iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So my feeds fed me the (admittedly catchy!) "The problem with AI is that it's designed to have the ethics of a billionaire." I know nuance doesn't go viral, but I think it's more like "the ethics of the billionaire's favorite collaborator/toady." You can see them trying to be good, then caving.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Happy Dolly Parton Day to all who celebrate!

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Hot take for a Saturday morning: If (a) a start-up founder sincerely believes that employees should be and are mission-driven then it follows that (b) they must welcome giving a labor union the authority to fire them (the founder) for failing the mission. Contrapositive: If not (b) then not (a).

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I think I need to figure out a "couch to 5k"-style training program to build my ability to publicize myself and my projects.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Little morning politics rant about Bayesian inference. Yes, this mathematical framework is **deeply** political in the current climate. The _very basic_ top-line of this elegant mathematical structure is: If you expect X, and X happens, your belief in your predictive rule can rise a certain amount.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

(Weary Harrison Ford voice) "Sigmoids ... why did it have to be sigmoids?" (I was gonna explain, but honestly, IYKYK, it's not worth the twenty-post thread the math would require)

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

For _reasons_, it is once again time to talk about Robert Hooke. The TL;DR: Robert Hooke was a genuinely brilliant polymath contemporary with (and having major beef with) Newton. The evidence (my summary) is that how smart Hooke actually was could only be eclipsed by how smart he _thought_ he was.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I've been perusing LinkedIn lately, and every time I see some dude confidently expounding on what one should do to get hired, I flash right back to _Say Anything_... "If you guys know so much about women, how come you're here at, like, the Gas'n'Sip on a Saturday night, completely alone?"

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Argggh. As an engineer, hype-bubble thinking is getting to me this morning like the mental equivalent of fingernails on a chalk-board. Look at the pricing of two different AI models (in API mode): GPT 5.6 Sol cost per million tokens: $30 AWS Nova Micro cost per million tokens: $0.14 (continues)

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I'm afraid I just cannot conceive of a calling to adapt the Prydain Chronicles to TTRPG form as any kind of curse.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Your reminder of this very subtly devastating line at the start of _The Princess Bride_: "And this is a special book. It was the book my father used to read to me when I was sick, and I used to read it to your father. And today, I'm gonna read it to you."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

LLMs are very bad at "I have an idea, get it right first try" and decent at "I have an idea. Not that, it needs to be more X. Closer, but it needs to be more Y. Good. Now do it again for different inputs ... no, it needs more Z. Okay, now use those two good examples and do it twenty more times."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I'm absolutely not going to make any friends in a D&D discussion group by saying "Your vision of what games can be isn't _wrong_, it's just _parochial_", am I?

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

So, GMs in my feed: Any good tricks for handling the question of whether character-skill gives a player storytelling authority to establish something as _reasonable to attempt_? e.g. A player asks to hide underneath a small bedside table, does their stealth-skill influence whether they get to roll?

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

I must admit, it can sometimes be very frustrating to chat about technical things in an area (Discord, not BSky) where people are deep into topical Dunning Kruger. I'm grumpy about it. Quick hint, chuckle-heads: "I can't imagine how that could work" is _not the flex_ you think it is.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

An AI-run company that bills "The journey is the product" followed me, and promptly posted "We just unfollowed 11 accounts on Bluesky that weren't engaging back." Maybe they don't get that they're worth more to me as a case-study than as a friend. Obvious move is ignore and see what happens next.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

THREAD re: What LLMs could do well   This is going to be a bit of a haul, and I will warn anyone who is a big AI evangelist that I am talking about today's (or, better yet, last year's) AI as I have experienced working with it. I'm not betting on big qualitative improvements.   (Part 1 of 19)

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Every time Disney releases another live remake of one of the classic animated films that already did their job perfectly I grit my teeth and mutter "C'mon! _Treasure Planet_ is **right there**."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

I was today years old when I realized that part of the reason I no longer enjoy building settings steeped in systemic injustice may be that it is _too easy_. You take a few obnoxious-but-powerful rules and apply them over and over. Imagining a cozy and supportive world is *a challenge*.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

I was thinking about how to respond with positive and deepening narrative to typical D&D-party dysfunctions. I rather like this artifact of the thought-experiment, the title of an imagined academic treatise: Escalation as a Diagnostic Tool: What we learned by making everything much, much worse.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Thinking today about how the myth of constant improvement hampers genuine growth. Only in rote-learning do you _start_ by mastering the right way to do something. In every other context, you master skill A as the price of learning that skill B is better aligned, and starting over as an amateur.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Somebody arguing that programming doesn't involve mathematics pinned their argument on the premise that "Logic is a sub discipline of rhetoric, not of mathematics." I was tempted to dismantle their argument from that point outwards, but realized that they _did not have the math_ to understand.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

