iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Our barbarism ought to shame us. Our lack shame about it ought to shame us too. I think it probably does, but we’re too chickenshit to admit it

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Doing it in some closed vault is for your comfort, neatly packaged to let you avoid eye contact with your complicity. The chicken nugget of state violence.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A country that executes people should not only do it publicly, but force its citizens to watch.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There’s a strain of lefty so foreign to political power that they can’t even conceive of having it, have no idea what they’d do with it if they got it. They relegated themselves to the sidelines and then forgot they ever wanted into the game

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One day we’ll meet aliens and they‘ll have spaceships or something. Will we call it ”anthropomorphizing” to refer to them as intelligent? Of course not.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

See, like this. The reason it’s “anthropomorphizing” is only based on the implicit and undefended claim that only biological systems can be intelligent. It’s a definitional fiat masquerading as analysis. bsky.app/profile/whst...

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

As for consciousness, I’ve never heard a workable definition and won’t even try, but that should caution us about jumping to conclusion about it. Ask yourself first how you came to have it out of the vat of carbon soup between your ears.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Put another way: the best way for a system to pass as smart is to *be* smart, for basically any definition of smart. Intelligence is an emergent property, not a specific bit of pixie dust. Thus, whether an LLM is intelligent is behavioral question and its implementation details are irrelevant.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

That they do this by ”just predicting tokens“ is irrelevant, just like your understanding is ”just neurons firing”. The token thing makes sense: human text contains a lot of meaning into it, so a machine that correctly predicts useful text will have that meaning embedded in it.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

My own opinion is that “understanding“ should be defined in terms of being able to answer question on the subject in question. This is exactly how we test human understanding! AIs pass this test for an increasing number of topics.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A lot of y’all are unexamined dualists

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Your brain is a bundle of cells following simple instructions on when to fire, and somehow “thinking” emerges from it. It’s different in many ways from how an LLM works, but what are the relevant ways, and why are they dispositive?

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There’s a certain religious flavor to “AIs do not understand anything!” because a) it sure seems like they do and b) you want to argue that they technically don’t, then you need to actually argue technically. But that’s not what’s happening; it’s just a handwave.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The “AI is not real” people should establish “human intelligence is real” first. Give falsifiable (and general, substrate-neutral!) definitions for terms like “consciousness“, “feeling”, and “understanding“. *Then* we can listen to arguments about what does or doesn’t have it.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I think this is right. No matter how strongly you believe in these collective dynamics, your kids aren’t supposed to be your tools for social change, large or small. They’re their own people and your responsibility to them stands on its own.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This is like the Facebook grandmas coming up with their own epidemiology and yelling invective at the people trying to explain Covid to them. You don’t know anything, you’re angry, and you kind of know how to use Google. Two posts ago you didn’t know what the CPI was. Fine, but who is lying here?

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The chart shows yearly change. As in, how much the CPI grew compared to the previous year, each year. To get inflation over X years, you have to multiply the X years‘ data points together, since they compound. The CPI is a specific metric; there are no variables to elide

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Reposted by Spork Monger

The Integers, PhD @theintegers.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I have solved my trade deficit with the grocery store by deciding to starve to death

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Most people are more worried about AI’s disruptive effects than about catastrophe risk, which is what the AI nerds are worried about. Any attempt to regulate any of this is going to be ineffective politically (no one will be happy), as well substantively (no actual problem will be solved)

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I read “Superintelligence”. I don’t think AI danger is wholly a crank fantasy, though I do suspect it’s distant. It’s that any possible attempt at intervention is going to be bloviating in senate hearings and poorly conceived regulation. Nothing useful will happen. In the meantime…

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

AI oversight lacks even an agreed-upon framework (what are the goals?), seems unlikely to be effective, and is way less important than [gestures around wildly]. Closer to tilting at windmills than anything else

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Moreover it has practical consequence: I get in arguments with people about whether companies should have free non-commercial speech rights, and my example is always that the NYT is a company. “Ah, but the press is specifically enshrined in the—“ no no no

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This one is also a hobby horse of mine. It should be obvious to journalists because otherwise “freedom of speech, or of the press” has inconsistent categories. It would also be weird for the Constitution to name an industry. And finally it just has the ring of more recently coined term.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

[logs into bsky for the first time in week] We’re still talking about data centers? Buildings with computers in them?

