iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I’ve been a Zotero evangelist for 20 years, first heard about it in the Digital Campus podcast*, did not know Zotero was an Albanian word though. *back when podcasts were cool and hardly anyone had heard of them before they totally sold out

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The more you read about the coastal hazards of South Brighton the more horrifying it is. The spit is only about 450 years old and was very mobile until they built houses on it, and could quite possibly split it two with sea level rise or a tsunami.

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The South Shore people get FURIOUS at political candidate meetings if you suggest their suburb is IN ANY WAY not perfectly safe.

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Katya @nzkatya.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Really surprising how much new building is going on in New Brighton at the moment, right in those blue areas.

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Harete Hipango's Wikipedia page: "Hipango acknowledged that she had asked a member of her staff to edit her Wikipedia biography to remove any mention of negative or controversial issues that Hipango was involved in, including her attendance at anti-vaccination rallies" She's no.7 on NZF's list

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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

8. The discovery was not the sole work of Watson and Crick, nor was it seen as such at the time. All three groups published back to back in Nature under a common title, and the reprints were bound together. The first public presentation of the double helix took place in June. Look at the authors:

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Daniel Burke - 🍺Innkeep @innkeep.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Shape’s unimportant, body (with down, like that one) and wing feathers cover all shapes and sizes. Colour is a good clue.

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Le Guin on the idea that there is a secret to getting good at writing.

I will dispose of the first myth as quickly as possible. The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, so many “secrets,” some teachable and some not, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice — in other words, by work.

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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Reading Jane Ward’s THE TRAGEDY OF HETEROSEXUALITY, and wow is the dedication to the point.

For straight women.
May you find a way to have your sexual needs met without suffering so much.

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wikipedia has been ANNIHILATED with AI bot traffic for a while now (because LLMs can't get enough of it) which puts a huge burden on its tech and server costs. and now it looks like bots are making unauthorized edits to pages and trying to hack community tools diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/o...

Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WDQS in May.

Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.

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Nic Rawlence @nicrawlencenz.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'll be giving a free public talk on "Mythbusting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction" in Christchurch (in the central city) on Thurs 29th Oct at 6pm. It would be great to see you there. Spread the word. events.humanitix.com/myth-busting... @smcnz.bsky.social

events.humanitix.com

Myth busting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction

Associate Professor Nic Rawlence, University of Otago will speak on can scientists actually de-extinct animals, and more importantly, should they bring them.

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And New Zealand! Very happy for Jenni Adams and her team

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This is on top of the millions of dollars in server charges caused by AI bots hammering Wikipedia’s servers to scrape the entire encyclopedia.

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Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27

The appeal of Apple is that it’s been relatively slow to cram AI in everything. I suspect if this tool is popular they’ll add an OFF switch in the next update. arstechnica.com/apple/2026/1...

arstechnica.com

The tool can free up over 12GB of storage.

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“What Marjorie Lindon could see in such an opusculum surpassed my comprehension.”

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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Reading The Beetle (1897)—trashy horror novel that at one point outsold Dracula—and learned the word “opusculum” (literally, a minor literary work), very satisfying to deploy as an insult.

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Wow. I’ve never heard of a flightless bird being transported to an offshore island by rafting, and we have a hundred or so examples of secondary flightlessness and body size increase on islands, so it seems pretty implausible.

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Interesting in that the website gets the difference between perihelion and aphelion wrong by about 3 million kilometres. So I’m not sure I would trust the rest of their maths.

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The Earth’s orbit is almost perfectly circular, difference from closest (July) to farthest (Jan) is about 3%. Latitude has vastly more influence, just see the difference between poles and equator (both essentially the same distance from the sun).

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How does that work? Car windscreens are usually treated to filter out the UV-A that causes sunburn.

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Andy McKay @korimakoecology.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It’s really just the different latitudes and the angle at which the sun’s rays pass through the atmosphere. Varying distance from the sun has no effect on our climate.

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I've had a quick skim through this and there is a huge number of things to think about. 1. Relationships are critical. Still way too much helicopter decision making. 2. Peers are trusted. Which goes to Point 1. re relationships. 3. Much of the distrust can be traced back to economic incentives.

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The link works, it’s just the preview that’s broken. But you can turn that off.

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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 03/10/2026

Hmm, that short URL didn’t resolve. I don’t bother with the short wiki addresses if I’m posting to Bluesky, which lets you delete the URL once it’s previewed.

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This Guardian article finally gets it right. Most coverage of the return to physical media frames it entirely as nostalgia when the real drivers are privacy, preservation, & sovereignty. Gen Z is leading the charge because they’re acutely aware that streaming platforms can’t be trusted.

theguardian.com

‘If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it’: why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl

People describe their return to physical media – whether to protect data, support artists, or retain control of one’s choices

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Yorrike. @yorrike.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is such a good policy because we’re not building the network from scratch. It’s already there and just needs upgrading. We used to build trains and rolling stock ourselves, and we could do it again creating high paid, skilled jobs. It doesn’t need to stack up commercially. It’s the government.

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KnitMeAThneed @thneed.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Why run a photo competition for #Dunedin scarfie flats? Well for a start our named flats are a unique phenomenon. Documenting them is fun! Flat names are often puns like this one from Hyde St. Contribute your pics here w.wiki/UYBq

Image of a student flat named “Hydetide” on Hyde St

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Emily @emilydawn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

@hockeyviz.com I found some beautiful data viz for you

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Mike Keesey @tmkeesey.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

PhyloPic is having an October fundraiser. The goal is to raise enough money to cover web hosting for the past six months. Please share the link, and chip in a bit if you can! www.phylopic.org

phylopic.org

PhyloPic

PhyloPic is an open database of free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. Download silhouettes for use in educational materi...

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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

“Labour plans to ban paywave fees as part of its new policy, putting the fees to use the service back on banks and credit card companies rather than small businesses.” Which, since those merchant service fees are plucked out of thin air, should have been the case all along.

thespinoff.co.nz

Arena Williams steals the show at Chris Hipkins’ no bullshit policy launch

The MP sometimes touted as a Labour leader-in-waiting outshone its current leader as the party launched is fair go for families policy in Māngere.

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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

An important point is that this happened in the face of opposition from some of the sanctuary's neighbours. I was in nightbourhood meetings in 1998 and people objected to not being able to walk their dogs there when the fence went up.

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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Watched a presentation where someone spent 125 hours to script, shoot, and edit a 5-minute promotional video for a science organisation. Meanwhile the organisation’s Wikipedia article is just one paragraph long and was written last month by a volunteer in Australia.

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KnitMeAThneed @thneed.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

@universityofotago.bsky.social @otagobiochemist.bsky.social @zoologyotago.bsky.social @otagoreligion.bsky.social It's a beautiful day to go and take a photo of a student flat so you can enter the Wiki Loves Scarfie Flats photo competition tomorrow! w.wiki/UYBq for more info and to register

Wiki Loves Scarfie Flats Want your flat to be immortalised? Get it into Wikimedia Commons and be in to win, 1–23 October 2026

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Just finished it, on your recommendation: excellent. Would make great TV.

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Deputy PM at least, based on the corresponding percentages in the current coalition.

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A shame that piece gave so much space to the fishing industry, and none at all for independent fisheries researchers and scientists to evaluate TOP’s proposal and whether the fishing execs are lying to us or not.

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