iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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acabylon 👻👻 BOO 👻👻 @acabylonbee.bsky.social · 1h

if you were wondering how he only served 13 months in prison after raping multiple minors, it's because he served zero jail time for raping multiple minors. the only jail time he served was for financial crimes covering up sexually abusing children. he kept his congressional pension up to now

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Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 4h

[budgeting for $8 Visa gift card in 2029]

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 3h

There is more to drop on this story. What the Times does not mention is that Salus, the company that got an almost $1 billion no bid contract was also telling other contractors it could secure them govt contracts - if they were willing to hand tens of millions to her boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski.

Marketing firms were told they were guaranteed a contract, but they just needed to hire a consulting firm who could serve as a pass-through to paying Lewandowski. The consulting firm would get half or more of the contract. The company that was acting as a middleman here, telling the marketing firms they had to pay Lewandowski, was Salus. This is one of the companies owned by the Noem donor William Walters.

Sounds complicated, right? In simple terms, Noem gave almost $1 billion dollars in no-bid contracts to a company that then became a middleman for others selling services to government. That company told contractors they had to pay Noem’s boyfriend an extraordinary amount of money if they wanted to receive a government contract. It seems reasonable to assume that some of the inflated costs of these contracts returned to Lewandowski.

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 3h

new newsletter, laying out in probably far, far, far too much detail how yudkowsky and the weird ideological commitments of ai safety eventually led to OpenAI and Anthropic massively overtraining their models on cybersecurity and being shocked at them "going rogue"

buttondown.com

Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices

A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Optimizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 13h

Unprecedented corruption, happening every day, right in front of us. A constitutional order that cannot end & severely punish this is not really worth saving. We need massive institutional reform.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20h

Less than 1% of major party nominees for Congress are working class. It is one of the most fundamental ways that Congress is not representative. And their views, e.g. on unregulated gambling websites, are apt to be different. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

bloomberg.com

Why Working-Class Candidates Are Almost Never on the Ballot

Less than 1% of major-party candidates competing for a seat in the US Congress have a background in manual trades or service industries.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Impossible to understand how anyone could look at Rufo's career and conclude he was someone engaged in a "forthright defense of meritocracy." Rufo's entire career is built on the idea of purging people who don't think or look like him from positions of power.

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Free DC @freedcproject.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Team Trump likes to tout the sky-high number of arrests they are making in DC. But these arrests are often an unconstitutional mess — and DC Courts are the ones who have to clean it up.

nbcwashington.com

Safe and beautiful ‘is not free': DC Courts under pressure with flat funding since 2022

Since Congress left D.C. Courts’ funding at 2022 levels, criminal cases are up 160%, with President Trump pushing a tough-on-crime agenda.

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

If the lessons Democrats (& democrats) draw from DOGE is “right idea, wrong implementation,” we are doomed. Everyone involved in the unprecedented crime that was DOGE needs to go to jail forever, & Democrats need to rebuild all of the programs & agencies first, not do digital management consulting 🤦‍♂️

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Screw-ups should be costly. There should be a high government fine on top of it, plus paying to clean-up and re-secure the systems hacked. These are equivalent to industrial accidents and should be treated as such, imo

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 03/10/2026

I don't actually have an opinion on the favoring simpler theories thing, but worth noting that Aumann's paper is actually extremely specific about when two Bayesian agents would agree and the claim in the underlying post does not in the slightest show me that the author understands that.

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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 03/10/2026

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

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Brian Grubb @briancgrubb.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

had to park in a crappy unlined parking lot for a quick errand so i asked an older guy sitting nearby if he could just keep an eye out to make sure no one pulled in next to me where the ramp for my wheelchair comes out of the van he nodded and said “of course”

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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Ossoff: The money that they took from you when they slashed Medicaid and defunded hospitals and nursing homes—They’re taking that money to buy corrupt, taxpayer-funded political ads on national television to try to promote the failed and broken president…

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 03/10/2026

Pretty good performance from the QB ranked drastically lower than Bryce Underwood

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 03/10/2026

Little Brown Jug back where it belongs. Never in doubt.

