iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It’s funny how one of the best potential uses of LLMs (complex semantic search, for lack of a better name) is also completely useless because of LLMs (the vast majority of stuff published online anymore is meaningless slop).

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Whenever I see one of these "closeted conservative" stories that doesn't mention the person's actual political views, I can't help but think of the classic tweet. (re: apple.news/AUGXnsTfARwq..., "Confessions of a Campus Conservative" from, of course, National Review)

A tweet from Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence):

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no...no not those views

Me: So....deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

(timestamp: 11:24pm on October 11, 2018)

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I really want a tech billionaire to attempt to claim Bir Tawil. Both because it seems like it’d actually be possible with that level of funding, and because the odds of them getting merc’ed by the actual inhabitants when they show up to gaze on their domain seem relatively high.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I assume you’re familiar with @margaret.bsky.social‘s work? Reminds me of some of it.

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

im starting to believe in acceleration. please trump. do your coup. burn it down. water the tree of liberty with the blood of our sclerotic institutions. the more you destroy the more that will need to be rebuilt. exhaust us, spend our rage, slake our bloodthirst. let the hangover begin

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Are you familiar with Jim Bell’s Assassination Politics essay? It’s about a very similar idea.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I don’t know the number, but it isn’t small, a lot of uses don’t need datacenters (small models often run fine locally), and the performance gain per token used is getting worse with each new model generation, suggesting a wall (either theoretical or practical) is approaching.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I think a lot of the “demand” is artificial. How many people are using LLMs because they’re currently priced below cost, or are mashed into things (Google burns tokens whenever I run a search or write an email, even though I’d rather it not), or feel like it’s necessary to not fall behind?

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Micah @rincewind.run · 08/07/2026

every day someone comes on this retirement home for millennial forum posters and gets my ass

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I suppose that could be a consequence of the cost of higher ed, by making education in general viewed more in economic terms. I don’t know if that differs in countries with more affordable college, and even then it could be influenced by the US.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

True, I think of it that way because it was such a part of my childhood but it’s way more complex in general. Re: cost, I think it even applies to free education. SBF is probably the most famous example, but it’s shocking to me the number of tech “geniuses” who never read books even before LLMs.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

On the one hand, it's funny how Trump's intervention to help the US team made it so a win would be viewed as illegitimate. On the other hand, it's also funny that barring some last-second miracle, we're still going to lose fairly badly.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

probably raised in the latter, judging by their actions and their parental backgrounds. I can wager guesses as to why someone would try to instill one belief vs. the other, but I’m curious if there’s actually any consistent trends tying it to socioeconomic factors, job category, family history, etc.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

It’d be interesting to see what factors lead to someone growing up in the paradigm of “learning/knowledge/understanding is intrinsically good” vs “learning/… is extrinsically good because jobs/social standing/etc.” I know I was raised in the former, but a lot of the tech CEOs seem like they were

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Terrible WSJ headline in Apple News this morning: “Chatbots Are Replacing Therapists With Little Scientific Evidence Behind Them” What the article says is incredibly different and it should be titled: “Chatbots With Little Scientific Evidence Behind Them Are Replacing Therapists”

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Listening to Ep.123 of @lionsledbydonkeys.bsky.social as they joke about if people in the present day used radioactivity as a health thing and apparently they haven’t heard of the “energy” pendants that are discs of heavily-thoriated glass.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Ooof. I went there as a kid. Sad to see them do something this dumb.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I feel old. I just realized that my github ID (271_804) puts me in the earliest 0.15% of users (approximately), given that the IDs are roughly sequential and they're past 197_000_000.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

In fairness, it’ll still be illegal to mail a handgun to almost anyone. This doesn’t get rid of the need for an FFL to handle the actual transfer, it just means that you can use the USPS to send a handgun to an FFL as opposed to being limited to one of the private shipping companies that allows it.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Anyone who calls someone “low IQ” as an insult immediately strikes me as someone trying to talk as if they were smart, whereas all the actually smart people I know will either use much more precise skill-related insults, or just call someone an idiot or a dumbass and not try to dress it up.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Yeah, I don’t think it’s quite correct, but is pretty close phonetically. That said, I don’t speak Old Norse and my bokmål isn’t great so I’m not anything approaching a reliable source.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

The top is the elder futhark for the old Norse spelling of “Valkyrie”, if I’m not mistaken, which fits with everything else.

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Jake the Quick @jakethequick.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I often find myself thinking back to something Robert Evans said kinda early on in BtB. “I’m not saying violence actually solves anything. But people treat you differently when they know that violence isn’t off the table for you.”

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Even more true if your order is identifiable without a name attached (e.g., unusual ingredient removal request or the like), although you shouldn’t do that just in the hope of better service.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

I’ve heard that waiter performance doesn’t influence tips much, but if you regularly go somewhere, tipping absolutely influences the service you receive. I had a friend not recognize a dish they’d had before because I ordered and always tip well, so it was super nicely done up and loaded.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

It’s possible this is a recent change, but last time I set up a Pi 5 it worked fine as long as I set up the user creds via the Raspberry Pi Imager, the WiFi conf via /wpa_supplicant.conf on the SD card, and enabled ssh by touching /ssh Have you given that a shot?

