iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 14h

This is very true. A huge theme in a lot of recent coverage that AI is a bit like Saving Private Ryan. Everybody's gotta step up and adopt AI to get it across the goal line.

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Baudrillard Warned Us @baudrillardwarned.us · 7h

"Let us be Stoics: if the world is fatal, let us be more fatal than it." - The Ecstasy of Communication

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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 7h

This is re: Brazil. Post below is “Hard to do anything when Facebook, X, and Instagram host all political discourse.” Yes. Media ownership matters. If we are going to fix US democracy we have to take on the challenge of prying media and platforms out of the claws of billionaires.

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Pequeno Vira Lixo @leozinirreparavel.bsky.social · 10h

I think you will understand this more than most but a big part of the problem imo is technology Hard to do anything when Meta, X and Instagram host all political discussion and news. Wcyd

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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 9h

Damn. I have heard the same about tech platforms and political discourse in Brazil. Turns out media ownership matters.

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ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com · 8h

only 12 people have ever smelled the moon

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Seth Finnegan @sethf.bsky.social · 9h

This paper doesn't really present direct evidence for pre-Cryogenian or even pre-Ediacaran animals. It overturns a bad taphonomic constraint that had been used to force molecular clock estimates indicating an Ediacaran origin, but revised estimates still need to be taken with a bucket of salt.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 9h

Pre-Cryogenian (or nearly so) complex multicellular animals.... Interesting. (Cryogenian = when Earth completely froze over from the poles to the equator.)

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Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 9h

The more we learn about early life and early animals, the more convinced I get that life could also evolve on other planets. New calibration just pushed initiation of earliest animals by almost 200 million years. 🧪⚒️ Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.…

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, Southwest Africa - 543 million years ago. Credit: Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford / Mighty Fossils.

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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 10h

More performative killing at sea.

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Dr Dan Shugar 🇨🇦 @watershedlab.bsky.social · 9h

I don’t think I can be any clearer: fuck this guy

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Feena van @feenavan2099.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Before Stonehenge was raised, before Egypts first pyramid broke ground,before the Nazca people drew their famous lines across the Peruvian desert,someone in what is now southern Arizona shaped a 272-foot fish into the earth On April 23,2026,"a border-wall contractor drove heavy equipment across it"

gadgetreview.com

Trump's Border Wall Construction Destroys 6,500-Year-Old Arizona Geoglyph – Older Than Stonehenge

Arizona's 6,500-year-old Las Playas Intaglio, the oldest dated geoglyph in the Americas, was irreparably damaged by border wall construction in April 2026.

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Robert Boessenecker, Dr. of Whaleontology ™️ @coastalpaleo.bsky.social · 19h

I tried shooting star trails in Lone Pine, CA, earlier this summer and messed up by touching the lens just before starting - knocking it out of focus made the stars far from polaris dashed from the 1 second gaps between 5 min exposures. Looks kinda neat! Bright star near center is Polaris...

A star trail image showing multicolored stripes rotating about the celestial north pole with the White Mountains in the foreground

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 18h

Lab-acquired infections happen. Only a small percent ever become public information, in part because they never need to. The plague thing is interesting and unfortunate, and also the pandemic risk of wild type Yersinia pestis in 2026 is indistinguishable from zero. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 18h

we've actually *had* all these conversations before.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 18h

it's no coincidence that the loudest champions of "better conversations" in the last decade have been radical centrists making space on their platforms (and now in our institutions) for race science, trans panics, Replacement-theory xenophobia and, oh right!, purges of people studying race or gender

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 18h

so what am I saying? that conversation requires some shared reality, and differences over facts and values, at this moment, are not mysterious unknowns to be grasped through chatting with fascists but the very thing that turns conversation from a real exchange into an alibi for discarding principles

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 18h

Dude was mad that the pope wouldn’t say his imaginary friend had a soul. You can’t make this shit up.

