iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 8h

I see this take more and more - was it a commonly-articulated definition of art before AI really got cooking? I have a hard time imaging that "quality is irrelevant" would be something most historical artists would have cosigned.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Struggling to decide how I feel about this. On one hand, I will always believe that education (even in "useless" fields) is fundamentally important for being a well-rounded human. Otoh, I see what student loan debt has done to my cohort and something *has* to change. newrepublic.com/post/213446/...

newrepublic.com

Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees

Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This whole discussion seems very silly to me since humans are compulsive anthropomorphizers. We see faces in clouds and get grumpy at our computers when they take too long to buffer a video. There is just no universe where we don't anthropomorphize something that actually talks to us.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The collapse of MAGA/Trump's popularity won't lead to people sheepishly shuffling back to the center. Instead, we are going to see a Cambrian Explosion of psychotic ideologies that will finally be able to proliferate now that the choking shade of Trump's shadow is finally withering.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I really want to know what made 4o a genuinely SCP-level cognitohazard. I hope they've still got the model weights in a lead-lined box somewhere at OAI because cognitive scientists need to study this thing.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Introducing Ferref - a reference manager for the AI age. github.com/thosvarley/f... I've been thinking a lot about how scientists should interact with AI, and one thing that really bothered me was that a lot of library tools are clunky, GUI-based interfaces that aren't great for agents. 1/N

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Opus 5.5 can solve basically any information-theory question I want it to. I can get the answer to every puzzle that's ever bugged me throughout my career, with zero effort or friction. Turns out...that kind of sucks. Faust was totally right.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Seeing this just days after learning that 64k people submitted to ICLR makes me despair for the future of academic science. Other early-career researchers - how are you thinking about all of this? What are we doing here?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I get myopically bogged down in annoyance with Claude for doing one silly thing or another, but then I step back and look at plots like this and think...yeah we may be into the foothills of Singularity.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I live ~30 mins south of Greenfield and have spent almost a third of my life in the Pioneer Valley. This is the most West MA thing I've ever read, right down to the clown school thing. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/22/m...

bostonglobe.com

A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose. - The Boston Globe

Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield wanted to build community. They got a firestorm instead.

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Ned Raggett @nedraggett.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Okay so @defector.com has had an odd glitch since the site redesign a couple of weeks back where the wrong photo and headline are often put together on the main page and I was going to ask them about fixing it but this just happened and as far as I'm concerned they have to leave it as is.

Screenshot for a Defector podcast episode with the headline "Consider the Emotional Lives of Scallops" only the accompanying photo is a white gormless stubbled red-headed UK singer of recent notoriety giving a flat smile to the camera while wearing a washed out peach top as beige as he is against a flat background. So, actually, probably a scallop anyway.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Do we even know if OAI told their model try Cordoba-style forcing, or did they just say "Solve Navier-Stokes, make no mistakes" and the swarm independently self-organized around that plan of attack?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The world actually IS ending...in a way. We're not all going to die, but "the world" as a collection of narratives, institutions, and norms that we use to scaffold our lives and make sense of what happens to us is absolutely falling apart. This is only partly due to AI. Who knows what comes next?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It's like Anthropic and OAI are in some kind of bizarre competition; can Anthropic provide service so abysmally bad that I'll eat my principles and go to OAI...or will OAI act so heinously that I'll stick with Anthropic in spite of their endless parade of BS?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It occurs to me that all the drama around the Navier-Stokes result is a tremendous stroke of luck for militant AI-antis: rather than acknowledging the reality of what OAI's models did, they can just say "the model just stole human work" (regardless of if that's even true or not).

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It did though. The discovery that computation could be embedded in mechanical systems was a foundational insight that spawned whole new branches of math, new philosophies of mathematics, and the whole universe of computers. The lack of scientific literacy (or curiosity!) is kind of shocking imo.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

This feels tragically reflective of a lot of thinking among vocally anti-AI people. Math is as much a human artform as poetry is - and is just as worthy of an existential crisis. But these people don't respect or value mathematics as a human endeavor.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

What drives me crazy is that these are all good and important goals...but these "stochastic-parrot takes" are actively harming that goal by refusing to acknowledge the obvious reality of what AI can do. How can you have good regulation if you deny the existence of what you're regulation?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

This is a great example of a particular kind of academic brain driving me nuts - rather than talking about what actually happened, instead the admonition is to instead *talk about how we're talking about it.* Meta-discourse gives enough recursive distance to avoid facing an uncomfortable reality.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I predict that as AI accelerations leads to increasingly widespread disruption, the boundaries between the reactionary left and reactionary right will dissolve and become a huge blob of psychotic anti-modernity nostalgia. Whether it's batteries, vaccines, or trans surgeries, they will hate it all.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I've grown to *hate* the term "accountability". You should be accountable to your friends, your family, and your community. There's absolutely no reason I (or anyone else) owes "accountability" to anonymous randos merely by virtue of shared identity characteristics or whatever.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

