iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 04/10/2026

I did a neighborhood art show today. Figured my Dad would’ve been irked if I didn’t, but I couldn’t help but recognize that it was his spinning wheel enabling that helped make me the yarn monster I am today. 😇🥲

The front porch of a craftsman style house. Skeins of yarn are hanging from the siding, and hand knit garments are on every flat surface. A man is sitting on a patio chair, working on his laptop.

The other side of the patio, yarn hanging from the siding. A circular rug is on the concrete, and a set of macrame curtains is on the far end of the porch.

A red lace shawl is hanging from gray macrame ropes. Trees and sunlight are visible through the open parts of the lace.

A small memorial sits on a column of a porch. A photo shows a man and a woman and their daughter, in her PhD regalia. The caption reads, “For my Dad, who bought me my first spinning wheel in 2008.” A tea light is lit to the right of the photo.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 27/09/2026

He could be profoundly difficult, but I loved him and will miss him terribly. Rest easy, Dad.

A sepia-toned photo from 1960 of a 13-year old boy with an alto saxophone. He's wearing a white, button-down shirt and tie and smiling.

A black and white photo from 1966 of the 5th US Army Band playing in a grassy field. There are about four rows of about five musicians each playing different instruments, and the front row of saxophone players have solid black music stand fronts. The alto saxophone player in the middle of the front row has very shiny hair and he is my Dad.

A polaroid from the 1980s shows a man with a mustache holding a swaddled newborn baby girl. She is very pink and looks like she is already verbally shitposting this world she was born into.

A photo from the early 2000's of a young white woman with red hair holding a black Fender Stratocaster guitar with a clear pick guard. She is looking at the camera skeptically, while her Dad is sitting next to her with an alto saxophone in his hands and smiling at the camera. The mouthpiece is partially blocking his face because he's a pain in the ass in photos.

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Britt Lundgren @brittlundgren.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

We could try communicating to the public what a great value education we provide, how nerds & LGBTQ+ students thrive in our kind campus culture, & that our small faculty bring in ~3x the research funding of WCU. But adding MMA & a Chick-fil-A is another option. www.theassemblync.com/news/educati...

theassemblync.com

How UNC Asheville Plans to Attract More Students After Another Enrollment Drop

UNC Asheville continues to struggle with enrollment challenges, but the chancellor says she has a plan to turn things around.

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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Wtaf is this question my university just asked me about my project?

Does the project involve any work that could be interpreted as promoting DEIA, climate change research, or non-compliant to any Presidential Executive Orders?

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Kyle D. Long @blatherscribe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

In 1980, age 8, I went to Radio Shack "computer camp" classes. The instructor said computers can't lie. I said yes they can, and made a BASIC program on my TRS-80 that lied. He said that didn't count because I made it lie. I said yes, that's my point. He told me to be quiet. And now, here we are.

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Luke Ontario @coolhand.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Oh my God, I agree with WSJ opinion Oh my God, shoot me in the face

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
OPINION COMMENTARY (U.S.)
The Hidden Agenda Behind the Al Panic
A mathematical model doesn't rebel.
Anthropomorphizing it helps obscure human errors and accountability.
By Gabriele Mazzini
September 21, 2026, 5:43 pm EDT

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 22/09/2026

"We are in a moment where you could plausibly argue that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land are the most influential policy intellectuals in the US conversation. Just look at the state of the two of them. This is not a good thing." www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...

programmablemutter.com

Machine god metaphors eat your brain

There are other ways of thinking about AI

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Southern Minnesota Museum of Natural History @smmnh.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

450 million years ago the majority of life in the oceans had soft bodies that did not fossilize very well. Their fossilized remains often appear as blurry stains upon a rock, but now and then a specimen is found with a well preserved body part, like this strange marrelomorph.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 22/09/2026

It's 74 and raining outside, 72 and 95% humidity in my office. For whatever reason, last week, plant ops decided it was time to turn off the a/c for the season. surfaces in my office feel damp to the touch.. hell is humidity

