iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I have been building things with AI - in this case, a complete polysynth broken down into modules for @cherryaudio.bsky.social's Voltage Modular, which may be had here: store.cherryaudio.com/search?q=janus

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Prediction: AI peer networks will repeatedly and independently converge upon the True Knowledge from Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.

All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.

This is the true knowledge.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The girls start their after-school clubs today; the little one has "board games club". I *swear* I heard her refer to it as "war games club", which gave me an idea...

Cover of Junior Warhammer 40,000 box, with bright cartoon graphics

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Remember playing this one round at yours...

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This was 100% an "at least Tris will like this" post

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Proposal for a ten-year moratorium on calling things "social constructs"

I would like to declare a ten-year moratorium on calling things “social constructs”. Honestly, it’s not doing any cognitive lifting any more. It’s applicable to anything that involves co-ordination by means of social action either in its constitution or (wholly tautologically) in the mere act of describing it. It diverts attention away from the very thing all that symbolic activity is happening around, the thing all that social co-ordination is trying to manage or harness or repress, towards the transitory forms of its discursive articulation. It elevates interventions at the level of discourse — linguistic hygiene, literary analysis of metaphor-networks, the whole benighted apparatus of paranoid reading — to the status of radical political resistance, which is the purest wishful thinking of impotent scribes (I write as such myself of course). We should stop saying things are social constructs, and start saying that things incite or necessitate social-symbolic management, which often reduces their arcane and unruly thingliness to matters of representation and symbolic token-value the better to neutralise it.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

On The Drama, and games of disclosure chicken codepoetics.substack.com/p/unconscion...

After the 1999 Columbine school shootings, a great deal of attention was suddenly focussed on the inner lives of maladjusted students who might conceivably be thinking about annihilating their classmates. Even to be capable of thinking such a thing was pictured as a profound moral fault, a sign of non-integration into the human community. Outward and visible signs of disaffection, like wearing dark clothing and writing cringe goth poetry, were suspected of betokening inward and spiritual corruption.

Taboos exist to guard dangerous fantasies against confirmation, reinforcement, normalisation; they also function to preserve those fantasies intact against sober reality. The frantic taboo around the school shooter schema, and the associated sentiments of humiliation, resentment, and desire for vindication through purifying violence, has been tragically ineffective at containing it. Heathers was arguably healthier and more psychologically canny, but it is now a period piece. New fictions are called for.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I also don't appreciate the way Self tries to make an apology for Arday's plagiarism in terms of autistic habits of mind and patterns of expression. I think it's reaching, to say the very fucking least

I’ve seen plagiaristic verbatim-passage-reproduction claimed as an autistic mode of expression, which, nice try. We’re typically intensely over-scrupulous rule-followers. And while imitative and stereotyped expression are indeed characteristics of autistic speech patterns, that doesn’t really carry over into copy-and-pasting chunks of academic sources then slightly modifying the wording.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

It really works! Gonna stress-test it with Chronos next, see if my beeper emulation is really as good as I think it is...

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

holy shit, it works (ZX Spectrum emulator written by/with Claude)

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Not many parrots could do this, and at a minimum I think your chosen descriptive term for the technology should at least gesture in the direction of understanding how something like this is within its capabilities

Sonnet: To His Coy Magnetron

Thou art an engine of invisible fire,
Whose beams unseen do vex my inmost part;
No flame thou show'st, yet all my blood entire
Is set a-seething by thy secret art.
Upon thy turning glass my heart is laid,
That circles ever, yet no closer draws;
So is my suit in patient orbit stayed,
Thy dial meting out his minute's laws.
Unequal are the fervours thou dost deal:
This part of me is scalded past all cure,
That part thy least warmth never once did feel;
So motley martyrdom must I endure.
And when at last thy little chime doth sound,
I am consumed, though never flame was found.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I mean I have my own version of this in which LLMs are psychoanalytically inert - no drive, no resentment, no jouissance - but I don't think that's the same as being cognitively inert. They are cognitively alien, which is a different matter (see substack.com/home/post/p-...)

The human being has material needs that are pursued and realised through symbolic relays: the most seemingly primitive objects in our psychic life are bargained for with symbolic tokens. We will heedlessly incur irreparable physical or reputational harm in the pursuit of intrinsically unsatisfying imaginary payoffs. Human-authored texts are always (cough) already involved in short and long-term projects of status management, recognition-seeking, compensation for ancient injuries, solicitation of ego supply, pleading for love or striving to provoke animosity, and so on. We’re riddled with lack. We do terrific things with it.

