iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

There are good reasons why people don’t put me in positions to deal with these sorts of issues, but if I had to solve this problem, I’d probably try to build this as a new school in partnership with UM and/or FIU, rather than create a new, unneeded university from scratch

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Or maybe they do need new universities in Florida because the De Santis is working so hard to destroy the public universities there? Even so — Miami already has the state’s top private research university

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If you’re going to build new university campuses, maybe they should be somewhere where there aren’t already a lot of universities?

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If $2B were sold and placed in the endowment, that’d translate into $100M/yr — a nice operating budget for a new school, to be sure, maybe even enough to have a nice building in Pittsburgh for the school. But if the real estate just has to sit there? What are you going to do with that?

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 15h

Like, why? Is there a need for a CMU campus in Miami? And if the campus is supposed to be built on the real estate, where is the capital and operating budget for this entirely new campus coming from?

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Have been listening to a whole bunch of climate week panels and in so many of them, people word sentences in chatbot-structure. "It's not X, it's Y", weirdly punctuated sentences. It is SO SO WEIRD once you notice it

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 30/09/2026

America.gov seems to be a fairly unbiased compressed image of gov’t documents right now. But, of course, if people become used to interfacing with the government through a single easy portal, it becomes easy to impose ideological filters. (Try chatting about politically sensitive topics with z.ai)

america.gov

America.gov

Find answers from official government sources and clear next steps for the services you need with America.gov.

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Jesus this is bleak. Just boilerplate “we, the undersigned CEOs, promise to try really really hard to only make good artificial super intelligences. We’ve got this. We promise.”

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 29/09/2026

However, climate change and global warming are both real (and not identical) phenomena, just like LLMs, ML and expert systems. Neither artificial intelligence nor super intelligence are

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 29/09/2026

I am NOT going to write a NSF proposal related to “Super Intelligence for Geosciences.”

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 29/09/2026

“Artificial intelligence” was a marketing term from the start. Maybe the rest of us can just start calling them “large language models,” “machine learning (or statistical) models”, or “expert systems”, as appropriate.

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026

Trump says Democratic concerns about AI are a hoax like global warming 🥴

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 26/09/2026

Microsoft's data center subcontractor in New Jersey illegally runs a bunch of gas "backup" generators on site, figuring they won't get caught or will just eat the wrist-slap fines if they do. Regulatory enforcement is so bad that a third party had to take drone images to get the state to act.

theguardian.com

New Jersey datacenter fined $1.1m after visual investigation showed dozens of unpermitted generators

State regulator’s record fine for DataOne facility in Vineland follows Floodlight investigation with the Guardian

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Michael E. Mann @michaelemann.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Yes--we found an increase in the intensity of the strongest storms (but not in the average intensity) using ERA obs and peak sustained winds. My graduate student Kenzie Weaver has examined this in more detail (comparing multiple datasets, metrics, etc) in a paper that is currently in revision.

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Valérie Masson-Delmotte @valmasdel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Very relevant for multiple contexts!

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Also from the STAP report:

STAP Assessment Statement on ETCs: In summary, there is very high confidence that the precipitation
rate of nor’easters is increasing, but limited evidence for long-term trends in ETC frequency, intensity,
and trajectory.

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Here’s the punchline on nor’easters (called ETCs, extratropical cyclones, in the quote) from the 2025 NJ Science & Technical Advisory Panel assessment

Regarding ETCs, future projections of ETCs show increases in precipitation (Seneviratne et al., 2021). In
addition, some studies suggest northward and eastward shifts in tracks of ETCs (Seneviratne et al., 2021;
Zappa et al., 2013). Frequency and intensity changes under future climate scenarios are ambiguous due to
low model resolution and the wide breadth of study areas (Priestley & Catto, 2022). However, a recent
study of the impacts of climate change on the intensity of explosive cyclones (a rapid deepening and
intensification of ETCs) in the North Atlantic has found warming scenarios will create more intense
atmospheric rivers that are also associated with explosive cyclones deepening earlier and for longer
periods of time: this is expected to result in potentially more hazardous future storms (Lopez-Marti et al.,
2025). In addition, so-called “pseudo-global warming” experiments, in which the effects of climate change
are simulated by imposing large-scale changes in environmental conditions (e.g., sea surface
temperatures, vertical temperature profiles), indicate enhanced ETC activity over the North Atlantic and
offshore of the US east coast (Michaelis et al., 2017). In another pseudo-global warming study, Willison et
al. (2015) found that horizontal resolution greater than what is used in most current climate models
results in an amplified storm track response.

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Whether the wind intensity or tracks of nor’easters have changed is less well established, though recent work by @michaelemann.bsky.social’s group at Penn provides some evidence for a historical increase in wind speed

pnas.org

PNAS

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tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov

Eyeballing NOAA data, it looks to me like the highest water level yet reached at the Atlantic City gauge is about a 1-in-2 year event (about 50% chance per year), about 5 times more likely due to sea level rise than it would have been 60 years ago

Extreme Water Levels - Atlantic City, NJ - NOAA Tides & Currents

Extreme Storm Tides, a map of coastal exceedance probability levels

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The literature about changes in nor’easters due to climate change is clear about two things: 1) more intense precipitation due to a warmer atmosphere, and 2) more extensive coastal flooding due to higher sea levels

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

Send this to every university President in the country.

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To be clear, the projected heat deaths are heavily concentrated in the Global South, particularly the Sahel, South and SE Asia, and Brazil. While all governments should leverage El Niño seasonal forecasts for interagency planning, in Ireland CIL’s forecasts are a foreign affairs matter

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 25/09/2026

Drives home that most of the value most people want out of LLMs doesn’t actually need a trillion dollars of data centers — Siri is a lot easier for a normal person to use than ollama

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Reposted by Bob Kopp

New Yorkers, a storm is arriving today. Don't travel if you don't have to. Never drive or walk through floodwater. Call 911 if you are in danger, and report nonemergency issues to 311. Look out for one another and stay safe.

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Apparently some Siri web searches go to an anonymized, privacy-filtered version of Gemini on Private Cloud Compute, so it’s not all on device as I thought - but why would I ever then use Google?

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Would be funny if 1) Google search becoming nearly unusable without a LLM interface and 2) people realizing their phone’s language model can basically replace Google search AI without compromising privacy catalyzed the popping of the bubble

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