iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

If memory serves me correctly Republicans spent a tremendous amount of money and ink running against Nancy Pelosi and the specter of "San Francisco values" in 2006 and it didn't do Jack or Shit for them. It's a bit cliche to say you can't spend your way out of a radioactively unpopular president.

120

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think one thing that's underappreciated in AI is it is only going to take 2-3 more generations of consumer hardware improvements for local models to be good enough for economically productive tasks like coding. We're already almost there with distilled models and top end GPUs.

350

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I blame Mike Rowe being a charming TV guy and media elites having that weird self doubt which also shows up in Diner Safaris.

260

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I just want to reiterate that, assuming the polls don't have a historical miss this year, all of this is consistent with my thesis that Trump's weird split term wasn't going to stop a 6 year itch midterm. The tidal forces of exhaustion and anger at the party in the White House are nearly unstoppable

160

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think my summary of the AI debate, without necessarily having all the technical math exactly down is: 1. The rationalist model of x-risk is insane and violates a lot of what we know about optimizers and real world (Knightian) uncertainty 2. P(doom) is still non-zero at the limits

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I lowkey suspect Republicans have hit the crabs in a bucket stage of panic where they're using shock polls to try and get some donor love so they can at least do some looting before they lose power.

0152

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The conversation about Cornell is giving me flashbacks to reading Our Guys in undergrad. It's important to remember the US has had a rotten rape culture problem forever. Me Too was not an overreaction. It was a necessary first step and misogynistic sociopaths want to ensure it ends there.

000

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Super microscopic anecdote, but a 12 pack or Doctor Pepper was down to $5 and change by the end of 2024 and now it is back up around $7 or more depending on where you shop. The tariffsflation is real. Biden was making real progress but we're just big dummies about this stuff I guess.

000

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Anyway, Trump being a disaster (both times!) has been probably the easiest political call in my lifetime. This was not some high variance worthwhile tail risk trade. It was completely predictable he'd bungle core government responsibilities for illusory payoffs.

150

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I'm really beginning to think it's become underrated how much Paul Volckers recession making everyone mad about unemployment instead of prices and reset expectations. Perhaps our psychology is too cursed to handle a soft landing.

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Bond vigilantes pop the AI bubble and inadvertently save us from technofeudalism/fully automated plantation fascism is a deranged sentence and yet it looks like that is a live possibility.

050

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'll say again, Reagan and Nixon never getting prosecuted is bad, but the germinal elite impunity is we didn't hang every single Confederate leader by the neck until dead.

260

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

One of my hotter (I guess?) takes is totalitarianism is more of a disposition than an ideology and you see it in all kinds of weird totalizing demands for obedience. And it must not be allowed to encroach into the political sphere no matter how or manifests.

030

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Anyway, the language debate is ridiculous as these things usually are. Saying a model hates black people is misleading anthropomorphism because a transformer architecture has nothing that could legibly be described as an intrinsic social-emotional motive.

142

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I'm back on my bullshit that absolutely everyone doing work on AI alignment and AI ethics has gone insane, and my main hope now is the brute reality of energy scarcity slows the industry down enough for more grounded researchers and policymakers to come to the fore.

010

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

We need to talk more about how the deranged sex cult people are *very* useful for the deranged neofeudal droit du seigneur people. The entire valley frankly needs to be bleached and then irradiated to stop the contamination.

010

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Trump is speedrunning the second Bush term on disapproval too. If the AI investment boom crashes before 2029 he could beat GWB's 25% during the housing collapse or even Nixon's 24%.

151

Reposted by Chris Wyman

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

i've been waiting for someone to come up with a good explanation of LLMs for laypeople and this is more or less correct. right now we're mostly getting our answers from virtuous pagans but we're working (via RL) on ways to drill to the bottom of Hell and get answers from Satan himself.

2037734

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I vastly preferred the og "we're doing AI/ML research to see if we can make computers do things that humans find effortless but are algorithmicly intractable" instead of the modern twaddle about building God. Is it conscious? Does it think like we do? Who cares, talk to your pastor or a philosopher.

131

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I've seen enough. The "Joe Biden ate my homework" excuse flying around social media isn't going to work. People don't care about 4 years ago. They just care that Trump swore he could fix it and manifestly did not.

120

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is by far the most probable path for a no shit governance crisis imo. Trump pretends black & white article 1 powers aren't real and forces an impeachment.

160

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I do think it's only a matter of time before the software industry has its first trillion dollar disaster. Executive leadership is coked and methed out of their goddamn minds and completely ignoring risk management because the magic black box will fix everything.

060

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I will say my experience with LLMs is they can converge on some startlingly intelligent solutions (at least where the problem has hard verifiability) but if they don't one-shot a solution they end up doing an awful lot of brute force trial and error - just much faster and tirelessly.

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I have never seen Texas Republicans as freaked as they are over their boy Paxton losing. Even in 2018 they weren't this worried about O'Rourke that I can recall. Judging from the ad blitzes and social media flood they hit the panic button.

