iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Claire Connelly @claireconnelly.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Why are all new cars so hideously unintuitive? Forget electric vehicles. Electric schmelectric. My next car money will go to the manufacturer that brings back physical knobs, car door handles, and a gear shift. Make cars… cars again. I don’t want to drive a tablet.

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Soraya Nadia McDonald @soraya.press · 09/02/2026

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

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The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 09/01/2026

This Minneapolis ICE shooting video has become a political Rorschach test: Some people see a peaceful protester getting murdered, and other people are fascists

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/01/2026

“To me, the vision of the future on show here is equal parts solitary and infantilized.”

engadget.com

CES 2026 offered a lonely vision of the future

CES 2026 was, when you think about it, a little bit dystopian.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 15/11/2025

reminder of cryptogyny, the hiding of women's contributions to science, technology, engineering, and medicine: "although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness." www.jstor.org/stable/jj.55...

Although the twentieth century finds male practitioners firmly in control
of formal Western medicine, women doctors and healers still have important
inventions and innovations to their credit.
For example, although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin,
women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to
medical usefulness. Women had discovered the mold’s usefulness centuries
or perhaps millennia earlier (Halsbury 1971, p. 19; Raper 1952, p. 1), and
one nineteenth-century Wisconsin woman, Elizabeth Stone, an early antibi
otic therapist, specialized in treating lumberjacks’ wounds with poultices of
moldy bread in warm milk or water: she never lost an injury patient (Stellman
1977, p. 87). In the twentieth-century development of the drug, it was a
woman bacteriologist, Dr. Elizabeth McCoy of the University of Wisconsin,
who created the ultraviolet-mutant strain of Penicillium used for all further
production, since it yielded nine hundred times as much penicillin as Fleming’s
strain (Bickel 1972, p. 185; O’Neill 1979, p. 219).4 And as Howard Florey,
leader of the British penicillin team, was quick to point out, it was Dr. Ethel
Florey’s precise clinical trials that transformed penicillin from a crude some
time miracle worker into a reliable drug. It was also a woman, Nobel laureate
and X-ray crystallographer Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who finally deter
mined the precise structure of the elusive penicillin molecule (Bickel 1972,
p. 216; Opfell 1978, pp. 211, 219).
Women were also involved in developing the sulfa drugs that preceded
penicillin. For instance, it was a married pair of chemists, Prof. and Mme.
Tréfouėl, and their colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who split red
azo dye to create sulfanilamide (Bickel 1972, p. 50).
At least two women have invented new antibiotics for which they receive
sole credit. Dr. Odette Shotwell of Denver, Colorado, came up with two new
antibiotics—duramycin and azacolutin—during her fi…

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𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 @sundaedivine.lol · 16/12/2025

Being disliked by people with bad judgment is a compliment.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 16/12/2025

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human
participation with synthetic data

author: Abeba Birhane

abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the
use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction
in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim
that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically
unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and
cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight,
and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations,
Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human
participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic
harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best

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TK-S Is Here Now @timekiller-s.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

A rare case of AI being used for biting social commentary. Commendable.

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Actually, make that two curated links People are tired of AI, and companies are running out of ideas for how to jam it into things.

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👻Spooky Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · 13/11/2025

Glad I have never needed to know what it means to have your fixer flip

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Kingfisher & Wombat @tkingfisher.com · 13/11/2025

I see the “technically it’s ephebophelia” crowd is out today, so just a reminder that A) this is NOT a case where technically correct is the best kind of correct and B) the minute you say this, the gods dump you in the “irredeemable creeper” basket and wash their hands thoroughly after touching you.

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

NEW paper! 💭🖥️ “Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What could possibly go wrong?” — Brief review paper by @olivia.science & myself, highlighting traps to avoid when combining Psych with AI, and why this is so important. Check out our proposed way forward! 🌟💡 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Table 1
Typology of traps, how they can be avoided, and what goes wrong if not avoided. Note that all traps in a sense constitute category errors (Ryle & Tanney, 2009) and the success-to-truth inference (Guest & Martin, 2023) is an important driver in most, if not all, of the traps.

