iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Actually made one of these a few weeks ago

A two-axis chart mapping positions in the AI debate. The vertical axis runs from "AGI is coming" at the top to "It's all hype" at the bottom; the horizontal axis runs from "Regulate it" on the left to "Build faster" on the right.
Top left (AGI is coming, regulate it): Eliezer Yudkowsky, PauseAI, Max Tegmark, Dario Amodei, Dan Hendrycks, Alex Bores, and Public First Action, the Anthropic-linked super PAC.
Top right (AGI is coming, build faster): Greg Brockman, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, David Sacks, and Ben Horowitz.
Bottom left (it's all hype, regulate it): a dashed box labeled "The horseshoe" groups Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, Meredith Whittaker, FAccT, Joseph Stiglitz, AI Now, Josh Hawley, Randi Weingarten, Guardrails Alliance, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and, straddling the vertical axis, the Tech Oversight Project.
Arvind Narayanan sits at the center, noted as having declined to be plotted.
Bottom right (it's all hype, build faster) holds a single figure: a guy shorting NVDA who thinks the whole thing pops.

Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

First comment ends on a real smackdown: “The reasoning behind gotcha pieces like this one is moronic and does the dirty work for the status quo.”

Comment in the NYT:

Karl Marx did not need to personally labor in coal mines to arrive at his theory of class struggle under capitalism. Friedrich Engels, meanwhile, briefly worked in a cotton mill in which his family had an investment, then promptly set about writing The Condition of the Working Class in England while beginning a lifelong partnership with Marx, out of which came The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

I do not understand why NYT journalists, whose own salaries depend on union representation, debase themselves by casting class analysis in such primitively binary terms. What socioeconomic markers would satisfy the Times' standard of socialist authenticity? Is a college degree allowed? Can Joe the Plumber, who runs his own business and employs ten workers, espouse top-down income redistribution without being written up for hypocrisy? What about the taxi driver with an MD from his home country but no license to practice in the US? The median sale price of a housing unit in NYC in 2026 is nearly $900,000. Does that disqualify every homeowner from supporting a pied-à-terre tax? Median asking rent in Manhattan is $5,000 a month. Are the people paying it forbidden from campaigning for a world where housing is more plentiful and affordable?

The reasoning behind gotcha pieces like this one is moronic and does the dirty work for the status quo.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The casual modifier clause “at least not in the swing state of Wisconsin” is doing a lot of work here www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/u... 🎁🔗

NYT screenshot: “Democratic socialists this year have won a mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., and House primaries in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia and Denver. But the force of that wave could not extend beyond such urban cores, at least not in the swing state of Wisconsin.”

BBC screenshot: “El-Sayed's victory sends tremors through Democratic Party”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

God was the original union buster lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/13/th...

Quote text screenshot:

They use it for a civilizational project:

let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven

But when God assesses the situation the bricks are not what concern him:

the people is one, and they have all one language, […] and now nothing will be restrained from them.1

The source of their power is coordination. They share a language and with that shared language they can combine their work into something no one of them could build alone. God does not take away the bricks or their knowledge of how to make them. He takes away their ability to understand one another, and construction stops.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Just casually searching for the news on a frontier ai firm and WHAT now

“People also ask” box in Google search results for “Anthropic” that just says “is Anthropic owned by Jews?”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how the Democrats can message what’s going on. The only way to describe this president and the party propping him up is the phrase “drunk on power.”

In days and weeks before he resigned as president, Richard Nixon came unglued.

“The President had always despised small talk, but lately he would interrupt the conversation and ramble, usually about his past triumphs,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in their account of the final days of the Nixon administration. “Then suddenly, he would seem to be jolted to the present and would offer preposterous alternatives, make ridiculous suggestions.” As the walls closed around him and the pressure from allies and enemies alike became unbearable, Nixon grew “increasingly unstable, obsessed, exhausted.”

He didn’t sleep. He drank. He acted irrationally. His son-in-law and adviser Ed Cox said that Nixon was wandering the halls of the White House, “talking to pictures of former Presidents — giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.” Woodward and Bernstein report that on one of his last days in the Oval Office, Nixon dropped to his knees in prayer, wailing in self-pity to Henry Kissinger:

Kissinger thought he had finished. But the president did not rise. He was weeping. And then, still sobbing, Nixon leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, “What have I done? What has happened?”

