iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It is never just one case gone wrong. There are always so many other survivors who were mistreated before any of these stories make it into the public eye.

223163

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I keep trying to think of any historical example where a given technology's PROMOTERS AND TRUE BELIEVERS were like 'we are absolutely going to ruin your fucking life so be prepared like it's the end of the world'

Andrew Curran: Axios is reporting that the top labs are wargaming scenarios for the aftermath of a catastrophic event in the next 6 - 12 months, that some executives now see as being inevitable.

Axios: Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAl and other Al companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.
Why it matters: These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.

Edouard Harris: This is our view as well. Relatedly, average people will want to increase their level of personal resilience and preparedness as their resources allow. We will be publishing about this soon.

Nick Farina: Best ways to be prepared? Generators, water, books and DVDs?

Edouard Harris: Power, water, food, sanitation for most part. Parts of this depend on your geo latitude - solar vs propane for eg.

But also: set aside a computer that is not (and ideally has never been) connected to the internet. Buy faraday pouches and tape. Print out essential docs on paper.

1262729614

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 23h

Not to mention that they mixed up the heroes and the villains in those stories.

110

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Nah. Reading has been my #1 hobby since I was a very little person, and I’ve bounced off every Dickens book I’ve ever tried. I was force-fed Great Expectations in high school and I’m still traumatized by how awful the story was—along with every character in it. Loathsome dreck from cover to cover.

010

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Physghoul 👻 🎃 @physgal.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

OMG. This is so typical academia. Sigh. Donna Strickland was only an associate professor when she won the Nobel Prize in Physics. #AcademicSky

34415

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 10/10/2026

"acting on their own" no, I need to know what the prompt was

1334353

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Exactly. Every behavior these LLMs engage in was specifically programmed into them as both a capability and a prompt. At BEST this excuse is like designing the first revolver, playing Russian Roulette, and then blaming the gun for deciding “on its own” who to shoot.

0120

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 09/10/2026

The exact personalization I want for my software is for it to not contain AI.

653871

Reposted by Alan J. Card

c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

In 2021, researchers from Boston University & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute aboard the Schmidt Ocean research vessel Falkor had a rare encounter with Vitreledonella richardi, the GLASS OCTOPUS. This mesmerizing creature, rarely seen, has a nearly transparent body with visible eyes & gut.

12415137

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What a great day at work for the researchers!

010

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Anise K. Strong @anisekstrong.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Why parents make great scientists: Because they recognize that "Lauren errors" happen all the time.

There was the incident that became known as “the Lauren error”: One day, her daughter Lauren, then four years old, was playing with the command module simulator at the Instrumentation Lab when she somehow activated a pre-launch program, called P01, while the simulator was in midflight — which crashed the simulator altogether. Hamilton created a program add-on in the technical documentation warning users not to launch P01 during flight.

She also proposed a software fix to prevent the error happening during a real mission, but she was overruled on the grounds that the highly trained astronauts were never going to make that same mistake. Yet during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, that’s exactly what happened: Jim Lovell inadvertently launched P01 during the flight, causing the on-flight navigational data to vanish. Hamilton and her team were called in to solve the error, and after that her proposed changes were integrated into the program. This was an early example of “defensive” programming, the practice of building software that could anticipate or fix errors on its own.

622184

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Sure. Definitely not intending to imply that it’s easy—or that a market-driven approach is the right way to prepare for the future we’re all facing together.

000

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The way we’re burning through first line antibiotics, we really should be developing vaccines against a lot more bacterial infections—especially ones as deadly (sans antibiotics) as the plague.

0136

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Jack Iwashyna @iwashyna.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

New @nejm.org Voices: how I write an introduction to a research manuscript “My first piece of advice…: write your introduction backwards. “My second piece of advice: innovate in your ideas, not in the structure of how you present the ideas.” voices.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

voices.nejm.org

Start Here to Write a Research Introduction Section

A step-by-step guide to writing a concise introduction to a clinical research manuscript

14723

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I spent a year watching school administrators do their jobs—and interviewing the students most impacted. I spoke to @thecut.com in a long-form Q&A about what I saw. Mainly, a system designed to protect perpetrators and punish victims in each and every case.

thecut.com

The Reason Why Colleges Still Fail to Address Sexual Violence

The “Cornell Seven” case highlights what’s wrong with Trump’s Title IX rules — and how the system was always designed to fail.

