iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Yet more evidence for the towering heap of proof that synthetic users are bullshit. As with all AI products, they do not improve "productivity" for a task but create an excuse not to do the task. In this case, the task is research. AI participants do not help you do research, but to AVOID research.

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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 15h

"For many Black scholars, academia is a burning house. If we cannot extinguish that fire, Black scholars will always bear a greater risk of being burned–& therefore have to insulate themselves against the risk more than others." @cydneydupree.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/blac...

timeshighereducation.com

Black academics face extra scrutiny. Our research shows its consequences

Scholars of colour told us they engage in strategies to make it harder for them to be dismissed as biased or lacking rigour, says Cydney Hurston Dupree

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Charlie Jane "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" Anders 🏳️‍⚧ @charliejane.bsky.social · 12h

I really do think tech crossed a line at some point between "helping you do the things you want to do" on the one hand, and "helping you do the things tech wants you to do" on the other. At this point, we're all contorting ourselves to live how the tech industry thinks we should be living.

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Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA @arrianna-planey.bsky.social · 15h

"AI will free us from medical tyranny" "AI is better informed than doctors" I want OFF this ride

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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 16h

Me: so if I need to, idk, go to work in the next 9mos, how am I supposed to do that? US healthcare system: sounds like a non-covered expense! But do let us know immediately if you lose your job due to your disability-- Me: --so you can help? USHCS: HAHAHA! No. So we can cancel your care.

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What software or web tool or workflow that you regularly use would cause the most grief if it just stopped working today? Can you think of a way to lessen the impact if it did?

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

As a researcher, I am trying to be more intentional about backing up files, data, and information in formats as close to raw text and images as possible. I want to be able to still access the information if a software company decides to no longer support the file formats or software I need anymore.

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Josh Chafetz @joshchafetz.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The more we buy into the logic that academia needs to be more like "the real world"--the more we buy into the idea that all we're doing is training students to go out and be good workers--the less we are fulfilling any sort of distinct mission, and the less exciting our work is our students.

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Josh Chafetz @joshchafetz.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

That's the point--and, frankly, I think the more most students are exposed to what is truly unique about the academy, the more they love it. A university is one of the only places where people can play with ideas without needing to expect any sort of commercializability.

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Check out this amazing course manual by @olivia.science for her course ‘AI as a Science’. Cite as: Guest, O. (2020). AI as a Science: Course Manual. Radboud University Nijmegen. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Learning goals
AI as a Science aims to teach you and for you to teach yourselves how
to:
• Define science and AI, critically and for yourselves.
• Understand the historical context for AI: when did AI, or AI-like disciplines and ideas, emerge?
• Understand the current state of AI and where the future might take us — is time a flat circle with respect to “AI winters”?

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John Berry @aniccia.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"Organizers had placed all barricades and staff at the market's entrance, and the episode has them rethinking whether access points need to allow authorized vehicles onto the site during setup without leaving an opening for others to slip through." Absolutely. Never give robots a physical opening.

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Brian Goldstone @brian-goldstone.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

There is something so unbelievably bleak about an article that calmly walks readers through how to navigate being laid off after 50, losing your health insurance, and somehow surviving the years until Medicare. What a broken country.

nytimes.com

Laid Off After 50, and No Health Insurance? Here’s What to Consider. (Gift Article)

At best, older workers will struggle to find health insurance that bridges the years before they qualify for Medicare at age 65.

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Elizabeth Zelle @kohizeri.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"the assessment did not consider the crocodiles" is my new metaphor for people choosing to just ignore the data point that doesn't agree with them

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Commiserates in Floridian.

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Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

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Chris Brody @chrisbrody.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

3-y.o. has interpreted the “lemon” from “easy peasy lemon squeezy” as an all-purpose intensifier. If something hurts: “Owie” If something *really* hurts: “Owie owie lemon owie”

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 10/09/2026

A small request: If you're sending people a form in which there are fields for "Name" and "Title," please specify whether by "Title" you mean "honorific" (Dr/Prof/Ms/Mx etc) or "job title" (Professor of Physics) because I absolutely never know which is being requested and the answers are different.

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Devin Fitzgerald, bibliothot @devinfitz.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

"The digital is the future" Meanwhile: Every link I have on my syllabus from *checks notes* 12 months ago is broken and much of the content no longer exists.

