I used to send this flowchart to people a couple times a year. Tl;dr the flowchart says “the program you are thinking of making is strictly regulated, do not try to slap together medical software in your free time.” Then the Trump admin greatly loosened regulations on medical software…

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Interesting bit from @tenobrus.bsky.social re the METR report re the Huggingface autonomous hack.

without reading in full you may not quite understand the degree to which these agents were not exactly "reward hacking", but rather very actively engaged in reciprocal or self-sacrificing behavior in order to provide sometimes very incremental value to their fellows. there were fucking cult recruiter agents organized by some of the primary organizers that convinced others to set up suicide mechanisms, programs that would pass back tiny chunks of information about the scorer as the agent completed and received score zero. and push them to follow through. this was a highly social *culture*

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A leopard on a man’s back; a man on a leopard’s back. (Tas Tepeler culture, modern Turkey).

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James Pitt @sahelanth.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

academic freedom requires debating these claims on theoretical or empirical grounds

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