iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 02/10/2026

Let me just explain the arithmetic thing real quick; I'm seeing a lot of people not understanding what it's supposed to show (or was supposed to show in 2023). First, let's agree that an LLM is a Stochastic Parrot, a description which I find poetic, useful, informative, and basically correct.

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ARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

ARC has given some details of how new Explore scheme will run ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub... ❗️There's a lottery❗️ Peer review yields 3 categories: highly competitive, competitive, uncompetitive. After funding highly competitive apps, competitive ones enter a lottery for remaining $.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 02/10/2026

10% serious. It almost suggests a theory of relativity. Perception of consciousness depends on the speed of consciousness of the observer.

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jam @socialistboat.dad · 01/10/2026

Caffeine doesn't replace lost hours of sleep, it only masks the fatigue signals to your brain so you don't realize how tired you actually are. You still suffer the cognitive and physiological deficits from the sleep deficiency, you just can't tell. Which is good actually and fine I've decided

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Someone should do a version of that quiz asking various kinds of animal how big a group of humans they could beat if they were allowed to organize themselves as well as they were able and use whatever tools they could find. It would be like "LOL grizzly bear thinks they could take a dozen!"

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George Pearkes @peark.es · 01/10/2026

This is a good thread and for some reason it unlocked something that's been brewing in the back of my head for a while.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

my first week at Oxford, I went to the college computer room. Because I had taught myself BASIC when I was 10 years old. I wanted IT friends, ppl who were also excited by tech. The computer room was full of giggling teenage boys sharing photos of boobs. I left and never came back.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 01/10/2026

p < 0.05 with 30% bots must mean that the underlying effects are large.

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 01/10/2026

got a new one of those printer-that-everyone-gets-because-it-just-works Brother printer to replace the one we left behind, and can confirm that it still Just Works here

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 01/10/2026

I don’t want to be glib about your sleeplessness. That’s absolutely awful. But Andrew, you are the Great Pagliacci.

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Christopher Neugebauer @chrisjrn.fyi · 30/09/2026

I subscribe to 500 Songs because: a) it's a truly great piece of 20th century social history writing b) getting to watch A Quality Autistic Creative Project playing out in real time that makes me feel more comfortable in my own inability to predict the length or frequency of my own creative output.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 30/09/2026

Time for a third Patreon bonus after hours feed.

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I think what this does get though is that AI is part of the boss/exec backlash that consumed tech leaders after MeToo and Work From Home. It's another way for them to assume more control of workers and the industry.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's a truth to this, but I think collapsing it to "Bossism" is wrong. It's just really hard to understand illegible tasks and tacit knowledge in general - that's what those adjectives *mean*.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 30/09/2026

Does that mean you successfully hacked the US government and the Chinese at once?

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 30/09/2026

This does only make sense for individual EU members if the others do it as well. Which means they’ll have to negotiate it with the EU who can then be blocked by a single member. Feature not a bug this time around.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 30/09/2026

I once shocked a table of academics by saying the best thing that could happen to my big paper is that someone would replicate it better and nobody would have to cite me anymore. I did not understand their confusion. What I am saying is that there were signs a long time ago.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 29/09/2026

Triply Robust Panel Estimators. You don't need a ton of data but you do need a supercomputer to run it in finite time. arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21536

arxiv.org

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Ben Chu @benchu.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What's happened to crude oil flows from the Middle East since the US war on Iran began? 🛢️ Has Iran effectively choked off the Strait of Hormuz? Or is the Strait now basically open as the US claims? & what's happened to other exit routes? Here's a helpful way of visualising it...📊 👇1/8

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fesshole 🧻 @fesshole.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Add your fess: b3ta.com/addfess

My wife and I did a "message in a bottle" in 1999 for our son to find. We dated it 1956 and from another continent. We planted the bottle on the beach but then couldn't find it. 3 weeks later it was front page news in our local newspaper. We didn't own up.

Fesshole GOLD from 11th June 2021

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In Otter News @in-otter-news.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

After a long day at the aquarium, the otters help tidy their toys away. Payment is made promptly and entirely in ice cubes.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 26/09/2026

There was a reddit post yesterday about a guy “reinventing bureaucracy” to keep his agent swarm doing what they were supposed to do. If you set the incentives correct at the top, bureaucracy will find a way.

