iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 1h

Struggling to get reimbursed for work travel because the digital font I signed my receipts from isn't sufficiently curly. I realize we are all-hands-on-deck to save higher ed...but at least some of this is self-inflicted.

000

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

And tbh - that really sucks. I can get the answer to any technical question that's bugged me over the years with absolutely zero friction...and I find myself just not caring that much any more? I'm genuinely debating leaving academic science at this point.

170

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

These are not "intern-level" answers. Some of these (e.g. the Quasi-Reimann result) would be career-making achievements for any human mathematician. I don't give out Fields Medals, but just talking to other people, that's the caliber that some of these seem to be.

140

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I can say anecdotally that Opus 5.5 can competently solve any problem in my domain I throw at it (at least, so far). Admittedly I don't work super far out there on the vanguard of mathematical knowledge, but my day-to-day experience is that my proof-writing days are basically over.

290

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Me getting into somatic experiencing in 2023: "Wow, what an interesting idea that I can use to explore the embodied aspects of my chronic pain." Me now: "Wow, maybe this will help me hold on to some final shred of humanity in the face of the fizzing digital fungus filtering out of every screen."

000

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

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.

100

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

For the record, I'm a big fan of political theory and ideological commitments that align with progressive/Left-wing values! But it's really silly to think that the motte-and-bailey thing is actually fooling anyone.

021

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Let's be honest with ourselves: what people mean is "a particular set of political theories and ideological commitments that generally align with progressive/Left-wing values." The highfalutin language about "humanities" and "liberal arts" is a fig leaf for "education-as-political-persuasion."

130

Thomas F. Varley @thosvarley.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Is it that weird that aristocrats, freed from the necessity of labor for survival, would pick hobbies that are generally interesting, fulfilling, and would be generally desirable across the board?

272

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

It's interestig that in all of these different styles of video, Opus 5.5 leans on the save visual metaphors each time. "I feel my atoms rearranging" always turns the protagonist into a paperclip, for ex.

120

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

The big question to my mind is whether this shock will ultimately produce new, affordable paths to necessary jobs like social workers, teachers, etc. That would be the Good Outcome. Given the administration who is implementing it, I'm not sure how optimistic I am, though.

000

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

"Student loans for all" was a policy that came from a good place and a sincere desire to produce a well-educated, equitably citizenry. A really laudable goal. But I don't think anyone can deny that Institutions exploited the hell out of it, screwing over my generation in terrible ways.

100

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.

100

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

If anything, I feel like a major criticism of Yud is that he is overly explicit, sometimes the point of absurdity. The man wrote a 2,000 page fan-fiction and then went on to do The Sequences. Say what you want about the guy but him being cagey is not an issue.

140

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.

020

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

What if we think 2028 looks bleak because we're all going to end up like Judas Iscariot at the end of Dante's Inferno - getting eternally chewed-on in the jaws of a gibbering ChatGPT?

100

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

You could probably make an argument that your average Less Wrong thinker circa 2012 had read too much HP Lovecraft/David Langford and was over-indexing on the idea of some mathematically incomprehensible alien mind from another dimension (this is also why the SCP project got boring eventually).

030

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

If I was a forward-thinking grifter, I wouldn't be writing "here's why I left the Left for MAGA", I'd be writing "here's why I left the Left for the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth" or something.

030

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.

130

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

The $64k question is: with Trump/MAGA popularity in the toilet, are people going to sheepishly shuffle back to the center, or are we about to witness a Cambrian Explosion of psychotic ideologies as the choking shade that MAGA has cast for a decade finally withers?

210

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

There's something operatic about a man whose career was built on bankrupting increasingly absurd businesses climaxing with the bankrupting of the entire United States. Is it possible we're all bit character is an O'Neill play or something?

2251

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

The AI thing is probably silly, but there's good reason to think that COVID-19 is bad for the brain. A lot of neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimers, MS, etc) are thought to be downstream of viral infections. synergies.substack.com/p/you-are-pr...

synergies.substack.com

You are probably getting brain damage from all those COVID infections.

A worrying look into the literature on COVID and brain health.

130

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

I nearly lived this one. I was an on-campus EMT in college and once had to explain to a (white) fellow student that she should still call us if a person of color needed emergency medical help - even though campus police also would show up on scene too

010

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.

010

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

Zoloft (in high doses) is one of the first-line pharmacological treatments for OCD.

020

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

Fwiw, I know lots of forever-maskers b/c I'm involved with Long COVID/post-acute-infectious illness support stuff and 99% of them are normal people trying to navigate an unbelievably shitty hand dealt to them by life. Don't let the minority of lunatics shift your baseline expectations too hard.

030

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

This feels uncharitable. Masking really is important for people with immune issues (immunocompromised from chemo, autoimmune stuff, post-acute infectious disorders). Yes, there's definitely a subset of deranged people, but for a lot the fear really is just: if I get a cold I might die (or worse).

020

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

How would you describe the behavior of a non-neural, biological system? Should we demand the same standards when talking about the immune system (which most immunologists would colloquially describe as "learning", "trying", and maybe even having "bias." Or slime molds learning to tolerate salt?

000

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

Can someone explain to me the immunocompromised PoC thing? I genuinely don't understand the point they're making.

350

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

Read the docs: ferref.readthedocs.io/en/latest/in... There's a lot of features I still want to add, but I'd love human feedback *that isn't people vomiting bile all over me for AI-slop*. It is AI...but hopefully not slop.

ferref.readthedocs.io

000

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

Agents, being text-based entities that mostly live in our terminals, can easily build bibliographies, manage references, and read the text of papers. There's also JSON functionality that should make ferref interface nicely with shell scripts/Python/w.e. 3/N

100

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

So, with considerable help from various Claudes, I give you: Ferref. It's a totally scriptable reference manager, with a TUI (for the Zotero-like experience). The core idea is that the reference manager should be equally useful for humans and their AI partners. 2/N

100

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

110

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

This story has been shared to death in my very lefty, very queer IRL social network and it's always something like: "wow, doesn't this remind you of [exasperating-but-kind-of-traumatic-experience-with-a-wrecker]?"

0630

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

I am dying at the idea of a hymnal whose songs include buildups and drops 🤣

000

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

Yeah I'll shoot you an email this afternoon.

010

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

It's a cool result and I'm definitely planning to use the methodology for an upcoming suite of analyses but also...if I'd done this, I'd have been really proud of it. But it would have been months of really hard work. And now I have it for free and...don't really care that much? It's sad

230

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

The whole thing took it...10 mins? And part of that was time spent running it's own computational checks in Python to test convergence, make figures, etc. It's the first time I really felt like I was fully-automatable. Not evening collaborating w/ the AI. Just out-of-the-loop at every step.

100

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

Today's new model really shook me. Idk about "every problem" (I'll cop to being hyperbolic to rhetorical effect), but it essentially soloed a pretty hard problem involving partial information decomposition for continuous-time spiking processes - and then wrote it up in a nice, readable paper.

100

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

"If I could banish Sorcery from my track, Unlearn the magic-spells that draw me back And stand before you, Nature, as mere Man, It would be worth the pain of being Human."

010

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.

372

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

I feel that really hard. It's job app season here in the States, too and I've been having a really hard time finding the energy to get moving on them this time around. Feels a bit like chucking rocks into the ocean.

100

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

I've done the Long COVID thing myself and my exp is: 1) The risks of COVID are absolutely still real, and deeply worrying (esp. neurodegenerative disease) and 2) There is an *extremely* vocal minority of COVID-conscious people who are just unrelentingly abusive in terrible ways. Both are true.

000