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 22/09/2026

"this is the same fight, the same ethos, but it’s about data and intelligence.” you know another way to democratize knowledge? free college for all. well-funded public schools. gatekeepers are elected and we have always had power over that. but don't let me stand in the way of a good grifty slogan

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 22/09/2026

political texts when you're expecting bad news are their own special brand of enraging

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 21/09/2026

i'm very late to this news, but what the actual *fuck,* Allbirds?! to go from a company centered on sustainability to one of the most UNsustainable products? they flipped all their birds at the planet. fucking assholes. when the bubble bursts, they'll have no shoes and no value

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 21/09/2026

it's true, i was not prepared 😂 i'm also extremely nervous because universities tend to be uni-see uni-do about all the worst tech and policies, and i want to know how to opt out of this kind of thing.

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Happy 118th birthday, spacetime. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ Hermann Minkowski addressed the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians #OTD in 1908, offering a radical four-dimensional reformulation of Einstein's theory of special relativity. Here is how he opened his address.

"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
- Hermann Minkowski, 1908

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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Closing the libraries and museums but at least we can afford to commit war crimes at scale

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Steven (with a PH) @sjksalisbury.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Christening a baby is nothing like christening a ship. I know that now. Once again I can only apologise.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 20/09/2026

it interfere it diffract it enable shark attacc

photo of a projected water interference pattern from a ripple pool

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 20/09/2026

And Now for Something Completely Different: A perspective on AI swarms from someone who actually knows something about collective behavior.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 20/09/2026

wild seeing people who think they’re brilliant for having blurred lines in their own minds between computer programs and human beings.. new brand of nihilism prob makes it easier to justify awful takes about/behavior toward actual humans. people who are so certain in their own righteousness

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 19/09/2026

I’m so glad we have a 2016 and the screen and software are minimally aggravating.. old ass cars ftw world will have to pry my 2006 Nissan out of my cold dead hands Never will I buy a car with shit like this Also fuck bots for scraping ao3, fuck them to omegaverse hell

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Sheera Frenkel @sheeraf.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

“Largest theft of labor in human history.” What a quote.

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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 16/09/2026

Oh. That's a heck of a subsidy.

At MIT, Harvard, or any other school, supervising an undergraduate researcher is a lot of work, costs a lot of money, involves a lot of meetings, and the results are not reliably excellent. Asking Claude is easier, faster, and may produce better results. It’s also cheaper, which is no accident: Harvard allows every Harvard student and faculty member to request a Claude token budget of $2,500 per month, even as research funding is continuously threatened and the University lays off staff.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 17/09/2026

old enough that faculty who creeped me out (looking me up and down in *that* manner) in grad school are now passing away. all I'm feeling is relief for students who are now safer. fuck how academia protects these people. almost 2 decades later, still mad i didn't feel safe to take second semester GR

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elizabethginexi.bsky.social @elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term, according to a tracking tool released Wednesday by a pro-democracy nonprofit and a group of researchers and scientists. apnews.com/article/trum...

apnews.com

Trump administration has cut or frozen $177 billion in grants across every state, analysis shows

An analysis finds that the Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

Ask yourself this: how have institutions that for years have said they face budget shortfalls, deficits, shortages that “required” them to deny faculty lines, fire staff, raise tuition, cut research support, etc. suddenly find the money to pay for outrageously expensive contracts for AI services?

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

UMass budgeted for AI services. It decided to not budget for (1) a humanities center; (2) adequate research support in the humanities; (3) desperately needed faculty lines; (4) urgent capital improvements to physical buildings. It’s not that it’s “too expensive,” it’s that they don’t want to.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

If you are willing to drop $47 million on AI services but unwilling to invest in research support & infrastructure for humanities faculty & students, you show that austerity is a choice. It’s not “too expensive” to give people the resources they need; you just don’t want to. bsky.app/profile/ashe...