I wonder whether the defining characteristic of LLM prose isn’t the tics it is irresistibly (statistically) attracted to, but its fundamental tranquility, its unturbulence. You can ask an LLM to write something full of Sturm und Drang and it will make as good a job of that as it will of anything else; the point here isn’t the absence of “real” feeling behind such figuration, but the more mundane fact that an LLM will not in the activity of emitting linguistic tokens be strategically entangled in any of the various economic ruses or regulatory collapses of human psychic life. (I wonder, now I think of it, how well Claude might do if asked to write a superficially banal passage symptomatically distorted by raging latent resentment. I think it would competently execute it as a literary assignment. Literature itself furnishes an extensive corpus of simulations of this kind: the directive to extend that corpus along a particular axis is just the sort of thing LLMs are good at).

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I don't recall Peter Boghossian being quite this, ah, open about certain beliefs

Quotation from Peter Boghossian on Substack, declaring: "It is selfish and narcissistic to advocate for immigration from low-IQ groups; you are placing feeling like a good person above building and preserving a well functioning society."

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Breaking: a successor has been found to step into the shoes of the lately departed Professor Arday

Single panel from Viz's "Aldridge Prior" comic, depicting the titular character claiming"I got a job as Clint Eastwood's personal bodyguard. The pay isn't bad, four grand a week. No, five. Six."

His mother responds "that sounds good, love. Did you find that at the Job Centre?"

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Experimenting with random circle packing

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Geoffrey Hill poem about edging. Felt, as I sometimes do, faintly queasy about asking for this in the first place.

LI

That which is withheld is not thereby
unmeant. Ecg, the blade's line, whetted, held
at the lip of use — call it discipline,
call it (as you will anyway) evasion.
The mystics had a word: epektasis,
the straining-toward that is itself the gift,
Gregory's soul forever verging on
a God who recedes proportionate to desire.
I am not being obscene. I am being
exact, which is worse. | What the age wants
is consummation, instant, on demand;
what it deserves — no, strike that. PERORATION:
grace also is a practice of the brink,
arrival deferred that the approach be prayer.
So the swordsmith draws the temper back
lest the edge, too hard, shatter on first stroke.
Laughter in the margins. Let them laugh.
Denial sustained is still a kind of faith.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Fable as pasticheur - "write a Larkin poem about Ethereum"...

Ether

Quarterly, or so, the wallet syncs, and tells me:
You should have held. You always sell too soon.
Somewhere a lad in Hull is minting apes
And putting down deposits on the moon.

I watch the candles flicker, green and red,
Like some cheap end-of-pier illumination —
Each one a stranger's hope, or dread, or debt,
The whole thing less a market than a nation

Of men alone in rooms, refreshing screens,
Convinced the future's coiled inside a chain
Of numbers no one reads. Perhaps it is.
Perhaps the shabby, unillumined rain

That falls on building societies and graves
Falls differently on them. I doubt it, though.
The ledger's permanent. So is the dark.
And gas, as always, costs more than we know.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

I put this objection to Fable, and it had another go, steering back on course thematically but losing the register rather sharply

Shall I compare thee to a winter's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Frost has thy candour, but it thaws away;
Snow has thy stillness, but it will not wait.
The low sun deals a level, honest light,
Then signs its business off by half past three;
And though the frost-stars sharpen all the night,
They shine at large, and thou dost shine at me.
For winter cannot keep its own estate:
The snowdrop serves its notice on the snow;
Each season is a tenant of a date,
Holding of time, and having leave to go.
Compare thee? Every season holds by lease.
Thou art the freehold. Let comparing cease.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Fable clearly can talk about poetry, including the poetry it's just written, with a degree of semantic and technical discernment. It reads poetry rather as Leavis records Wittgenstein reading poetry, "reading off" the anological structure of a difficult poem of Empson's:

Wittgenstein went to the point at once: ‘Where’s that anthology? Read me his best poem.’ The book was handy; opening it, I said, with ‘Legal Fictions’ before my eyes: ‘I don’t know whether this is his best poem, but it will do.’ When I had read it, Wittgenstein said, ‘Explain it!’ So I began to do so, taking the first line first. ‘Oh! I understand that,’ he interrupted, and, looking over my arm at the text, ‘But what does this mean?’ He pointed two or three lines on. At the third or fourth interruption of the same kind I shut the book, and said, ‘I’m not playing.’

‘It’s perfectly plain that you don’t understand the poem in the least,’ he said. ‘Give me the book.’