What I want is a feature where, if your comment is too similar to one already in the thread, it doesn't get posted and instead you are invited to upvote the post that beat you to the punch. It would massively reduce dogpiles and also the overall level of redundancy/hive-mindness on here.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Any tech billionaires want to help me start the Pioneer Valley Complex Systems Research Institute? I'm semi-serious about this: as Academia grinds against the rocks of demographic collapse, loss of public trust, and costs, we need new places for people to work on complex, high-dimensional issues.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is really sad - it sucks to see someone's awesome passion project get torn down by maniacs. Can you imagine the world that these people would create if they actually had any power? It'd be a nightmare.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

This is super cool - for scientists interested in reproducibility, I'd highly recommend learning Nix.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

A pre-print that I worked on w/ other members of @renegaderesearch.bsky.social formalizing the mechanical basis hypothesis of ME/CFS has been shortlisted for a "Popular preprint of the decade" award. If you feel so moved, a vote for us would mean a lot. www.preprints.org/activity/awa...

preprints.org

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I genuinely don't understand what people think they should have done instead since AI is now being used in the kernel itself, which is upstream of any distro. Should they have forked the whole kernel? Or just created arbitrary carve-outs for what packages can and can't use AI?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This plays in my head every time I eat a tin of sardines or anchovies (approx ~1x/day). www.youtube.com/watch?v=rggS...

youtube.com

i eat the sardinie for lunch

YouTube video by Mummy Joe

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I was having a fantastic time with NixOS until I started trying to rebuild my research Python environment. What do you mean this thing doesn't follow FHS?!

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Do these people think that Anthropic/OAI are deliberately buying and destroying every copy of a given book? Even though that would be totally pointless from a model-training perspective? (Better question: do these people think? Period?)

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The agents are inventing religion.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It really sucks that the right is trying to pull of a hostile take-over of the Linux/open-source community with millions of dollars and at the same time, large swaths of the left have apparently decided that "tech bros" are the source of all evil - just happily conceding the ground without a fight.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Thinking of doing a Woke alternative to Omarchy w/ Niri instead of hyprland. Whose in?

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USER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

cory doctorow is a blogger and science fiction author and is not an authority in any real sense, is the thing

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I cannot wait to watch all the left/progressive content creators who spent the last decade calling out conspiracy theories and Q-anon to twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels over why *their* conspiracy theories about AI are totally different and totally don't come from the same cognitive place.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I might finally take the plunge and switch from LaTeX to @typst.app. How are people feeling about the comparison these days?

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

A lot of the analysis on why Americans hate data centers has the same energy as that Iranian guy saying "according to Alexis de Tocqueville, who I'm sure all Americans have read..."

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Siobhán @shibbi.me · 22/08/2026

excel lent

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Its going to be an era of contradictions. Polls will show everyone hates AI overall but also everyone will secretly use AI all the time for lots of stuff. AI companies will be underwater in public opinion but also many people will feel strongly attached to their own favorite model & care about it.

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mlf. ⎔ @mlf.one · 21/08/2026

the level of misogyny a lot of these "hating AI is my personality" people display honestly makes the "tech bro" label feel kind of like self-reporting

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Was totally uprepared for the YouTube algorithm to serve me a song that perfectly reflected my own traumatizing experiences of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If anyone needs me, I'll be staring vacantly at the wall for a few hours. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiE7...

youtube.com

Julien Baker - "Repeat" (Official Lyric Video)

YouTube video by Julien Baker

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

This is really scary for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is because the most high-profile historical example of this kind of thinking (anti-tech/anti-modern leftism) was...the Khmer Rouge.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

My feeling is that since AI is trained on the collective output of humanity (hoovered up without consent), then it should always be seen as part of the "commons": access should be democratized and the economic benefits distributed fairly over the population.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

It's absolutely insane that you'd be doing bourgeois-vs-proletariat jobs discourse when you are the CEO of a very-online humor magazine. Glass houses should feature a lot more prominently in your thinking, dude.

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Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

As someone who is quite worried about the negative impacts of AI, it really sucks that the most vocal critics appear to have opted to completely disconnect with reality. Any effective response starts with understanding what the tech really is and can do...if you won't face that, you're DOA.

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maxine ⎔ @mfzx.net · 20/08/2026

Archived Newsweek article
Title: The Internet? Bah!
"Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana"
By Clifford Stoll
From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make
government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

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