iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 29/09/2026

It's weird to argue about etymology of a term from 3 years ago, right? We have contemporaneous evidence pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

The term “frontier AI” has only recently gained traction. It has been used in several publications (e.g., Anderljung, Barnhart et al., 2023; Bucknall & Trager, 2023; Shevlane et al., 2023) and in the context of the UK AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park (DSIT, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d) and the AI Seoul Summit 2024 (DSIT, 2024a, 2024b). It has also been adopted by several companies, including Google DeepMind (2023a, October 27, 2024a), OpenAI (2023c, October 26, 2023e, 2023f), and Anthropic (2023a, September 19, 2023b, July 25), as well as the Frontier Model Forum (2023). In this article, “frontier AI models” are defined as highly capable GPAI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in the most advanced models (DSIT, 2024b).8 Similar definitions have been suggested by Shevlane et al. (2023),9 Anderljung, Barnhart et al. (2023),10 and Phuong et al. (2024).11 But note that the term has also been criticized (Helfrich, 2024). By “frontier AI developer,” I mean any organization that develops frontier AI models.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 26/09/2026

The top category is practically "Other"; the third is just three different things. Drowning and car accidents would both be above the bottom five without changing Accidents' overall rank at all. We could have an "infectious disease" category encompassing COVID and flu, but don't.

A chart listing causes of death 0-19y. "Certain conditions originating in the perinatal period" is the top, followed by "Accidents", "Congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal abnormalities", Assault, Suicide, Malignant Neoplasms, etc

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 26/09/2026

Whatever Heim told Medina during that mound visit, it sure didn't work

Gameday sequence of events
- Bases become loaded with a walk
- Mound visit
- Ball (88.8 mph slider) on an 0-0 count
- Wild pitch, runner on third scores, Houston 5 Athletics 6

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 21/09/2026

A machine can't really be said to have "sensory input" if all that sensory data is just reduced on-site before being sent down a wire. That's too indirected to be a real sensory experience. pic unrelated

Diagram of the human nervous system from Wikipedia

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 16/09/2026

Eliezer, 2008: Superintelligence would derive general relativity by watching a few frames of an apple falling off a table

Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 07/09/2026

Does she have the proper certification to be saying this?

Dan Olson holding his Worth Decider certificate

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 26/08/2026

This is a transistor. It controls current between the collector and the emitter. It's a fancy dimmer switch. There is nothing this device can do that you couldn't already do with a bunch of dimmer switches. No matter how fast they are or how much Bell Labs hypes them, it's just a dimmer switch.

Basic circuit diagram of a transistor in use

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 23/08/2026

AL West mediocrity simply unmatched

5 dragon heads, all of them are derpy, and they're wearing baseball jerseys for the Mariners, Astros, Athletics, Rangers, and Angels

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 23/08/2026

Power's out in the neighborhood because someone crashed their e-bike into a power pole. Still a chaotic scene 7 hours later. jk it was a car

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 21/08/2026

Did IEEE754 write this sign? What category is something using 4.000 kg CO2e?

Sign defining Low CO2 emissions as "less than 1.9999kg" CO2e

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 20/08/2026

Responding with just "read the FAQ and search for duplicates" to 30% of incoming GitHub issues and seeing how long it takes for me to get fired

Screencap from dontpastetheai.com

When someone asks you something, they want your answer. Not a wall of unedited ChatGPT output. A short reply from you beats a long one from a model, every time.

What's happening
Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.

The person on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds. They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement.

The world is filled with people that don't want to read or think about things, don't be one of them.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 14/08/2026

I feel like I've been lied to

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 13/08/2026

Fun to imagine this regulatory scheme actually enacted. Sir do you have a license for that beer belly?

Should we require riders who weigh 250 pounds to travel slower than riders who weight 200? / Yes

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 13/08/2026

750 W and 7,500 W are different and it's stupid to pretend they're the same

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 13/08/2026

Despite being written in 2011, there are obvious signs that Ernest Cline used AI to help him write Ready Player One, specifically ELIZA

Human "How do I describe Donkey Kong in The Oasis to my readers?"
Computer: "> IT LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE DONKEY KONG"
Human: "oh my god."

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 07/08/2026

OK, let's crop the chart so the Livewire has 1/3rd the hp, same as maybe a Rebel 300 Personally, I can still see the difference between the e-bike and even the Surron. Not sure which of us is obtuse here.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 07/08/2026

Imagine if "but they kill 40,000 people a year" got mentioned whenever cars came up as reliably as sidewalk riding does when e-bikes are discussed. Hey man you thinking of buying a Corolla? Yeah I need a car even though they kill 40,000 people a year. Anyway it gets good mileage. 40k deaths tho

My only problem with ebikes is all the idiots that ride them on the sidewalk; they're going to kill somebody one of these days. But I have that same problem with manual bikes, too. If it isn't illegal to ride ebikes and manual bikes on the sidewalk, then it really should be.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 06/08/2026

"math is fake" being a horseshoe phenomenon makes me lose all hope for democracy as a means of achieving a better society

But, again, good luck collecting the data for that, because it will only be a disproof if your sample size is the entire population.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 05/08/2026

When we said TypeScript was "blazing fast" this was not our intention

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 05/08/2026

Come wait out the fire alarm with me!

