iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 5h

"we can't afford these students"

Others argue that the district's tiniest campuses are unable to offer the full breadth of academic courses and extracurricular activities. CPS also spends significantly more per pupil to operate many of its smallest schools because fixed operating and staffing costs are spread across fewer students.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 5h

"people are scared, this will affect Black students, property values at risk"

Ahead of Thursday's school board meeting, a group of community leaders rallied outside CPS headquarters, demanding that the district extend its school closure moratorium indefinitely. School closures have been a political third rail in Chicago since officials shuttered 50 schools in 2013, a move that prompted widespread outcry across the city. Those campuses were almost entirely on the South and West sides and disproportionately affected Black students.
Research has found that closures disrupt students' academic progress, while generating little short-term savings for districts. Some of the school buildings closed in 2013 still sit empty, raising safety concerns and lowering property values.
Wilma Pittman, a longtime organizer with North Side Action for Justice, said any closures would be "catastrophic" to students of color.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 5h

"the district faces Hard Choices"

The enrollment decline comes as Chicago officials debate whether - and how
— to address a growing number of underenrolled schools. The district's school closure moratorium will expire next summer, after a fully elected school board takes office.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 5h

here you can see them hitting the required beats: "enrollment is down!! for assorted different reasons but mostly birthrate"

Chicago has slightly reversed its recent population loss, gaining 5,253 residents in the year leading up to July 2025. But the city has still lost 16,748 people since 2020, according to census data. Experts cite rising costs and a lack of affordable housing. For Black families - who have left Chicago in droves over the past decade - chronic disinvestment on the South and West sides has also driven population shifts.
Public schools also face more competition than ever, including homeschooling, private schools and online schooling options. A January report from the advocacy group Kids First Chicago found that CPS served only 71% of the city's school-age population in 2023, down from 75% in 2018.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 10h

Here's an example from the Tribune in 1965, the year that "Enrollment stories became scarcity stories: what if there's not enough? What if there's not enough for my kids? The implied audience is white families, who are meant to be the readers and not the subjects of these stories."

Chicago Tribune headline image reads

WILLIS PREDICTS 1965
SCHOOL FUND CRISIS
White Pupils in Minority Now, Count Shows

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 10h

If you are unfamiliar with the genre, it goes like this

Every year on the 20th day of school, Chicago Public Schools announces how many students are enrolled. The press takes this number and runs the same scary story: enrollment is down, the district is in danger, the future is in question, and hard choices have to be made.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 28/09/2026

this part of the sopranos also very relatable

screenshot of a white guy in a suit, the school counselor on the sopranos saying "Anthony could be A.D.D."

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 20/09/2026

update: if you are in the Chicago area and want a small gray tabby kitten maybe 8-10 weeks old, dm me (don't congratulate me on our new cat, we have four cats already, we are not keeping this one)

a gray tabby kitten in a cat climbing tree

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 19/09/2026

i am not generally the kind of person who can diagnose car problems from the sound the engine makes. but it's easy when the sound is incessant meowing

a kitten hiding in the engine block of a car

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 18/09/2026

it's all just making up numbers to justify giving them money and power, anybody can do it. what if there was a 1% chance that *not* building data centers leads to a future where eleventy trillion humans are infinitely happy??? DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT THE IMAGINARY PEOPLE

screenshot from the Good Place, three women (Eleanor and her two roommates) sit in a Mexican restaurant. one of them is looking at Eleanor saying "Or not. We could also not."