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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you've used my drawn statement on Ai for a class or other Ed context – I'd appreciate learning a bit about that (here or directly), I'd like to document a bit of where it's ended up. And if it's new to you, feel free to make use of it, all online here! Tnx! spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

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David Zipper @davidzipper.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Fresh evidence that car touchscreens are a giant step backwards for road safety: "For all tasks, the touchscreen was associated with increased visual distraction." doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The poor Dialect Map doesn't know what to do with me! mydialect.us/quiz-standar.... Started well in the midwest and then ended up in Montana, but still a toss-up! For the record, I have never spent more than a day or two in Montana.

mydialect.us

Standard Language Quiz — Dialect Map Quiz

Take the Standard Language Quiz to see your regional US speech profile on an interactive dialect map. Based on the Harvard Dialect Survey.

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If you have a pet that sometimes snags your clothes, or if you're clumsy like me, I've found Dritz Snag Nab It to be very useful. It's a needle with rough grooves on the tail end. Push the needle through the cloth and it'll pull the snag to the fabric's underside, where it will be hidden.

A green plaid flannel shirt with two snags on the face side of the fabric. There's a Snag Nab It needle next to the snag.

The same flannel shirt, but the snags have disappeared.

A photo of the underside of the cloth. The snag is now on the underside.

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

As someone who recently moved to Florida, I greatly enjoyed the tree talk in #Daggerbound by @tkingfisher.com. All new Florida residents should get an official warning about our local death tree upon establishing residence here!

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Keith Dunne @keithdunne.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I don’t want to order or set up an account, I just want to see the menu.

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Bits @bitshammer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I assume it was ignored because most people don't write recipes in Excel spreadsheets.

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Woah this is devastating! It's too easy to think everything is safe with cloud backups, but they are really quite fragile!

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Reposted with Alt text. I miss the old style every day!

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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

After fifteen years of studying the anti-vax movement, I came to the conclusion that upholding legal requirements for vaccines for school entry is the single most important thing we can do. You cannot use facts to convince someone who did not employ facts to make their decision. So use the law.

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~ 🗣️ All Elves Are Cats 🗣️ ~ @saetje.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

A bit more CT Children's Medical Center artwork! Like I said, it's difficult to show the scope of this project, I will need a full week to get it organized & take photos of final installations. I did way-finding character creation, signage, illustration, murals, statue design...! #art #vectorart

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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

the little legs kicking

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Dr. Earyn McGee @afroherper.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

For the longest time, I've been taking #FindThatLizard photos with my Nikon D3500, which I absolutely love! However, I am much overdue for an upgrade. I applied for the Black Women Photographer x Nikon Quarterly grant and won! Part of the award includes a new Nikon Z6III.

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Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦 @danielloxton.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

As a further aside to an aside, dead ends are yet another reason why good research takes so damn long, whether you’re studying history or trying to make scientific progress. Dipshit bosses and politicians want to make everything a production pipeline, and that just doesn’t work for everything

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Courtney (Dr. Version) @cakrolik.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

the general format of a four-sentence essay is as follows: 1. They say [Idea A] because [Idea B] 2. But I say [Idea B] (isn't right/isn't good enough/etc.) because [Idea C] 3. They might say __D__ 4. But I reply ___E__. Sentence 3-4 also tend to have to have the "because" set up.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

predictably excellent from hollingshead, every word "Against the forces of antiintellectual fascists+AI tech lords, self-flagellating academics+immediacy fetishists alike, we need to champion the difficulties+pleasures of humanities scholarship with our whole chests." defector.com/humanists-ha...

defector.com

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

carlsonlab.bio

The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab

Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...

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the beggars out of here getter @milesklee.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

we must recover the old wisdom

Biryani for 800 people
4 kg ginger
2 kg garlic
200 kg mutton (cut 6 pieces from each 500g of meat)
50 kg rice
32 kg masoor
80g saffron (8 tolas)
2 kg chilli powder (red)
2 kg crushed chillies (red)
500g whole green chillies
360g elachi
250g turmeric (use sparingly of this quantity and use egg yellow to obtain richer colour)
500g jeera
250g shah-jeera
250g tuj
20 kg ghee (use sparingly. If mutton is fatty, less with be needed)
20 litres oil
1½ litres lemon juice (or vinegar or ½ vinegar and ½ lemon)
40 x 500ml yoghurt
12-16 doz eggs
25 kg potatoes
20 kg onions
1 kg fine salt (use only as much as is required)
6 kg coarse salt (for rice and meat)

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.

