iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Bram Spookmund

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 05/10/2026

It's okay to learn from everything, and train on everything. That's everyone's birthright, and we shouldn't apologize for it. Prohibitions on copying were a late invention, and a narrowly tailored one. They do not express a general ethical law that all information ought to be priced and paid for.

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Reposted by Bram Spookmund

Wingsrising @wingsrising.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

At my first faculty job the library did a little seminar on copyright violations and tried to make it personal by saying, "How would you feel if other people posted PDFs of your papers in their online course shells for their students to read for free, and we were like, "That would be awesome!"

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Reposted by Bram Spookmund

Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 19h

Ironically, I think it's a kind of commodity fetishisation - blaming AI as the cause elides the labour relations underpinning the tech and how it's used. Change the relations and we change the outcomes. If we fight the symptoms, then the cause (unequal labour/capital relations) may just get worse.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 20h

Drives me nuts, so many left leaning folks see AI disrupting capitalist labour relations, and they go all in on anti-AI - reject labour saving technology, strengthen copyright, fight for our right to do wage labour! It's a defense of free market capitalism in the name of socialism.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Bus Slop"? Even the ding dang buses got AI in em now smh

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I'm afraid they're doing the mash, sir. Yes, sir. That's the one.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Sleeping like this today. Alright mate.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Palate cleanser, meet my hand crafted golems. I think it's important to sometimes do dumb things that you're bad at.

Handmade clay figurines, they are not good.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Calling it the Eliza effect says nothing to prove or disprove any belief. Congrats, you categorised a human tendency, gave it a name. Doesn't mean my computer doesn't work.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

People don't choose to do bad things, people are forced to do bad things by pain and trauma. Someone does a bad thing? Proves they're a victim. You hold them accountable? You're adding to their pain. It's your fault they do bad things. Obviously, that's all nonsense - but common "logic", I think.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Logos golems... Lolems... LoLeMs... Hm.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Maybe not great (*huge* understatement) that Trump is doing algorithmically recommended crimes, but let's be real, this horror show was happening well before AI. Pinning awful decisions on AI use ironically elides personal responsibility of awful people's awful personal choices.

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Reposted by Bram Spookmund

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

philosophers should have simply *answered* the deepest and most intractable questions ever posed. instead they've chosen to fuck around. disappointing

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Is Facebook not a real website? Are Teslas not real cars? Yeah, these guys are evil, but even if they're superfluous to the actual products - let's say they 100% "bought or stole their way in" - the products exist and are real. You can argue they're social net negatives, they're still real!

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I cracked my skull open but there was no little guy in there. Not feeling so great. Can't think straight. He must've escaped.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I've seen people compare AI to Terry Pratchetts auditors, and there's something there - but Discworld had an AI, Hex. It used ants as neurotransmitters, no one fully understood how it worked, and it was sort of semi-sentient. Also, golems: robots with selfhood, whose brains were made of words.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It's crazy to me to think Anthropic are meeting the Pope and stuff as a cynical marketing ploy. That they really believe in this stuff is pretty clear. Cynicism is not a useful rubric for understanding reality.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A guy I knew broke up with his girlfriend, said she made him feel like the world wasn't so bad and maybe everything was going to be okay. He had to dump her so he'd stay angry and motivated to do activism. When I see "you owe it to the victims to watch videos of atrocities" stuff I think of him.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Donated to the library. Better production quality than you might expect! I don't think we'll be including this one in the collection.

Booklet cover reads: "R by R POLITICIANS ARE FINISHED R by R"

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Reposted by Bram Spookmund

Thorne 🌸 @ens0.me · 30/09/2026

Thinking using technology to make life easier is evil is a reactionary belief no matter how left-wing you see yourself as

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"It looks like you're taking iced coffee to a job interview, would you like some help?"

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Common misconception. The *tower* isn't Big Ben. Big Ben is the *bell*. The tower is called Shrek's Adventure.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's framed as upbeat, life affirming, but echoes of "suffering builds character" here. It's really something how often this happens: the anti-AI position recapitulating tired ole' conservative tropes. Old wine in new wineskins.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Well, work can't have this back, obviously. It serves a higher purpose now.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The world ends all the time. Change is the only universal constant. Sometimes it sucks and hurts bad but it's also exciting and it's what makes it possible to keep going. If the world never ended we'd never get anywhere. It's good to grieve, but staying stuck in it sucks even worse.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Sad to watch my fellow 38 year olds age into close-minded reactionaries. Nothing is as good as it was in my day. The world's going to hell in a hand basket. My generation was the last to have a normal upbringing. (But leftishly, so we can pretend it's different than when boomers said it.)

