iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Brian Lynchehaun

Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 27/09/2026

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

Ann Pierce
@itsannpierce
20h
I am disheartened by this as well. I already lost a bunch of followers for agreeing with @tautologer, but it's saddening to see local nerdy women being caricatured as Karen-like outsiders and getting pushed out of the scene. This is exactly why you hear so few concrete, names-attached stories of sexual harrassment and assault. I'm told there is a history of discrediting these because the "slut normalization" thing is top priority and these stories get inconveniently in the way of spreading this ideology.
I got roped into attending last year's Saturday Slutcon party because so many local and out-of-town friends were there (to echo sentiments @tautologer expressed about "slut events becoming central to the larger scenes). Mostly I hung out with people I knew and that was great. But in the course of my 3-ish hours there, there were 2 times my "no" was not accepted by a man I didn't know, and I was physically pushing a huge guy off of me who was rubbing his penis on me, who continued to do it despite my physical force against him, and after I finally wriggled away from him, told him I wanted to dance alone etc., he came back and did it again.
This was scary and bad, but it didn't even cross my mind to report this because one of the other people who didn't accept my "no" earlier in the night was the bartender (an officially sanctioned authority at the event), and I knew the event was organized exclusively by women into CNC (who are vocal about how rapey behavior turns them on), so I figured this sort of thing would just get me laughed at. And anyway, I heard there were a lot of other incidents like it. Later though, someone encouraged me to report this story to the organizers, and despite my embarrassment I did, so *they know* that this and other incidents happened. This is why they cut the Saturday night party this year and created a larger training program for the flirt girls - *because* of things like this last year. Yet the narrative bein…

People who haven't been to Slutcon are saying "it's just group therapy," "it's just innocent flirting." But the environment is much like a sex party in that many people are nude, there is making out and sex acts happening out in the open. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect that every nerdy girl who likes rationalist bloggers or is into EA/AI safety should automatically be comfortable with this! That if she's not, there's something wrong with her, we don't want her in our scenes, etc.
Not to mention, it's explictly an event *for men*, where men are the clients and the "flirt girls" are the product. Last year I overheard an exchange where a man felt "led on" by a flirt girl and was trying to get her punished/kicked out. (A dynamic that seems inevitable in this context!)
Anyway- it does sound like they've upped their consent education a lot this year, are more organized, and that's good! As I've told my friends who are attending: I hope they have fun!
I heard several accounts last year of women who had no problems and really enjoyed the event. That's great!
Just... can we live in reality about this? There are real reasons why male-female sexual dynamics are tricky.
Encouraging autistic men who can't yet read body language to go around asking to see womens' boobs is maybe a bit ill-advised. Maybe not everyone should be/identify as a slut; maybe it's not for everyone.
And yeah, filtering the Bay Area Al safety scene down to only women who are super comfy with this eliminates *most* women - including many of the really smart, nerdy, weird women who've been in the larger scenes for years. What a loss for humanity.
I absolutely understand why people with a minority sexuality would want to create belonging, would want to create spaces for people like themselves. But why do it like this/at this cost?

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Dr. Merritt Rae Turetsky @queenofpeat.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I am a mom and scientist begging everyone to look closer at the muck. We’ve been conditioned to see wetlands as wastelands. But three decades of research, I see a fiercely defiant wilderness. The boreal mire is a dynamic carbon-trapping vault that in some places has outlasted ice ages. 1/

A woman scientist - me! - standing over the boreal forest in interior Alaska.

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M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Legacy of Slavery - My family and Bristol

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Alisdair Calder McGregor @acmcgregor.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Americans stop talking about the UK like it's a desert without food options, Challenge Level: Impossible

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

a lot of people act like there's a trade being offered where we give up trans athletes in sports and in exchange fascism is defeated forever

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 21/09/2026

The most perfect, and easiest, crime

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Kevin Marks @kevinmarks.com · 13/02/2024

Also

Screenshot of 2 tweets by Chris Marks:
Steven Pinker's books are like "people say that life is unjust and intolerable under neoliberal capitalism. But in fact, mean global consumption of fruit-by-the-foot is up 300x when compared to our 19th century counterparts"

But fruit by the foot didn't exist in the 1800s?

