iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It is with pleasure that Jelena Vidojevic and I share the inaugural post of Histories of Government, a Substack aimed at exploring the challenges of democratic statecraft in the post-colonial and post-socialist worlds. historiesofgovernment.substack.com/p/reflection...

historiesofgovernment.substack.com

Reflections on Government in Most of the World

The View from Elsewhere

000

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

You might imagine that an event celebrating 75 years of the Turing Test would be all "Wasn't he prescient, and look, now we really do have machines that think!" Mercifully, this event yesterday was close to the opposite. /1 royalsociety.org/science-even...

royalsociety.org

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test | Royal Society

An event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test, held at the Royal Society on 2 October 2025.

17434

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

An Austrian theologian named "Wolfgang Palaver" unwillingly guiding Thiel down the road to Apocalypse is more Thomas Pynchon than Thomas Pynchon. www.wired.com/story/the-re...

wired.com

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

04512

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Dr. Holly E.A. Sutherland @heasutherland.com · 30/09/2025

I'm coming to realise that the primary purpose of a doctoral thesis is that it's essentially a nicely-organised citation repository for my specific interests.

0111

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Thanks for all the discussion on this. I'm pleased to see the debate. Also pleased (and interested) that my 19-yr-old daughter, a classicist, is much more hardline than me in refusing to use AI, for a variety of reasons.

2121

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

None of this is to deny that the technology has some uses in these capacities (though not ones I've felt any need for myself). But I worry that we are starting to see intellectual labour as just a means to an end, and as something that can be shortcut.

2678

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

113726

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

...I mean that even with careful prompts I would not be confident LLMs could perform the function I'd want. How do I know that any bland AI summary of a paper is going to extract what might be of value to *me* in it? I don't even know that myself before I read it...

615625

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

I'm often surprised at how much researchers are using LLMs for intellectual work. It's not that I disapprove, or at least not on principle. It's more that I'm surprised at the trust being placed in the process. And by that I don't just mean LLMs can give wrong information...

1114924

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

In about 40 years, some history postgrad class (probably in China) will run seminars trying to understand why the US liberal establishment, at one moment so smug and arrogant, allowed a bunch right-wing authoritarian nationalist idiots to take over their country, apparently with zero resistance.

150

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

The folks at Globalizations have managed to get their hands on one of those devices from Wm Gibson's novel The Peripheral that allows you to send messages to people in the past. This one arrived today, 19 September from, let me see, 23 October 2025. Reviewer 2 is presumably in a different stub.

011

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

011

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

University of the Western Cape @uwconline.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

[READ] Professor John-Mark Iyi promised his older brother, Godwin, that he would complete his PhD before getting married and starting a family. He kept that promise and worked hard to achieve academic success that far exceeded his family's expectations. #IAmUWC

021

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Bethany Black @bethanyblack.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

I think the world, or at least my part of it, was better when we didn’t have 24 hour access to Americans

120214

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 29/08/2025

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/...

Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts compressed into them but that compression is lossy (see also Ted Chiang).

The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters.

This thought sparked by a comment on Hacker News asking why an LLM couldn't "Create a boilerplate Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico with st7789 spi display drivers configured". That's more of an lossless encyclopedia question!

My answer:

The way to solve this particular problem is to make a correct example available to it. Don't expect it to just know extremely specific facts like that - instead, treat it as a tool that can act on facts presented to it.

2227036

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

My book, A Blow to the Head, in which I reflect on my own experience of the violence of white supremacy and the complexities of repair, is on the Longlist for the #Canex Prize for publishing in Africa. What a surprise, and what an amazing honour!

382

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Time flies. I remember Zohran as a little boy with tousled curls, cute as a button, the pride and joy of Mahmood and Mira. They must be beaming

140

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

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

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

6253660911257

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Nice look for you, Facebook! Thanks, hometown paper! And more thanks to the people who advocated for the "permanently disabled" status of my account there to be overturned. www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

sfchronicle.com

S.F. author temporarily banned on Facebook after writing about L.A. riots

San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit’s Facebook page was temporarily shut down after she posted an essay on the Los Angeles protests.