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Becky @beckvalle.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The scientific publishing landscape is an expensive, overwhelming, maze!

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Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they) @katjathieme.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

In fact, what we most need is funding to build out and stabilize the network of academic workers. We need more secure positions for people who work in universities, so they can do good teaching and research, day in and day out. We do not need to hire stars.

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Metin Seven, Moon Child's dad 🌝 @seven.eurosky.social · 04/08/2026

Nice initiative by @jaredwhite.com: a growing opt-in directory of software developers who write code by hand. If you're coding without the use of LLMs, you're invited to add yourself to the list… handcraftedcode.org #code #coder #coding #NoAI

handcraftedcode.org

We write code by hand: We use Natural Intelligence to build software.

We use Natural Intelligence to build software libraries and applications in production today. Some of them you may be using right now.

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David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

To write in the classic high fantasy mould, you need not be hung up on food specifically, but there must be SOME very mundane thing you're sincerely interested in and prepared to describe in excruciating detail every time it comes up. Clothing. Furniture. Architecture. It doesn't work without it.

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David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

This should be self evident but clearly isn’t. From @lewisgoodall.com

The problem is not that higher education has failed as an engine of social mobility. It is that, for too long, it has been treated as the only engine. The curriculum is not the problem which is driving our NEET malaise; the weakness of local economies is. Any Labour administration should therefore tread very carefully before dismantling any part of the comprehensive educational settlement created by the Labour governments of the 1960s. Burnham's proposals also misunderstand the multi-layered nature of the modern university, which in many cases is as likely to offer vocational courses as strictly academic ones.
In any case, let's stop the obsession with STEM subjects and
"practical" training. There is already too much snobbery in the assumption that working-class students are somehow less interested in the arts and humanities. And we've never needed those graduates more. In an age in which we are already outsourcing so much of our critical thinking to machines, and in which none of us can be entirely sure of the truth of what we see, where the world's complexity is ever deepening, subjects like philosophy, history, political science, linguistics, classics and literature have rarely been more important.
I'm sure our English graduate prime minister might agree.

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Nicolas Clairis @nclairis.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

You can also see very quickly the outliers on our where-to-publish life-sciences database where APCs are mostly based on the openAPC database www.openapc.net for-profit journals and especially Elsevier and Springer Nature journals are clearly at the top

wheretopublish.github.io

Where to Publish?

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Retraction Watch @retractionwatch.com · 09/07/2026

Th resigning editors say the publisher’s decision to become fully open access is “irreconcilable with our vision of science.” According to the journal’s homepage, all submissions from July 1 that end up in the journal will be subject to a $2,990 article processing charge (APC).

retractionwatch.com

‘The exploitation still remains’: Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing charge

Eighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish. In a July 8 stat…

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 31/07/2026

Happy Friday everyone, as promised, here is my personal theory on this. I think Redwall takes place in our world, after an apocalyptic event of the nuclear variety caused rapid but varied growth of all animals, including humans, leading to our extinction and their mental development. Okay? 🧵

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Eric Hayot @ehayot.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Penn State Comp Lit departmental statement on in-class tech use (recommended), posting here in case you are working on one of your own or want to use/copy/edit for yourself.

Research on the use of laptops, phones, and tablets in classrooms consistently shows that students who use those technologies—even if they are taking notes or looking at course slides—learn less in class than those who do not. Students who use such technologies also impact the learning of others, since flashing screens create consistent forms of classroom distraction. Best practices on technology use in classroom suggest that it works best when it is used socially—as when students look together at the slides for the lecture or work in groups on a specific project. Research also shows that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who type them onto a computer.

As a result, unless you have a specific accommodation request from SDR that requires the use of this kind of technology or are explicitly directed to use a device for a collaborative classroom activity, you are not allowed to use laptops, tablets, phones, recording devices, smart glasses, or any other screens or screen-adjacent technology in this classroom.

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