iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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The Stillfleet Studio ☉ more than play 🇵🇸 @stillfleet.bsky.social · 8h

Stillfleet Studio is heading to Gaelcon 2026! Come meet the team and play the Grit System games with us! 🎲 PICARO! — Fri Oct 23, 18:00 💀 Danse Macabre — Sat Oct 24, 22:00 🚀 Stillfleet — Sun Oct 25 & Mon Oct 26, 10:00 See you at Gaelcon! 🎲⚡ #Gaelcon2026 #Stillfleet #GritSystem #TTRPG

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 8h

We are going to occasionally talk about AI, work, data politics, and sociality here for everyday people. Some ground rules: 1. we won’t cotton to a lot of intellectual elitism (“morons” etc.) 2. This will focus on how I ask questions. This is *my* lens on the world. YMMV is always implied.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 8h

This is my data politics collection. I’m not saying it’s exhaustive. It’s growing almost every day. And several volumes (like “The Nerd Reich”) are scattered elsewhere & in use. But my point is: I have one. And I think you should too.

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Rise Up Comus @riseupcomus.bsky.social · 9h

Old-school saving throws are one of those things you always want to name and rename until they're perfect (like attributes). One of their virtues is that they tell you what the game is about (Death! Poison! Petrification!). Trying out this set for a little project. They map to the OSE ones.

An OSE style class table for the Knight with the saving throws: Faith, Wit, Grit, Quick, and Counter-spell.

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Miguel Sicart @miguelsicart.bsky.social · 8h

Impressive how uninteresting these people are. Weird, but also so, so, so dull.

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 8h

Personally, I wouldn't knowingly use AI-generated music even for the low stakes uses I have for background music (TTRPGs). I certainly wouldn't pay for it.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 8h

One of my main mental buoys right now as ai eats the world is Bea Wolf 2. I don't think I can write any better than that, and it was hard, and every time I see a book get withdrawn (for secretly being ai) after winning many awards I think of the ballad of John Henry racing the steam drill*.

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 8h

Also my experience more than half the time, which does little to dissuade me from my assertion that this is part and parcel of the gambling economics that seem to have captured commerce at the moment. Where each spin of the wheel offers the chance of correcting the error the first spin introduced.

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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Meta Muse appears to read your Apple messages and upload them to the cloud even if you explicitly tell it not to: appleinsider.com/articles/26/...

appleinsider.com

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will jobst @willjobst.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

playing different games is good but playing with different people may be better

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Thursday Garreau @keftiu.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the OSR and PbtA scenes have some real common ground and i'm glad that some of the petty tribalism around both has died out. we get better games when folks take from multiple movements for their designs, imo!

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I can’t say strongly enough that these are not realistic scenarios for the people I observed and, based on data about family lives, almost anyone else we might consider normal and/or not rich.

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Alicia @heyalicia.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

People handle tasks so complex and with so many shifting variables as part of our day-to-day existence that the complexity is underestimated. It’s like how knitting machines have existed for over 400 years but there still isn’t a machine that can crochet, though we think of those tasks as comparable

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Earth & Environmental Sciences Ph.D Program-CUNY Graduate Center @eesgccuny.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Curious about a PhD? Join our Earth & Environmental Sciences Open House on Thursday, October 8 in-person at the CUNY Grad Center or on Zoom! #CUNY #PhD #Admissions Details & registration: www.gc.cuny.edu/events/ees-a... @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social

Flyer for CUNY Earth & Environmental Sciences PhD Admissions Open House on Thursday, October 8 in-person at the CUNY Grad Center or on Zoom!

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Rachel Gunter, Ph.D. 🗃️ @phdrachel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I don't know how they think AI is going to take over the grocery shopping when most people aren't satisfied with another human doing the shopping on Door Dash/Instacart.

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Dorothy Berry @dorothyjberry.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

An eternal bummer correlation to the necessary truth that there is no level of cultural milquetoast you can make yourself that will make you respectable enough to be heard in your profession, is that there is also no level of competency that will get you there either

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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

@washingtonpost reported earlier that hospitals insurance costs next year are projected to spike by the most in 2 decades, partly "due to medical providers’ increased use of artificial intelligence to find more claims they can bill for" www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 27/09/2026

1. "Intelligence" in regards to living beings is at best a loose umbrella term for a diversity of behaviors and systems and at worst an eugenicist project 2. "Intelligence" in humans does not emerge strictly from symbolic manipulation, nor does it correlate with symbolic manipulation

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Christina Wolbrecht @cwolbrecht.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Delighted to see our Element, Gender & Local Political Ambition, out in the world this week! We ask whether local politics (with lower demands & closer to home) and appointed offices (which don’t require campaigning) are more attractive & accessible to women. 🧵 www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Cover image of the Cambridge Element, Gender & Local Politocal Ambition by C Wolbrecht, M Holman, L Iyer, S Chapa, F Rodger, & E Schroeder.

