iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.

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Feral T. Robot, Oil Swamp Utility Bot #7629 @feralrobots.bsky.social · 31m

TIL this mundane post - which expresses a basic & uncontroversial truth about technology that many of us have been observing for 40 or more years - is apparently a radical anti-AI screed.

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Ugly Reykjavik @uglyreykjavik.bsky.social · 20h

The trees are lovely, but the house is definitely not in good condition. #Iceland #Reykjavik #photography #streetphotography #nature #abandoned #decay #trees

An abandoned blue house surrounded by trees.

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Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 @patigallardo.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

This collective LLM delusion is completely baffling to me. People are talking like truth, correctness, precision, performance, security… none of it matters anymore. Generating a lie is «good enough». Wtf is wrong with people? If correctness doesn’t matter, why would I pay you? A wrong answer is free

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

"I belong to a cult. Someone did some research that undermines the core tenets of my cult and came up with a catchy phrase that makes it harder to recruit more people to my cult. This makes me sad."

Screencap of tweet on X from @jackclarkSF (Jack Clark):

"stochastic parrot" was a mimetically-fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025; it temporarily blinded many gifted people to the nature of AI progress, burning up crucial years in which they could have helped think through the response to the situation.
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Kestrel Casey @kestrelcasey.com · 1h

Computers have always been so dumb as to be funny, but I've noticed a definite uptick in "new kinds of stupid" since vibecoding came in.

Security question: What is your pet's name? Answer: Doug. Error: Answer must be at least 5 characters.

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 4h

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

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Right Livelihood @rightlivelihood.org · 3h

What happens when an AI researcher challenges the direction of the industry from within? Meet @timnitgebru.blacksky.app, one of the 2026 Right Livelihood Laureates — a pioneering researcher confronting concentrated power in artificial intelligence. rightlivelihood.org/the-change-m...

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Thomas Fuchs 🫯 @thomasfuchs.at · 2h

Correct www.wired.com/story/the-bi... You don't need to "believe" this by the way; LLM don't have thoughts or reasoning. The output state is entirely deterministically derived as a straightforward strictly defined mathematical operation from the input state.

wired.com

Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI

One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 16h

Friends, while they're trying to talk about fictional machine gods, don't lose sight into what they're all actually powering in real life. You can browse the the entities on the website and use the API, and learn more about it on the DAIR project site: dair-institute.org/projects/sur....

dair-institute.org

Surveillance Watch

This interactive map reveals the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

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Sara Soueidan @sarasoueidan.com · 9h

I made some minor design & content structure tweaks to the Practical Accessibility website (ahead of its 3rd anniversary). practical-accessibility.today One of the changes I made was creating a dedicated page for the many reviews & testimonials that the course has received over the past 3+ years.

practical-accessibility.today

The Practical Accessibility Course

A get-right-down-to-it online course for Web designers and developers who want to start creating more accessible Web user interfaces and digital products today

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Chuck Wendig @chuckwendig.bsky.social · 2h

The Lowdown was likely the best show on TV last year (I mean, according to me, not some kind of scientific process), and I am deeply wildly pleased we're getting more of it.

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Dominik 🔮 @tkdodo.eu · 6h

I'm in this picture and I don't like it

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 4h

Kind of amazed at all of the people who say "AI" made them better systems-thinkers when none of their analysis includes the models they rely on, let alone the cos that build them, or the finance that enables it all The whole point of "systems-thinking" is that the system is larger than the object.

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Steve Farrugia @fasterandworse.com · 23h

These are not products of an effective design process. Instead of starting with a purpose and finding the best way to satisfy it they are starting with a behemoth existing material and desperately trying to find ways to make it useful. This is anti-design.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 6h

It’s also really clear to me this week that the people telling us that AI will transform work…haven’t seen a lot of jobs where people work.

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Andy Bell @bell.bz · 9h

for some reason wordpress decided not to make the chart the featured image, so here it is

A line chart showing sporadic peaks, but healthy sales with a sudden drop-off to an almost flat-line situation. The drop-off is labelled 2026

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Sam Missingham @samatlounge.bsky.social · 9h

Might be a good time for @thebookseller.com to revisit this and see if anything has changed? (This if from 2017)

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 21/10/2025

Sometimes I feel the discussion on AI use devolves into: A: I'm allowed to use copy-paste! You use it all the time, right? B: I don't use it to plagiarise, reproduce sexism, or pollute the environment. A: OK, but it's useful & fast for me! And um, that's really degraded thinking on A's part.