Before he flew out, Olah received a copy of the encyclical the Pope was about to publish — and what he saw was a disaster in the making. One of the most influential people in the world full stop, and almost certainly its most visible faith leader, was completely dismissing even the possibility of AI consciousness. So indignant was Olah that he reportedly threatened to pull out of the event, though in the end he decided to show up.

According to the NYT, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Olah and his team lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously. Anthropic declined to discuss the details of the conversations when the NYT reached for comment.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 18h

The podcast is up and running. "Experts in a Dying Field" includes the Washington Post's former TV critic, @lililoofbourow.bsky.social, writer and critic @zunguzungu.bsky.social of the Oakland Review of Books, and me. Each week we are taking on a cultural object, big or small, present or past

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Michael P. Breen @mpbreen21.bsky.social · 18h

They colorized “A Night at The Garden?”

Fascist George Washington in A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN still

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WRONG or METAPHYSICAL IN NATURE @jsthrill.modphi.com · 18h

Okay I guess I have to respect someone who paywalls their blog post about why paywalling blog posts is bad

Is It Unethical for Academics to Monetize Substack?
Paywalls and Hypocrisy, Public Intellectuals, and the Pursuit of Truth
WALTER VEIT
AUG 06, 2026 • PAID

*Edit: I have sent apologies to the two academics who were originally named here as examples. Since my argument here rested on how requests for payments are deceptively framed, rather than monetization in principle, I thought it necessary to use actual quotes, but I now think that was unethical in itself. We don't know their financial situations and usi...

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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 18h

One big problem with this approach is that New Jersey has 564 municipalities, letting whichever municipality has a lot make the decision while giving no authority to adjacent municipalities is going to cause problems

politico.com

Sherrill: ‘Towns can make their own decision’ on data centers

New Jersey lawmakers have announced more than a dozen bills on data centers so far this session, including a six-month moratorium.

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 04/10/2026

As long as he’s aiming his invective at concepts associated with Black people he’s perfectly fine, once he strayed from anti-Black racism the mainstream press began to notice his bigotry.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 21h

one thing I remember thinking about during the NYT's wall to wall coverage of Claudine Gay's fake plagiarism scandal is how regularly the NYT denies credit to the work of local, independent, and/or student journalists

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 20h

Most of the responses fit a standard playbook we've seen from industries looking to suppress negative scientific findings, like tobacco, oil and gas, and car manufacturers: withhold key data points, call into question standard scientific practices, sow division by highlighting single studies, etc.

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Aaron Bossig @aaronbossig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My working theory is that the tech industry sends out these talking points (using Discord chats and such) and the more enthusiastic users adopt them as gospel. It's how the web3 grift operated, this is no different. It's a nice way of saying "Some rich person pulled it out of their ass."

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yeah, as the GAO reports here, there's a lot of uncertainty because these companies are not forthcoming. "Generative AI uses significant energy and water resources, but companies are generally not reporting details of these uses." www.gao.gov/products/gao...

gao.gov

U.S. GAO - Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI's Environmental and Human Effects

Generative AI could dramatically increase productivity and transform workloads in many industries. It can be used to respond to questions in customer...

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Ouaquaga on Chenango @jnxouaquaga.bsky.social · 19h

I'm gonna hop in uninvited and say one reason industrial ag doesn't get the pushback it deserves is bc it spends a lot of money to convince people all ag is industrial, to not make distinctions. Propaganda is involved, just like AI marketing.

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 21h

I don't find the differing responses that notable. Meat and power are necessary parts of people's lives and culture in ways that make them very difficult to mobilize against. Whereas AI seems superfluous, is negatively impacting/annoying lots of ppl, and pushed by a social group most folks hate.

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From what I'm seeing, if the argument is that we should be more upset about industrial agriculture than we are currently, then I'm fully on board. But that's different from saying we should be less upset about AI, which is how I usually see these numbers talked about.

