iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

JK @miniver.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Stand ready every day just in case today you must do the right thing

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Happy Stanislav Petrov day to those who celebrate en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisl...

en.wikipedia.org

Stanislav Petrov - Wikipedia

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

😂 😂 this thread is gold. Software engineering as a whole is clearly not trending better or worse with LLMs than w/o. And while there is no evidence for it, a very plausible cause for this pathetic situation is not engineers but their management. neuromatch.social/@jonny/11733...

neuromatch.social

jonny (nonvenomous) (@jonny@neuromatch.social)

this is a great product. everyone should get a free muse account with a burner email, give it no information, open a shell into it, and use it to mine cryptocurrency. this is taking meta at their word...

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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 01/10/2024

*Statistically Average Earthling*, vertebrate division. A million billion glowing, sparkly xenomorph fish.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I think I need to say this, though I’ll probably regret it: Sports made spectacle is bad, actually, when the planet is facing ecosystem & civilizational challenges. It’s an opiate and it is wide open as a site of propaganda, and people who care about sports tend to be illiterate to this situation

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

It’s really damn annoying that all academic publishers adopted AI before they gave us dark mode. The latter is approximate several tens of millions of dollars cheaper and makes vastly more users uncontroversially happy.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Oh no they made a new Lara Craft game.

A screenshot from the upcoming Tomb Raider game showing Lara apparently cooking a stew while standing in a tomb.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Cartoon of two identical castle towns on opposite sides of a river, which are at war, labeled our robust business model VS their unsustainable silliness. On the left various things are labeled our profitable expansion, our scaling to meet real demand, our huge addressable market, our visionary founder. On the right the same things are labeled their reckless spending, their crazy amounts of compute, their lack of customers, their foolish hype man.

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

This is excellent data detective work showing yet more spurious findings in a highly-influential paper from Dan Ariely. But very depressing.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Is “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” discourse secretly just a toxic way of doing self-compassion?

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Boo-tros Boo-tros Ghoulish @dlbowman76.com · 29/08/2026

Everyone ignores the most competent woman on the team.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Make your favourite video game sound as boring as possible without giving away the title: A man delivers some packages.

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Hindi/Urdu speakers on the modern internet have an unfair social media character efficiency advantage because if wewant a short gender neutral collective we say"y'all"but if we want a short gender neutral singular, we also say "yaar"

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Paul Duane 🥔 @paulduane.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Weirdly this story about trying to quit society & discovering the Panopticon won't let you quit feels more current every year that passes.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

*screams in nothing interesting is open access*

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This thread contains TWO instances of animal body horror. The second one is just slipped in where you are unprepared to receive it.

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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton, an American hero if ever the was one.

Iconic photo of Dolly Parton from the early 1970s.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This is incredibly good news for public health, particularly for women’s health. HPV related cancers and other issues are largely invisible to most people and often primary care catches this too late. It’s really good to have this as part of the toolkit.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Island nation on the periphery of a major continent finally achieves productive capacity corresponding to the resources it owns and invests in.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Yo fellow researchers, here’s a good side project for you to volunteer on. Consider helping with data collection, analysis, or any other part of this project.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I have a suspicion that the LLM slop turn towards attaching to inert objects is an outcome of the mainstream press habitually for decades rendering human actors passive and their actions detached from their origins: Price hikes bite, gun-involved events occur, cars hit pedestrians, etc

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Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 05/08/2026

This is the highest-resolution view of the surface of the Sun. Ever. Taken by the NSF's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, features as small as 19 km across can be resolved. The wispy things are magnetic field boundaries formed by Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. The island of Ireland for scale.

A swirling, complex view of yellow–orange–brown wisp-like features. The dark shape in the middle is a superposed outline of the island of Ireland to show scale.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

A security update for Ghost and the fact that they broke direct mail sending in it made me setup my own outbound-only spam-aware recipient-locked postfix service and it’s 1. Nice to see old decentralised internet infra still works 2. Sad because the community solution was “use Mailgun”

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

It’s kind of fascinating that the largest/fastest growing protests in recent history the capital of the most populous democracy in the world is getting fuckall presence in the BlueSky timeline, even in the algorithmic bits. It’s clear we’re not getting 2010s Twitter back for a long time if at all.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 20/07/2026

finally saw "Project Hail Mary" this weekend without knowing anything about it other than that it was written by the guy who wrote "The Martian," and wow I was not prepared for how hilariously goofy it was going to be key takeaway: nothing ramps up the goof like a thick veneer of earnest scientism

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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

If we ignore everything we know about a domain, implement a standardized analysis regardless of study design, obtain artificially commensurable results from across domains, LLMs can allegedly predict them well with some noise??? What at all have we learned about anything?

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I despise honour cultures b/c I haven’t seen a single ine that hasn’t gone horribly toxic & violent, But looking at the world right now I wonder if the samurai had a point in seppuku: in taking responsibility by suffering personal consequences for failures, even when they have power to avoid them.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

If I hear one more UX person arguing for synthetic users I’m going to take all their public data, feed it into a RAG, have a conversation, and then post an “interview” with “them” as if it’s the real thing. And then see how quickly I get objections about misrepresentation.

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garrison @garrison.corporate.fm · 29/06/2026

Frog put Claude in a harness. "There," he said, "now Claude can no longer delete files." "But Claude can edit the files" said Toad. "That is true," said Frog.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I just filled out a UXR maturity survey to contribute to a community map and the survey design was so bad that I’m convinced that any such community report must contain large amounts of invented detail. I suppose I should have learned my lesson from the DORA report, but it still makes me sad.