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Abstract Tesseract @abstracttesseract.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

More and more I feel like I need to end these conversations by saying "it sounds like you've made up your mind to rationalize your choices despite knowing what the harms are, and that's very unfortunate because I thought you had better judgement than that"

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David Gerard @davidgerard.circumstances.run.ap.brid.gy · 21h

AI surveillance trial costs £320k, catches zero crooks even the AI that works doesn’t work www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QEMoNIuamg… - video pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260929-ai-su… - podcast time: 4 min 10 sec

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Dr Keith Wilson 💭 @keithwilson.eu · 11h

There are no responsible uses of AI in evaluating research funding applications. Just calling it ‘responsible’ doesn’t make it so. #EthicsWashing #GenAI

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MadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 10h

When your proposal gets killed by an algorithm that has no capacity to understand science, what will you do? When your colleague's proposal gets killed by an algorithm that has no capacity to understand science and amplifies biases by default, what will you do? That's where we're at 🧪

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 21h

> Capitalist elites hate workers and despise worker expertise. [I] have decades of experience, sitting in rooms with (mostly) men who [...] hated that a wage servant possessed technical expertise they needed, but were too lazy, arrogant or stupid to grasp. — @cloudquistador.eurosky.social

monroelab.com

The Tech Industry: An Autopsy

The tech Industry, and the fields that grew from it, are dead. The Industry, which, as Yasha Levine details in his book, ‘Surveillance Valley’, was always a tool of oppression, and never &#82…

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Marco Rogers @polotek.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I can understand why the features of a supposed AI assistant are compelling. I kinda wanna try it too. But I know too much about how these things work. Do not give a cloud-based agent access to your shit. Especially one from the big tech companies.

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026

So wild to me that the entire economy is propped up by companies who think living your best life is being a middle manager to a collection of bots.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 29/09/2026

A thing I learned about Meta when I was trying to understand how their statements relate to their actions a few years ago is that *they just tell absolutely indefensible lies* and journalists almost always let them. They believed no one would ever punish them for it in any way that matters.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hey, remember when engineering fields (all of them) took pride in precision, rigorous testing, safety standards, sufficient margins for error, etc? Yeah, that was nice. www.404media.co/these-tech-w... >>

404media.co

These Tech Workers Made ChatGPT Drive a Toyota Corolla

The team used frontier LLMs with no prior training data navigate a simple parking lot course.

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Rick Ellis @toomuchtvcom.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Venn diagram of bosses who insist their employees need to work in the office in order to build "teamwork and collaboration" and those who believe AI can replace most of their white collar workers looks like just one circle

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Sarah ⚧ ✡︎ @sarahkorse.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

This includes BIRTH CONTROL, by the way. As well as a shitload of mood stabilizers. Do NOT eat "spooky" black foods and snacks. Just don't.

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 29/09/2026

Why social media is not actually social These platforms have become a very different thing #socialmedia #disinformation See the full video that talks about how influencers really aren't your friend at youtu.be/q5gvoorgX3E

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David Gerard @davidgerard.circumstances.run.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

Meta’s Muse AI agent: a hilarious security disaster ‘the only form that this kind of product can take is a botnet factory’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytNZfilDJs… - video […] [Original post on circumstances.run]

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 29/09/2026

The turn most software devs have taken shouldn't have surprised me. Well before LLMs, most devs I've met had the soul of a landlord Sometimes "landlord trying to be cool". Sometimes "landlord who wants suffering with the rent" But both see the world with the eyes of a rent-seeker

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Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 28/09/2026

The most recent event I went to had multiple big publishers talking about the question of future of media in an age where search is sabotaged by Google's push to AI and the verdict from all of them was basically: 'we lost a bunch of traffic, but our least loyal, least engaged, least valuable users.'

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Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 28/09/2026

So I work on the revenue side of media and while the numbers are already changing *for sure* the mechanics are slowly shifting along with it. Google traffic is through the floor. Butt the result is publishers are going more audience focused and dropping restrictions that existed to serve Google...

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Austen @ac-f.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A friend of a friend made the suggestion of simply asking "what did you say?", which I found to work decently on getting people to backtrack on messed up statements and is easy to deploy even if you're not sure you can confront the person for whatever reason.

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 28/09/2026

One thing missing from the Coyote vs Acme box office discourse is that AFAICT it’s launching a bit later, dubbed, in some non-English speaking countries. So it’s probably going to have legs in the box office.

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 28/09/2026

I recorded the audio here with a lavalier microphone (a Primo EM258 capsule) and, even though you can hear a lot of the room and it needed more work, I'm finding that I don't hate the sound. I'm thinking maybe lavalier for shorts/TikToks and the Shure SM57 for the longer videos/podcasts from now on

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 28/09/2026

Why is it always Mastodon users who have the most condescending and annoying replies to pretty much anything? They are so fond of refuting things you didn't write and denying points you didn't make

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