iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alastair Smith

Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Two Democratic members of Congress attacked in three days. Maxwell Frost was assaulted on Saturday, Ilan Omar tonight.

CNN: Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost assaulted at Sundance Film Festival event, police say
By Aleena Fayaz
Updated Jan 24, 2026

NBC News: Man lunges at Ilhan Omar during town hall and tries to spray her with unknown substance
January 27, 2026

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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 28/01/2026

These words demand attention. “In a real sense this is holy ground, consecrated by blood spilled here. The cost is high, and so I had to be here to stand in the very place where this tragedy unfurled… I think we’re at a defining moment for our country…” ~ Rev Warnock Take a moment, so much more…

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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Amazing story in The Times. Reform UK failed to pay VAT to HMRC on its sales (tickets, merchandise). About £400k in all. Not tax avoidance. Not tax evasion. They just didn't realise when you sell stuff you have to charge VAT.

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oli @olil.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 03/10/2025

There’s a lot of things I like about working for @1password.bsky.social, but today’s DJ hour was *chef’s kiss*

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 03/10/2025

Likewise! Hope your keynote went well and you had/have a smooth journey home!

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Seems a lot like the Cameron/Osborne austerity programme was an entirely avoidable national calamity with devastating, still worsening consequences, but I don’t get much sense anyone has learned any lessons from it except “We got away with it by shouting into microphones”.

theguardian.com

Scrapping of audit watchdog for English councils ‘led to soaring costs and chaos’

Highly critical report finds that instead of promised annual saving of £100m, fees have rocketed amid financial crisis

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 19/08/2025

This is a great read, very insightful. Thanks for sharing!

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 19/08/2025

Found this line buried in our code: // this relationship would make Cersei Lannister blush …and honestly I think I’m done for the day.

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David Klemperer @dmk1793.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Extremely pleased to have been able to write for Comment is Freed about the problem of low turnout in UK elections, and its wider political-economic implications. Once again, I draw on @duncanweldon.bsky.social's notion of a high-turnout "post-economic voter bloc" as a central obstacle to growth.

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 14/08/2025

A strong thesis exceptionally well-argued IMO. Well worth your time.

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Oregon 🕎🎲 @oregonthedm.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

COME ON DOWN TO THE BLUESKY BALLS RACE! PUT YOUR BETS DOWN NOW ON THE MOST AMAZING RACE OF 2025

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James Martin, SJ @jamesmartinsj.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Laughing in front of cages designed to hold migrants and refugees, many of whom came to this country fleeing extreme violence and poverty, and hoping to raise their children in a more compassionate country. And many of whom followed all the legal procedures to enter the country.

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

There is not a single person in the Democratic Party who is treating the death of USAID with the gravity it deserves. There’s no political issue more important than the death of 14 million people, but they’re just delivering boilerplate condemnations and nothing more.

According to the forecasting models, the current steep funding cuts— coupled with the potential dissolution of the agency—could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2·4 million deaths per year. These deaths include 4·5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700 000 deaths annually.

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

maybe instead of asking socialists whether billionaires should exist we should be asking billionaires whether poverty should exist

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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

u know what this *is* a really well done video and worth watching

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Fun @funkelly.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

because it has to pass again in the house everyone PLZ call and writer your congresspeople AGAIN and tell them they MUST votes against it. The current Medicaid bill lasts til Jan 2026, then it will kick 20 Million people off Medicaid. 40% of all children are on Medicaid. 70mill Americans total.

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Bradley Whitford @bradleywhitford.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

If only there were a clinically proven, totally safe way to prevent diseases like measles…

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Susan Hall is the GLA Conservative group leader. She has become the most senior Conservative to support Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain movement. One of Lowe's core goaıs is to shift the immigration debate to remigration: not how many people come but how many leave: mass deportations & net outflows

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Mira @thefreeradical.org · 01/07/2025

TRANS PEOPLE - If you've had your account on any social media site - but especially LinkedIn - censored, taken down, removed, etc, for using your chosen name - message me. I'm working on a story about this happening as a broad phenomena, and the more people I talk to the better. DMs open!

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Bat 🦇 Borus @matthewborus.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I’m not the first to say it, but today’s Senate vote sure feels like a punch in the face to the first day of Disability Pride Month. A reminder that one source of pride is sheer survival.

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The Empty City @davidallengreen.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

The problem with hung parliaments is that important Bills end up having to be negotiated between ministers and backbenchers. And that is why we need governments with large overall majorities, to avoid such embarrassing brokerage. Oh.

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Ben Goggin @bengoggin.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

ICEblock, which allows users to alert others to the geographical location of ICE officers, is the top social networking app in the App Store right now after Karoline Leavitt condemned it from the podium yesterday.