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Hal Duncan @halduncan.com · 27/09/2026

CSAMagotchi

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

People sleep on CUNY but it is one of the absolute JEWELS of U.S. Higher Ed and has been for decades. And what's the thanks the system gets??? It has to fight for its life every single year because it has been systematically defunded.

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Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Reading a very strange and timely book from 1956 called The Obsolesence of The Human

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Exhausted sociologist @iaracpassos.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

@mozilla.org launched a campaign against the tech billionaire class during the UNGA — and my face is in NY. 🧵 The ad places me next to Zuckerberg: he manufactures surveillance eyewear; I build local AI to expose political violence in Brazil, with Instituto Fogo Cruzado.

Triad of posters from the Mozilla Foundation campaign. First panel, left: Mark Zuckerberg; second panel, center: Iara, a white woman wearing glasses. Above, the text "Mark gets into eyewear / Gives creepers, peepers" over Zuckerberg and "Iara builds local AI / Exposes political violence" over Iara. Third panel, white background, all caps: "The powerful shouldn't choose what we see", below: "We all decide."

Triad of posters from the Mozilla Foundation campaign. First panel, left: Jeff Bezos; second panel, center: Rose Njeri Tunguru. Above, the text "Jeff builds a rocket. Celebrities go to outer space." over Jeff and "Rose builds democracy tools. Kenyan voices grow stronger." over Rose. Third panel, white background, all caps: "Joyrides won't build a better future", below: "We all will."

Triad of posters from the Mozilla Foundation campaign. First panel, left: Elon Musk; second panel, center: Rudy. Above, the text "Elon buys the blue bird. He trashes the place." over Elon and "Rudy builds Blacksky. Communities call the shots." over Rudy. Third panel, white background, all caps: "Wannabe kings don't rule the internet", below: "We all do."

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/09/2026

But can I take it to a job interview?

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/09/2026

Damn, I didn't get that last job because I walked widdershins around the chair. Thankfully I counted. It was fewer than 7 times.

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990000 @990000.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

lnkd.in/p/gwq86W7w

Denis O.
Fintech Professional | Al Solution Ar...

The classical Al winter is here..

Everybody is running around with Jev or RLCD like it is the new kid on the block. Fast decisions, probabilities, confidence, structured outputs. No giant stream of generated tokens. Ooooh, ahhhh! Lol..
RLCD stands for Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions. But strip away the marketing and it is the familiar machine learning and statistics.. train a
model so its predicted probabilities are calibrated
against observed outcomes. But probability calibration is not a new concept. Neither are classifiers, scorers, discriminative models, confidence estimation, structured prediction or decision functions.
Yet somehow Al changed generations and forgot its own field.

Of course a system designed to make bounded decisions can outperform an LLM at bounded decision making. LLMs were never designed to be
stable autonomous decision engines in the first place. Go back to Attention Is All You Need. It was not a paper about AGI, autonomous intelligence or a
universal cognitive architecture. The Transformer was introduced as a sequence transduction architecture and demonstrated on machine translation. Then we became hypnotized by fluency at scale.. Hyperscale it enough, feed it enough
human output, and the statistical continuation over bullshit became so convincing that an entire industry started confusing linguistic competence with intelligence.. Then we wrapped it in tools, memory, RAG, planning loops and agent harnesses
and tried to turn a probabilistic sequence generator into an autonomous cognitive system.
And the industry response to Jev is hilarious. We are rediscovering classification, scoring, regression,
state estimation, structured prediction and bounded probabilistic decision making all over again when we already had all of this for decades if not a century (.!).

Jev may be useful engineering. Yet everybody is acting shocked that direct decision computation can be faster and more stable than asking a giant autoregressive LLM to generate tokens about the decision first.
It feels like the Al industry is suffering from dementia.. It went through machine learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning, probabilistic models, expert systems, cognitive architectures, search and planning.. Transformers came around,
scale exploded, and somehow everybody forgot where we had already been.. Now we are walking
around the same tracks in circle and calling it major progress.
The deeper problem is simple.

Hyperscaling did not breach the intelligence wall. It gave us extraordinary generative NLP, structured coding and generally better learned distributions through curated human labeled datasets.. But scaling the NLP did not magically turn it into a
fundamentally different form of intelligence or superduper AGI.. Stable autonomy under uncertainty
is still out of reach for GenAl.
So now the industry is moving backward while calling it 'forward' or Jev.. and that, my bros, is your
standard classical Al winter.

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/09/2026

Apropos of nothing, I'm wondering why I never tried running Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine with the Wendy's TTRPG Feast of Legends. The PCs are made of food. (Which from certain perspectives was always true no matter the system...)