210

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My thoughts on LLMs is staring at 100 billion dimensional vector curves must surely open your brain directly to cosmic horrors. It is surely the only explanation for the gibbering madness from almost everyone deep in it.

010

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Trade unions - not a particularly reliable bulwark against fascism. This Paramount business is something nudging me a little more toward the socialism end of the spectrum. We need broad solidarity, not special pleading.

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think particularly professional raters may be sleeping on some key differences between the somewhat disappointing 2018 and 2026.

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Today is a good day for my native Pacific Northbest "let's saw California off and shove it out to sea" antipathy to come out I see.

000

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think calling Twitter brainwashing is a bit too far, but it does create a social environment for the mask to slip for people who never really bought into the collective obligations of liberalism and gives cowards all the audience pressure they need to duck the hard questions.

241

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I love how MAGA propagandists are now pretending history started in 2011 so they don't have to talk about how George Bush's bungled Iraq invasion was the original whack at the hornet's nest that destabilized the energy economy.

111

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I'll say again, there is a nihilistic thesis that nothing matters anymore, that it is propaganda and social media hallucinations all the way down and I don't think you can look at the past 2 years of Trump and square that view. Hence I subscribe to the feedback loop explanation.

100

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The Trump crash out is going to be equal parts hilarious and terrifying, and I chose to be somewhat cock-eyed optimistic we will get through it. Signs point to the old guard conservative project not being willing to self-immolate for an octogenarian's last gasp.

060

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I keep seeing conservatives trotting out "Inflation is all Biden's fault, Trump is fixing it and just needs more time" and routinely getting savaged. Sucks to suck. And it's just undeniable the social and psychological forces that cause presidents to get bodied in the midterm are alive and well.

120

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

We don't talk enough about how the "everyone but me and my fellow oligarchs are NPCs" philosophy is just feudal manorialism with post-industrial obfuscation.

041

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I don't think I could roll my eyes harder at the idea a 3 trillion parameter superintelligent AI is going to escape containment by...using sub-ISDN speed air gap exploits to replicate itself.

100

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hmm. I have to say I think some of the state level polling is once again going to be shit this year (looking at you Blorida), but the national environment is looking so blue we still have pretty good odds on the Senate.

010

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I think I'm back to Gaulization thesis for American politics. People are going to be grumpy and dislike whomever is in charge for completely irrational "we just don't like anything" reasons, but within that frame your choices can affect whether you're at 42% or <30%.

140

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I think it's both true that better policy wouldn't have saved Trump from backlash and that better policy would have spared him from being literally the least popular president in the modern polling record.

141

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

On the flip side of of people overhyping gray goo, I want to make sure we don't underhype the growing capability of open source models running on inexpensive servers. Open source optimizations are only running about 6 months behind the big boys (at least on synthetic benchmarks)

162

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I'm not going to lie, it's the exuberance of software executives for liquidating their staff and turning over almost all development to agent frameworks (which really means handing control to Anyhropic and OpenAI) that has me the most terrified.

120

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I'm pretty firmly in the camp that the main near term risk of LLMs is misuse, no sci-fi gray goo fantasies. Conceptually there is no reason a Silicon brain couldn't be a lot smaller but I would guess not as long as we're emulating one on GPUs and definitely not with transformer architectures.

150

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A thing that still really annoys me about AI discourse is we have a far better understanding of how artificial neural networks work through mechanistic interpretatability studies and circuit probes than we have for the human brain.

184

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The near term (6 month to 2 year) problem with AI is not going to be godlike superintelligence I feel, but very spikey intelligence - eg a system with 99.999% ability to hack infrastructure but too stupid to know "causing a cascading blackout will lead to disconnection."

110

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Subposting on something, no there weren't really net doomers in the 1990s on the lines of AI permabears today because the Y2K bug sucked up all the oxygen. If you wanted to make bank back then you talked about how the entire technology system from banking to military was going to crash.

220

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

After watching that Kash Patel thing I think I'm going to have to invoke Hanlon's Razer. He's just a moron. Though I wouldn't put it past a staffer bamboozling him to get their donkey fucking friend a sweet government job.

010

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

There is no such thing as a "secret military buildup" and it is impossible to completely hide all traces of industrial activity. Note how little trouble we had determining North Korea had successfully tested a nuke and was building up a small inventory and they're the most secretive regime on earth.

130

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I am probably in a tiny minority of people who played the old Amiga Game Pioneer Plague which is a much better conception of a runaway partial intelligence than evil killer robots, but I also live in the real world and understand concepts like logistics and inertia that inevitably introduce friction

100

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Honestly people aren't thinking big enough about the fascist sex cult. The original sin was not stuffing them in lockers and treating Internet fame as something serious instead of something only deranged people covet and an idiotic thing to funnel money towards.

140

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My other hot take is we should rip the tech industry out of the Bay Area by the roots and reestablish micro-agglomerations in more stolid soil like Boston, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

140

Chris Wyman @wymancr.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I think the logical conclusion is if your product might cause an extinction level event your maximum liabilities should be measured in the quadrillions.

110