iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

From a historical perspective it's a genuinely strange state of affairs that the Church of England turns out to be too woke for much of the modern right. But really it just feels like: having a consistent moral code that demands taking Lessers and Outgroup seriously is impossible for populist right.

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emily thai @ethai.bsky.social · 20h

as a child of the social media left it is really obvious to me how we exported what should have been Social Media rules (pressure, block, deplatform public figures with whom you cannot have good faith conversation) into our personal lives (going no contact with your family who voted Trump)

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 21h

seeing conservative men debate how to dress online is very funny. can't dress up or wear interesting casualwear bc you've made any visible interest in dress to be a sign of homosexuality. but you feel the need to dress better bc you've linked dress to respectability. a prison of your own making.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

It is genuinely bizarre that we’ve become acclimatized to right wingers throwing a tantrum every time a black person (particularly a black woman) is cast in something, but are also supposed to pretend that this is not racism but related to some other substantive concern.

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Erin Keane @erinkeane.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I was raised by a nurse with an associates degree and a steel mill electrician. I am not denigrating the value and dignity of blue collar work when I ask how many elite national media staffers are raising future bricklayers themselves. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

theatlantic.com

Time to Consider Becoming a Bricklayer

College degrees hold less value, while jobs in the trades are booming.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 04/10/2026

"Resurface"

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Micah Warren @micah541.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I told my wife, who works in the mental health profession, that there's all these people who believe AI models can feel pain. She immediately responded with "are these people who struggle to identify their own emotions?" I think she hit it with one shot

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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

~Approximately no one in the general public knows because the leaders of the R1 research universities - whose budgets, programs, & personnel are entirely or significantly dependent on federal funding - have been totally absent from the public square in explaining & collectively protesting this.

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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 02/10/2026

the Saudi government now enjoys a 15.1% equity stake in the new, bigger Paramount Warner Brothers

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Marc Scully @marcscully.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Behavioural Science in 2026.

The Homer stonecutter meme.

Top image: Remove the stone of "Terrible MTurk data"
Bottom image: Attach the stone of "Terrible synthetic sample data"

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Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My first exposure to this guy was hearing him on Ezra Klein's podcast and being surprised that a computer scientist would say such things. Then, I googled him and learned he was not only *not* a computer scientist, but had never finished high school. Everything made a lot more sense after that.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The names of these judges will eventually come up, and they should lose their jobs, be disbarred, and answer to society for such gratuitous cruelty

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is my favourite Borges story.

The Witness by Borges and translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with
gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal
odors, meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep. The day, faithful to
vast secret laws, continuously displaces and confounds the shadows in the
wretched stable. Outside stretch the tilled fields, a deep ditch filled up with
dead leaves, and the tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the woods
begin. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The bells calling to prayer
awake him. In the kingdoms of England, the sound of the bells is already
one of the customs of the afternoon, but the man, while still a boy, had
seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the
rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments,
seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be
dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of
the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.
We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end
when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things,
die in each death—unless there is a universal memory, as the theosophists
have conjectured. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ
were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with
the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What
pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio
Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and
Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

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Mikhail Gorbaechev @mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

GODDAMN IT THIS IS AMERICA

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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 28/09/2026

Periodic reminder that you should not platform this man’s Manhattan Institute colleagues or publicly engage with material published in City Journal, their house magazine.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Conor is an old friend and a smart guy, but he sometimes practices interpretive charity to the point of self-willed blindness. I don’t know how you can have Chris Rufo on your radar at all & not recognize him as a flagrantly bad-faith actor.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Marlboro has launched a new filter to help keep their cigarettes from going rogue and giving smokers cancer"

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Dear @himself.bsky.social: if you just heard a loud cry of horror traveling like a shockwave coming from NYC please know that was me just now from reading the quoted post Once we had Vannevar Bush and John Von Neumann advising the US government. So low we have fallen. How do we fix this?!

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I’m publishing something tomorrow about Alpha School. One of the things I focus on is how it is an incubator for EdTech platforms with the ambition to hyperscale. Alpha may only have a few hundred students nationwide, but its founders are developing MANY extractive EdTech brands. This is one:

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 27/09/2026

Quite pleased to see that despite continuing to exist in a paraphysical world where the rules of space and time do not apply, in Resonant, just as in the original Control, the “Minimizes Residuals!” OLS/loglinear whiteboard lives on at the Federal Bureau of Control. Even the Hiss can’t defeat OLS.

Adiabatie Procoses
No opporturity for Heat Transfer
Expo ne
No Time to equelizet
P,O conderos RAIN.
Mf LinearRegression
Dota → Tables → Liaßess
(cotalyst)
) Duta→ Table → Transform
Data
[For nontinarddeta (logy, lege bogg
Ex :
구
Exp Reg
(,, (a):
y=0.9871•1.307x
Minimizes
Residieels!
Cintay (4, 4)
r= 0.%
飞yt.
gyr, 'ogey Filed! +=0.776 CURVEP!
So... ia coutà be:
• Expohential -
→ Tochock: 13 = logg [Lg=log (L)]
o Romer Function
Then, graph (x, logg)
or (4, 13)
(logx, 1og9)
Is it Lincar?
Its more Linear!

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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Democracy is good because with the proper set of institutions it can create stability, growth, and policy progress while guarding against despotism and maintaining governmental legitimacy. It is not good because people are smart or virtuous. There are a lot of suckers.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It is becoming imperative for us mathematicians (among many other people) to equip our students – and our colleagues – with frameworks and conceptual tools to navigate the emerging landscape in our profession. Here is some literature I found very helpful birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/24/R...

birdsnfrogs.github.io

Some recent literature around AI and mathematics

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What business motivation leads OpenAI to inject itself into and meddle with the scientific process? Do they really need to solve the Hodge conjecture to convince their investors that their business model is sound? (Hodge… Wall Street’s favorite conjecture!) birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/22/O...

