iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 08/10/2026

it's good to see this laid out clearly, but i'm once again going to point to Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"

The present discussion is a contribution to the understanding of what programming is. It suggests that programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 07/10/2026

I took some photos with my new film camera.

Dark hallway with people and light in the middle.

Little library and tilted pole, wrapped in police tape

Traffic light with bright green and red color

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Tony Tran @tonytranrpg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Stock art maintenance - if you've worked with me; I'm a big fan of @kinopio.club; I'm currently working out a way to catalogue my stock art - starting with #Morktober 2026. So this will be a white board experience with what each card/day would release with as I cut em up.

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Molleindustria FUTURE? NO THANKS! OUT NOW @molleindustria.org · 04/09/2026

Future? No Thanks! IS OUT NOW ON STEAM An open-world comedy adventure about workable utopias, the twilight of patriarchy, revolution, and the horrifying possibility that the younger generations might be right. 💀 Windows + Mac 💀 6+ hours of gameplay 💀 20% off at launch futurenothanks.com

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 04/10/2026

LLM-generated output posing as “writing” is like that junk mail you get that looks important and personal, with a handwritten message. Then you realize it is a fake and immediately toss it in the trash because you know it’s worthless and trying to sell you something.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 29/09/2026

Every AI-based solution is a bandaid for a symptom and only worsens the entire system. Oh, I need to orchestrate agents to filter out all the noise among the chats and Jira tickets and emails I get. The problem is organizational. But use ai, and you lose sight of that and never fix it.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 28/09/2026

Another consequence of LLM output having no author is that the output lacks authority. There is no expertise, knowledge, experience of an author to pin this on. If someone takes that output and "reviews" it, they are then participating in something akin to plagiarism.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 26/09/2026

What would Jesus vibe-code?

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 24/09/2026

it's just personalized, customizable plagiarism

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 23/09/2026

surely i'm missing out on a sponsorship or other opportunity to monetize the fact that my surname has the letters "ai"

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 23/09/2026

This meeting could have been an email could have been a podcast

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026

as a hater let me acknowledge something ai is good at: producing irritating discourse at scale this is usually because, like "ai" itself, people are talking about different things like they are one thing so let me disentangle, with statements numbered for easy disagreement

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Tamara Kneese @tamigraph.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

So excited for this timely event on community responses to data centers in Pennsylvania! Congrats to Cella and the other organizers on pulling so many stakeholders and threads together

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

When I say I've been working on this debunking for *years* that includes academic publications. Here's a quick thread:

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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 15/09/2026

a lot of my frustration with the LLM onslaught has in fact been disappointment at realizing how many people do just want to pretend (at work, creatively, interpersonally)

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I wrote down my thoughts about the last several weeks of AI hell. aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

aiguide.substack.com

Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks

What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency

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nn @nicknoble.works · 23/08/2026

I know I’ve been posting a lot but I’m thinking of reviving The Organic Software Directory as a webring. ("Organic Software" was coined by @pketh.org in this fantastic post, which you should read: pketh.org/organic-soft... )

pketh.org

In Search of Organic Software

So over the last couple weeks, I’ve been talking to VCs and founders who have and haven’t taken VC to learn whether it makes sense for Kinopio. I don’t think it does.

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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Who defined the problem? Who controls the system? Who benefits and bears the errors? Who can contest the decision? Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu propose four questions every consequential AI audit should answer, adding a "power test" alongside the fairness test.

techpolicy.press

AI Audits Need a Power Test, Not Just a Fairness Score

As audits enter AI regulation, ask who sets the goals, controls the tools, gains, and can contest results, write Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

For all human history, it was far more difficult to write a document than to read it. Until now. But generating a document doesn't make the work of *producing meaning* disappear. It's just been outsourced from the producers of the document to its consumers.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

Cognitive Pollution: Real knowledge only forms through doing the work

many humans appear to be on auto mode, not on manual mode

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10/08/2026

What's so sad about those who deny this is they must then therefore think humans are formal systems. Which may be true I guess, but we have no evidence for this. So if they truly think this, they can prove it by showing us the formalisms. But I won't be holding my breath for them to write it up. 💀

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 08/08/2026

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Anyway, your problem isn‘t finding the time to take notes. The problem is that taking notes is thinking and thinking has to be done by someone. women have been doing a lot of metacognition that looks like a task when it’s really thinking.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 27/07/2026

I predict that in the future, there will be only two types of people. Those who are right-handed, and those who are not.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 27/07/2026

semicolon is punctuation dark horse

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 24/07/2026

Is Flickr still okay?

