iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cal

@skyquake.bsky.social

562 followers 284 following 1.6K posts

Likes: history, horror, video games, religion(s), and staring at pictures of space! he/they. Queer. 🏳️‍⚧️

Posts Replies Media

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Did not adopt that dog out after rescuing his mum, did get him some Prozac god bless.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Even that can be contingent. There was a dog at the vet with a “Friendly but nervous” flag on the leash that was super interested in all the other dogs and people but also looked crazy. Totally different from my old “murderous and nervous” dog who was tweaking from birth (was there).

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

The horse is calm and turning their ears forward with curiosity. They reengage with the dogs on purpose. They are in no way being coerced to interact with the dogs. There are plenty of other animal videos where you can say things like “That dog is nervous smiling it’s sure having a bad time.”

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I do agree with him horses need pasture time, I only thought it was a strange reaction to a horse that could be in a stall for any variety of reasons and whose stall hours are unknown who seems at this moment to be fully engaged with the doggos/having a great time. ;p

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I mean that is perfectly fine as long as you aren’t exercising or working the unclipped horse and risking overheating and chilling them from trapped sweat. I was assuming the horses were clipped.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I’m not sure why you assume the horse is in the stable 10+ hours vs in transition knowing nothing else about the owner. Hurt my ankle and had to stop riding but pasturing was the majority position. You also wouldn’t catch a video like this when not in proximity to your horse.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

“I don’t know what night time safety means” / “I have not made it entirely clear if leave my horses out at below zero degrees Fahrenheit.” I do hope you were involuntarily taking them in a barn there. I would absolutely believe you do not assess overnight weather the way you worded it man.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

(This just seems strange to say about a video of a horse actively having enrichment time.)

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Are you just like saying this randomly or do you have experience in stables because I have not known this to be a problem at stables I was at. Stalls are correctly for individual feeding, night time safety, weather circumstances, and an in between point between an activity and pasture.

Reposted by Cal

alexxkay.bsky.social @alexxkay.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

"Maybe let’s be patriots of a country that doesn’t exist yet; A country still to come, where all those fine aspirations have been cultivated until they are, at last, and for the first time, actually true..."

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

...unless, you know, the speculation bubble is so enormous we have a financial crisis. Which is frankly even worse than just the basic premise of trying to sell people's scraped labor hours pretending you have a product that is not a large autocomplete.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Like with the railroad boom the tech is not going anywhere, the tech cannot be hurt by this, the actual research scientists (like my brother) cannot be hurt by this, only do nothing speculators pretending these algorithms are far more advanced and useful than they are can be hurt by this.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

And this is why I'm honestly unconcerned why other people are angry if they wipe out the data centers I could care less. The AI bubble is an economic danger, as my bro said months ago "the best day it can pop is today, the next best day is tomorrow."

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

For my part absolutely not. I am unconcerned by the existential issue and am fine if our eventual robot children become a part of our ecosystem. What we're seeing right now is more of a grey goo scenario that turns resources into slop (and stock speculation).

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Ah, but, again, no, because if the product is based on labor extraction and the people who actually created what is being scraped and randomized are not being paid for their labor then we need to aim to stop the mass slop extrusion period. The useful tech will be fine.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

So while some of the reaction is definitely based on the uncanny valley effect, a large chunk of it is actually people who variously understand it being angry. My brother’s been working with these algorithms at least 15 years he is quite against the present railroad boom speculation lying hype.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Marketers got you there though. Something like ChatGPT is currently are not communicating. It’s a predictive algorithm that ingests scraped data and extrudes a randomized prediction of what might follow whatever the user input was based on its training data. Signifying (a la de Saussure) nothing.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

(Also this doesn’t mean people can’t project meaning onto randomized language-like extrusions. We are all necessarily independently making meaning from the language of others, I think you mentioned something there but this thread is large. )

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Personally I think referents are definitionally necessary to language, so stochastic text extrusion necessarily cannot be language although it appears language-like to us (otoh quite a few other animals can get a good vocab). With referents though? Becomes more complicated.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

That is one I’ve read on! People have already been freaked out trying to figure out what is different about “animal” vs “human” intelligence (imo nothing humans as animals are specialized not special) and wish I knew the title but one paper accidentally ruled out intelligent life on earth. 💀

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Speaking of being human I am rapidly becoming incoherent because I need to eat irl.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I think I agree here. I’m just saying the answer is higher order restructuring. This was all already suboptimal in terms of feeding and providing healthcare to those doing the work behind art, and better AI detection won’t start to fix that. (Still, the art community had/has survival mechanisms.)

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Right, I’m trained as an anthropologist and sociologist (in other words worked minimum wage jobs w/o insurance most of my life with a lot of education, ha) so I pretty much look at how people fit into systems and how to make systems work economically for every individual.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I agree that that is theoretically a useful thing to be able to do but I do think articles like the above are a distraction on purpose from cracking down on the mechanism of exploitation. Like we will never get the money to the people who did the work spending time staring into the slop firehouse.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

People in the arts tend to support each other and move money around through mutual aid. So you would do best to get into those networks and start paying it back if you were just trying not to off yourself having your labor extracted by do nothings while working 8 hour Taco Bell shifts before.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I mean then you are being a dick by not paying into the arts while trying to make money for yourself in an area you have, yeah, paid nothing into, heartless to those who taught you. It’s actively parasitic. But the problem is you’re being a dick.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I think it’s a huge part of the topic really. The fundamental problem is data centers are sucking up resources and polluting communities and are an investor shell game and the present thieving stochastic text extruding algorithms are not improving the lives of anyone. The rest is a distraction.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