221252470

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/10/2026

Remember when us phil-tech types said effective altruism was just utilitarianism taken to its worst possible extents? This is what we meant: Real harm for unquantifiable potential benefit. "…'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology….'"

politico.com

Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.

38715223

Reposted by Alan J. Card

The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 04/10/2026

A cartoon by Rose Anne Prevec.

6467108

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Earlier this week, I agreed to interviews with two USA Today journalists. They wrote fantastic articles about the Cornell case that I'm proud to have been a part of. What I did not know is that their employer considers interviews to proprietary and opens up recordings to be used by any journalist.

5847051400

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Fraud, too, but kids are more important.

010

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This seems like a perfect state of affairs. Assuming your goal is to enable child abuse.

100

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you need me, I'll be over here laughing at this for the next hour or two.

0291

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is quite the graph from a new retrospective cohort study in Neurology: “In conclusion, football is the leading cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury in children and young adults, and its risks are amplified by institutional promotion despite decades of accumulating evidence of harm.”

Figure one: age breakdown of traumatic brain injuries by activity. The graph clearly shows that American tackle football has the highest number of traumatic brain injuries.

611657

Reposted by Alan J. Card

darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

my inner voice telling me not to go to sleep just yet there is one more thing to ponder

2263532

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” — Paul Batalden

010

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

To be fair, it did seem plausible that you were half fire daimon. 😂

000

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Kate Elliott @kateelliottsff.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I hope that at the time When The Wolves Come is published (a Witch Roads novel, likely spring 2028) some nice podcaster will let me ramble for an hour about how this novel rebelled against the story i thought it was meant to be & I had to let go of my preconceptions.

7737

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

(And I would argue the kind of use you described is academic misconduct even if the journal did allow it.)

020

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s academic misconduct to A) feed someone else’s confidential submission into the plagiarism engine, and B) play off the outputs of a language model as the insights of a peer with actual content knowledge. I think I’d raise it with the editors.

172

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Robyn Swirling @rswirling.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

After being raped by a man on my hall sophomore year, I couldn’t leave my dorm room for weeks and failed several classes. I had to take out student loans so I could retake those credits. We almost never talk about the financial toll of campus sexual assault on survivors.

161590322

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

While we’re talking about campus sexual violence, I want to revisit the recent history of a topic where we have seen some of the biggest backslides: Expelling rapists from school.

328199

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Kat is right about all of this. One of the reasons that college sexual violence is uniquely devastating is because it changes the victim’s entire future.

4488134

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I’ve been leaning on it in reviewing proposed Title IX & discrimination policy changes for my university system (and recommending it to whoever is drafting them), and it’s really shaped the way I’m reading the news about Cornell. A super important book for anyone, but especially anyone in higher ed.

031

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Celeste Labedz @celestelabedz.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If anyone is looking to better understand the horrific bigger picture around campus sexual violence, follow Dr. Bedera. I wish I could assign her book "On The Wrong Side" as homework to literally every single person in higher ed.

1439

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

All these tools are BUILT on stolen data. If you can’t trust the people who made them to respect the law, you definitely can’t trust them to respect user instructions.

023

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

You’ve really gotta feel for quadrapeds. I’d hate it if I were physically unable to reach and scratch an itch.

110

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It’s as though they were specifically designing every aspect of the system to stoke the anger of their users. Really, just incredible work by that standard!

110

Reposted by Alan J. Card

Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/09/2026

Just when I think I can’t hate OpenAI and Sam Altman any more, new details come out about how ChatGPT helped a shooter plan one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history in Tumbler Ridge, BC. OpenAI made an explicit decision not to report the user to authorities.

motherjones.com

ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals

OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.

1533491491

Alan J. Card @alanjcard.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

That’s awesome! I think my poor high school teachers were already too burned out and demoralized to do anything like that.

030