iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I had forgotten about this Jack Handey joke but it is obviously the germ from which the GLOAT (Greatest Lede of All Time) evolved.

Irish times: Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories.
More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Copyright strikes again. Went to check this 2019 kickstarter to digitally fix The Departed bc: "the movie has one giant glaring flaw. In the last shot, Scorsese has an actual rat crawl across the screen. The rat symbolizes rats." We can't have nice things, chapter 237.

Kickstarter screenshot: text is

Digitally Erase the Rat From the End of The Departed (Suspended) is the subject of an intellectual property dispute and is currently unavailable.
View copyright notification

Final shot of the departed: the Massachusetts state house dome with an actual rat in front.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Google’s purchase of Spirit airways internal data is extremely interesting, and so is the way it intersects with the claims of unions that *haven’t* gone belly up really raises questions about alternative governance… www.forbes.com/sites/suzann...

forbes.com

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JP Ahonen 🇪🇺 @jpahonen.eurosky.social · 11/08/2026

I think this graph is perhaps the most important to consider when trying to understand the failures of our energy policies.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Can anyone recommend reading about how de-Orbanization is going in Hungary?

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Gerrymandering makes nicely named legislative districts harder. Makes me wonder—are there egregious examples of gerrymandering at the city ward level? Or do municipalities always have sane-looking wards?

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Wow Deutsche bank “apex of civilizational ambition oftentimes expressed in steel and fire” gives pat buchanan’s 1992 convention speech a run for its money as “better in the original German”

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

"My favorite founding father is Thomas Paine" is an opinion roughly equivalent to "my favorite ice cream flavor is cocaine."

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

arxiv.org is finally graduating from Cornell. TIL it has almost the *exact same* origin story as the web -- a little project on a NeXT workstation in a giant non-university lab (CERN 1990 for the web, Los Alamos 1991 for arxiv). news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

In 1991, arXiv was an email-based service housed at Ginsparg’s Los Alamos lab workstation, on a cluttered desk using a NeXTstation (forerunner to Apple’s MacIntosh). It was never meant to be a fixture for science dissemination and discovery.

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David Ramos @imagineterrain.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Time is a flat circle.

A wetland in front of the new Lincoln Memorial, 1917. (National Photo Company collection, via the Library of Congress.)

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Alexander Doria @dorialexander.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Doing the most responsible thing an European AI labs can do after this weekend: shipping a blogpost. Why the EU can't into AI, how it's not about compute, but actual skill issue and failing for years to build an actual training ecosystem. pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

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Robin James @robinjames.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Saw that report on the supposed politicization of humanities & social science scholarship, ppl would be well served by reading John McCumber's account of what happened to US academic philosophy under McCarthyism, so much chimes w that today: nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014607...

nupress.northwestern.edu

Time in the Ditch - Northwestern University Press

In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political p...

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Carl Sagan's books-as-seed metaphor shows what a milquetoast ninny he was compared to John Milton. "I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

i’ve only seen one brief clip of Jonathan Haidt’s NYU commencement speech but it’s him saying purple is his favorite color and then immediately mispronouncing “2026”

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Fresh torment nexus unlocked! 1. Job seeker spams a list of AI companies with resume/ llm-written cover letter. 2. The AI companies all have e-mail auto-reply bots that start responding to chain. 3. Classic reply-all e-mail chain with a twist: nobody on it cares that it keeps going!

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Somehow that got posted without alt text.

It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together on a doorstep; and the atheist said, “It is raining.” To which the man replied, “What is raining?” Now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase, “il pleut,” clings round the phrase, “il faut.” In English it is generally represented by the passive mood in grammar, and the Eugenists and their like deal especially in it; they are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Lady Macbeth said, “Give me the daggers; I’ll let his bowels out.” The Eugenist would say, “In such cases the bowels should, etc.” But when the Eugenists say, “Conditions must be altered” or “Ancestry should be investigated,” or what not, it seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it, whatever else they may mean. The question remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? Who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist’s verb?

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

More garden of heroes reporting! Since last I indulged my obsession with this story, they've abandoned the idea this would be in North Dakota and moved it to Washington DC. Completely predictably it's over budget and behind schedule... www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/u...

nytimes.com

Trump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

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Benjamin McKean @blmckean.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Extremely funny that Bard’s trustees have called for “an orderly transition,” like Botstein has been deposed by a color revolution

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I’m struggling to remember what Richard Dawkins is actually famous for—at first I thought he was the racist guy who stole the double helix, but no, James Watson. The entomologist positivist? Nope EO Wilson. Now struggling with the idea the word “meme” somehow explains why I’m supposed to know him?

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

One of those "essays I'll write one day" is that a great many people forget that Du Bois really was a PhD economist in-all-but-title and thought with economist brain sometimes. The much discussed "psychic wage of whiteness" thesis from Black Reconstruction really just is classic economist reasoning.

