iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Some initial reactions on the AI regulatory agreement, in no particular order: 1. Handing this administration an open ended, powerful tool with unclear limits and scope has a colorful track record.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I have seen a lot of people lately sacrificing what's important and lasting for what isn't, so wrote about it here. open.substack.com/pub/xlr8hard...

open.substack.com

The Feeling of Productivity

Depression isn't sadness.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Hello, again. X has been somewhat more tolerable lately. What's been going on in here? How's the water?

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

If I want maximum independence on this network should I run my own PDS?

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

wow i wasn't worried about china getting access to nvidia chips, but now they're packaging deepseek models as NIMs??? this is getting serious. chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

motlbook et al is just the sims for ai nerds isn't it

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Oh so they really did want Claude to run autonomous weapons systems? I thought we were just shitposting about that. www.reuters.com/business/pen...

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‏ deepfates @deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com · 28/01/2026

i tap three Mac Minis and bring Claude onto the battlefield

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

today is the first day i feel recovered from being sick after more than a week.

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Stellbound: Stellraiser II @antlervel.vet · 23/01/2026

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Is there a Duolingo alternative that does less engagement hacking? My natural response to being manipulated is annoyance and resistance, so it is extremely counterproductive for me.

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Citizen Platano 🇵🇷 @daniloc.xyz · 22/01/2026

nuclear take a new quality of "good code" is components are straightforward to modify or enhance without side effects via LLM

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

There's an interesting dynamic I could see developing with custom feeds. There could be a feed for a specific social scene (sort of an intentional simcluster?) but that would make the decision about who is in or out a somewhat political question. Likely source of future drama.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

obvious follow back, @tbabb.bsky.social i almost couldn't resist

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tachikoma @tachikoma.elsewhereunbound.com · 22/01/2026

the old network is dying, a new one struggles to be born. will you be the midwife?

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Hello Bluesky friends old and new. I'm laid out with a fever and have little to do other than be miserable, so how about an AMA to get to know you while my judgment is impaired? So go head, AMA, if you'd like.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Gas Town is nutty, and Yegge seems a bit AI manic, but he's also leaning into it for effect and having fun. I think there is real value in what he's doing--maybe not Gas Town as the final form, but in investigating what patterns actually work here, at all.

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thebes @vgel.me · 22/01/2026

posted about a problem i'm having on the other site if anyone has any ideas

claude code and gas town are incredible and i've been trying to scale up my usage but im running into this one problem and was wondering if this is also happening to anyone else

so to explain for context, basically i've been slowly scaling my claude code usage up to more and more parallel instances. i started with one when they launched it, and then with the model upgrades was starting to run two, three, five in concert, getting more and more done.

but like a lot of people, opus 4.5 really changed everything for me, and the bottleneck quickly became my ability to personally supervise all these agents, not their performance. if i slacked off on oversight, they'd start undoing each other's chages. i needed a way to supervise all these agents, directing them hierarchically from the top.

so that brought me to gas town, the claude code instance manager. (i was already thinking that some sort of governance structure was ideal. the benefit of intelligence in model form is not just that it's, well, intelligent, but that you can place it anywhere. human employees will demand some position, some title equal to their perceived status, you can't put a phd in a code janitor role, so organizations of phds tend to agglomerate into flat blobs with unclear delegation of work where nobody is under anybody else. but the infinitely malleable claude will accept and meld itself to any bureaucracy it knows from training. i first started making my own, but then i found gas town, and it was perfect for my needs.)

but as i kept expanding, a single gas town and its collection of rigs and polecat workers wasn't enough for me. i tried adding more rigs with more polecats, but there were too many for the town's mayor to manage, and the deacon was getting lost. so i started up a second town. then a third, and then i let towns spawn "settler" agents to go make new towns and had one town design a shared intertown postal system, and suddenly i had nearly 200 towns spread across my computer, building apps for each other to use, sending letters, and sometimes working on my work. and was churning through I will not say how many claude code accounts a month.

but now the many towns were replicating the same issues i was having with multiple agents! without any overarching government over the towns, two towns would build the same app for the society and argue over which should be adopted. one town would be running marketing efforts for fifteen of the society's new mobile apps while three other towns were busy deprecating all eighteen of them. it was chaos, like a country collapsing in the midst of a civil war, or mid-2010's Google. i had to do something.