Steven Pinker: Not as we currently think of it, no. But if you consider fruit that had dropped from trees and was literally by people's feet, the picture starts to become much clearer

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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 20/09/2026

We have gotten three mandatory Birth of a Nations per year every year since 9/11 what the hell are you taking about

The poster for Daily Wire Run Hide Fight: Infidels, a film in which Jonathan Majors portrays a thinly veiled surrogate to Ben Shapiro, who of course fantasizes about being a large Black marine. He is a speaker at a colleges & has to kill Muslims

The poster for Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante in which Uwe Boll plays a white American immigrant in Europe that is enacting vigilante justice on immigrants for being brown

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Just gonna light this bag of dogshit on fire and walk away from the doorstep, but the people in media I hear saying AI has made them "more productive" appear to be producing less than ever, and worse things than ever. I wonder if they can even tell.

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Patrick Cosmos @veryimportant.lawyer · 20/09/2026

Not really sure where a bunch of liberals got the idea that they can’t win without throwing trans people in the garbage, but they’re stupid and cruel and wrong. If you want a human sacrifice so damned bad put gavin newsom in the wicker man

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Paul F. Tompkins @pftompkins.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It’s very simple and it’s been said over and over but I guess it needs saying continuously: if you deem one group too small to have equal rights you are enabling fascism, not fighting it. The people saying Dems are GREAT on trans rights are not paying attention and/or saying stuff like this.

Nichole Hiltz
The Democrats defend the Kennedy Center but not trans people.
A building.

@treewarrior.bsky....
maybe because defending everything about a super small minority of the population is not worth losing to fascists

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Black Aziz Anansi @blackazizanansi.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026

Hey all, Im looking for any academics who may be able to help someone from Gaza get enrolled in a European University. Please let me know if you can help or if you know of anyone who could help.

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

New — I wrote about this weird thing where people within the Republican party keep being exposed as Nazis and the party then tries to claim each one is an aberration. The facts, as I lay out here, indicate otherwise:

thehandbasket.co

Republicans don’t have a Nazi problem—they are the Nazi problem

A spate of recent revelations have shown the ideologies and their adherents are one and the same.

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Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A lot of people seem to take it as a fact that the private sector has secret efficiency magic the public sector doesn't have. It doesn't. It pays workers less and charges more for the same service. That's like 99% of private sector "efficiency." And everyone's worse off, except shareholders.

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

As someone with a degree in philosophy, who spent a whole bunch of time focusing on ethics: the effective altruists and "rationalists" are completely full of shit. Utterly. Without exception. Yes, including Singer.

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Emily L. Hauser (she/her) ❌👑 @emilylhauser.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I usually don't say stuff like this but I'm having a lot of feelings about the noise around Macklemore/Sheeran, most stemming from decades of watching the American people & govt not giving a shit for Palestine or the Palestinian people. I wish y'all had gotten this exercised before Oct 8, 2023.

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ed Sheeran represents the worst of Irish people. Those of us who want to pretend that: - Irish history began with the economic recovery of the 1990s; - generations of struggle and genocide leave no lasting marks; - we're plastic fucking Paddies, all smiles and no depth; 1/2

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Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Mitch McConnell disappeared for three months & kept his full salary. Disabled people are forced to prove they’re “still disabled” just to remain in legislated poverty. Folks on SNAP must re-apply and prove they’re “still poor”. Republican Senators don’t even have to prove they’re alive.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 10/09/2026

this is, I think, one of the inherent problems with LLMs using natural language interfaces: they are a statistical tool *that looks like* a logical tool statistical approaches can be a useful way to find related information! BUT for it to be useful you have to *know that's what it's doing*

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Rex Huppke @rexhuppke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is spectacular, folks. We live in a moment in American history when the president and his administration are so racist and dumb that a toy company has to put out a statement saying: "OUR GIANT ROBOT THAT TURNS INTO A TRUCK DENOUNCES RACISM AND HAS NO CONNECTION TO THE CURRENT PRESIDENT."

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The US has had concentration camps for a roughly decade now. Anyone arguing against this either doesn't know what a concentration camp is (at best: confusing them with death camps), or is actively denying reality for various reasons.