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

So one way to understand transphobia is discomfort laundered into religious righteousness, then that laundered into a deep insecurity

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

My other note here is that a huge amount of right wing religious angst seems traceable to the fact that their worldviews are fundamentally childish, at some level they know this, and their defenses are anger and scorn.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I recognize that there are plenty of atheist moral realists but they’re a) wrong and b) at least those supposedly inscribed values are usually loftier than proscriptive gender roles

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

[puts on internet atheist fedora] Religion is a permission structure for declaring your values to be universal, inevitable, the almighty’s will, regardless of how fiddly and fragile and petty those values are. God can inscribe into nature any shit you think up, no further examination required.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

He was also a congressman who committed crimes…I don’t think that counts as being capriciously vicious to soft targets like the UK press often is

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

WW2 Japanese soldier who was accidentally left on a small island, never heard the war ended, still is fighting for the Emperor in 1965

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

These weirdos picked such an odd hill to die on. Like it can’t be emphasized enough how much “this movie adaptation of a Greek myth is cultural betrayal” is just a whacko thing to say

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

As LLMs are trained to be less directly sycophantic (easy to steel yourself against anyway), they become much more subtly reinforcing, mirroring your worldview in ways big and small, which is much harder to combat.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

One of the more seductive features of LLMs is that they speak *you*, your private language. They understand you and respond in idiomatic you. This is both very helpful for having high-bandwidth conversations, and dangerous because it constantly reinforces your framing, no matter how wrong it is.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

We just need to get Trump to read these 16 important LessWrong posts and discuss them with his cabinet

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

As someone who likes these things and despises Trump, I’m happy to simply realign. He kept nuclear power on his side of the fence, though.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Trump has done a great job of quickly and thoroughly recoding free trade and the US-led world order more generally as left-coded, seemingly with no exercise of agency from any part of the left. It’s been remakable.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

“Oh those things are bad for poor people, actually” makes little sense, but it’s almost forced by the situation

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Especially when that guy also really cares about not being some bougie asshole. So how does he match his affectation of poverty with the fact that he wouldn’t shop at Walmart if you paid him?

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Poor people cheap things because they can afford them. Globalization, especially imports from Asia, have improved their quality of life significantly. You can see why this doesn’t sit well with the guy whose identity is at least in part “person who buys hand-woven stuff from the craft fair”

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The thing missing in this discussion is why the bsky kids hate cheap goods and are willing to die on that hill: they like and can afford fancy things! And they want to feel *justified* in liking those fancy things; they want their aesthetics to match their class solidarity

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

This is good though! Always reaching higher. (I get the complaint: people want to retcon the past and deny the progress, which leads to weird distortions.)

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I have been trying to figure out how to say “ankylosaurus” ever since listening to an audiobook that said it completely differently than I expected. Turns out no one knows?

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

The foreshadowing-to-things-happening ratio feels off in both books. And the second one seems to start with a dramatic breakup with a character we don’t know, so its emotional impact didn’t land for me. But there is much to like, maybe I’ll give it another go.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I couldn’t get into the second one at all, lmk if you do better

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Every country has weird mythologies they’re constitutionally incapable of critically examining, but this one seems pretty extreme.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

One of the things I’ve learned from talking to the “man on the street” is that they really do feel like citizenship and its privileges (chief among them seems to be right of first refusal for any job) are their sacred birthright, whereas foreigners must, at best, suffer to earn it

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

And when the engineers all say “the AI is good but terrible at making decisions and it’s going to get everything wrong if not carefully, closely steered by experts” the CEO just sees them as protecting their turf. Arrogance and resentment.

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Spork Monger @sporkmonger.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Because the CEO, being a pretty smart guy who go good grades and understands his domain pretty well and is already wealthy, secretly thinks all this engineering stuff is probably pretty easy, more shamanistic knowledge than real skill, and he’s been getting bilked this whole time by greedy engineers

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