iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Jason Duval being intact is a kind of cultural progress I suppose.

Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I think this is a brilliant idea. I don't like how news apps, incl. Google headlines, drip feed me stories throughout the day. Sometimes they are things I am interested in and would not have heard about otherwise, but it's usually nonsense and should be delivered to me at most once a day.

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Reposted by Alexander Zanate

Disgruntled Lesbians in YOUR Area! @docmagnus.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

"Men read less than women, this must be because—" CORRECT BUT MISLEADING! a 2025 survey by Pew Research Center found that 71% of American men had read at least one book in the last year, versus 78% of women! the difference is statistically significant, but I don't know if I'd call it dramatic!

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

You're declaring this entire human tradition wrong because today there's an edge case that is politically inconvenient and pretending it's common sense, c'mon. I'm a moderately hard atheist and I'm saying this.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I think this is making more of a strong claim on metaphysics than it might feel like. Humans believed for a long time, and many groups still do, that everything was alive and thinking, including like rocks and the wind. Everything has a spirit, even if it's _really_ alien, kinda deal.

Saying chatbots might be conscious is a very dumb thing to say. We gain nothing by pretending it's not. 2/2

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

If Richard Garriott gets the Ultima copyright back that's nothing but good IMO.

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Reposted by Alexander Zanate

dame @dame.is · 08/10/2026

fun fact: racket abuse is the number one violation in professional tennis and there are consequences notably, rackets do not have consciousness or self experience that we know of

Racket abuse
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99
Audible obscenity
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140
Unsportsmanlike conduct 287

67
Coaching
87
152
Ball abuse
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35
Verbal abuse

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

(math adjacent PhD student) Minus delta results are a thing in math and can be rather interesting but this is kinda a display of why computed results are usually not, a human proof would probably find a very small bounded function instead of a raw number. (Inverse Ackermann is my guess for this one)

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Wow that last post was word salad I'm really tipsy sorry

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The medical school student loan situation is probably more dire but I would put this above a glonzo.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

They're also a little rough, math proofs are their own art and these are very dry even by math proof standards. I don't think this is good, those uninteresting problems are what get people master's and PhDs, practice to work on bigger things, but also it's not yet the end of the world.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reading the math proofs published by OpenAI adjacent to my field and here's some observations. They're very specific, for the ones adjacent to my field these problems weren't solved because everyone kinda knew how they'd turn out even if it wasn't proven, there were just always juicer targets.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm almost done with a PhD that involves some math proofs and a few of the problems listed are in the distant orbit of what I'm doing. I'm not really anti-LLM but it's uncomfortable being even this close to the train tracks.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I can't see the original post but if I'm picking up the vibes right it might be nice if they reach out to profs in the space to see if there were any grad students working on these problems first, there's so many problems withholding a few for that couldn't hurt and would be good PR.

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Reposted by Alexander Zanate

Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Imagine Mormons but for Lord of the Rings instead of the Bible and their missionary work involves making fake versions of Saruman as sexy as possible, usually by turning him into a young blond schoolgirl.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I haven't read all the in game books but the in game books are deliberately unreliable, especially ones by Vivec.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The Princes, outside of Skyrim where they're all insane maximalists, represent their whole domain not just its extremes. There are also some indicators that they put on an exaggerated face especially for non-followers. Molag Bal's behavior in Morrowind's vampire cure quest is what I'm thinking.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Idk how much ESO changes things but given the text of the mainline games I think there's of read of Molag Bal and the Volkihars where Serana/Valerica just had to do some consensual kinky D/s with Molag Bal and it wasn't a brutal assault of Harkon's wife and daughter just Molag Bal cucking him.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Absolute vaugepost king got my first what

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This seems like a pretty big concession, actually, compared to the default argument for a long time. There are open source models trained with materials that meet this criteria, however tiny. I'm not a fan of genAI generally, but I do think the opponents have reinvented religion a little bit.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com This is your occasional reminder that generative "Al" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead 1/2
5h

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Reposted by Alexander Zanate

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Lab-acquired infections happen. Only a small percent ever become public information, in part because they never need to. The plague thing is interesting and unfortunate, and also the pandemic risk of wild type Yersinia pestis in 2026 is indistinguishable from zero. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A pattern in arguments over ending daylight savings or switching to Celsius is people who see the unit as the thing itself (6:00 _is_ the time of day, 50° _is_ the temperature) vs people who see the unit as an abstraction of the thing (the time is 6:00, the temperature is 50°).