Nixon spiraled into self-destructive mania at the end of his term. President Trump has reached those depths with three years left on the clock. For weeks, the president has been threatening the military takeover of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. His reasons amount to little more than greed and vanity; he wants to be known to posterity for the territorial expansion of the United States.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

BREAKING: X has stopped working

Screenshot of the refocus app blocking X

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I was not cool enough to know about this site as a youth on the ‘net but this Ukrainian lacing with a captive starting knot blew my mind just now

Interactive diagram of a Ukrainian lace on Ian’s Shoelace Site. The lace has two loops at the top and a “captive” starter knot. Yellow and blue laces illustrate the technique. At the bottom, play, reverse, stop, and fast-forward buttons control the animation.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

The coolest guy I ever interviewed, and the only person on TV to ever encourage me to read, would never have reached me with that message in a million years without CBP

Post from LeVar Burton: “There are those who have wanted to defund PBS for years. The same with the national endowment for the arts. that dreadful day has come. We have officially severed an important connection to the artistic, educational, and accessible knowledge in our nation, as well as the importance of using our public airwaves for the beneficial enlightenment of all citizens. We have repeated the history we did not learn from. We are in no way ‘great’ for it. Instead we have entered a new dark age of the denial of the human spirit.”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Been vaguely uncomfortable with Brazilians’ use of the term “miscegenation” to describe interracial marriage, finally looked up the etymology, and well

Etymology from wiktionary: Blend of Latin miscēre (“mix”) +‎ Latin genus (“race”) +‎ -ation. Coined by American journalist David Goodman Croly in 1864 and first used in an anonymous pamphlet he coauthored, which claimed to be written by a person who believed in the inherent unity of all racial groups, that marriage between blacks and whites would create a better race, and that the American Civil War was a fight for the latter idea. Later, it was exposed that the pretext of the pamphlet was false and that it had actually been written by a group which hoped to inflame anger, particularly against then-US President Abraham Lincoln who was up for reelection.

miscegenation (countable and uncountable, plural miscegenations)

(chiefly US) The mixing or blending of race in marriage or breeding, interracial marriage. [from 1863]

(figuratively) A mixing or blending, especially one which is considered to be inappropriate.

Usage notes: Often considered offensive, pejorative, or old-fashioned, and therefore alternative terms are more common in contemporary use, such as interracial, interethnic, or cross-cultural for relationships, and mixed-race, multiethnic, multiracial, or mixed for persons.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I’m sorry he hung a WHAT now (gift) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/u...

NYTimes quote “Mr. Trump has hung a photo of an autopen in a space where Mr. Biden’s portrait would otherwise be, and disparages his predecessor’s physicality often.”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Come for the withering drags, stay for Mark Peterson’s beautiful, poetic photos of the defeat party

A woman looks upset while speaking on her phone and holding a New York Les Cuomo sign. In the foreground, a woman’s hand is seen holding a wine glass.

A photo of chairs leaning against a round table after closing, with multiple Cuomo loves New York signs sitting abandoned.

Photo of the crowd watching the election results with upset Luhks. On the left, a woman looks down while massaging her temples with one hand. In the middle, a woman looks up at the screen with one hand raised towards her face and a wine glass in the other, securing an expensive clutch in the crook of her elbow. In the background on the right, an elderly man wearing glasses hold out his left hand, palm up, while speaking to three other men in suits with a concerned look on his face.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Looks like University of Pennsylvania got phished today 😲 This email appears to have been sent to all alumni just now.

Hacked email sent to Penn Alumni:

Dear Penn community,

The University of Pennsylvania is a dogsh*t elitist institution full of woke r***rds. We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic. We hire and admit morons because we love legacies, donors, and unqualified affirmative action admits. We love breaking federal laws like FERPA (all your data will be leaked) and Supreme Court rulings like SFFA.

Please stop giving us money.

Warm regards,
The University of Pennsylvania

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

My doctor’s office has the best content moderation policy

Doctors office sign that reads “interfering with our healing environment may result in removal from this facility and/or prosecution.”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Just saw a guy walking through Union Square with a giant inflatable banana

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

“mansion boy” eh? pretty rich from a guy who used to live here

Photo of the New York State Executive Mansion, located in Albany, New York

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Really great newsletter from @danmall.bsky.social today about where he finds time to read ~all those books~

Screenshot:

A friend once told me they wrote a book by buying train tickets to small towns two hours away. They’d write for two hours on the way out, explore, eat lunch, then write again on the way back. The travel wasn’t just part of the plan; it was the reason they got it done.

When someone asks me where they can find the time, I give them my best recommendation:

Far away.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Had to look up some proper Latin for a bit yesterday and I have never searched so carefully in my life

Screenshot of a Google search results page with a Stack Exchange post titled “how does one use the Latin word “cum“ in a sentence?”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Been thinking about this tweet a lot

Screenshot of the famous meme tweet:

My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Protest in Manhattan this afternoon, outside the NY County Supreme Court

Photo of a large group of protesters holding yellow and black signs that say “ICE out of NYC” and “Stop the deportations now!”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Today in potentially fatal localization bugs: an email from my insulin pump warning me not to use commas as a decimal point 🤯

Screenshot:

This is a voluntary Field Safety Notification related to how your iPhone’s keyboard and region settings may affect the Omnipod 5 App for iPhone.

