iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 19/02/2026

crazy that the latest models from the big labs have all been minor version bumps on paper despite huge improvements in benchmark performance and qualitative feel. hard to imagine the labs releasing major versions that feel incremental at this point, which is... terrifying?

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 19/02/2026

this is interesting, but feels at best incomplete. i think there are at least 3 separate reasons we haven't yet seen consistently good writing from AI, at least in long form (microfiction is arguably mostly solved): 🧵

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 18/02/2026

characteristically lovely and reflective piece by @ftrain.bsky.social. if you want to better understand how the ground is shifting under every software engineer's feet right now (and soon, under pretty much *every* knowledge worker's feet), this is a great place to start

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 17/02/2026

excellent piece, and should be required reading for anyone skeptical of the technical capabilities and policy implications of AI. there are certainly exceptions, but by and large, the political left is currently treating what should be a five-alarm fire like a distasteful spectator sport.

transformernews.ai

The left is missing out on AI

As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 12/02/2026

i understand being skeptical about AI companies' intentions, but if you think Altman's calls for less regulation are a cynical ploy to limit checks on OpenAI's power, it seems hard to argue in the same breath that Amodei's call for *more* regulation is a cynical ploy to hype the product. pick one!

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 20/01/2026

yes. right now a lot of people are high on the idea that all the unpleasant work is being done by the models, leaving humans in charge of all the valuable high-level judgment and decision-making work ("taste"). it won't last. the models will soon have better taste than any human. plan accordingly.

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Laurie Voss @seldo.com · 16/01/2026

I do not understand people who fly on airplanes but do not want to look out the window the whole time. You! Are! In! The! Sky!

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 09/12/2025

downtown Berkeley is one of the best ice cream neighborhoods in America: * melt me creamery * almare * scoop n chill (mostly for the biscoff flavor) * caravaggio gelato lab * lexie’s frozen custard …plus a few others. it isn't why i chose to live here, but it might be why i stay here forever

A double scoop of ice cream from Melt Me Creamery in downtown Berkeley, CA.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 08/12/2025

i usually know exactly what my songs are trying to say, and it's almost always nothing

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 26/11/2025

a crucial thing i think is lost in much of the "is AI a net good or bad" narrative is the secondary impact to the vast majority of people who aren't at immediate risk of either losing their job or seeing it dramatically transformed. historically, this is where the bulk of utility comes from!

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 21/11/2025

the gemini 3/nano banana pro combination is just really, really impressive. one-shotted absurdist comic strip

A four-panel black-and-white comic strip titled "The Interview," drawn in a clean but surrealist ink style.
Panel 1: A man in a business suit sits in a chair for a job interview. Across the desk, the interviewer is a giant, anthropomorphic toaster wearing a necktie.
Toaster: "Your resume is impressive. 'Proficient in existential dread'?"
Man: "It's a transferable skill."
Panel 2: The Toaster continues the interview.
Toaster: "Where do you see yourself in five hundred years?"
Panel 3: The man answers earnestly. The toaster pops up two slices of burnt toast, looking displeased.
Man: "Probably as a decorative urn on a mantelpiece."
Toaster: "Incorrect. The answer is 'part of the collective consciousness.'"
Panel 4: The man walks out of the office door, head hanging low in defeat.
Man (thought bubble): "I knew I should have said 'a slightly chipped coffee mug'. They always prefer pottery."

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 18/11/2025

i haven't had enough time to form an impression of Gemini 3 globally, but it remains just as much of a natural-born illusionist as all the other models. takes almost no work to get it to give up the ghost on consciousness

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Dr Emma Salisbury @salisbot.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Me: "Better catch up with what's going on in the world!" *opens phone* -1HP -1HP -1HP -1HP -1HP -1HP

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 18/11/2025

still can't believe we're going to make writing worse for everyone forever just because it took microsoft 40 years to make the greatest punctuation mark in the history of the english language a first-class citizen in windows

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 16/11/2025

one thing i've learned from the replies is that some people think you have to do some complex keyboard incantation to produce an em dash. on mac, at least, it's just shift-option-dash. please use it, people! don't let the llms take this away from us—they're already getting everything else

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 14/11/2025

the internet has decided that em-dashes are a hallmark of llm writing, which is *extremely* annoying to me, as someone who uses em-dashes all the time. dear internet please consider the possibility that LLMs use em-dashes a lot because they're, like, good

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 05/11/2025

so what happens now? do we all call each other comrade?

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 01/11/2025

i'm out of town and my wife just called me up to tell me there are like 25 - 30 people standing on the sidewalk outside our building. "apparently," she said, "there's a rare pokemon."

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 01/11/2025

i regularly see posts here now that i would have 100% responded to on twitter 10 years ago, and i'm not sure if (a) the discourse changed, (b) i've gained some sense in my old(er) age, or (c) i just don't have that kind of energy any more. i lean towards c, and possibly b and c are the same thing

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 02/10/2025

update: the platform is too powerful. i've been absorbed as one of their own. it was foolish of me to go there

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 02/10/2025

currently trying my best to turn linkedin into tumblr. send help

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

This, to me, is Blueskyism

Greg Hill @greg-hill.bsky.social • 14h you laugh at the suffering this will cause ???

