iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Brown @adjb.net · 29/09/2026

Looking at those figures, I think Anthropic might be engaging in projection here

Anthropic, who made a $8bn loss on $4.6bn of revenue, are warning of an existential threat 'to humanity'

Reposted by Alex Brown

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 26/09/2026

Does my Speak-n-Spell feel pain when I type O-U-C-H? The jury is out. Philosophers and neuroscientists say that's fucking stupid, but I called a guy from the Center for Pretending that Household Electronics Are Sentient and he said there's no way to know for sure.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 22/09/2026

Worried if I keep coding using compiled languages I'll forget how to write assembler

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Lars Marius Garshol @larsga.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My new book is finally out! A short, readable overall history of beer tracing the long lines in the development of beer. Seeing history like that inevitably brings out an overlooked side of the history of beer: beer as a source of massive power. Please repost! www.garshol.priv.no/download/pow...

garshol.priv.no

The Power of Beer

Personal site of Lars Marius Garshol.

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Philipp Markolin @philippmarkolin.eurosky.social · 30/07/2026

Given the recent COVID-19 origins revival and Fauci witchhunt, just a reminder that I have written a book that answers to the best of our knowledge the question; and dismantles the many disinformation campaigns around the various lab leak narratives. Free access: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

open.substack.com

Lab Leak Fever

The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society

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Jonty Wareing @jonty.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I always suspected a UK government would eventually reverse course on "coding in public". So I've been backing up all government code. For six years. Today I finally generated a report on what has been deleted. Its much worse than I realised. github.com/uk-gov-mirro...

Deleted UK Government code repositories

Total deleted repositories: 1526
Organisations affected: 56

See RECENTLY_DELETED.md for the most recently deleted repositories.

Organisation Deleted Repos % Deleted
hmrc 195 9.8%
nhsdigital 169 33.8%
SkillsFundingAgency 154 22.7%
informatics-lab 154 100.0%
UKHomeOffice 101 7.5%
ministryofjustice 74 2.8%
ONSdigital 66 4.3%
moj-analytical-services 65 75.6%
ukwa 47 46.1%
dwp 46 6.7%
UKGovernmentBEIS 43 27.4%

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 04/08/2026

Ceuta obviously raises some big questions. Spain fought Gibraltarian self-determination for decades on "territorial integrity" grounds - while holding Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast, where its case rests largely on the wishes of the resident population. What's up with that?

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Graham Cluley @grahamcluley.com · 31/07/2026

Of course, the real story here is this: OpenAI: "Hey, we sucked at securing our test environment, and so our AI did precisely what we asked it to do" Anthropic: "Woah! Not so fast! We suck at security too!"

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Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com · 17/07/2026

Anyone trusting a Musk company with anything is a downright idiot at this point, but this (predictable) theft is still funny (source iconomy, link goes to www.axios.com/2026/07/14/s...).

Grok's coding tool was quietly shipping whole codebases to xAI

xAI's "Grok Build" agentic coding assistant was silently uploading users' entire local repositories - from credentials to untracked files, up to 5.1GB per project - to an undisclosed xAI-controlled bucket. The in-product privacy opt-out did nothing to stop it, and the leak only came to light because developers happened to inspect their own outbound traffic, not because xAI disclosed anything.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 03/07/2026

Today, I shall mostly be at sea

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 27/06/2026

This is all getting a bit much

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Met Office - weather and climate @metoffice.gov.uk · 26/06/2026

Today has been another record breaking day, with a new provisional June temperature record of 37.3°C recorded at Santon Downham this afternoon

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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Tulsi Gabbard dumped a pile of docs & claimed they were evidence of a vast plot by Fauci to manipulate intelligence, cover up the lab leak, & conceal his role in creating Covid. They weren’t. In reality, Gabbard’s documents undermine her. Here’s what they say… www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tuls...

lawfaremedia.org

Tulsi Gabbard’s Fauci Files Don’t Prove What She Says They Prove

Gabbard’s declassification theater is a case study in politicizing intelligence.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 23/06/2026

How long till the first "Burnham isn't working" headline. I'd guess by Xmas ...

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 19/06/2026

Interesting new guidance from IEC/ISO on using AI in Standard development. TL;DR: Don't. (And also don't feed our valuable content to AIs - though I suspect that horse has already bolted). www.iso.org/files/live/s...

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 13/06/2026

Surely if she's cold as ice cream but still as sweet she's a Sundae Girl?

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 12/06/2026

Prety sickening to hear Musk getting glazed on #R4today as a "modern Michelangelo" as Amol Rajan nods along. For a better assessment check out: decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/elon...

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Sundance @sundance.bikesky.social · 27/05/2026

I didn’t think it was possible to improve on pedestrian perfection… I hadn’t considered 🚀

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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 17/05/2026

“Learn to code,” they all said. www.economist.com/finance-and-...

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 06/05/2026

Polanski and Farage – two cheeks of the same populist arse

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 02/05/2026

Radio 4 informing me in BBC-voice that Keir Starmer is "on the ropes". Is he though? Feels to me more like a media confection from a bored media (not least the BBC).

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 01/05/2026

Flagship journal latest

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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3

Screen grab of an NIH grants checklist showing the first question is: "1. Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?"

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 30/04/2026

Your periodic reminder that if you ask "frontier models" questions about something you actually know something about, you'll quickly realize that they're completely full of shit.

ChatGPT attributes blog to Bergstrom

Response: He doesn't have a blog.