A screenshot of the opening to the blog post. Title “OpenAI: the reckless, brittle empire”, there is a photo of the imperial intelligence meeting room from “Andor”, with the caption “A typical work day at OpenAI”

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I am going to start a thread of my personal favorite posts in @teorth.bsky.social's blog for the past few weeks (in chronological order)

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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Very good piece, you can think that this is a major transformative technology with important and potentially terrible consequences but not an agent at all, let alone a God. And that the AGI RSI etc discourse is a distraction from the real dangers and solutions.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"...seeing what dominates the public discussion around LLMs makes me quite mad. These are not serious people. I see the very important topic of LLMs treated like a tool to game the attention economy to pump up an IPO price" Oh Caro, guide us in this dark time! birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/21/C...

Robert Caro: "So you're more in fear -- not in fear or in hope..." 1/2

Robert Caro: "...but in awe of what government can do" 2/2

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

“The most important problem is unsolved,” says Luis Silvestre, a mathematician at the University of Chicago. “The Clay problem is settled, but the main problem for the Navier-Stokes equations is not.” www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-...

A screenshot from the article with the following text:

"But the new work released last Thursday shows unequivocally that if the force is removed, the blowup will disappear. OpenAI’s method can never work, in fact, without using a very contrived equation for the force that is unlike anything that could occur in the real world. “They essentially prove that the formulation with an external force was different from the problem we really wanted to solve,” Silvestre says."

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g0m @g0m.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A world where a twist ending is repurposed as a video title. where a thing's climax has been removed, leaving an advertisment for the gap where it used to be. such things are commonplace in. the twilight zone

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Micah Warren @micah541.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Great piece- I'm all for taking community ownership of the products of LLMs. The training data didn't fall out of a coconut tree.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The Parable of OpenAir and Airthropic birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/20/T...

A kid-like drawing of two UFO-like devices with the logos of “OpenAir” and “Airthropic” using some kind of beam to gather oxygen from the Amazon.

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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I don’t know, but sometimes I think humanities folks occasionally confuse a general war on rigor and seriousness with a war on the humanities. That war may take a guise as a pro-STEM movement but it’s not like the STEM fields are doing *so* much better across the board.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A detail that illustrates the lack of seriousness by OpenAI towards mathematics and science is the fact that not a single of the people there have offered to give a presentation on the paper their little LLM produced. I suspect this is in part because not a single OAI employee bothered to read it

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/09/2026

When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.

Google
Sorry...
We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
See Google Help for more information.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Peter Constantin, Mihaela Ignatova, Vlad Vicol announced today a result adapting their work from earlier this year to show (and here I am oversimplifying) the type of blow-up construction for Navier-Stokes cannot work without the force. This is significant, arxiv.org/abs/2609.20803

arxiv.org

Regularity of asymptotically axisymmetric solutions to the 3D Navier-Stokes equations with analytic forcing

OpenAI~\cite{OpenAIManuscript} has recently announced a proof of finite time singularity formation for the 3D Navier-Stokes equations, in the presence of a $C^\infty$-smooth body force. The constructi...

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Last week I posted my essay on LLMs, cultural technologies, and mathematics. It is my earnest attempt at convincing mathematicians that should be optimistic, even prideful, at this critical moment: birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/12/F... 1/

birdsnfrogs.github.io

Happy, those able to know the causes of things

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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A modest proposal for reorganizing the production and reproduction of mathematical knowledge, courtesy of Asimov's Second Foundation:

"If I may interrupt, Speaker - How is a change made?"
"Through the agency of the Radiant. You will find in your own case, for instance, that your mathematics will be checked rigorously by five different boards; and that you will be required to defend it against a concerted and merciless attack. Two years will then pass, and your development will be reviewed again. It has happened more than once that a seemingly perfect piece of work has uncovered its fallacies only after an induction period of months or years. Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.
"If, after two years, another examination, not less detailed than the first, still passes it, and - better still - if in the interim the young scientist has brought to light additional details, subsidiary evidence, the contribution will be added to the Plan. It was the climax of my career; it will be the climax of yours.
"The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all corrections and additions can be made through mental rapport.
There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition is yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no person-alization. It is rather a creation of all of us together. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Speaker!"
"Then, enough of that."

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 14/09/2026

Good times. McArdle went off at me for making a remark about this graph back in the day.

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Good lede. Terrible headline.

Greg Jaffe
By Greg Jaffe
Reporting from Washington

Sept. 14, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET

For decades, secretaries of defense have largely sought to insulate the military from the country’s divisive culture wars.

Pete Hegseth, more than any of his predecessors, has taken the opposite approach, bringing those fights directly into the Pentagon.

Trying to Rid the Pentagon of Culture Wars, Hegseth Has Created His Own

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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 13/09/2026

My interpretation is that OpenAI embraced the xrisk/pause narrative as an opportunistic excuse to avoid acknowledging that they do not have the finances/fundamentals to IPO.

forbes.com

Sam Altman Says It Would Be ‘Ill-Advised’ To Take OpenAI Public In 2026

Wall Street was poised for a massive OpenAI IPO by the end of the year—but the CEO says that’s not happening.

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Tuffy @smtuffy.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

We need to really focus on the fact that OpenAI employees are behind this not sentient software. Like, if a person/company creates a malicious code then they’re responsible. AI does not change that

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

"He threatened me. I replied that I am an academic." lmao yes

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Incredible story. And another huge example of why tenure protections for academics are important

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