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Robert Kelchen @robertkelchen.com · 22/04/2026

Here's an important read for today: policymakers are encouraging students to learn trades that are costly to teach, but community colleges and apprenticeships don't have the capacity to meet demand. This sends students to the more expensive for-profit sector, where they take on debt.

wsj.com

They Chose Careers in the Trades and Still Wound Up With Debt

As community colleges and union apprenticeships fill up, more students are turning to pricier training options for blue-collar careers.

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 15/04/2026

They tried so hard to make this headline shorter but there just wasn’t a way to do it.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Feeling buyers remorse for booking in the quiet car now that I’ve realized the giant group boarding the loud cars is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

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Bert Spaan @bertspaan.nl · 08/04/2026

12½ years ago, I made a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands. Unexpectedly, people loved it! Ever since, I have been wanting to make an updated version of the map. Newer data, higher resolution, more interactive! I never got around to it, until last week: bertspaan.nl/buildings

bertspaan.nl

All 11.333.878 buildings in the Netherlands

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Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

How many Republicans not named Donald Trump or Ron Johnson have won a statewide election in Wisconsin in the last nine years? Just one: Brian Hagedorn in 2019

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 29/03/2026

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

When a Schmidt dies, we take all the USB cables they accumulated in life, chain them through older and older ports, back to a splitter on my great-grandfather’s telephone jack… and so back through the generations, across the sea. Each grave flickers with power from a waterwheel in the old country.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be pip-installable.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

RIP Jürgen Habermas! His work was central (in hindsight, weirdly so) to my college education, so much so that I rushed to meet him when he was on campus for an honorary degree…

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Ben Gross @bhgross144.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Today is the one-year anniversary of my departure from the library referenced below. It is disheartening to see how that organization's leadership has continued to marginalize subject-area expertise and promote overly simplistic narratives about the history of science & tech. #histSTM #histsci 📜 🗃️

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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Reminder: You can watch the DOGE bro depos on YouTube! (I’ve seen a lot of clips compiled by news orgs, but some of them don’t link to the full videos.)

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Today's edition of "collapsing boundary between human and machine" substack.com/home/post/p-... (see thread below for an analysis of how this helps the AI industry)

substack.com

Introducing Claude's Corner

Why Anthropic is giving Claude Opus 3 its own Substack.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Noting in this NEH grants filing from the Author's Guild that Michael McDonald wasn't the only NEH staffer collaborating: Adam Wolfson also helped triage which chat-GPT flagged grants might actually be related to the garden of heroes or America 250. www.neh.gov/staff/adam-w...

"109. Fox and Cavanaugh sorted grants in lists labeled “to cancel” or “to keep.”
110. No grant relating to DEI as broadly conceived of by Fox and Cavanaugh peared on the “to keep” list. Grants that Fox and Cavanaugh considered “wasteful” d thus slated for termination could be moved to the “to keep” list by Defendant cDonald only if they related to “America 250” or the “Garden of Heroes” initiatives sed on the views of Defendants McDonald, Fox, Cavanaugh, and NEH staff ember, Adam Wolfson.

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Schrödinger's Sneetch Belly @rtodkelly.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Now I want to know which CNN reporter or producer doesn't know the word "sycophant."

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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

If strong-form unitary executive theory is true and there’s no executive *branch*, just a president and a bunch of subordinates carrying out his will, then immigration “judges” and administrative “warrants” must be false in any way that carries constitutional significance. 1/2

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 24/01/2026

Democrats: here’s a handy cheat sheet of the current state of discourse so you can send your consultant money directly to support groups instead: Leftist: revolution Liberal: impeachments + trials Centrist: Nuremberg-style trials Libertarian: abolish ICE Conservative: reform ICE Fascist: more ICE $

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Josiah Hawthorne @josiahhawthorne.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

This is your reminder that Hungarian-Jewish scientist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. He then left the dissolved solution on his shelf and fled to Sweden. (After the war he un-dissolved the gold and the prizes were re-cast.)

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Digital Humanities people -- positionally I feel like I could maybe write something useful/interesting here as someone who moved from running a DH program to CTO-ing an AI startup -- any questions you'd conceivably read if I answered them?

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Andy Famiglietti @afamiglietti.org · 05/01/2026

The debate over LLMs needs to absorb the lessons learned in the debate about internet governance 20 years ago. Yes, we are not going to uninvent linear algebra. Sorry Butlerian Jihadis. But that doesn't mean we can't set policies that influence which LLM uses are central and which are marginal

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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

A concept I've been meaning to float to make sense of what's happened to the US Constitution is an idea from the British constitutional tradition: "implied repeal." It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.

Bumper sticker that says "No Farms No State" above a mesopotamian cityscape and the phrase James C. Scott 2017

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.

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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 03/12/2025

IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal. www.imls.gov/news/stateme...

imls.gov

Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants

Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants Washington, DC– Upon further review, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has reinstated all federal grants. This action supersede...

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.

The land and waterhemispheres. Equal-area projection. Map from wikipedia.

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