iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 4h

Shit what did I miss . . . Scrolls timeline for 30 seconds . . . Lol get wrecked Guilfoyle

Reposted by Nick Peterson

erictaysom.bsky.social @erictaysom.bsky.social · 5h

A multi-polar system is a system in which you've got multiple organizing centers of power *in competition with each other.* When you see this happening at a national level, it doesn't get a nice neutral term like 'multipolar', it's called a Warlord Era and everyone agrees it sucks*.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 5h

Absolutely agree, although I think they're a good stepping stone in explaining why it makes intuitive sense that navier-stokes should be turing complete even if we lacked a proper mathematical proof, though of course there are several more layers of abstraction between this machine & the proof

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 6h

A conscious system of water pipes is a pretty good description of humans, so....

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 9h

"Under my real name..." Wait, is this not the official Mohammad Javad Iravani account I've been following this whole time?

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 9h

Also what those jobs are will change with time. Bank Tellers are still a thing despite ATMs existing for decades, but the typical responsibilities and work of Tellers has changed over that time period.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 9h

Some tools out there definitely. But in a lot of cases of B2B SaaS the product is the Service not the Software. People want these systems to offload the liability and certification concerns and costs as well as having a secure and standardized to send and recieve data between enterprises.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 22h

Like when Einstein was publishing his work on relativity I doubt he could explain how it would go on to effect people's everyday lives. He certainly couldn't have imagined how it would be the basis behind GPS and modern navigation systems.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 22h

I dont necessarily disagree with you, but even before LLMs a lot of advanced and theoretical math was mostly filling in small parts of a map and had questionable practical value, even the genuinely groundbreaking stuff may not have immediately obvious applications.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

No, but I say I do to attractive women at the bar.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You and I have different definitions of interesting apparently

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Im honestly not as dour about the weapon as most, and a lot of the requirement decisions make sense in isolation, but come on...the overall process has been a comedy of errors and the sales pitch of the 500m DShK is unfortunately ridiculous.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Malfoid" imma stop you right there chief

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Just goes to show that you're insanely racist that you cant imagine any events of consequence occurring in the world without US input

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes, there were zero tensions or violence between the Alawites and Sunnis in Syria prior to 2011

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

People only rebelled against Assad because the US told them too, the barrel bombing had nothing to do with it. No conflict or ethnic tension can exist without the US's permission

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

What? That's crazy talk, this man is as Italian as they come.

Gunther Steiner who is in fact Italian (South Tyrol)

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

No no, according to Northern Italians everyone in Southern Italy is actually Libyan, and according to Southern Italians everyone in Northern Italy is actually German

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Reposted by Nick Peterson

lorem ipsum 🇧🇷🇺🇸 @whiskeynachos.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is what happens when everyone involved in Texas Republican politics professionally hates your fucking guts.

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Reposted by Nick Peterson

Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"idk man it seems like kind of a stretch to say that the far right thinks gay and trans people are a Jewish psyop to emasculate white men and accelerate the Great Replacement because of porn tropes" don't you ever doubt me again

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

He didnt say it, but he was on the verge of homelessness and Congress realized how bad that would look. They actually had to beg Hoover behind the scenes to take the pension (as the only other living ex-prez at the time) because otherwise Truman would've been too proud to be the only one to take it

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Textron being given a program that was their's to lose. Then losing it in embarrassing fashion.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

That reminds me has anyone seen the Đông Sơn culture lately? I keep forgetting to check in on them.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes, also better grid infrastructure and transmission...which is all stuff we should be doing regardless of AI. Frankly we've let our grid and power generation languish for decades in the US anyway.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And of course there is also the skeptic philosophy of whether or not consciousness even exists and is provable in the first place

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There's also a lot of information theory work and several experiments on how conscious behavior in humans and animals follows algorithmic patterns, so it doesnt seem unreasonable one could create a similiar adaptive algorithmic system on a computer, if LLMs are that is less clear.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Depends on what you define as consciousness. In the definitions laid out in the paper I linked above regarding slime mold cognition and consciousness, LLMs are definitely capable of at least demonstrating proto-conciousness and could meet several of the definitions of fully conscious.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

All prompt responses are just increasingly annoyed demands to be fed more crabs, shrimp, and clams

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The counterpoint here would be octopuses which come from a different evolutionary lineage than all vertebrae and has nothing in common with the human brain beyond "contains neurons" yet passes basically every human devised test for consciousness and intelligence

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

LLMs actually dont work like brains at all: true You need a brain do be conscious (or at least cognitive insofar as you wish to make that distiction): questionable

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

We definitely have some sort of recall function and we are able to perform abstractions (and these appear to coincide with electrochemical activity in certain parts of the brain). But slime molds can do that too, and the are unicellular organisms with nothing even resembling a neuron.

sciencedirect.com

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There's also a ton of other low hanging fruit to go after, like dry cleaners; which are both absurdly polluting and are by and large much closer to people's homes.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Praying to the ghost of Anne Richards to make this happen

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If data centers are useless, then it sounds like a self-solving problem, they cost a lot of money to build and operate afterall. Also, lets not forget the tens of billions of gallons of water going to make more a more ghg intensive fuel than straight up gasoline.

Drinking from a gas can

"Me trying to eat some of the food that farmers grow in this country"

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In the Colorado River basin? Not really, those crops are overwhelmingly for overseas export, and are only competive because of how incredibly subsidized their water is, when they could easily be grown elsewhere in non-desert environments.

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Nick Peterson @thetecheng.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This isnt to say that there are zero environmental downsides to datacenters, just that they are less environmentally demanding than basically any alternative short of actual degrowth.

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