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 04/08/2026

They should make a new cut of Super Size Me where every time Morgan's symptoms are due to the alcoholism he was hiding, it plays the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme

Still from the movie. [Doctor] If somebody were doing this to their liver with alcohol, they could wipe out their whole liver. I've never heard of anyone doing that with a high-fat diet, but I guess anything's possible.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 02/08/2026

I didn't assemble this bike, but one of two things must be true: - it came from the factory this way - they expect the end-user to correctly set up the brakes from scratch Neither is acceptable if "safer braking" is your whole deal

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 22/07/2026

This is my guess too and yet

"how is it not suited" because it fucking hallucinates. this is not a controversial, unknown, or otherwise unfamiliar function of an LLM.

it produces "answer shaped objects", which is a category distinct from "answer".

the conjecture is about polynomials. the LLM spits some out. wtf do you want?

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 12/06/2026

If these are 1,320' center-pivot irrigators supplying 40 acre-inches (standard for California alfalfa), this is half a billion gallons per year:

Iron and Wine: Around the Well image cover

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 06/06/2026

I don't think riding a Lime Glider (e-bike with no pedals, max ~18mph) should require the same license as a Hayabusa (0-60 in 2.8 seconds)

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 05/06/2026

We're changing how single-character inference in template literals works in TypeScript 7.0 TL;DR

"you wouldn't split a surrogate pair" in the style of "you wouldn't download a car"

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 01/06/2026

When people do this, I just sit there and refuse to turn. Why? Because they're creating a dangerous situation where they're making me turn into a bike lane where they've blocked my view of possible cyclists in it.

Diagram showing that stopping for a left-turning car blinds that car from bikes coming from an outer bike lane

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 01/06/2026

Wow, Gemini image creation is amazing

Draw a diagram of a two-lane road with bike lanes on the outside, as seen from above

We look at a long road running vertical, with a cross-street. A northbound car is waiting to turn left (west); its blinker is illuminated. A southbound car has stopped, incorrectly giving up the right of way. The southbound lane has a bicycle lane to the west of the travel lane. A cyclist in the southbound bike lane is positioned such that the northbound left-turning driver cannot see the bicycle due to the southbound car's inexplicable stop. Dashed arrows indicate that if the turning car were to proceed, they would collide with the bicycle in the bike lane. Make sure each car and the bike are in their correct lanes. Do not apply any text labels whatsoever

I have created this diagram of the traffic scenario you described, which illustrates the intersection and the visibility conflict that leads to a potential collision between the turning vehicle and the cyclist.

However, please note that the diagram does not align with your request for a vertical primary road axis. In this version, the two-lane road is running horizontally. Additionally, while you specified no text labels, some markers labeled "CONFLICT" were included in the image.

(the image does not even come close to matching the description)

(Continued from previous screenshot)
> Start over and try again

Image: Photorealistic image of two men and two women enjoying dinner outside in a busy European courtyard

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 29/05/2026

I don't know why we're talking about the homeownership rate when there's a 20% homelessness rate driven almost entirely by investors who neither rent nor own/occupy. We need to get these investors into homes of any kind.

So very roughly, the country consists of about 2/5 owner/occupiers, 2/5 renters, and 1/5 investors.

By the relevant definition of "people who own the home in which they live," home ownership in the US is around 40%, which is undeniably "not most."

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 19/05/2026

I am calling this "sockturfing"

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 10/05/2026

Somehow I've been exposed to more meta-criticism about this guy than actual criticism about Mass Effect

Some youtube OC of a guy that was on Jenny Nicholson and Big Joel's recent videos. I don't know who it is

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 23/04/2026

You might think this calculation is suspect, but it's not. My friend Tim died when he was walking (3mph) around his house (400,000 lbs) and bumped into a wall. He exploded on impact.

My favorite physics lesson!

"Ebikes also run red lights" yes but at 28mph it can hit you about as hard as a car going (checks calculator) 0.6 mph

Still better not to! But you probably won't die

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 21/04/2026

My favorite commercial right now is the ESPN ad where a guy tries to explain the pricing structure involved in the unholy trinity of ESPN Plus, MLB TV, and Your Local Team's various premium offerings. I asked ChatGPT for a summary and it gave me this, not sure what's going on:

Zefraath, an extremely text-heavy Yu-Gi-Oh! card. There's too much text to transcribe. It's just a huge amount of text. So much text.

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Ryan Cavanaugh @searyanc.dev · 18/04/2026

No one had to advertise the iPod! Pic unrelated I guess

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