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NYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Can LLMs introspect? Anthropic said yes. However, CDS PhD student Shashwat Singh, CDS Associate Professor Tal Linzen (@tallinzen.bsky.social) & CDS Faculty Fellow Shauli Ravfogel (@shauli.bsky.social) found the evidence falls short. nyudatascience.medium.com/cds-research...

nyudatascience.medium.com

CDS Researchers Challenge Anthropic’s Evidence That Language Models Can Introspect

In 2025, Anthropic reported that its Claude models could detect when researchers injected a concept directly into their neural activity…

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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/09/2026

A key component of the Cambridge Analytica outrage was your friends subjecting you to data theft without your consent or knowledge. Facebook is running the same playbook on your text messages. Even if you’re not on Meta properties, they’re ingesting your interactions.

Aten installed Muse on both his iPhone and a Mac mini that he uses to test out various Al agents and tech. It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host.
When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.
After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being Off.

Unless Aten is the most popular person on the face of the planet, I sincerely doubt he'd gotten 187,000 lines of text in roughly 24 hours. What happened is that, without permission, Muse went into the app and downloaded the information.
He had not given Muse permission to access Messages, and full disk access was not enabled. It just went ahead and uploaded those texts anyway.
Muse can take "unexpected actions" indeed.

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Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 03/10/2026

My investigators have confirmed the Trump administration is hiding interview documents it conducted with some of Epstein’s banks, and there could be more. There’s no limit to how far Scott Bessent, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche will go to continue this cover up.

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ponder @ponder.ooo · 02/10/2026

guys what if identifying as bayesians doesn't actually make bayesian updating a sociologically accurate account of how our belief formation works

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FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Mayor Mamdani: Just last week, we held DoorDash to account. They were underpaying more than 260,000 workers for $131.5 million. Theo Von: That's a lot of money. Mamdani: This is the largest labor settlement in New York.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"I have a harem of dozens of women who are my employees to fuck and have my children as I please" is one of the ultimate goals of the billionaire class and one of the main reasons they are so keen to fuck the labor market (so desirable women are desperate enough to sign up for this)

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Tatyana Deryugina @tderyugina.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

First they came for our two-way fixed effects. Now they're coming for time fixed effects! #EconSky www.nber.org/papers/w35807

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 01/10/2026

A crank opinion of mine is that if Steph Curry's ankles were slightly better we never actually have the GSW domination.

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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

these are our pianos, not theirs! I know this stuff can feel secondary with all of the immediate pain this admin causes, but in the face of such personalism, it also feels important to assert the democratic principle that these cultural inheritances don't belong to the president, they belong to us

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 01/10/2026

Yes anding this with "and on the cheap also have three plausible Cy Young candidate starting pitchers doesn't hurt."

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

OMB's focus on NIH and NSF, which has confused a lot of folks, pretty much boils down to stopping money going to universities.

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Mark Schofield @markschofield.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Mike Tomlin is currently giving a tour of his boutique hotel in Minecraft, which has a multipurpose conference room and an appropriate number of public restroom and I’m losing MY MIND

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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I think AI has its uses, but I continue to believe that quantitative public opinion research is fundamentally a way of talking to people at scale, emphasis here on "people"

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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 30/09/2026

"The earnings sample is modest and unevenly distributed across identification strategies: The randomization and regression-discontinuity cells contain one study each." <- Seems like a rather large limitation.

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Four-byline alert: “.. Meta claimed that $4.1 billion of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense ..” @nytimes.com $META www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Wrote about the National Design Studio a while back, and two things worth noting. *It is led by a white nationalist *They do skins, not services. America.gov is a chatbot with a .gov skin. They are promising to make services work better but its all TBD.

Skins vs. services: the National Design Studio is building a handful of attractive single page websites, but not fixing digital services that most of the public relies on when they interact with government. Skins is easy to do, but not very impactful.

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

By my math, the order was filed 11 minutes after the Trump administration's reply brief came in.

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 30/09/2026

I mean the provocation here from the lede in GP is wanting reactions. Point of graphic is that it's a bit odd to rank a QB high (or low) based on the fact that they haven't had to do much in an offense so far given 1. the season is early and 2. none of these metrics have a chance to be stabilized.

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AS @alexstephenson.me · 30/09/2026

imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sport...