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 15/06/2026

After a few months of paying the actual cost of AI via token-based billing, an increasingly-anxious conversation has begun about AI's ROI. Per Cisco's Jeetu Patel, the costs of AI tokens are far higher than the actual value that these tokens are generating at scale. www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

In the middle of April, The Information’s Laura Bratton likely burst the AI bubble with a piece about how Uber had burned through its entire annual token budget in a single quarter.

This kicked off an industry-wide anxiety about the mounting costs of AI, with multiple other companies burning millions of dollars in the space of a few months, including Zillow, which destroyed its annual Cursor budget by the end of May. What really began the downfall was a comment by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald:

"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. "I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features."

He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can't draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.
In a single podcast, Andrew Macdonald gave the entire tech industry permission to say the truth: that nobody was actually able to show any ROI despite its massive costs.

This began an increasingly-anxious conversation around AI’s ROI, made worse by the fact that you can’t measure the cost of a task because of the sheer number of models and harnesses, and can’t cleanly translate “AI spend” into “actual financial outcomes.” Toward the end of May, Axios would publish a story about how a company somehow spent $500 million on Anthropic tokens in a single month after failing to set up cost controls.

A few days later, Sam Altman would make a massive fuckup, saying that customers were “totally happy” with their AI spend at the beginning of the year (before token-based billing), and that spend was now a “huge issue,” likely because the costs vastly increased.

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Cyd Harrell @cydharrell.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

an idea's been rolling around in my head about how what we lose with assuming everyone wants "answers" & not search results is similar to what we lose when "route" is the only kind of map we encounter I won't get the academic terms right, but it's some version of skipping an essential abstraction

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Dr. Velislava Hillman and Dr. Peter G. Kirchschlaeger argue that as AI erodes job markets, it exposes the reality that the crisis facing young people "was never primarily technological, but political." Time to rethink what education is for, they say.

techpolicy.press

AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education.

AI now bypasses the original logic of the educational bargain altogether, write Dr. Velislava Hillman and Dr. Peter G. Kirchschlaeger.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 06/07/2026

the language around the red card being suspended is confusing because without it being suspended, the balogun is suspended. two different suspensions being talked about.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 02/07/2026

@hiro.report hi there, do you have thoughts on, or a favorite G-shock watch?

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

A phenomenon I've noticed recently is people trying to occupy some untenable middleground wrt to the use of systems sold as "AI" -- this is a position where people try to recognize the harms of this tech but also hold space for "responsible" or "ethical" use. 🧵>>

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victoria @vashetc.blacksky.app · 24/06/2026

dear colleagues, you dont have to say "im excited to share" everytime you want to share something. you can just share it

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 17/06/2026

Checking out all the ai generated websites so I know not what to do

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 17/06/2026

I'm at a point in my career that I am comfortable ignoring Hi messages with no further context

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 11/06/2026

Sparklines and comics. Things I would have expected to get more playing time.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 22/05/2026

Metaphors are garbage

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 06/05/2026

The irony is that humans are the ones hallucinating

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odbol @odbol.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

feels like AI is 10xing too many -1x developers

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 27/04/2026

you heard it here first: these are called prayer prompts

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Depeche Median @happybusman.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

All the human-in-the-loop bullshit assumes the human is a constant, unaffected by the loop. In reality, the loop is making the human stupider, lazier, and more careless.

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Pope Leo on AI: “Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.” This short thread is worth reading:

Pope Leo XIV
@Pontifex
X.com
#ArtificialIntelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments.
Like every great historical
transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality.
1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 91K Views

Pope Leo XIV
@Pontifex
X.com
Within digital environments —
structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons!
Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded.
1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 209K Views

Pope Leo XIV
@Pontifex
X.com
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread.
What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.
1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 696K Views

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 29/07/2025

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

title and abstract from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 1 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 16/04/2026

Please read this urgent paper. I am then going to repost a bunch of comments I made last night (sorry).

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 13/04/2026

Same with ai literacy or fluency

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Alastair Somerville @acuity.design · 11/04/2026

Practice is to encounter more opportunities for errors. Being wrong and correcting is the way we learn. Simply being presented with the right answer or memorising that answer won’t stick. The direct path of AI does not help.

Diagram on how the prediction/error/correction loop is how people learn and acquire memories

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Erika Hall @erikahall.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Please make this mandatory in all critical workflows immediately.

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