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Mark Jacob @markjacob.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Did the New York Times ruin journalism?

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: Did Women Ruin the Workplace?

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NPR @npr.org · 22/10/2025

The discovery of three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes was confirmed this week by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, which said the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight. n.pr/4qeQhWS

n.pr

Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes for the first time, as climate warms

The discovery of three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes was confirmed this week by the Natural Science Institute of Iceland, which said the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight.

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Brady Haran @bradyharan.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

NEW NUMBERPHILE VIDEO It's a wild and epic ride. youtu.be/XhA5U9pFXuU

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 09/09/2025

"The real Q is what donor influence costs: what do we lose when the pursuit of knowledge becomes secondary to the cultivation of relationships? These costs accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, embedding themselves in the daily practice of academic life." nias.knaw.nl/news/from-st...

Universities moved from saying “thank you for supporting what we do” to asking “what do you think we should do?”

Claudine Gay
Meanwhile, state funding began its long decline as a percentage of university budgets. This period marked the birth of modern fundraising as we know it today: multi-year campaigns with ambitious targets, sophisticated donor research, and the emergence of an art and science of cultivation. Universities began asking donors for both money and engagement.

The choreography of modern donor influence is a complex dance where universities anticipate donor reactions, donors express preferences without making demands, and decisions get shaped by conversations that never officially happened.

Claudine Gay

The most perverse form of modern donor influence: when universities find themselves protecting donors and their activities from criticism or negative attention.

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Mary @mfbrodie.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

"[Those policies] are not realistic" is rich-speak for "This policy is going to cost me money and make me like those dreadfully, ordinary plebians."

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Brett Frischmann @brettfrischmann.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

But they’ll still shove it into everything, force-feed it to everyone (unwanted integration into software, unproven edtech etc), externalize costs, induce unpaid work. …

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Ginny Hendricks @ginsta.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Very good article and thread about open alternatives to google scholar, which clearly will go away when its founder retires. The @barcelonadori.bsky.social movement is getting a lot if attention and OpenAlex.org a lot of support. The Lens currently looking for new home about.lens.org/expressions-...

openalex.org

OpenAlex

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August C. Bourré @fishsauce.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

The University of Chicago also has a long history of backing the dictatorial takeover of democratic nations. The US-backed coup of Chile in 1973 was a continuation of program that the University of Chicago had helped launch to undermine the country's resistance to US economic interests.

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Risk InSight @socriskanalysis.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Study uncovers local views on climate adaptation in flood-prone community and how political ideology can make a difference. Read it now: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #Climate #Flooding #Research

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 09/08/2025

I call this the reverse Turing Test. If an LLM is producing something passable, it doesn't mean the tool is intelligent, it means humans were being asked to write something meaningless

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 04/08/2025

“We are going to create a machine that solves all our problems” is a preposterous assertion and should be treated as such. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

In other words, we are in the final few years of pre-AGI civilisation, after which nothing may ever be the same again. To some the prospect is apocalyptic, to others, like Hassabis, it’s utopian.

“Assuming we steward it safely and responsibly into the world, and obviously we’re trying to play our part in that, then we should be in a world of what I sometimes call radical abundance,” says Hassabis. He paints a picture of medical advances, room-temperature superconductors, nuclear fusion, advances in materials, mathematics. “It should lead to incredible productivity and therefore prosperity for society. Of course, we’ve got to make sure it gets distributed fairly, but that’s more of a political question. And if it is, we should be in an amazing world of abundance for maybe the first time in human history, where things don’t have to be zero sum. And if that works, we should be travelling to the stars, really.”

Is he getting too close to his own technology? There are so many issues around AI, it’s difficult to know where to even begin: deepfakes and misinformation; replacement of human jobs; vast energy consumption; use of copyright material, or simply AI deciding that we humans are expendable and taking matters into its own hands.