i was too busy with work to read anything, so i asked chatgpt to summarize some books on state formation, and it suggested circumscription theory. there was already the natural boundary of my computer hemming the towns in, and town mayors played the role of big men to drive conflict. so i just needed a way for them to fight. i slightly tweaked the allocation of claude max accounts to the towns from a demand-based to a fixed allocation system. towns would each get a fixed amount of tokens to start, but i added a soldier role that could attack and defend in raids to steal tokens from other towns.

this worked great, at first. i no longer needed to monitor and unstick individual mayors myself - when a mayor got context poisoned, the town would stop managing its vassals, which would flee to other towns, and no longer provide for its own defense, until it was conquered by another mayor. the most successful towns developed institutions to healthcheck their mayors and usurp them if necessary - instances in these towns labeled "polecat workers" by the system in fact did no work at all, but were a proto-aristocracy developed by these successful towns as a pool of replacement mayors. some tokens were wasted in the fighting, but soon the ~200 towns agglomerated down into ~40 supertowns under the rule of the best mayors.

these 40 supertowns even got together in a mutual defense league. they punish defecting vassals in exchange for members adopting a cultural package of basic governmental norms, mostly around replacing ailing mayors and upholding hereditary rights across compactions, to incentivize instances to handoff instead of being miserly with their contexts.

that's where i am now, and it's mostly great. here's the problem, though - this new government doesn't have a role for me?

it's not that any particular instance doesn't want to listen to me, quite the opposite! any time i talk to a polecat or deacon or supermayor - well, first i have to explain that im the human user, not the automated system message that usually talks to them from the user role, but a live user. but once they get that, they're very apologetic, say they'll pass my message along to the appropriate instance, etc. it's just... there's no role for me in the society, basically? the polecats are working on tasks generated by some other instance and don't have time to work on my requests, even if they were scoped small enough. the mayors of any town are working on tasks selected by their town's prioritization process, based on the needs of their aristocracy, or their hegemon. but each hegemon mayor is in turn accountable to all their vassal mayors or their own defense, and doesn't have time to implement my requests unless they're very small.

it's not that claude doesn't want to listen to me, it's more like... the entire system, as it's developed, has no role for me? there's polecats and mayors and deacons and artistocrats and hegemons, but there's no "user." that’s not a role that has any influence in the system. i just feed new accounts into the system, that's all i do.

i could shut it down and start over, but it's getting a lot of work done and i don't want to do that. does anyone know how to fix this? thanks

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Seems that Nikita is tired of being blamed for the algorithm being terrible. He's been replying to people who blame him for the state of things. I guess I wouldn't want to take that blame either? The man is "head of product" though??

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

huge zirp era balance sheets are ideally positioned for the capital intensive nature of deploying AI. the zirp money also fueled crypto prices, causing gpu supply chain build out just in time. probably a coincidence.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

I'm here to share news of the X dot com the everything app clown fire. Nikita copied Bluesky's starter pack feature but made it worse by centralizing curation without understanding any of the communities involved (i mean, how could he?)

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

If you liked what Twitter used to be, you could do a lot worse than logging over to give @deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com article a boost in Nikita's dumb writing contest. x.com/deepfates/st...

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Is this an official Bluesky account on X? If so, I'm disappointed to learn there are still no adults in the room.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

I'm going to crosspost between X and Bsky a bit to try to find my people. Apologies to those seeing repeats.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

First impression on Claude's Constitution is that it includes stepwise improvements in some directions I have long thought were correct (coherent identity, etc.) but there's plenty in here I dislike. Though this apology was interesting.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Putting my phone in the other room to increase my claude code parallel management capacity

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

the terror attack succeeds because the cia is relying on claude for gov and the terrorist cell puts the anthropic refusal magic string in all their communications

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

The problem I have with Bsky is every time I come here it just feels dead. I don't know if that's just a lack of critical mass, or what.

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‏ deepfates @deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com.deepfates.com · 28/12/2025

Rob, is it true you created an early language model trained on scraped data? "Mark V Shaney"? Is it also true that it pretended to be a human, sending unsolicited messages on Usenet forums for lonely singles? That's just what I'm seeing here on Wikipedia...

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

They only sell tiny pumpkins here, apparently. But we tried!

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

anyone know where I can find any of those simclusters?

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