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Before there was Wes Anderson, there was Bichitr

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Delicious thread of what should definitely be watch faces

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Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me · 25/06/2026

BROOOOOOOO

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I think that is being called “cognitive offloading” when describing use of LLMs is is more usefully called “cognitive abdication”. “Offloading” is a blurry term because we all – especially but not only knowledge workers – largely engage in situated cognition. 1/

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Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

Structured Success @structuredsuccess.ca · 19/06/2026

Struggles loom so large for ADHD and/or autistic people sometimes, and this brings with it intense pressure to completely avoid failure, struggle, or awkwardness. That's not possible. Stop making this the goal. Instead, make the goal to do just a little bit better

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I’m in awe seeing the very large and powerful make the very small and delicate, and I’m reminded that big events can contain smaller processes that can produce wonders. (This is also a reminder to do something for your community today.)

A picture with two photos arranged side by side. The left shows a volcanic eruption. The right shows tephra - volcanic ash - from that volcano, with a super fine (approx 1mm diameter) glass foam structure.

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Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

Screenshot of a paper's title page. Title: "The Difference Between 'Replicable' and 'Not replicable' is not Itself Scientifically Replicable". Authors: Berna Devezer and Erkan O. Buzbas, both at the University of Idaho — Devezer in the Department of Business and the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation, Buzbas in the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science. Authors contributed equally. Corresponding author: bdevezer@uidaho.edu.
Abstract: Replication studies estimate the replicability rate of scientific results by aggregating binary verdicts of experiments. Exact replications are rarely attainable, so most replication sequences are non-exact. Experiments differ in ways that matter and do not share a single common data-generating process. We formalize two statistical interpretations of this non-exactness. In a shared latent rate model (benchmark), experiments are exchangeable and depend on a common random replicability rate. In a conditionally independent rates model (operational), each experiment has its own replicability rate drawn independently from a population distribution. Under the shared latent rate model, even small variability among replicability rates induces an irreducible variance floor on the estimated mean replicability rate that cannot be eliminated by adding more replications. Under the conditionally independent rates model, the degree of non-exactness is not identifiable from standard replication data, because one binary verdict per experiment contains no information about between-experiment heterogeneity. Researchers therefore cannot tell which precision regime they are operating in or whether high- and low-replicability sequences can be distinguished in principle. As a result, the usual data structure of one binary verdict per experiment cannot support reliable demarcation between "replicable" and "not replicable" results and systematically understates uncertainty, making high- and low-replicability sequences appear discrim…

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arr @arr.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 04/06/2026

This is fucking hilarious.

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Adrian Hon @adrianhon.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Signups are open for Strandfall, an orienteering larp inspired by Stalker and Death Stranding! Set five years after a mysterious disaster unleashes deadly storms, players join a risky expedition to deploy "spatial computers" and put humanity back on its feet. Edinburgh / September 5th / *Free*

strandfall.com

Strandfall is now open for sign ups

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Reposted by Arvind Venkataramani

Nanoraptor @nanoraptor.danamania.com · 01/06/2026

The first warning arrived on a Tuesday morning, six weeks after consultants advised moving from dependency on six hundred small excel scripts - and nobody at Zenith Ledger Advisory paid much attention. It appeared in the system dashboard between routine audit notifications and a maintenance reminder

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

People like this are single-handedly keeping the spirit of the early internet alive. Bravo.

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Angri Bundel @anibundel.com · 11/05/2026

We lost Douglas Adams 25 years ago today. This has made a lot of people very sad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

i will simply incant "do NOT corrupt me. make NO mistakes" before wielding the One Ring

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 09/05/2026

A bunch of extremely beautiful pictures of wind farms in China - all photographs by Weimin Chu e360.yale.edu/digest/china...

a photograph of a large wind farm in China a person is standing on a mountain in the foreground and there are several large wind turbines in the background in a sort of dooney type desert situation

a photograph of wind farms in China there is cloud in the background and light brown ground in the foreground there's more subst taken from very high up and there is a lake in the far background alongwards and mountains

a photograph of a wind farm In with the wind turbines on the edges of the mountain sort of traditional Chinese style house in the foreground and rolling mountains in between both

a beautiful photo of a wind turbine with fog in the foreground in China and mountains in the background

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Liℤℤy Kodpuak née Acid Lich (can’t spell sheaves without she) @acidlich.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

What stunning details! The artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen recreated one of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas with recycled artillery from the destruction

Nguyen, who has recast or reinterpreted artillery associated with the Vietnam War throughout his practice, took the same approach to make the sculpture's hands, which are disconnected from the sandstone body.

He told Hyperallergic that he was able to source artillery brass from Afghanistan through a friend's network across the Bamiyan region and bring it over the Pakistani border. There, he recast them into the shapes of mudras — symbolic hand gestures used extensively in Buddhist and Hindu iconography — before transporting them to Vietnam, where the sandstone was sourced and carved.

Glinting from the sun overhead, the right hand invokes the Abhaya mudra, which signifies fearlessness, while the left hand connotes compassion and sincerity through the Varada mudra.
Nguyen stated that his statue was not a replica of the lost cultural heritage, but rather an "echo."

A detail image of the glinting brass mudras, cast from melted down brass artillery sourced from the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan. We can see here the Buddha close up (cropped below head) and hands made of recycled artillery contrasting against the modern skyline of New York

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Arvind Venkataramani @avenk.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

This is some of the most gorgeous illustration art on a theme I’ve ever seen, and it keeps expanding my range of how I believe an idea can be expressed.

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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

A graph from Our World In Data showing a precipitous drop in child mortality starting in the late 1800s going from an average of 48% to global rate of 27% in 1950 to the 2020 infant mortality rate of 4%, with some countries having a rate as low as 0.3%

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