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

More than any higher ed development in recent memory, institutional subsidies for AI at R1 universities prove that austerity is a choice. It is not “too expensive” to invest in a humanities research infrastructure; rather, it is a choice that R1 universities make not to & subsidize AI instead.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

it’s important to take breaks from worrying about rising inequality and climate change so you have time to also worry about the fact that we’ve sent so much clutter into space that we’re at constant risk of a chain collision that makes satellite tech unusable for generations

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Jonathan Fortney @jjfplanet.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Insane lightning over Ohio, from 37,000 feet, @planetarygao.bsky.social !

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Andrea Suozzo @andreasuozzo.com · 15/09/2026

When my colleagues and I started digging around in CDC data on pregnancy-related deaths, we noticed something surprising: the rate of ectopic pregnancy deaths had more than doubled in recent years. Nearly 200 women died between 2020 and 2025. So we set out to learn why 🧵

A chart showing an increase in the rate of deaths after an ectopic pregnancy, normalized by the number of live births. In the three-year period starting in 2014, the rate is a little above 4 deaths per million live births. The rate rises sharply for the 2020-2022 period and continues to increase, to 9.8 deaths per million births, in 2023-2025.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 15/09/2026

show me the studies that prove AI helps learning. reputable ones. I’ll wait. (so far, all I’m seeing is how it destroys people’s ability to think, which … is counter to our mission, as I understood it, anyway)

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 15/09/2026

agh, balls. accidentally deleted my draft... but, it was a thread about things we once thought belonged in schools that then turned out to be catastrophically bad ideas. my main negative example was corporal punishment, which i remember vividly as a kid in elementary school in texas.

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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

this is so fucking crazy. huge huge huge scoop www.404media.co/inside-proje...

In a dashboard available to the workers, human reviewers are able to select which “task” they want to take on. Once they click that, they are presented with the real ChatGPT user’s prompt. 404 Media has seen multiple real prompts but is not quoting any of them for source protection reasons. Some of the prompts indicate the ChatGPT user does not expect that a human may end up reading their conversation, because they ask ChatGPT to keep the content to themselves.

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Dr. Natalie Mendoza @drmendozan.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

🗃️ Some of us have been saying this for awhile (like Lindsay and OP). It’s simple. Give faculty time and resources to teach, per basic pedagogy practices, no innovation needed. It’s a matter of prioritizing this as necessary for the university to do well as an institution of higher learning.

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 14/09/2026

me, laughing so hard I can barely speak: (at husband) did… did you see, there was a golf thing, and … him: oh the four Irish guys using their bodies to spell- me, gasping, laughing even harder: i love that you knew exactly what i was about to say 🤣

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just some Alicia @aliciaaarnio.solar · 13/09/2026

feeling badly for pals named Astra rn. i'm only ok with things being named Alicia that cause at least $3 billion in damage (in 1983 USD)

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Joe Stieb @joestieb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So glad my university paid to have shaq dj a quad party before a game against Middle Tennessee State University instead of paying faculty competitive salaries or fixing its collapsing infrastructure

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The people running these companies believe that climate change could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a fringe worry. Publicly, many executives soften their language to sound reasonable, but privately, the fear is real. No other industry poses this level of danger to civilization.

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Do not underestimate the scale of this climate crisis. We are watching feedback loops accelerate, ice sheet collapse, ocean heat content, methane release, that could lock in irreversible warming. We have all witnessed the data, and it is not slowing down.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I feel so confident saying the native intelligence of this generation is not the problem. The looting & wholesale sabotage of their educational infrastructure is.

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Louigi Addario-Berry @louigi.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I'm proud to announce the creation of the Association for Human Mathematics. We aim to protect mathematics as a human endeavour against the threat of AI and to maintain the independence of the mathematical community from corporate interests. www.ahmath.org

ahmath.org

AHM

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