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I also can't help but think that "reviewing code someone else wrote" and "fixing/maintaining code someone else wrote" are the two worst parts of being a software developer (at least, among parts touching code, so not counting meetings etc.), based on my experience and everyone I've talked to.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Also important: Tylenol is often taken for diseases (like flu) that *are* strongly suspected of increasing the risk of various long-term impacts (such as schizophrenia) on the resulting offspring. So if there's a correlation, it's likely due to something else causing both autism and tylenol usage.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Apparently 3 AWS data centers in UAE and Bahrain were damaged by drones (two direct hits, one near-hit that still caused damage). Definitely looking targeted at this point. Fun times. www.cnbc.com/2026/03/02/a...

cnbc.com

Amazon says drone strikes damaged 3 facilities in UAE and Bahrain

Amazon Web Services warned that instability is likely to continue in the Middle East, making operations "unpredictable."

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

In fairness, the people he's trying to convince to vote for him in 2028 know what a splitting maul is and can explain exactly when to use it vs. an axe. That said, they probably also won't be swayed by such obvious pandering.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

I’m hoping the top-level one is something like this: 1. Why did EC2 go down? Answer: DC hit by a drone (or shrapnel or whatever). 2. Why was the DC hit? Answer: we bombed Iran 3. Why’d we do that? Answer: <gestures wildly around at the state of the US>.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Oh man am I glad that I no longer work on AWS CloudHSM. The service was/is great but having to deal with a secure-hardware-based stack after a datacenter takes a military strike is not an experience I'm eager to have.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

While it’s true there is a difference, it’s also important to remember that neither are actually diagnoses in a clinical sense, just overlapping sets of symptoms characteristic of a few different psychiatric conditions.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

I’ve been asked to give a workshop on GenAI-assisted coding at work, giving me quite a bit of faith that my boss isn’t snooping on my public socials.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I'm guessing it's terrestrial erosion, as I'd expect a meteorite of that shape to be iron instead of stone, but I'm very much not an expert. Regardless of origin it's a beautiful, cool rock.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

"Also in the medal mix are Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson of Britain, whose presentation is so energetic they should be scored in kilojoules." I couldn't resist: if we assume a top speed of 5 m/s and a combined mass of at least 80kg, then yes, that is over 1000 joules. (from archive.is/ACK4f)

archive.is

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Yes, I’m sure the market crash is because of how much AI is enabling and not the realization that while it may help with some specific tasks, it isn’t economically feasible for the vast majority of what it’s supposed to take over. People are insane. apple.news/ANeh0JCpYTgq...

apple.news

Anthropic Just Sent Shockwaves Through the Entire Stock Market by Releasing a New AI Tool — Futurism

A minor update with major consequences. Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Last week, Anthropic released a new AI tool for automating legal work, precipitating a mass stock market selloff...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 04/02/2026

if you’re not putting General Sherman in charge of the DOJ in your administration we aren’t interested

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

But that may just be me being overly cynical after a dozen years working with HSMs and hardware security. I'd love to be wrong and for there to be a reasonably simple solution to this. At the very least it'd be cool if Apple tried something like this with iPhone cameras. (3/3)

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

It might be useful in certain situations where the camera can be examined frequently (photographers at prestigious news agencies and crime-scene photographers are two that come to mind), but I don't see it having much public impact as cops and journalists are already tanking in terms of trust. (2/3)

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

This is less useful than a lot of people think. The TL;DR is that 1. TPMs aren't 100% immune to tampering and you just need to crack one to sign fake images, and 2. the input data itself could be faked (either by replacing the sensor or pointing it at a good-enough screen). (1/3)

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Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

3 yrs ago I started writing a book that is in stores TODAY. It's narrative nonfiction, anti-fascist spy thriller set in Trump era. It's timely as hell & I'm proud of it. A thread of what people are saying abt it & why I hope you'll help make it a bestseller www.simonandschuster.com/books/To-Cat...

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Looks like it 404s when accessed over a VPN but not if you aren't using one.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

It feels very weird to dig out my old mountaineering gear to go for a walk in the coastal plains region of the south.

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

It pisses me off when articles like apple.news/A5Wrva_s7RL6... say that the speed with which AI is evolving is why it’s crucial to integrate it into school. That’s exactly why it shouldn’t be a big focus. GPTs are 8 years old and have been common for 3. Tech changes quickly; math and science don’t.

apple.news

Why higher education needs to embrace AI — Fast Company

In a panel with Fast Company, education innovators shared why colleges and universities have a responsibility to arm students—and workers—with the skills they need as AI transforms the workplace. [Ima...

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Steve Norum @stevenorum.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

I really wish more people realized that recent layoffs aren’t because of AI, they’re because the economy is in the shitter and only propped up by AI speculation. AI is just a convenient excuse that delays a complete collapse of the market. www.axios.com/2026/01/15/c...

axios.com

The Fed may have crushed entry-level jobs more than AI

The deterioration in the job market for young workers began before ChatGPT was widely available.

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