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 16/09/2026

Breaking: Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem will no longer be opening for ed sheeran

Muppet band Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem playing

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 14/09/2026

this reminds me of the rust LLM policy blog post "Polished PRs no longer indicate effort; authors of polished PRs no longer necessarily understand their code-and in the case of autonomous agents, there is no longer someone on the other end at all"

Technical products no longer indicate effort
It used to be that if an open source project got a polished, well-tested, detailed PR, that indicated that there was someone on the other end who had put time, effort, and understanding into the PR. That influenced Rust's culture in several ways:
• We are generally reluctant to close PRs, since they represent someone else's hard work.
• Our process emphasizes incremental discussions, where PRs are allowed to change existing design if we discover new facts during creation or review.
• We treat PRs as an indication that someone is interested in joining our community and being mentored to work on future PRs.
With LLMs, none of these signals are reliable. Polished PRs no longer indicate effort; authors of polished PRs no longer necessarily understand their code-and in the case of autonomous agents, there is no longer someone on the other end at all; and because it's become so much easier to write code, a polished PR no longer indicates that someone is likely to stick around for the long term.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 14/09/2026

but heads up @sarahhollowell.bsky.social I just went to your website and the link to your book is broken and hmhbooks now redirects to hmhco which seems very unrelated to your work

a screenshot of hmhco.com shows a Black woman in red glasses and an ambiguously ethnic young person next to header text that says Great instruction in every class

one platform equips your teachers to move each student forward
button: see how we get results

A streamlined teaching and learning experience

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/09/2026

me, trying to do something today that i also did yesterday but in that time they changed the interface

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 11/09/2026

most people don't know this but the typical mathematician is no more than 7" tall

The mathematical community functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity. It

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 08/09/2026

at least one is a school board candidate rather than legislator

network graph showing donations from Anthropic employees to Illinois campaign committees, including Friends for Jennifer

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 05/09/2026

I'll be doing a little set in a bit

A sound system and a small tube amp under a tent

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 05/09/2026

N4EJ block party getting under way next to McKinley Park

A bouncy house on Damen Ave south of 37th street

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 04/09/2026

A+ preview image, @emilymbender.bsky.social with the perfect reaction for so much ai nonsense

professor emily m bender, a white woman with short hair and glasses, on a video call looking down at a screen in an expression of perplexed disgust like "what in the actual fuck"

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 03/09/2026

here's a quick rough view of the 2026 budget in CoP days

a table shows a list of city departments, their total amount allocated in the 2026 budget, and what that translates into as Cost of Policing (CoP) days. Most of them get less than a week

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 30/08/2026

This is trash framing. Notably, the subhed starts by repeating a lie: "federal immigration officers were after the "worst of the worst" in Chicago" No they weren't. That's not true

Photo of the sun times front page, with the headline "operation midway miss: federal immigration officers were after the "worst of the worst" in Chicago but sun times / wbez analysis shows that just 15% of prior detained here had a prior criminal conviction"

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 29/08/2026

Ok the research in question is "counting posts on X" so let's pump the brakes on the doomer validation cycle

Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June, with more than 300 cases in the month, according to the Loss of Control Observatory, which monitors reports made by AI users on the social media platform X.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 28/08/2026

hey chicago there's a lunar eclipse right now

A picture of the moon, partly shadowed by an eclipse. It's a completely black background

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 27/08/2026

every time i see this i think it would make a good t shirt for people who play a contact sport. idk which one. maybe roller derby?

The back of a pace bus. In large letters it says AUTHORIZED TO USE THE SHOULDER

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 24/08/2026

bold of him to assume this was a new thought

screenshot of a reply from fletchtove.bsky.social saying "Half the fun of social media is engaging with new thoughts and ideas.
Why don't you just ignore replies you don't like instead of letting them
bother you?
Like this post for example. This is a test."

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 22/08/2026

deployment, the fun part of any web app

six log entries for failed deployments of the dg-api

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 18/08/2026

i see a line going down the left hand side like this and my aidar starts pinging

a screenshot of a code repo, with the title and overview whited out bc i'm not trying to put this one person on blast, just using as an example bc they have a rocket emoji up top where the title was, a red pin next to Project Overview, a bullseye next to Features with green checkboxes for bullet points, a hammer and wrench emoji next to Tools & Technologies, and a folder icon next to Project Structure

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 16/08/2026

this is another example of how negating a frame reinforces it. if you define your character as the opposite of the stereotype, they are still shaped like the stereotype

