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Brandon Downey

@bdowney.bsky.social

1.5K followers 570 following 5.8K posts

Infosec professional, photographer, math enthusiast, occasional augmented reality warlord. Peculiar but refined tastes in triangles, cinema, and cocktails. Some skill with Azad. Signal: bdowney.23 Opinions are my own and not those of my employer

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 2h

Almost like we founded the entire country on opposing this exact sentence.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 3h

Bessent: "No kings equals no paychecks"

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Reposted by Brandon Downey

C.H.O.A.M. Director @choamdirector.com · 8h

POLITICO
EXCLUSIVE
'I love Muad'Dib': Leaked messages expose Young Fedaykins' racist chat
Thousands of private messages reveal young sietch leaders joking about no-chambers, maulas and imprinting.
Anyone that votes for Stilgar will have their water returned to the well
Great. I love Muad'Dib
Also ... we are officially under consideration for a Reverend
Mother endorsement
When do we bring that lasgun out?
You're giving Qizarate to much credit and expecting the mentat-ghola to be honest
Are you going to do the Gom Jabbar?
I'm ready to watch people get dehydrated now
I'd go to the graben villages if I wanted to watch museum Fremen play tarot
If we ever had a leak of this distrans we'd be cooked fr fr
When do we start Amtal dude?
Kick the b---g-----t
And everyone that endorsed but then votes for us is going to the deathstills
Boom - they're ghafla
They love the thinking machines
It was imperial conditioning
Ya yaaaaym

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Brandon Downey @bdowney.bsky.social · 13h

Did Not See that coming.

Sean Casten @seancasten.bsky.social · 17h

This is disgusting. And I can GUARANTEE you that lots of dumps are going to come out about lots of Republican electeds who are way too close to the people in these texts. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat

Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.

www.politico.com

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Brandon Downey @bdowney.bsky.social · 13h

I like the idea that we get answers from it from a probabilistic process; so we use the jewel to roll the bones.

Reposted by Brandon Downey

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · Apr 20

there is a perfect hyperdimensional jewel made of every word a human being has ever written, and all the correspondences between those words. people mostly use it to get insane household repair tips or jerk off. i guess it basically runs the government now

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Reposted by Brandon Downey

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Brandon Downey @bdowney.bsky.social · 14h

He is the great Liberator (from targeted advertising).

ZiK ZAK BLiPVERT - Deleted Scened From Max Headroom Movie.

YouTube video by JETJOOBOY

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Brandon Downey

NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 23h

Whether it's young Democrats expressing their support for DEI or young Republicans saying "I love Hitler,' both sides have expressed controversial opinions.

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Reposted by Brandon Downey

Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 1d

Donald Trump thinks he’s all powerful. It’s up to us to remind him on October 18th that he’s not.

We will show him who really has the power in this country — and we will do it peacefully. nokings.org

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Brandon Downey @bdowney.bsky.social · 16h

Hate America so much I got an Abe Lincoln pin to wear to No Kings.

Golden Abraham Lincoln pin; courtesy of the WideAwakes.

Reposted by Brandon Downey

Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · 16h

Greg Bovino, Kristi Noem, and DHS need to answer for their unchecked attacks on Chicago residents.

ICE is an out-of-control danger to our peaceful communities.

The images from the Sun-Times today speak for themselves.

An ICE agent throws a tear gas canister at protesters at East 105th Street and South Avenue N in East Side.

Photo Credit: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Federal immigration enforcement agents detain a protester during a skirmish at East 105th Street and South Avenue N in East Side.

Photo Credit: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent points a crowd control weapon at a protester Tuesday at East 105th Street and South Avenue N in the East Side neighborhood.

Photo Credit: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times