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Like the other fringe policy positions, eg weed policy until really the past decade or aspects of gay rights going back farther, the political borders having not solidified means my team is full of whiney idiots, however vehemently justified those whines are.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The Eric Clopper lawsuit getting thrown out is bad, equal protection means equal protection not equal protection except for boy children, but it doesn't create some nefarious precedent that will be insurmountable. If it gets used to justify throwing another case out that case was never going to win.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Emulators are rather important for some elements of historical preservation and them themselves using very clean code is part of the legal framework for them to be allowed to exist, I don't actually think the statement is that weird.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

PhD in computer science Cannot operate a text based website (Sorry I accidentally empty quote posted like 4 posts)

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

No "which," my publishing editor tells me.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I guess I am on team "yeah there isn't objective standards for meaningful art," because religious texts which are all fluffy gibberish that have been elevated to deep meaning by brute force. If it can be done to the book of Isaiah and the book of Mormon it can be done to My Weekend Orc Fantasy.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The Count of Monte Cristo comes to mind as an example of something that wasn't really written to provide more than entertainment but was revealed to be more over time.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is a bit of a hindsight argument, I think. Which works were transcendent were revealed by the test of time, Jane Austen was surrounded by plenty of now forgotten nobilityslop. Some authors wrote it because they liked it, for money, or transcendence and no group had a 0% became-classic hit rate.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Believing in some kind of abstract animism for everything emergent but still granting special status to people also works, humans believed the trees had thoughts and cut them down anyway for a long time, but like actually owning it. I'm kinda surprised this isn't more common.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

SSD prices appear to have dipped a bit from their peak, only a bit and it could just be an aberration but it gives me hope.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think this is only true if you draw the categories very carefully, the breakneck speed of LGBT rights post-AIDS crisis/post-90s would not have been possible without Internet/texting, at least. I don't believe Obama and friends like the ACA would have been either. I dont think the lurch is uniform.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What I want to know is why Deep Space Nine on Paramount+ is worse than the DVDs but Voyager on Paramount+ appears to be the same as the DVDs? There can't possibly be a legal issue that means Paramount can only source the VHS release of DS9 but can source the DVD/broadcast release of Voyager.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The first few DS9 seasons are available on LaserDisc but it doesn't look like the DVD only seasons are from a different source than the ones that have LaserDiscs so I'm inclined to believe all DVD seasons are from the same source. Idk if the LaserDiscs are meaningfully different from the DVDs.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm not opposed to the idea of streaming quality being fucky, Deep Space Nine famously has a worse quality on Paramount+ than the DVD release, which is extra damning because the DVDs appear to be recorded from broadcast not from film or original files. Broadcast is better than VHS, at least.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Does the Land Before Time have an HD-DVD release and is it different from the Blu-Ray release? Universal was one of the main backers of HD-DVD and I think if it exists it's probably the best modern release.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I think this says less about physical media vs streaming and more about Universal not really caring about the Don Bluth movies.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A fair question would be lost relative to what? The Blu-Ray release was famously poor, streaming appears to use the DVD release reencoded, VHS is worse. So the only way to see more detail would be LaserDisc or the original 35mm, and I still doubt either would carry the full frame like this.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A robot live-in chef would be nice, even more so if they could go to the grocery store for me. Both things I like doing and enrich my life but that I have to do more often than I like or find enriching.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

FWIW recipe generation is something that LLMs have performed very poorly at in my experience. Moderately good at combining ingredients, eg what can I make with what's in my fridge, but something totally borks the quantities and ordering.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Cooking and the basics of food science should be in schools, even if only to combat things like MAHA, and has great potential tying in to everything else (history, social studies, chemistry). It's one of those things like reading [insert language equivalent] Shakespeare that everyone should do once.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I liked flat root beer from the get go. I didn't like vanilla pudding until I thought about it and it fit all my priorities.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My 2¢, as ostensibly a STEMie, this is too broad a brush either way. There are things, probably even most of them, that I arrived at just through feelings. However there are absolutely still things that I had to noodle out first before I landed on how I felt about em.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Some people treat interviews as something to absolutely min/max for appeal and once those people have to start giving interviews they start looking for the same. I don't think it's healthy but it's also kinda hard to argue against if you feel a hiring squeeze.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Avoiding credit cards altogether out of an aversion to debt is being a little misinformed but if that's your principal that's your principal. If you need a credit card specific service that debit card won't work for try using a charge card, don't complain like the world is out to get you.

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Alexander Zanate @snapgracklepop.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There's a certain type of criticism of liberals that in the culture war games they use minorities as the ball instead of as players, but the thing is that to not do this sometimes involves being quiet, not putting these minority issues front and center. A lot of people clearly cannot handle that.

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