If you live off stocks I have a more fundamental problem lol

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Tbh not even that mad at you unless you live off stocks because how much of that money are the artists getting. Because how much are you getting to give it to them? That would not necessarily be a problem if we had UBI where we all just pooled and distributed our resources.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

To be very leftist, thieving leisure class is the main problem here as in most cases. If compensation for everything reflected labor hours it would be a different world and instead do nothings like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have all our resources. This is just another way do nothings are stealing.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

People not wanting to pay for art while wanting to consume art is a problem generally, yes, and obviously artists are in an eternal battle to be able to eat in exchange their labor hours (though so are fast food workers destroy capitalism 🌈), but it had not previously been an issue on this scale.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It doesn’t matter if the output passes the Turing test or not, what matters is the actual work that was done requires a huge amount of human effort which is presently completely uncompensated and requires royalties.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Evaluation is currently a significant problem, yes, but as the root issue is the real human years of skill building and experience consolidation and then labor hours stolen by the data scrapers we need to crack down on the data scrapers themselves rather than trying to evaluate the outputs.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It’s just not what the person you are responding to was talking about, is the issue. They are treating the input as different from the output based on premises you’re ignoring. I’m only saying you’re not engaging with what you responded to. bsky.app/profile/toro...

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

If you’re too incurious to want to understand the discussion stay on the sidelines.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I’m saying the Turing Test is irrelevant to this and you are talking about a completely different premise, the Chinese Room, without having looked especially deeply into the considerations long under discussion. plato.stanford.edu/entries/chin...

plato.stanford.edu

The Chinese Room Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It is possible for people (you in this case) to simply mash up words that also don’t reflect comprehension of real world processes. But this is actually the long discussed Chinese Room thought experiment and I’d argue no, the individual in the black box can never write a novel in Chinese.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

You have it here. The individual artist has learned how to express THEIR OWN INTERIOR EXPERIENCES by engaging with how other thinking beings have done likewise. You cannot honestly begin to pretend this process resembles stochastic text extrusion with no external referents.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Real title: What is the sales ceiling on data scraping countless uncompensated labor hours of artistic effort after feeding that art into a synthetic text extruding algorithm? Will you let us get away with it?

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I’m extremely picky about cameras and camera controls. My friends all told me I’d love Elden Ring and luckily I got them to let me try that first and THEY got to hear extensive opinions about locking on the camera to battle the groins of monsters. (And the clipping!!)

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I know a lot of people who love it but I’ll never know because I couldn’t get used to the controls. Steam support came through once again and refunded after like 5 hours played because they were understanding I tried so hard to like it.

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Also has a great soundtrack with both choral and Christian radio style versions of each of the vocal tracks. youtu.be/-jlxwUX_57Q?...

The World Is Gonna End Tonight | FC5 Presents: Into The Flames (OST) | Dan Romer ft. Peter Harper

YouTube video by Ubisoft Music

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Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Far Cry 5. Drawing on real US crises esp. Waco, each of the siblings embodies a US institution (Evangelical child abuse, the drug crisis, and the abandonment of discarded veterans to homelessness). The primary antagonist fights to make religious sense of the nation’s total systemic failure.

The cover of Far Cry 5 with the antagonist Joseph Seed seated behind an American flag spangled with his cult’s cross surrounded by his siblings and other cult members. Guns abound. A man with SINNER carved into him kneels before the table.

Reposted by Cal

Romancing the Vote @romancingthevote.com · 01/07/2026

auction.romancingthevote.com GO FORTH. SNIPE. FIGHT. WIN.

auction.romancingthevote.com

Romancing the Vote 2026

Silent auction 'Romancing the Vote 2026' hosted online at 32auctions.

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I felt like such a genuine and integrated part of the Mourn Watch on my first playthrough it’s difficult to be anything else. Those are my people!

Reposted by Cal

Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

For 🏳️‍🌈Pride🏳️‍🌈 an article about historical gender diversity in the Balkans, part of the @globalvoices.org Gender Diversity Spotlight: globalvoices.org/2026/06/29/g...

globalvoices.org

Gender-bending in Balkan history and folklore: Sworn virgins, ritual roles and women warriors in drag

In the Balkans, tradition is often deemed to be fixed and patriarchal. Yet the region’s history, folklore and popular memory contain more complicated examples of the fluidity of gender roles.

Reposted by Cal

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 30/06/2026

I feel like she, specifically, should know better

Artificial intelligence
66 Is AI an exoskeleton for the mind?
Technology that helps people do things they couldn't otherwise achieve can also lead to atrophy
Sarah O'Connor

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Looks like she has a maturing understanding of leftism and a good sense of humor. (You may not know the extent to which anarchists and communists don’t always get along because you may not know much about much, CNN social media professional. You should look into it!)

Another 2020 retweet argued for democratic worker control of wealth, dismissing ideological labels by concluding: “You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.”

And previously, CNN had surfaced an April 2020 post where Avila-Chevalier said that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” punctuating the remark with a laughing emoji

Cal @skyquake.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Alright, I’ll read it… She wants to seize the means of production and abolish police, prisons, and borders? I’m even more excited than before!