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 · 27/08/2026

Can still move by blowing out your mouth, because, hey, no friction!

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Who needs a heartbeat without friction? You just lie on the floor to stop it pooling too much and the blood just circuits without any help.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Perhaps occasionally deploying strategic flatulence to decelerate.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Wouldn’t we just propel ourselves around through breathing out the sides of our mouths?

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This is wrong! It’s “*and* per se and” — a letter and the alphabet has 27 letters ending with x, y, z, and, per se, and.

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

I love this guy: "you can pledge $70 to have to receive one of the 50 limited edition copies. "This will allow me to buy you a legal Blu-ray of The Departed, throw that disc away, replace it with my superior version, and mail it to you," Sacks explains." nofilmschool.com/2019/02/kick...

nofilmschool.com

A Kickstarter to Digitally Remove the Rat from the End of 'The Departed'

That rat was a bad idea and this guy really wants to fix it.

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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

Unions tend to deposit their records at universities In a world where recent historical records have considerably greater economic value, I could see a case for legislation that more aggressively enshrines unions not unis as primary custodians of a variety of records in their industries…

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

Doing my dissertation one of the big early questions was “what happened to the internal CBS archives?” Somewhere in the paramount/Sony/etc flow they just vanished. Corporations are terrible at preserving things. We rely on states and philanthropists:nonprofits to do that…

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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 · 11/08/2026

You could then put another morse code controller on the controller-emitted stream to watermark *it*... each one summarizing the stream below it. You'd get a hierarchical summarization for free!* *Actually, for lots of money.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

If it were me, I'd define each token prediction choice as long (taken from the long, less probable tail of the distribution) and short (the more likely half). Then have a second llm constrain the generation at each step to choose either short and long, writing a second stream in morse code.

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

Oh looks good though, I think Scheppele was the first person I ever heard talk about Orban

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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

Wow I went hunting in nyc but the only weird spot is I think just the result of deciding which part of Brooklyn gets consigned to have a Staten Island rep.

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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 · 09/07/2026

Yeah Newark! 5 named wards, four directions and “central”

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Jersey city has lettered wards too…

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

And got to be somewhere where there’s a north ward and south ward?

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

NYC community districts are numbered from 1 by borough, so technically can’t be described by a number *alone*

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

I was describing this to a friend who is a cs professor a couple years ago and when I said the answer was to reduce to the TSP he kinda blinked and said “you know where I come from if you take something and turn into an NP-hard problem that means you’ve lost, right?”

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

“The apex of civilizational ambition, oftentimes expressed in steel and fire” —Deutsche Bank

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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

Anyhow my favorite politician from the founding generation is Thaddeus Stevens.

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

He went out for a pack of cigarettes and phoned us 10 years later from a French prison

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

A) He's not a founding father; B) If you think you can handle it you're deluding yourself.

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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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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Gonna print some “no kings” t shirts with Angus on them.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I’ve forgotten the finer points of this debate but I remember that merch signifying something along those lines.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I don’t think this is probably what’s under discussion but I bought some “Warren Democrat” baby onesies in 2019 because I definitely saw Bernie’s refusal to join the party as disqualifying for leading it.

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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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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

The thing I hope people were yelling about is that zotero was made by historians! Like that’s the flip side I was trying to get in that article—American digital history has often been extremely good at using computers for things that aren’t proving a thesis statement.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Geez, ok. That makes no sense, but at least more than the world of Mendeley deadenders I was imagining.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Wait there was a throw down about bibliography software???

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Similar to a frequent phenomenon in cartography of fake places: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_st...

en.wikipedia.org

Trap street - Wikipedia

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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

2020s sure suck but at least we're not in the 1640s.

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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

What kind of human text? First thing that occurs to me with this is that copy-edited human text should have significantly lower entropy than un-copy-edited.

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