We have received reports from users where the App does not recognize numbers correctly if a comma is used as the decimal point. This issue only occurs when the keyboard or region are set to certain countries outside the U.S. that use a comma instead of a period. The Omnipod 5 App for iPhone will not recognize the comma as a decimal point or number separator. If the user does not recognize that the number entered is wrong due to no decimal, this may lead to delivery of more insulin than intended, which can lead to severe hypoglycemia.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The latest episode of @hearmeout.co’s Work Face podcast is out this morning! @bijan.bsky.social joined the show to talk about his experience going from journalism to games writing, and explained why some people get pegged as “talent” while others get passed over.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Rio for the tail end of carnaval and saw my friend play in a fantastic band in the park 🥁🎉

Photo of a woman dressed in a blue leotard and pleated, flowing yellow leggings spreading her arms in a welcoming gesture as she towers over a massive crowd forming a circle around the band just outside a city park on Rua da Gloria in Rio de Janeiro

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

As Brazil enters Carnaval weekend and shuts down all non-party-related services, here’s a timeline cleanse from last year’s parades in Rio de Janeiro.

A carnaval parade dressed in colorful military garb. The subject in the center has a jaunty pose.

A carnaval parade dressed in a swamp thing type motif. The subject in the center is dancing while looking off-camera.

A carnaval parade dressed in red and gold imperial-style royal dresses and white barrister wigs shot from the side.

A carnaval parade dressed in blue and gold with bright blue feathers and little blue hats.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Love this story from the latest episode of Work Face, a new podcast from @hearmeout.co, where @yc.latebutstill.com shares the time he got paid $2k for a viral tweet featured in a Taco Bell commercial with @georgetakei.bsky.social 🌮💰

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Absolutely haunting image in this NYT story on Mr. Beast www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/a...

An anguished man sobbing in a blue tracksuit while sitting on a bed in a bare room surrounded by $650k in bags of cash.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

“Try to avoid thinking, ‘this person doesn’t deserve help.’ Everyone needs help. So help them.” Listen to our full interview with @etvpod.bsky.social about luck and meritocracy on Work Face: open.spotify.com/episode/4aln...

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Spotify is filling its curated jazz and lo-fi playlists with cheap stock music to increase revenue per stream: harpers.org/archive/2025...

Cover of Harper’s. The lead story is “Ghost music: inside Spotify’s fake artist scheme”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

did you see the hip hop jewelry exhibition right next door in the hall of gems and minerals with the big ass chain

a big ass chain made of diamonds that spell out the words “big ass chain”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Alaska had such a delightful little walk in the fresh snow this morning, I had no choice but to set it to holiday jazz 🎹🥁

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Spotted at Daytime, my neighborhood café, a surprisingly effective message about inclusive language. Note the tone: warm, inviting, and simple enough to explain to a child (or emotionally stunted adult)

Handwritten sign in a café that reads “Hey there! We appreciate gender neutral language when referring to our staff!” with examples like “You all make great lattes!” and “Hey there folks!” enclosed in speech bubbles and closing with “thanks much!”

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

PSA: in a cruel twist of fate, Trader Joe’s has the good blue eggs now and they’re less than five dollars

Photo of Trader Joe’s heirloom fresh free range blue and brown eggs. Two of the eggs are cracked in a bowl to show how nice and amber the yolks are

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Played my first ever DJ set last night and I can see why people abandon lucrative careers for this

Photo of a man adjusting the volume levels behind a CD-J in a colorfully lit bar. To the left, a disco ball shines purple sparkles across the wall. Tones of red and orange mix with the disco ball to form a rich, warm gradient.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

Hit the doors for Kamala in Philly yesterday and the vibes are still on! 40 people showed up on a Monday morning from places as far as Chicago and Oakland. I repeat, organizing is the antidote to despair 🌞🎉🗳️ There’s still time to sign up for a shift this weekend, links below ⬇️

Photo of a man a black sweatshirt and jeans holding a clipboard in the park. On the clipboard, a sticker reads “I voted early“

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Balaji, despite having zero interactions with him

Search results with no posts from my account mentioning balajis

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 12/09/2024

NYC friends: our monthly Listening Party is next week, and we have a killer set of French disco and yé-yé. This month, we’re hosting the event in Brooklyn at Parkhouse, a beautiful space with great food and drinks in the heart of McCarren Park. Join the list: hearmeout.co/events

Flyer with a black and white photo of François Hardy reclining in a chair on the set of Grand Prix in a beret, sweater and pencil skirt. The flyer is for Hear Me Out Listening Party, a low-key networking event on Weds, September 18 at 6pm. The music theme is Francophile disco and 60s ye-ye, selected by Michelle Mattar.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 03/09/2024

Had to go all the way to NJ but we took Alaska to the beach today

A white dog wearing an orange harness sitting on a yellow and green blanket at the beach and shaking the sea water out of its coat.

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Ben Jackson @benjaminjackson.bsky.social · 22/08/2024

Drinking a salty mango oolong mai tai topped with Thai basil called the Secret life of Plants at Hey Love 🍹 #xoxofest

A tropical yellow drink filled with crushed ice and topped with mint, resting on a wooden bar. In the background, liquor bottles rest on multiple shelves.

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