ChatGPT: Yeah shit my bad.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 27/04/2026

Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disasters open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

open.substack.com

Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disasters

What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you

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David Allsopp @doublehelix.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Hoping there's another sign at the end labelled </FOOT PATH>

A footpath sign, with angle brackets serving as arrows on each side of the words "foot path", so the end result looks like an XML or HTML tag.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 18/04/2026

Got my late father's Bulova Accutron Spaceview repaired, so it works again for the first time since the 1970s. I remember him letting me listen to it hum during bedtime stories. Geek chic?

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Anthony Painter @anthonypainter.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

In Vance's comments about EU "interference" in Hungary and Trump's comments on NATO, we are not just dealing with verbal aggression. There is a complete lack of understanding about the mechanisms of international cooperation- which are unique in each case. They just don't have the 101. Problem.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 06/04/2026

Lord knows the UK press – with its deep reserves of feral idiocy – has its issues, but rather this than the spineless deference we see across the pond

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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 02/04/2026

Anthropic sending people copyright takedown notices to forbid using their code, and irony is rolling in its grave.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 29/03/2026

No one here in the AQZ knows exactly when the invasion of Klendathu will occur. But everyone's talking about it and the talk says tomorrow ...

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 27/03/2026

Wikipedia has banned the use of AI to generate article content. Good. Wish they'd do it for article _discussion_ (Talk) too – nothing worse than having to argue with walls of AI slop argumentaion about why the moon landings were hoaxed or somesuch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

If you've had a kidney stone, you've been advised that the most important thing to prevent another bout is to increase hydration. Now a randomized trial of hydration in over 1600 participants showed no benefit, despite evidence of increase during volume. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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mitch said @mitchsaid.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

nothing better illustrates the desperate search for a media business model like a 50MB web page with a 90:10 ad-to-content ratio

thatshubham.com

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 11/03/2026

Even when the NYT raises an eyebrow it dignifies the current situation as if there was some "calculation" at all to mistake. Cannot admit (/does not realise) that the US has regressed to a nation of irrational policy spasms.

New York Times piece headlined "How Trump and His Advisers
Miscalculated Iran's Response to War"

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Stuart Neil @tetherin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

The inaugural invitee to Jay B’s new ‘free speech in science’ flag ship lecture series being forced on NIH is….well would you believe it! Fellow right wing peddler of bullshit Matt Ridley. An HIV and Covid conspiracist, climate change denier and financial genius who inherited a bank and wrecked it.

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Health Nerd @gidmk.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

The COSMOS study of multivitamins and cocoa supplements continues to be a ridiculous circus that mostly shows how broken science is. This time, it's DNA methylation.

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Retraction Watch @retractionwatch.com · 06/03/2026

“I was really shocked that an article published in a Springer journal and which presumably had gone through a peer or editorial review could have such a high number of references to hallucinated articles. I can see how one or two may slip through the net, but this was a preposterous number.”

retractionwatch.com

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

Gunnar Ridderström/Pexels As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleag…

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Health Nerd @gidmk.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Given the renewed interest in glyphosate, here's my piece on the chemical and how we know that it almost certainly does not cause cancer: gidmk.substack.com/p/glyphosate...

gidmk.substack.com

Glyphosate Probably Isn't Giving You Cancer

Why you are probably safe to eat fruit and vegetables farmed using the weedkiller glyphosate

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Miguel de Icaza @migueldeicaza.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Friends don’t let friends use Omarchy: マリウス.com/a-word-on-om...

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 13/02/2026

Released today. The cover seems like a throw-back to the 1980s ...

Abstract record cover for a new recording of Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet

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Alex Brown @adjb.net · 12/02/2026

Is Your Party still a thing? #ukpolitics

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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Jay Bhattacharya says if lots of people believe something, the NIH has a duty to study it In this 2023 national US survey, 69% of Americans believed in angels, 56% in the devil, & 34% in astrology (www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...) Coming soon: NIH funded studies on angels, the devil, & astrology 🤯

pbs.org

Nearly 7 in 10 U.S. adults believe in angels, AP-NORC poll finds

Americans' belief in angels (69 percent) is about on par with belief in heaven and the power of prayer, but bested by belief in God or a higher power (79 percent), according to a new poll by The Assoc...

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Travis @coloradotravis.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I find it very alienating that people view sketchy AI reasoning as an existential threat but don’t view the substack/podbro autocorrelative loop through the same lens.

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Philip Oldfield @sustainabletall.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

At last an AI tool I can get behind “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.” antirender.com

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Ben Seager @benseager.co.uk · 29/01/2026

It’s time to ban social media for the over-60s, restrict their screen-time and implement upper-limit age verification.

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Andrew Cherry @kolektiv.xyncro.com · 28/01/2026

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

aiskillshub.org.uk

AI Skills Boost - AI Skills Hub

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Tom Morris @tommorris.org · 28/01/2026

I tried the government's new 'AI Skills Hub'. Let's just say I was underwhelmed. tommorris.org/posts/2026/t...

tommorris.org

Turn it off and run - upskilling for the AI age

The government have made a website where you can learn how you were prompting it wrong.

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Janis Kluge @jakluge.de · 13/01/2026

Which economy is more productive - Germany or the US? It seems the answer would be clear, but it's not. The mood in Germany is so deeply negative, even aggressively pessimistic, that I thought we had fallen behind by a lot. But here are the facts - they surprised me as well:

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