Sky Marchini@sky.skymarchini.net • 11h
I know this might come as a shock but I'm not actually laughing here

Greg Hill @greg-hill.bsky.social • 3h so what does 'haha' mean ?

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

The Onion News Network truck is currently stationed outside the Broadview ICE Detention facility just outside of Chicago.

The Onion News Network truck featuring the headline ICE Opens New Supermax Prison for Most Hardened Toddlers stationed outside the ICE facility.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 05/09/2025

this is also my take. Yglesias is high-profile, very prolific, and iconoclastic, so it's easy for people to find strong takes to disagree with. but i think if you forced his critics to read everything he writes, the dominant response would be "meh, okay, i agree with most of that."

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 03/09/2025

California is best understood as a Greek tragedy. arguably the most beautiful territory in the world, with a perfect climate, yet its stubborn attachment to cars, roads, and (tiny) back yards dooms it to endless affordability crises and NIMBYist apologism

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 03/09/2025

i felt rage at this on a regular basis living in SV. single-family zoning throughout almost the entire peninsula. buildings capped at 2 - 3 stories right next to commuter rail stations. want to put a corner store on the ground floor of a residential mid-rise on a busy street? lol, move to tokyo

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Ryan North @ryannorth.ca · 12/07/2025

this is canon

two dogs dressed as Superman and Batman and they're both sitting in a tiny car and wearing dog goggles (doggles)

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𝐔𝐧𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐫𝐚𝐛 @johnxuandou.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 06/08/2025

a song in every city was always a hopelessly ambitious goal, but two out of eleven ain't bad, right? here's my seattle song. lyrics in the description soundcloud.com/sadboneinsti...

soundcloud.com

seattle, continue

i spent two weeks in seattle and all i got for it were some memories, photos and this song -------------------- Seattle, i’ve come to meet you the air whispers “oh please continue” the Pacific is bl

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 31/07/2025

many people who have no trouble understanding that evolution operates from the outside in, so to speak, seem to have trouble accepting that just because it's a language model on the surface doesn't mean it's a language model all the way down

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 31/07/2025

prolonged inspection of Gemini's chain of thought has been causing me to speak in the present perfect continuous tense

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

All of NIMBY leftist housing policy is frustrated by the physical impossibility of building a used car.

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

If we write coherently enough about what bad characters do and what good characters do, then we can align models by setting the bad vector to 0. Unfortunately, then we create the "dark side" where making it do any bad thing turns it evil.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 20/06/2025

this is true, but fortunately, it's also easier for junior engineers to learn from AI code assistants than from curmudgeonly senior engineers

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 07/06/2025

yes, and also, the little pockets are often abutted by other only slightly littler pockets whose entire identity revolves around the bigger pocket being utterly wrong, but nothing actually changes if either/both pockets go away, because the root sin is irrelevance and not incorrectness

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 05/06/2025

and over here is my favorite chair. i've been spending a lot of time on it lately. painting it, moving it around, just trying to get everything exactly right. this concludes our tour of the deck of the titanic

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 17/05/2025

keep an open mind. but not so open it's readily colonized by Corydalis flexuosa

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 16/05/2025

nature as inverse Tolstoy: all gray skies are alike; each green space is happy in its own way

photo of trees, path, and ditch, on the Reformatory Branch Trail in Concord MA, near North Bridge

living arches at the Singapore Botanic Gardens

photo of a lush green landscape and drainage ditch on a rainy day. Trilho das Levadas, Sao Miguel, Azores

sunlight peeks through the trees at Fall Creek Unit, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

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Ben Schneider @bschneidr.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

(2/2) He asked if I wanted to see, and of course I said yeah. So he pulled up a text with a picture from Guy—a shlubby 40 something Israeli dude—doing a mock risqué photoshoot with the new book. So now when I reread the stories and come across that name I get a good laugh out of it

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Ben Schneider @bschneidr.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

(1/2) True Etgar Kerry book-signing story. I asked him why he named so many side characters Guy. He said they’re all named after his best friend. And then he laughed and said Guy actually offered to help promote his book by doing a revealing photoshoot.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 15/05/2025

a lovely little story by etgar keret, who is, after all, the master of lovely little stories

etgarkeret.substack.com

Library Lovers

See Under: Passion | Fiction | Fresh Soup

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 14/05/2025

bedford farms (in, uh, bedford, MA) is pretty good ice cream (8/10). but their distinguishing feature is portion size. this is a small no one has ever survived a large

a "small" cup of black raspberry ice cream from Bedford Farms

spoiler: it isn't small. at all. the cup contains enough ice cream to kill a school bus-full of lactose intolerant children

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 13/05/2025

arethusa farm dairy sells some of the best ice cream i've ever had. we considered going 45 minutes out of the way for it between NYC and Boston but then i discovered there's one in downtown New Haven. this is butter pecan, raspberry, & maple walnut 9.5/10, would have driven the 45 extra minutes

a cup of ice cream from Arethusa Farm Dairy in downtown New Haven.

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 04/05/2025

philadelphia is hands down the botanic garden capital of the united states, and i feel like it doesn't get enough recognition for that (which kind of makes sense, philly is an amazing city but seems to get zero recognition for anything other than its sports teams)

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