8. The other research: History of the stereotype.
A common strategy for writing the other is the inversion of stereotype. It's only a starting point because you're still beholden to the original cliché, so really it has to go further than this. But to begin a counternarrative, you have to know what's out there already. Otherwise you play directly into the same old shit. Texts like Edward Said's Orientalism famously turned the tables on white anthropology, analyzing the analysis. This isn't what people usually mean when they say "do the research," but it's as much if not more of the subtext to the story you're telling. Be up on your oppressive representations history.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 14/08/2026

It was inside but still happened

A throwing star made of folded public records printed on vellum

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/08/2026

7. She closes by explicitly rejecting the need to appeal to bigots, instead centering the affirmative frame, the good way to think about this: "we love basketball and each other and ourselves more than we’ve ever scared anyone else." She ate their frame entirely. No leftovers

I never will write anything in an attempt to change what’s in the heart or mind of someone who has decided that queer people aren’t deserving of equal grace, rights and dignity. But I want to speak to and for my community. My friends. I want to be heard, even if it’s only by the people who already show up for me every day.

I think basketball means more to us than to most people. Community too. It’s why we keep coming back to the basketball court, even when our knees aren’t up to it anymore, even when our childhoods drove us away from the sport. It’s why we care so much about each other. And it’s why we’re going to win. Because we love basketball and each other and ourselves more than we’ve ever scared anyone else.

Basketball will be here forever. So will the queer community. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon. That’s a promise.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/08/2026

6. She reiterates the kirby frame, dismissing what they're saying by talking about **why they're saying it** They're talking about girls playing sports, but they don't care about girls playing sports. "They want trans people to be gone."

I need those in the middle of the road to understand something. The people leading this charge don’t want to protect girls in sport. They want trans people to be gone. And they never will get what they want because trans people always have existed and always will. This movement won’t go away if you give it this victory. They will just take and take and take. There’s no point placating a campaign founded on hate.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/08/2026

5. She points out that even though you can make logical arguments about why the lies are wrong, that's *not* the right argument

This is a valid argument, but it’s not one I care to use. I would feel the same way about this issue even if trans people made up 10% or 20% or 50% of our country. This community deserves dignity regardless of its population size. And more importantly, all of our girls — all of our kids — who want to play sports deserve the same privacy and support in their gender expression.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/08/2026

4. Only *after* she explains that the bad faith arguments are lies motivated by hate does she point out that they also don't make sense. And...

I know some questions are asked in good faith. I want to hold patience and grace for those who simply are trying to navigate a touchy conversation with limited context and information. For those who fit this bill, I would ask for a simple tracing of the logical next step that follows any cry to keep trans girls out of girls sports: How do you decide who gets to play? Any legislation attempting to bar trans girls from sports would, by definition, require cis girls to prove they are not trans.

Those who truly love women’s sports know what this means. We know that girls are twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports by age 14. We know that invasive testing and gender surveillance only would worsen the body-image and self-confidence issues that plague young girls, ultimately leading to their withdrawal from sports entirely. We know that the policing of trans bodies leads to the policing of cis bodies, such as the Orlando Pride’s Barbra Banda and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. And we know that anyone touting these measures as a victory cares more about isolating and alienating trans children than they do about uplifting and empowering girls and women’s sports.

There’s another argument to be made here. Trans people make up about 1% of the entire U.S. population, according to studies by UCLA’s Williams Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They account for less than 1% of the total participants in youth sports, boys and girls included, according to the same study by the Williams Institute. Participation rates in youth sports among trans girls are barely a third of those of cis girls. Those who advocate against trans girls participating in sports are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying against a straw man.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 13/08/2026

3. She pivots to how we should actually be thinking about this question. The real "trans kids in sports" problem is that *we are excluding trans kids from playing sports*

Many of my trans friends stopped playing organized sports at a young age as they became aware of their queerness. The locker room stopped feeling safe. The unity of the team stopped extending to include them. When I think about keeping kids safe in sports, these are the kids I think of first — the ones who were afraid to be themselves, who shied away from spaces where their body was put on display, who missed out on years of joyful play as they figured out their identity away from the court or field.

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