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Sooz Kempner @soozuk.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Every time an interviewer has a Reform candidate in front of them who insists they need to legislate against trans women to "protect women and girls" they should bring up the woman who was beaten for protesting at conference. Otherwise they're just shit journalists, bad their jobs.

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Leena 🌵 @leena.reuben.games · 07/09/2026

if people were genuinely interested in preparing children for an “inevitable future” they’d be stopping global warming and solidifying concrete pathways to homeownership, not teaching kids how to play with Claude The Guessing Toy

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I watched this thinking "why tf does this feel like a knock-off Rocky Horror song" (given the aesthetic and everything else): turns out that Richard O'Brien also wrote this.

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Daniel Ahmad @zhugeex.com · 01/09/2026

Obviously Milo is still being insincere here, but it does showcase two eternal truths: 1. Conservatives are unable to understand or believe that the terrible things they advocate for may impact them. 2. Only when the terrible thing happens to them or a loved one can they understand it's bad.

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Your Internet Friend Tom Tomorrow @tomtomorrow.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

just saw one of the never-trumpers making a reasonable point and I still feel like, thanks buddy for fucking laying the groundwork for this horrible reality. thanks for supporting the republican party of the iraq war and the nascent surveillance state. here we are! thanks to you, pal.

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Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I would object to LLMs even if they weren't planet destroying plagiarism-based bullshit engines because students need to learn core skills and how to do the work themselves. Also, they are planet destroying plagiarism-based bullshit engines that give answer-shaped nonsense.

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Anyone streaming a HP game is a piece of shit. Doing so renders any "I support trans folk" statement as vapid, superficial, and false: "support" is an action, not merely a statement and you can't support a group while actively materially supporting those who seek to destroy that group.

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herenowandthere.bsky.social @herenowandthere.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

will never ever not be insane to me that we are actively starving/destroying Cuba bc supposedly an active threat while we run a concentration camp on the island itself

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Joel Morris @gralefrit.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

That story that a humanoid robot at the Droid Olympics covered 100m faster than Usain Bolt would also be true if they’d fired it from a fucking cannon.

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Alistair Barrie @alistairbarrie.com · 25/08/2026

Absolutely astonishing to discover scientists have also built a robot that can fly faster than a bird. It’s called an ‘aeroplane’ and may well have some commercial potential.

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Brian Lynchehaun @blynchehaun.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

"We need to capitulate to the asshole, because he will immediately stop when we do" is truly a Conservative take.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 22/08/2026

Friends, have you seen the investigation on UK students hiring Kenyans to write their papers & dissertations? I assume it wasn't cross Atlantic news as the media only seems to be interested in laundering eugenics to the mainstream. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

theguardian.com

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students

Highly educated Kenyans working for essay mills ghostwrite academic work that students pass off as their own

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I am *extremely insistently* tapping the sign to remind you all to support independent, worker run, billionaire free news how and where you are able to

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TheBossRoss 🧶 @thebossross.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

This must be the third video of wonderful voices singing global scales I have seen, and each is mesmerising and has taught me things I didn't know. Such as: That these scales exist and how they, the bare backbone of tunes, reflect and unlock whole world regions' music. This is amazing.

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Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 18/08/2026

Another way of rephrasing the paradox of tolerance is that we can't have an agreement to disagree if the disagreement is over whether one side is free to continue existing or participating in things like society and civil disagreements without being exiled or discriminated against.

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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

White people, DO NOT DO THIS! Don't take the names of real human beings who risked their lives to say one of you is just like them! Especially if they're Black or any other marginalized group! It's racist and ignorant. Who can be a good activist? Regular folks can be! No stolen valor needed.

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Zoë “Baddie Proctor” Quinn @unburntwitch.com · 12/08/2026

also what happens to union voice actors who literally fought to not have their performances used for training data?

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Rose Schmits @roseschmits.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Every actor justifying their role in harry potter

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💜 Cyn ✨ @obicynkenobi.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The lady quoted in this news article should be thrown in the bin

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Andrew Hickey @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 09/08/2026

Anyway, shouty white men in the 70s saying the Queen leads a "fascist regime" and "ain't no human being" = good, shouty Black men saying "fuck the King and his paedo brother" in the 2020s, bad. To the exact same people.

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