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Wil Wheaton ❌👑 @wilwheaton.net · 01/07/2025

This is a concentration camp. Call it Alligator Auschwitz, because that's what it is. This is America. Never forget and never forgive the people who allowed this to happen.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I got permission to share this, and I'm extremely grateful for that. The Onion got this letter from one of our subscribers in Alaska. She works with dementia patients and decided to leave a copy in the car for each one. This email made my year. Read it and you'll see what I mean. People are good.

I work as an elder and hospice caregiver, which I am oddly passionate about. I can love on them shamelessly and no one complains about my codependence. It's a win-win situation.

Many of my caregiving colleagues complain about the repetitive questions and, sometimes reactions, of the elderly, especially when those patients happen to read the newspaper, especially with the current downward spiral of our country — as if these people haven't lived through enough horror...

I love my dementia peeps, but sometimes wonder if there's a Guinness Book World Record for how many times an hour a dementia patient can repeat the same question — it's got to be in the hundreds. At least with small children, they ask different questions. Dementia patients will get stuck on one short question and ask it until you can interrupt their train(carousel) of thought and successfully redirect their attention. That carousel is pretty manic sometimes.

A couple days ago, I picked up my mail from the post office and drove over to the nursing home to take (let's call her "Miss Daisy") Miss Daisy out for a drive. Before we took off on our road trip, to the end of The Road and back, in our landlocked little town (Juneau, Alaska), I set my copy of The Onion down in front of her.

Over our two-hour excursion, tiny Miss Daisy read that front page at least a dozen times and each time she would snicker, giggle, and guffaw, then put it down on the dash board and, a minute later, discover it anew. I think it was the best afternoon of my life. We don't often hear them laugh and when they do, it's the sweetest thing you've ever heard.

...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for the really important work all of you do. You make the world a better place.

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🎃Darin S Pumpkins🎃 @darinself.com · 01/07/2025

If a sitting president can openly muse about arresting and disappearing someone who is likely to become mayor of the country's largest city, while also getting the funding for a massive secret police, it'd be hard to find sufficient evidence to qualify that country as a democracy.

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 01/07/2025

“Turdles” was right there

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Mark Thomas @markthomasinfo.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

In all this Bob Vylan pearl clutching some are conveniently forgetting the IDF is committing genocide.

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(Self) Regulators, mount up! @bankuei.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Genocide is a policy carried out by the hands of many, tolerated by many more. bsky.app/profile/oluf...

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

this is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades - the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century - become logistically possible and politically likely

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Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Many of those standing up for the people of Gaza would have been people who stood up for Jewish refugees in the 1930s because the reason they stand up is humanitarianism, religion and ethnicity play no part, it is the concept that EVERY child’s life has the same value

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Christopher Taggart + Rhys MacDonald pled guilty to publishing written material to stir up racial hatred: encouraging people to attack a hotel to get asylum seekers 'gone' New Runcorn MP Sarah Pochin heard about the case yesterday + opposes the conviction as 'truly shocking' x.com/SarahForRunc...

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Buy Mass Effect The Board Game! @ithayla.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Jurassic park irl would only be a net good. the billionaires would lose their shirts cause the dinosaurs keep killing people. tickets will be so expensive that only the one percent will be able to afford to go, and thus get eaten. the rest of us get videos of live dinosaurs... eating rich people. A+

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Dr Ellie Mackin Roberts @elliemackinroberts.net · 01/07/2025

Just so everyone is on the same page: PIP is a top up benefit. You can’t live on PIP, it’s there because being disabled is more expensive than not being disabled. PIP recipients *in work* may only be able to work because of PIP. This government is just unnecessarily cruel.

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

That's about the same as all the people who have died in every war of the 21st Century, and includes millions of dead children. All blood on MAGA hands.

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 01/07/2025

Ooof I’d not noticed that 🫠

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Alastair Smith @alastair.dev · 01/07/2025

I … never thought of this. I’ve been grudgingly accepting all the mishearing and misspellings all this time

A coffee cup with the name “Allistor” written on it

A coffee cup with the name “Allister” printed on it

A coffee cup with the name “Allaster” written on it

A coffee cup with the name “Halastine” written on it

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.

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Elizabeth Warren @warren.senate.gov · 30/06/2025

Republicans are putting 17 million lives at risk in their “Big Beautiful Bill.” These are more than just numbers. These are real people who deserve to live a life without worrying they will go broke if they need health care.

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Kneecap @kneecapceol.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Day after day - scores murdered by these war criminals. Today a cafe bombed with over 30 dead mostly women and children. Yet still Western media and governments rush to give them cover.

'Body parts flying everywhere': Israeli forces killed at least 67 people across Gaza today
One strike on a café in Gaza City, which was crowded with women and children, killed at least 30 people.

Image caption:
A man carries the body of a child who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.

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