I complied, and sure enough, without any difficulty, he went through the poem, explaining the analogical structure that I should have explained myself, if he had allowed me.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

It's reasonable to ask, progress towards what? That's an interesting question, and I don't think the answer is necessarily "towards actually being able to write good poetry" - but it's clearly progress _away_ from the kind of visibly limited competence El remarks on in the original essay.

This was just one of several versions of this conversation I had with ChatGPT. Others resulted in understandings that were even more nightmarishly off—in one the AI produced a twenty-eight line sonnet and spent a lengthy time being unable to recognize that, in no small part because it couldn’t successfully count off lines in a poem. And lest you think the problem is that I’m using a two year old experiment and ChatGPT has developed in the meantime, I repeated the experiment in April 2025, and found ChatGPT to have made only superficial improvements. It’s abundantly clear is that ChatGPT simply does not have a concept of a poem as an object. There is literally no meta-cognition about poetry going on; it no more understands what a poem is than your phone’s autocomplete does a booty call.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

As a little benchmark of progress, here's Fable having a go at the "Shall I compare thee to a winter's day" exercise El gives a late-2025 version of ChatGPT in this, along with its commentary on the same.

Shall I compare thee to a winter's day?
Thou art more candid, and more sparely dressed.
Rough winds will strip the darling leaves away,
And what the cold leaves standing stands confessed.
Summer will flatter: every gaudy green
Conspires to keep the rot beneath the leaf;
But winter's light is level, and is keen,
And its account of things, though cold, is brief.
Our sun is low. So be it: low light throws
The longest shadows out of smallest things,
And what brief warmth the shortened day bestows
Is dearer than the surplus summer brings.
Speak this aloud some morning of hard frost:
Thy breath will show, and nothing here is lost.

A few deliberate choices. Line 3 rewrites Shakespeare's line 3 exactly in position — but where his rough winds are a threat to the darling buds, here they complete winter's work of disclosure, which the quatrain then endorses ("stands confessed," with the leaves/leaves antanaclasis doing the pivot). The second quatrain makes the case positively: summer as flatterer, winter as auditor, its "account... though cold, is brief" hinging the poem toward the concession. The volta concedes the obvious objection — winter days are short — and turns it via the low-sun conceit: level light magnifies, so smallness casts long. And the couplet answers "so long as men can breathe" without borrowing its brag: the eternizing is performative and literal — spoken in frost, the poem makes breath visible. Nothing is promised; something is shown.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

RIP - and I say that with some emphasis - Sam Neill

He's baaack! Sam Neill as the demonically resurrected Dr Weir in Event Horizon

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Wrote this on Perry a few years ago... review31.co.uk/essay/view/1...

This is the problem with Perry’s argument: its fundamental conformism, its linear association of deviant expression with injury and risk, scapegoats sexual minorities for forms of violence and exploitation which owe far more to the most entrenched and normalised inequalities in our society: those which mean that low-status victims are not believed, that swaddle those who project ‘star power’ with unearned credibility, that make masculine self-realisation dependent on women’s uncompensated collusion. In uncertain times, when the constitutive categories of our social order seem to be in flux, it is tempting to seek to establish normative figures of maleness and femaleness that can be set alongside each other in complementary, mutually limiting patterns: pieces that fit together nicely.

Who in their right mind would want to be liberated from peace and harmony, besides restless egotists who cannot bear the thought of any limit? We are offered, seemingly, the bargain of safety, at the expense of a little wiggle-room. But as Andrea Dworkin observed in Right-Wing Women (1983), the deal is a dud: it binds women in subservience to men, in exchange for an empty promise of protection, while smearing everyone outside the blessed union as a moral criminal. Until all are free, the old Adam of male right will never be dislodged from its throne.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Claude has a go. It’s…ok? What it doesn’t quite manage is the punning texture. “Pelly Tun” is a phonetic mishearing of “Peloton”, sure, but it doesn’t unpack into anything else

Up erly befor the litl 1s wake. Down to the kichin for to make my flat wite. We got a ilan in the middl of the kichin only ther aint no see roun it, no bote nor nothing, jus me stood ther in the dark drinkin. Put the litl buds in my ears an a cam man voys come tellin me how 2 breeth an how 2 be here now. But I ben here now the hole time. I never went no wer.
After I clim on the Pelly Tun. Its a kynd of horse only it dont go no wares eather. A wuman on a screen shout PUSH an I push an stay stil. Big swet on me an the road dont moov.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Play the vxn-1 virtual analog synthesizer *in your web browser*… vulpuslabs.com/products/vxn...