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/09/2026

Okay so why do I keep circling around to RDF and such? Let me tell you. Once upon a time, we dreamed of being able to ask computers natural language questions and having them spit back verified facts that required multi-domain traversal. To assert any kind of authority, the facts have to be encoded.

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Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"High up in the continental pedigree the entire DNA fingerprint matched a predicted empty space. The Maine team had found a living lost progenitor to hundreds of varieties—a tree that had been contributing its characteristics to American apples for hundreds of years." #DNA 🧪

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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 24/09/2026

i liked what @chrisshank.com had to say about react: it obscures the structure of the page (he said "corporatizes"), encloses it, makes it inscrutable to view source (hell i find half the time the react dev tools thingy can't even make sense of it)

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

am I alone in thinking that “I need more power. If you don’t give it to me, something terrible will happen to you” is actually the same AI pitch as before

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 24/09/2026

Possibly because I don't hang out in any AI booster circles, I never encounter real discussion about how LLMs tend to break down tasks into endless lists of subtasks, to the point where you look back after a dozen iterations and find yourself optimizing an app feature you don't even need.

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 24/09/2026

👀 Now wondering if I could manage to get one shipped to Vienna. There's also the laser cut option.... (I visited an art supply store here, Boesner, and they sell metal presses for a minimum of 309 €)

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems: “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”

APStylebook @APStylebook
X.com
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.

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c3rmen @c3rmen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Losing my mind while doing some research for my creature design lecture that the closest relative to the maned wolf is the bush dog. Like there has gotta be a fable where the maned wolf took all the leggie from its cousin

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's great to see tailoring accommodate such extreme movement today. This level of tailoring was a bit more common in the past, as you can see in old films featuring Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, but many modern suits will lift off the wearer's neck even when they're just walking.

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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 23/09/2026

just doing a little light review lol

Many Functions Are Intrinsically Unsuited To The Systems Approach.
Anyone who has tried to manipulate an umbrella in a high wind has an intuitive feel for what is involved here. Technically, it has something to do with rapid and irregular fluctuations in the parameters. The great secret of Systems Design is to be able to sense what things can naturally be done easily and elegantly by means of a system and what things are hard—and to stay away from the hard things.

Also, if you really must build a system, by all means remember the Systems Law of Gravity, otherwise known as the Vector Theory of Systems:

Systems Run Best When Designed To Run Downhill.

(from john gall's systemantics)

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The Merry Mushmen @themerrymushmen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A cool wilderness map by Ripley Matthews, for Winter and The Wolf Princess, Brad Kerr's new adventure. Did I say we're pretty excited about this one? (Stay tuned!)

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Chaucer Doth Tweet @levostregc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

• OLD ENGLISH: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon... • MIDDLE ENGLISH: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote... • EARLY MODERN ENGLISH: To be, or not to be, that is the Question: / Whether 'tis Nobler in the minde...

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 23/09/2026

Given the excitement/hype around Rust and its speed and safety and such, I thought, okay someone probably has made a triplestore in Rust. What I found was a thoroughly vibe-coded experimental engine whose code repo has 2500 issues racked up over a few months, 3800 commits, and 175 open PRs.

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Prof. Dimitra Fimi @dimitrafimi.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wonderful #Tolkien news! Westminster Abbey has announced that J.R.R. Tolkien will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner. I've known about this project for some years + was privileged to be consulted during its development. Great to see it made public! www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-news/a...

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WiddershinsWanderings @naeolin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I've been talking about play style preferences lately, but there's another aspect of table culture that I think is a key determining factor on whether a gaming table stays together. Whether you're playing Cairn, Mothership, or Vampire. widdershinswanderings.bearblog.dev/ttrpg-table-...

widdershinswanderings.bearblog.dev

TTRPG Table Alignments

A blog post where I compare a Tabletop Roleplaying Game session to having a communal meal, and why its important for everyone's expectations to be aligned.

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Irina Dumitrescu @irinadumitrescu.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Medievalist friends, can anyone point me to sources on the hunting of dolphins in the early Middle Ages? How was it done? Could one man hunt a dolphin alone? Were dolphins ever beached, and if so, were they edible?

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Present & Correct @presentcorrect.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Typology of Pedestrian Walking Symbols walking-men.com/product/hood... Via @kottke.org

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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 21/09/2026

One of the problems with the AI industry being run by apocalyptic millenarian cultists isn’t that their end of the world scenarios are made up; it’s that like other similar millennialists, they think their desired end of the world is a utopia and they’ll do whatever they can to make it real.

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Mikell Taylor @mikell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This gets back to the moravec’s paradox thing where we wrongly assume that if a computer can do something we think is hard, it must also be able to do all the things we would have to learn to do in order to do that hard thing.

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