18753158

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Presumably he knows that Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, so "travel to the stars by 2030" is close to being literally impossible. So he's speaking metaphorically - what's it a metaphor for? fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...

fortune.com

Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just 5 years and predicts we’ll 'colonize the galaxy' in 2030—but he draws the line at robot nurses

2030 will be “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy,” Google DeepMind CEO says. Bill Gates and Marc Benioff have shared similar predictions.

14366

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

GroundUp News @groundup.org.za · 07/06/2025

ZEP holders have won another court victory against the Minister of Home Affairs, but their legal battle to stay in South Africa is far from over. Read groundup.org.za/article/new-... by Tania Broughton

groundup.org.za

New Zimbabwe permit court showdown looming

At the heart of the matter is the question of whether the minister or Parliament can change the status of the permit

032

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Ben Jenkins @bencjenkins.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

I worry that recommendation algorithms may be getting too good.

362782389

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

True of much of Marxism, poststructuralism and mainstream economics. Also, according Sabine Hossenfelder, theoretical physics. The interesting work is often at the margins, with the people working between traditions, at the frontiers of disagreement.

000

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Sassy South African @aviate.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Zapiro

042

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I will be canceling my @backlisted.bsky.social subscription until I hear this has been sorted out

010

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Incisive piece from @nilsgilman.bsky.social on MAGA and the Risk Society. Spot on, I think, and it points to the key issues at stake in the assault on universities and the professional-managerial class more generally.

open.substack.com

The Impunity of the Unscathed: Risk, Elite Security, and the Rage of MAGA Populism

Ulrich Beck's concept of "the risk society" explains the political logic of MAGA

010

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

So is the fact checking really by Michelle Harris? How would we know?

000

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Who is going to play Bix Caleen's daughter in the inevitable #Andor sequel?

010

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

People keep talking about the left needing its own Joe Rogan as if I don't already exist???

81043

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

No, the anger is about the willingness of people who should know better to make nonsensical claims

000

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

I’m pleased with #Andor writers’ decision to leave behind Lucas’s infantile Good v Evil framing and to explore, instead, the idea that rebellion is political

110

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

gillian rose @profgillian.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

lots of wonderful geographers celebrated by the @rgsibg.bsky.social yesterday - honoured to be in their company. check out the full list here: www.rgs.org/about-us/our...

rgs.org

2025 Awards - RGS

Discover the full list of our 2025 medals and awards winners, recognising excellence in geographical research, fieldwork, teaching and public engagement.

5291

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

ɪᴍᴍᴀɴᴜᴇʟ ᴋᴜɴᴛ @soberthots.blacksky.app · 11/05/2025

In the spirit of Mother’s Day, here’s a clip of Björk two-piecing a reporter who was stalking her and her baby.

215111892429

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Robert Macfarlane @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

Hello––Is A River Alive? is published in the US & Canada on 20 May. I am coming on tour––dates & locations below––& would love to speak of the book’s ideas, people & rivers to as many folk as possible while I'm out there. Please let anyone know who you think might want to come to an event. Cheers!

1612131

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

I have never been able to understand why David Graeber has such a stellar reputation.

050

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

ACLU @aclu.org · 10/05/2025

Today, our client Rümeysa Öztürk was released on bail from ICE detention in Louisiana, and she will return to New England to continue her studies. 📸 Giancarlo D’Agostaro

Two woman walking and embracing each other in front of an ICE detention center. The woman on the left is wearing a black dress and heels. The woman on the right is smiling and wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. Members of the press are in the background.

Two women standing, smiling, and embracing each other with grass, water, and the sky in the background. The woman on the left is wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. The woman on the right is wearing a black dress.

Two woman stand next to each other and hold onto one another. The woman on the left is wearing a black dress. The woman on the right is smiling and wearing a white hijab, glasses, and a pink garment. In the background is the fence of an ICE detention center.

537310105559

Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC @andriesdutoit-uwc.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

In which it is discovered that the Pope is, in fact, Catholic

010

Reposted by Andries du Toit - School of Government, UWC

Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 10/05/2025

The Trump administration wants startups to remake the US military, setting the stage for a battle over the world’s biggest defense budget

bloom.bg

Silicon Valley Is Coming for the Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Budget

The Trump administration wants startups to remake the US military, setting the stage for a battle over the world’s biggest defense budget.

114623