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Michael Lowry @michaelrlowry.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

If you think I've forgotten about the hurricane satellites, think again. The Navy is permanently unplugging them this week, on the brink of the busiest stretch of the season. There's so much more to this story, and I have the latest scoop. ⬇️

michaelrlowry.substack.com

Navy Set to Unplug Critical Hurricane Satellites this Week

Abrupt termination of satellite data by U.S. Department of Defense sends forecasters scrambling for a fix on the brink of the busiest stretch of the hurricane season

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

I watched this (youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY?...) on the abuse of LLMs & 'vibe physics' by @acollierastro.bsky.social - well worth a watch! - and I was struck by how the back 15 minutes (the 'thought train') also summed up neatly what it has been like to be a public-facing historian, even before LLMs.1/

youtu.be

vibe physics

YouTube video by Angela Collier

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Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

ctvnews.ca

For women, the increase of AI use in the workplace may affect their careers: Harvard study

Women are using AI significantly less then men and it’s going to have a major impact on their careers, according to extensive research on the topic.

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Khoa @khoavuumn.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Using time series graphs to make causal claims be like

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jaz @jannazinzi.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

I’m gonna start sending these articles to every person that sends me an email for their webinar on how to use AI for my business or trying to convince me that I’ll be “left behind.”

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Tim Longman 🏳️‍🌈 @timlongman.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

They’re going to call it: The Harvard Business School.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 11/07/2025

👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿

I don’t think we want a world where a few oligarchs can influence our beliefs very heavily, including in subtle ways by shaping what their social media sites do, where they can plagiarize anything without consequence, where they can defame anybody without consequence. We don’t allow that with people. With people, we say, “Well, you’re infringing on this person’s copyright, you’re defaming them, this is hate speech.” And yet, because machines aren’t clearly people, and because the laws were designed before machines like this were widespread, there are a lot of holes in the current legal structure that basically let the companies get away with anything they want. Every effort to hold them liable, whether for smaller things — like defaming an individual — or larger things — like conceivably giving rise to some cyber-attack that takes out the infrastructure for the entire United States for five days or whatever. They have resisted having any liability whatsoever.

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

For all we write about the issues with the tech oligarchy, this type of thing still seems just a bit too on the nose. Crummy Black Mirror episode or some throw away subplot to Mountainhead. techcrunch.com/2025/07/10/g...

techcrunch.com

Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions | TechCrunch

Elon Musk's newly launched AI chatbot, Grok 4, seemed to reference Musk's posts on social media before answering controversial questions.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10/07/2025

There’s so much wrong here, but in particular it’s noted in the article that the creator of this project met with a bunch of stakeholders who told him the idea was shit, and he did it anyway.

404media.co

The UN Made AI-Generated Refugees

The AIs are designed to teach people about atrocities in Sudan.

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Philip Drobar @philipdrobar.northsky.social · 28/11/2024

Had to bring this banger over from Mastodon.

Crying Wesley Snipes meme (he's aiming a revolver off screen). Caption reads: " When the nice indie software begins to tell you how to "supercharge your productivity" and a sparkle icon appears

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 01/07/2025

NEW: More women have nearly bled to death during miscarriage under Texas’ abortion ban. Experts say the trend paints a troubling picture of the harms of unnecessary delays in care. “This is striking,” one doctor said. “The trend is very clear.”

propublica.org

A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage

A new ProPublica data analysis adds to the mounting evidence that abortion bans have made the common experience of first-trimester miscarriage far more dangerous.

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

openletter.earth

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025

“A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas.”

newyorker.com

A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts

Recent studies suggest that tools such as ChatGPT make our brains less active and our writing less original.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025

“Unfortunately, hallucinations are a fact of life, and they will be for the time [being].” 💀

Are there concerns about hallucinations and how to teach kids how to check for accuracy?

Sikkut: That goes right into the technical skill set of using these things. Unfortunately, hallucinations are a fact of life, and they will be for the time [being]. These AI skills will be taught by applying them in the rest of the curriculum. So in history class, as you use this AI study assistant, that’s where you learn about hallucinations and how to watch out for them.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 19/06/2025

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

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