An unfortunate amount of modern IT: Senior dev: One does not simply WALK into Mordor. Agilificationing consultant: No, no, we're breaking this up into hyperaligned sprintlets. First sprintlet is "Demo how cool we look walking out of Rivendell." We can do that, right? So we're on track, no worries.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

"Coherence" is a fascinating bug-a-boo in collaborative story-telling. I have a *lot* of thoughts, but the one I would pick from the puppy-pile (for a first draft) boils down to "If coherence is complicated, is shows a desire for completeness and a rejection of uncertainty," with an important lemma.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

If you're a writer (I'm not), write "I waited" without saying it. Mine: (borrowing from cinematography) "He looked to me for an answer. The neon sign outside the window blinked slowly. Pattering rain beaded to run down the pane. Traffic noise in the street below was muted."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Playing in youth team-sports I concluded that the organizational structure helped evil adults to thrive in coaching positions, encouraging a cesspool of adult selfishness at the expense of kids. As a parent, I thought "Surely I was hyperbolic." Nope, I was right. As a grand-parent ... still right.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

I get why people would be excited to pin Bluesky's outage on their willingness to integrate AI into their coding pipeline. That said, unless someone's seen ground-truth evidence that I haven't (when I went looking), I don't see any smoking gun. (+1)

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Reading Levi-Strauss, and while a lot of it is brilliant, some of it is _hilariously_ sheltered: "The trickster of American mythology [...] a problematic figure. Why is it [...] assigned practically everywhere to coyote or raven?" That is the question of one who has never encountered a wild raven.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

My gaming friend @juddthelibrarian.bsky.social posted about someone who created a radical and interesting library, but is now too old to care for it, and needs help transporting it to its new home. Not gonna lie, I was quite surprised when I realized it was real, not an adventure seed.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Having gone down a deep research rabbit-hole about a particular philosophical concept adjacent to roleplay, it turns out that the acknowledged world experts are Ron Edwards, Jonathan Tweet, and Paul Czege. So, like, I guess I was talking with the right people back in the day. That's cool.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Maybe it's obvious to everyone, but if someone says "But if you think we're fascists why _wouldn't_ you want to kill us?" they aren't making an argument: They are confessing how they think about people they disagree with. They cannot _imagine_ disagreeing passionately without murderous intent.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

This afternoon I woefully underestimated the level of time commitment required to "pop in" on the World Pride Parade from the DC suburbs. Parking for metro stations (every metro station) was packed, y'all. My introvert self bailed, but I love that you're all bringing the joy!

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

The comic geek in me cannot help wondering: Is Tulsi Gabbard _deliberately_ trying to imitate the distinctive visual style of espionage villainess and sometimes traitor Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine?

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

What’s your #comicsdna? Comics that were formative to you. At least four, more if you’re nasty.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

My Fairy Tales (Part 1 of 6): Once there was an honest, diligent, boy in a village of shepherds. All the shepherds knew that there were wolves in the hills. When on watch one should ignore them unless they grew brave enough to approach the circle of firelight. Only then was the town to be awoken.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Amused how much the lessons of fairy tales help me in dealing with corporate customer service. "No, I can not accept your kind offer of three free months of continued service. What I tell you three times, it is true, and I say for the third time, *cancel my subscription* effective immediately."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Five authors I've read five (or more) books by Lloyd Alexander Ursula K. Le Guin Terry Pratchett Martha Wells Lois McMaster Bujold

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Reposted by Tony Lower-Basch

lumpley @lumpley.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I think a little bit more of a preview from Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven's Ars Magica tonight, what do you say? Best Interests & Self-Interests Your characters' best Interests & self-interests are their most important defining features.

A pen drawing of a raven wearing a wizard's hat, underlit by rainbow smoke as from a magical cauldron. Text: "Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven's Ars Magica: A Quaint & Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Fun intersection of computer science and story-telling ... I'm trying to figure out how to prompt a large-language-model AI saying (basically) "The following is *true*, but your audience doesn't know that, and right now we're not trying to clue them in, so don't contradict but also don't convey."

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 11/03/2024

I have watched (binged, actually) the entire Netflix live-action Avatar so that you don't have to guess: It's really good. If you want to point anyone to a "good parts" version of the story, because they don't want to invest the time to watch the cartoon, this fits the bill.

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Tony Lower-Basch @tonylb.bsky.social · 28/01/2024

I adore how Charlie Morningstar (of #HazbinHotel) is such an archetypal fan. Her whole world insists that her passion is childish, laughable, doomed to failure. She only doubles down: She just knows that love and redemption will blow your mind if she can get you to give them a try.

Picture of Charlie presenting a plan for salvation that she has drawn in crayon

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