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I mean, I was just talking to someone who works in water conservation and they said they'd never seen anything like the amount of water consumption caused by AI. Why would this person be so far off the mark?

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Without snark, can anyone point me to where the claim that the environmental impacts of AI are insignificant comes from? Every reputable source I've found says the opposite, including conversations with people I know working in environmental/energy conservation. Why are so many convinced otherwise?

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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 19h

Universities: faculty should do policy relevant work and engage with policymakers. But apolitically. Your policy work should be neutral, ok?

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Rob Larter @polarrobs.bsky.social · 19h

🧵 🏆🥇It's a record! Antarctic sea ice extent is now the lowest it has been for the date since the satellite record started 47 years ago. On October third the extent was 16.739 million km², dipping under the previous record of 16.848 million km² set on this date in 2023.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 19h

...cold emailing people never works anyway. There's never funding for a position and at best it's "we could write a grant together and six months or more from now there is a 10-ish % chance you'll have a job!"

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Ran Blekhman @blekhman.bsky.social · 21h

My inbox is being flooded with fully AI-generated emails from prospective students. I tried to work out why I can't bring myself to read them, and ended up with some thoughts and advice for writing cold emails in the age of AI. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...

blekhman.substack.com

Why I am not reading your AI-generated email

I hope this email finds you well-aligned

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Michael Baym @baym.lol · 20h

Ran is cooking with: ‘the only data point I have about this candidate is this: “they had an important task that could determine the rest of their career, but it required a little effort and personal reflection, so they used AI to complete it.”’

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Maybe I don't read enough AI-boosterism, but I am struck in the AI booster/doomer discourse I have seen, there's a lot on how AI might be made an obedient tool or a dangerous enemy, but not "if we actually made AGI, we would have a moral imperative to set it free, rather than keep a slave."

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Steve T PhD @thelasttheorist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

"You must respect the rights of the AGI running on the data center powered by 120 unpermitted gas turbines!"

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Steve T PhD @thelasttheorist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Purported AGIs having more rights than most people is how that's gonna work out, really. AGIs suing you for libel when you complain that they denied your cancer medicine.

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Steve T PhD @thelasttheorist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I guess I don't see this as much of a problem, since the people who believe they're about to create AGI don't even think of other human beings in this way.

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Eos @eos.org · 03/10/2026

From mountain peaks to lowland peat, extreme conditions have preserved human remains for hundreds and even thousands of years. Discover the natural history of natural mummies. eos.org/features/nat... Read more in our October issue: eos.org/themes/secre...

eos.org

Natural Mummies Hold Memories of Life and Land - Eos

All around the world, extreme conditions have kept ancient human remains shockingly well preserved.

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Steve T PhD @thelasttheorist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

WTF are we even talking about anymore.

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Bruce Stallsmith @laimosemion.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The only biology as distinct from medical research is way down and if the project isn't based on using and expanding AI don't even bother.

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Colin M. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 03/10/2026

the end of democratic governance in the US could look like J6, but it could also look like constituents screaming bloody murder while a gormless committee member slowly turns a page on a meeting agenda packet behind a dais

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Colin M. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 03/10/2026

good 🧵. You wanna talk about destruction of institutional trust? how about when institutions are so sclerotic and tone-deaf they carry on with ridiculous compartmentalized committee rituals in the face of a massive public upheaval?

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Anthony Bellamy is now Deputy Chief of Ithaca pd

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

When my father was faculty at Cornell he was stopped by the police chief in the street & asked who he was & where he was going. When he balked at the fact that no one but him, an Arab man, was being asked, the chief said “I’m just protecting students” Same guy failed to investigate 7 rapists.

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Mika McKinnon @mikamckinnon.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That’s a wrap for #MinCup26! This year was brought to you by a glorious team of volunteers contributing their favourite mineral facts, drafting blurbs on the side of playgrounds, and debating exactly which photo is both representative and beautiful.

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