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I used to play WoW and you'd sometimes see a forum post like: "When I was 15 I'd play WoW with my friends for hours. The future seemed bright and open. Now I have a full time job and I'm stressed all the time. My friends are all busy, I barely have time to play... Why has Blizzard done this to me?"

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

They claim my apple tree's dropping apples, but look at this data from only six months back: ZERO ripe apples! So something doesn't add up.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Oh yeah, Scarborough Fair, yeah, maybe. Depends if I - oh, yeah? Yeah, if I see her, I'll - uh huh. Uh huh, okay. Yeah? Oh, really? Okay. Look, can I - it kinda sounds like she doesn't wanna hear from you man.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Pfft, if AI produces an output, it's only because of how it works." Are outcomes only worthwhile when they arise spontaneously, without any underlying mechanism? No! Obviously a tool functions because of how it works? And many useful tools are useful without being necessary or essential!

Post reads: "If an LLM actually makes a novel discovery, it's because of the underlying ML model noticing patterns (that appear linguistically). But that could have been done without the LLM. There is no ghost in the LLM machine that is thinking about and solving problems."

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What might we call it, when a program completes a task in a way that wasn't specified? Did the program "fail"? No, it completed the task. Did the program "succeed"? Not in the way specified, no. So, "rogue" describes it perfectly - or maybe even "creative"!

Post reads: "4a. This isn't rogue. It is a model following the instructions given to it. The genie isn't to blame for fulfilling a wish in a way you don't specify."

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Packed and ready for the big move.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Sometimes I remember Davos in A Clash of Kings, when he learns about the ancient hero Azor Ahai, who forged the Sword of Heroes by heroically stabbing his beloved thru the heart, and Davos thinks "jfc glad I'm not a hero" As they say, "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane".

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

They won't tell you this, but even two fell swoops is pretty good.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Cows holding signs "MOR" "AY" "AI"

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Using a pillow as a pillow, she's just like people.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Nolan's Batman trilogy is so good, the central message is like... the system is corrupt, but we'd be worse off without it, so it's evil to destroy it, but it's too restrictive, so to make it work we need to let one guy break its rules, to preserve it, because it doesn't work, because we need it.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

When you drop a lemon seed you should be allowed to leave it on the floor. What, I'm supposed to pick that up? I don't have all day.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is driving me nuts. Even if bots were sentient, it's still OpenAI responsible for what their bots did. So what's it matter? How about this: "Eurostar train injures six in derailment". Are trains sentient? No. Is the headline misleading? No. Will Eurostar be investigated? Yes.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

When I first played Spore, which was five games in a trenchcoat, I was blown away. Top-down to first person to a little RTS, then galactic trade and exploration? Simplistic, sure, but I remember thinking wow, all games are gonna be like this in the future! Then I never saw another game like it.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Does a thinking being need to be embodied before it can truly be considered conscious? There's only one way to find out: put Claude in a purple gorilla, or maybe some kind of googly eye paper clip.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Wrapping my books to ship across the seven seas. Having far too much fun, it's like packing little presents for my future self. Yes, I've labelled them individually, yes I'm a madman, I'm a librarian, okay.

Stacks of books individually wrapped in butchers paper.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

AI "going rogue" seems like a reasonable way to phrase it. Also, if your rogue AIs keep doing crimes, you're responsible. I don't see a contradiction.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

With AI, it's very important to remember, complex systems can never give rise to unintended or unexpected emergent properties. Everything a technology does is entirely caused by whoever created it, with full and perfect foreknowledge. Do NOT let them fool you.

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Has anyone ever dodged legal accountability based on the language choices of someone's Substack? (No.)

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Bram Spookmund @brambrockmund.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Avoid anthropomorphising language. Do not call the murderborgs "evil". Rather, say "the thrice-damned fools who loosed these mechanical horrors on our world imbibed too deeply of the emptiness between the stars"

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