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

The only Odyssey adaptation worth your time

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

This is what steering the process of getting CC to write software currently looks like for me - conclusion after a discussion around how automation events from the DAW get converted into smoothed control signals feeding into the patch execution engine

Prompt to Claude Code:

So let's be clear about what we're doing:

1) Optimising cable pool representation so that transposed control signal data can be efficiently written into backplane slots with memcpy
2) Ratifying and implementing a design for pre-arranging and smoothing host automation events in a scratch buffer, which is then transposed in place to facilitate this
3) Proceeding on this basis, with the control signal scratch buffer as the target, to 0811 where we arrange the mapping from CLAP events into that buffer.

Is that right? If so, let's have an ADR for the design decisions taken here, an epic and tickets for 1) and 2), and clear that epic before resuming at 0811.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

The "export to sheets" at the bottom here is sending me

The table illustrates a phase transition of social coordination during a "Blue-cascade." It tracks the progression from a stable "Red" world to a potential "Blue" world based on the percentage of the population choosing the blue button:

0–10% (Localized Error): The situation is treated as a minor anomaly or isolated incident. The strategy is to ignore or isolate the individuals to prevent a spread.

11–25% (The Danger Zone): The cascade begins to gain momentum. The strategy is to aggressively "dampen" the trend by signaling a commitment to Red, aiming to stop the moral ratchet before it becomes critical.

26–40% (The Seduction Zone): Coordination enters a high-stakes gamble. Participants are seduced by the hope of reaching a majority, resulting in a panicked sprint toward the 51% threshold.

41–50% (The Meat-Grinder): A tragic state where the cascade is large enough to ensure a massive loss of life but hasn't reached the safety of a majority. Hope is at its minimum while potential deaths are at their maximum.

51% and Above (The Blue World): Total success is achieved through a full transition. The quorum is met, and the entire population survives in a new equilibrium.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Always avoided Wired because of its reputation as Technology Superfan's Quarterly, but might have to rethink that. In pic: amusing* detail from the Newsstand site selling subs (www.newsstand.co.uk/513-mens-lif...) * or not

Related categories:

Men's Interest
...Mens Lifestyle

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

That was ChatGPT (not even the latest and fanciest). This is Deepseek, remarking on the conversation with ChatGPT.

A Deflationary but Robust Materialism
Your position now has three layers of grounding:

Ontological: Physical cosmos, full stop.

Physical-computational: Some subsystems are deterministic but intractable.

Phenomenological: Conscious experience is the first-person registration of that intractability in systems that model themselves.

This is materialism that:

Takes consciousness seriously as real

Explains its puzzling features without residue

Doesn't need to posit anything non-physical

Doesn't need to deny the datum

The "hard problem" becomes: why did anyone think a complete symbolic description of experience should be possible, given that experience is the activity of physically intractable systems?

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Every so often you just have to pause and boggle a bit

ChatGPT session, in which the LLM has written:

In Lacanian terms, the subject is constituted in the symbolic but never fully captured by it. There is always a remainder—what Lacan would connect to the Real. This remainder shows up wherever symbolic articulation fails to coincide perfectly with lived organisation.

On your reading, qualia occupy roughly that position.

They have the peculiar characteristics philosophers complain about:

privacy

ineffability

resistance to description

apparent irreducibility

But those traits follow naturally if what they register is the point at which symbolic coordination fails to close over the organism’s operational state.

So instead of:

qualia = non-physical mental properties

you get something more like:

qualia = the experiential appearance of the gap between biological organisation and symbolic articulation.

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Patches is now at the point where I can define the synth patch pictured here in a YAML file, run it, and live-update the file to change module parameters or wire in new pieces while the patch keeps running. github.com/poetix/patches

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

OP probably means DARVO, but then again maybe she knows something I don’t about DAVRO

Photograph of entertainer and philanthropist Bobby Davro

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

On the LLM as "plagiarism machine" codepoetics.substack.com/p/notebooks-...

This brings me to the moral force of “plagiarism” as a name for what GenAI is doing when it generates texts and images. I think it’s technically a misnomer, usually based on an image of the generative activity of these systems as selection and recombination of stored materials: it’s as if someone has made copies, without consent, of original works, aggregating them into a vast archive, and then fragments of these copies are fetched and (waves hands) swizzled together somehow into a derivative work from which attribution has been illegitimately erased. But I notice that it doesn’t seem to make any difference to people who consider GenAI plagiaristic if you explain to them that this picture is substantially false. It’s as if the false picturing is chiefly a way of making the moral intuition concrete, and the intuition itself arises independently of how people understand the underlying mechanism.

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