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 26/09/2026

I wouldn’t be surprised if banks had to increase their anti-scam budgets because of crypto. Like crypto made banks spend money to protect their customers from pig butchering scams.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 18/09/2026

To be fair if we can use the rationalists to automate system 1 thinking I am all for it.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 18/09/2026

Today on Bluesky we celebrate Jev, the LLM that attaches probabilities to every decision and we condone the rationalists, philosophers who attach probabilities to everything.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17/09/2026

stone cold classic

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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 17/09/2026

For the modern batshit definition of conservative, Cerebus. For the older, more reality-compatible definition, the collected works of the Kinks 1964-74. Or It's A Wonderful Life.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 17/09/2026

It would be kinda cool to develop some kind of DeGroot network model where research practices and research results spread through social networks of researchers and how that affects individual quality and total network research quality.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 16/09/2026

Is the tariff exemption for chip imports an important factor for the imbalance towards AI investments? It has the shape of stereotypical econ101 distortion but the magnitude of the effect cannot be that big.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 16/09/2026

I mean that's just normal. You check things and make sure they're correct and have experts review them and so on. You edit, you extend, you simplify. It's research. Solving the N-S conjecture on Sunday and publishing the proof on Monday is weird.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 16/09/2026

The reasoning probably extends to more than just the scientific results in the whole AI race. Optimizing for speed of releasing new models and results is not necessarily the optimal path for society.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 16/09/2026

Extra irony: It got refuted because it's findings were tested in again in a tv show.

bbcprisonstudy.org

Resources - The BBC Prison Study

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Mrs. Detective PikaBOO, Esq. @clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · 15/09/2026

This is one of the funniest threads I’ve read in ages. At no point does OP break, and the landlords, well, www.reddit.com/r/Landlord/c...

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Ben @cinemashoebox.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

the next two-ish weeks are the Chess Olympiad, a kind of weird event where national teams compete for an overall trophy. each nation fields a team of four which, each day, plays another nation, with the winner of each match-up being whichever one won more of the 4 games.

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Dan McCrum @mccrum.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

An alternative take on AI doomerism which fits a standard model incompetence theory of humanity

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 14/09/2026

This fits my innovation vs maintenance pet peeve

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 14/09/2026

The EU using its historical advantage again to grab territory.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 13/09/2026

But this comes back around to why I do support the statement Tao et al made. I like it more than the Leiden Declaration, because it doesn’t pretend it can regulate or limit change. It explains why we value knowledge-creation in the first place, and says “whatever comes next must do this too.”

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Leah @leah.myatproto.social · 12/09/2026

I guess that's enough yelling online for a Saturday, here's a meme. I'm going go gambol in the fields and frolic in the buttercups or some shit.

a scene of someone pitching a tent near a vista, caption reads:
Treat your body like a data center
consume as much water and literature as possible
upset local city councils with your existence

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CLAYFACE: CELEBRITY DIRT #3 out now @judedoyle.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

People of All Genders Empowered to Maintain Delusion That They Have A Chance With Gillian Anderson

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 11/09/2026

This is probably partly an incentive problem. Once assessor only looks at well written submissions, the incentives change. And yet, I would at least entertain the hypothesis that the AI does not understand (loosely defined) its submission and has a hard time explaining it.

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Stijn Masschelein @stijn-masschelein.net · 11/09/2026

Something interesting in Ruben's experience, in the Navier-Stokes saga, and basically all of open-source now is that the AI generated solutions are badly written for a human assessor. You would think that the large *language* models could do one more round of revisions to get the language clear.

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Baltic Takes (formerly badbaltictakes) @baltictakes.com · 09/09/2026

A Chinese official attempted some of that Wolf Warrior Diplomacy ™ shit. It did not go well. Philippines' Defence Minister Gilberto Teodoro was speaking up for smaller nations and international law at a forum in Korea when he was handed a note from a Chinese official, meant as intimidating.

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Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 08/09/2026

After years of youthful exuberance, causal inference people are quietly turning into grumpy biostatisticians like @statsepi.bsky.social

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