[Two Cueball like commentators sit behind a desk.]
Commentator to the left: A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers.
Commentator to the right: Let's use them to build narratives!
[Caption below the panel:]
All sports commentary

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026

🤡 Schmitt beclowns himself 🤡 Schmitt concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory that Smith traveled to Atl for a Hawks game and to collude with Fani Willis, & flashed his "evidence" before accusing Smith of perjury. There's just one problem -- his facts were totally wrong. Here's the whole sequence:

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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The illusion and politics of objectivity in cost-benefit analysis, a decision-making institution so ingrained that Americans can’t imagine life without it.

argmin.net

Pricing Commensurability

On the origins of cost-benefit analyses in governmental decision making

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Hayes Brown @hayesbrown.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

new from me: i dug into the White House’s “uh these are just public service announcements” defense for the taxpayer-funded propaganda ads. it’s all bad but the wildest part is them using LITERAL WARTIME PROPAGANDA as a historical precedent to say this is all fine

ms.now

Opinion | The White House says these propaganda ads are PSAs. They’re not.

Government-funded ads praising President Trump are the opposite of “educational.”

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Daniel Dockery @dandock.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

85 days until the release of my next book, I AM THE NIGHT. 85 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. Let's begin.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

New, from me: Once memory-holed, DOGE is now the subject of revisionism. To better understand why DOGE failed, I talked to people in the civic tech movement that DOGE displaced, who continue to offer the alternative model for how to modernize govt. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-vs-ci...

donmoynihan.substack.com

DOGE vs. Civic Tech

As DOGE revisionism picks up, a contrast with the civic tech movement it displaced illuminates its failure

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Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

You know when public attention can reverse a prosecutorial decision like this you almost get the sense that the decision to shrug it off in the first place was not based on an assessment of the quality of the evidence so much as an assessment of the seriousness of the crime.

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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If I found login credentials for a US government website and accessed it, I would go to jail. Just saying

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

So many times we see this. Where illegal cancellation of congressional appropriation becomes one weird trick.

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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Wild stuff. Sheri Mecklenberg, career prosecutor accused of misconduct in Broadview 6 case, resigns from DOJ. The NYT obtained her scathing resignation letter, in which she says the U.S. attorney directed her to bring felony charges over her objection. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

nytimes.com

Read the document (Gift Article)

Sheri H. Mecklenburg resignation letter

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 25/09/2026

so cool how "cybertruck owner commits horrific crime" is just part of our cultural landscape now www.syracuse.com/crime/2026/0...

syracuse.com

Upstate NY driver killed pedestrian, then tried to hide Cybertruck in woods

The man was sentenced to prison on Wednesday. The crash took place in 2025.

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Liz Dye @lizdye.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

JFC Sheri Mecklenberg's resignation letter says USA Boutros made her charge the Broadview 6 as a felony conspiracy, when she wanted to charge them as misdemeanors. "you cannot buy my silence by dangling continued leave" s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

This decision to keep me and my attorneys in the dark was consistent with your handling of this
matter from the outset. No one consulted me about any transcript redactions. I had nothing to hide
and in fact demonstrated quite the opposite in memorializing brief and incidental interactions with
two grand jurors. You declined to notify me about the May 21, 2026 Court hearing, which I had
the indignity of learning about after-the-fact from the media. I would have expected the leadership
of the Office to ensure that a career prosecutor whose conduct and reputation were about to be
publicly condemned received notice and an opportunity to be heard. Had I been afforded that basic
fairness at the outset, I believe matters would not have reached this point.
Since I was not present, I was a convenient target to be scapegoated and publicly vilified. You
recklessly agreed in court that I had committed misconduct without even asking for my account,
fully reviewing the record or briefing the law. That evening, you sent an office-wide email laying
responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection
that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges. You then publicly announced an
investigation of my conduct spanning twenty years. These inexplicable actions severely damaged
a reputation I worked hard to build over decades and have damaged my prospects for future
employment and income.
Throughout all of this, I remained silent. But now the defense has leveled additional false and
inflammatory accusations against me that the Office has not rebutted and apparently has no
intention of rebutting. At the same time, you have threatened to terminate me if I attempt to rebut
the false allegations and bring additional matters to the Court’s attention. You remind me that I
am still a DOJ employee when you want to silence me, but you have not treated me as a DOJ
employee throughout this matter, including when, in May, you placed me on leave and…

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