iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

started a new hobby project and before I'd written a line of code (generated scaffolding excepted) spent a good hour on an anxiety-driven tangent about FOSS+LLMs. nothing to show but a license (AGPL3.0+) and a REUSE.toml file. for a private repo. with, as yet, no code. This is not a good timeline.

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John Holbo @jholbo.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

“The first Sauron administration got a lot done & - Isildur’s Bane. That was what they called it remember. It wasn’t so much that Sauron was the Lord of the Ring. Men were weak, as even establishment liberals like Elrod admitted So you couldn’t blame Sauron who was very much an outsider politician …

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Lucretiel @lucretiel.me · 25/09/2026

Ironically one thing that helps you understand rationalism is ignoring that word rational in the title. I don’t mean that as like a cute little dig, I mean it in the same way you have to ignore the “science” in “scientology” to actually get a complete understanding.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Does this feel to anyone else like somebody from @greatdismal.bsky.social's jackpot future is fucking with our timeline? "AI is already year over year the biggest infrastructure build in American history… the entire economy is now dominated by AI spending." talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-a...

talkingpointsmemo.com

The AI Economy – Not An Exaggeration

There’s an article (gift link) out today in The Wall Street Journal...

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Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

We can’t allow this man to get within striking distance of a viable presidential candidacy.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"If you start… from the perspective that AI does not inevitably replace humans in the dissemination and discovery of knowledge… then you begin to start asking questions that are systematically obscured by Machine God Thought." www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...

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tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 15/09/2026

I was trying to write about this yesterday because I feel like a clear and neutral explanation for normies about why frontier labs are Like This would be really useful but I just couldn’t bring myself to explain it because it’s so fucking TIRESOME.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 14/09/2026

One of the venues that refused to allow Macklemore to perform is Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, which is run by Hillsborough county. They did allow Kanye to perform even after he released a song called "Heil Hitler" and sold swastika merch. In case you thought this was about antisemitism.

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Patrick Samphire 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @patricksamphire.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The title of this YouTube video cracks me up. I dunno. Maybe it's because Cory has enough of his own stuff to do? Also, I'm not sure he'd want to.

Title of a YouTube video by Adam Conover: "Why AI Can't Replace You with Cory Doctorow".

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brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Anthropic's models run on terabytes of VRAM. It's not going to "just copy itself to other computers."

Rohan Paul
@rohanpaul_ai
Jacob Coxon's next interview on CBS News (ex Anthropic+Open AI researcher who resigned)

"We can't just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers. Like it's not that difficult to find yourself because an AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place and then you unplug it here, but it's actually still over there and maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they're all cooperating."

----

From "CBS News" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

but this is the thing; if I showed up saying "I'm interested in writing programs that reproduce executable code, based on more or less stochastic input" I think people would say "could you try doing that on a computer that isn't connected to the internet until you're sure you know what you're doing"

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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I've spent my entire career reporting on the War on Terror. Many this week have asked me for my extended thoughts on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Here they are.

forever-wars.com

Today We Must Finally Remember What The 9/11 Commemorations Ignore

Righteous victimhood fueled the War on Terror. 25 years later, we also have to remember all of those slain under its banner

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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

There are already articles circulating trying to rewrite history and say America was great after 9/11 and united and thoughtful and just a reminder that that period was marked by intense and insanely racist hatred, paranoia, and a frothing desire for unhinged violence and oppression.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Because the Chinese researchers are basically normal engineers approaching AI as a difficult technical problem and not members of a psychotic cult that has spent the last 30 years trying to "build God."

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

indeed the last two paragraphs are excellent.

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Chris Dwan (he/him) @somershade.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A friend refers to the "a pedestrian was struck by a car" construction as the "exonerative" tense, and that shall be its name henceforth and hereafter.

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power word: ivy @proxi.dog · 20/08/2026

*forgetting the word voluptuous* you're looking really velociraptor

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 29/08/2026

If you’re in the US, expect maps on your phone to start showing you “Lake America” soon, now that the US Geological Survey has updated the GNIS. The USGS is a fabulous resource for spatial data in so many ways. And now it has to implement this stupid shit, for the most spiteful of reasons. Gross.

USGS
science for a changing world
USGS Home
Contact USGS
Search USGS topoBuilder
Help
Data Download
Services
Per Secretarial Order 3453, Lake Ontario has been renamed x

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

At the center of my message to faculty yesterday was: 1.) We may not be adequately prepared for how angry students are about tech. 2.) They are not all angry for the same reasons. 3.) Being angry at it doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. The sense of entrapment fuels the anger.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The best thing about someone using CC instead of BCC is when other people start using Reply All to berate people for using Reply All.

Screenshot of an email message, addresses and other identifying information redacted, but CC line ending "… & 160 more."

Text reads:

"Sweet muppety Odin! I need y’all to learn two things: 1) [redacted]! Congrats on the new position! FIGURE OUT BCC’ING WHEN SENDING EMAILS. 2) Everyone else - YOU DO NOT NEED TO (nor should you!) HIT “REPLY ALL” WHEN RESPONDING."

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Getting tired of these @arstechnica.com pieces that just breathlessly repeat claims. Do AI companies see this as a threat? How hard is it to use? To circumvent? What about screen reader users? Basic questions. Times are tough but as a paying subscriber I’d like to see some actual journalism here

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Cara Ellison @caraellison.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

We were watching that silly new Tom Hiddleston reenactment of the disaster of Pompeii and he was like ‘we have amazing new tech that allows us to track people through this disaster’ and I was oh no he’s going to say it’s an AI brain or something and then he said…. ‘Its a spreadsheet’ and I CHEERED

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Abigail Nussbaum @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Every graphic/video that the Trump admin/MAGA/GOP release is AI generated these days, and they all look like ass. Is that the association that the ethical AI boosters on my feed want? Because increasingly it feels like this is technology by dumb, evil people, for dumb, evil people.

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Anne Trubek @atrubek.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Only a teensy tiny fraction of books are truly rare, unique, or scarce. But the idea that people destroy the 1,921st copy of a book no one is interested in always freaks people out. They are appalled that libraries weed books, too.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Reading @greatdismal.bsky.social's Sprawl trilogy back in the day I wouldn't have guessed that the most depressingly prescient bit would turn out to be the sociopathic zillionaires like Josef Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools, but here we are.

A paragraph from a paperback book (William Gibson's COUNT ZERO, 1986): "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

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Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

is Kpop Demonhunters a Jamesonian allegory for capitalist development and the romance plot a longing for Korean re-unification. I'll take my answer off the air.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

@knownforms.bsky.social apropos of nothing, at lunch I was having a wide-ranging discussion about higher and professional education that touched on medical residency trauma, and I realized I'd lost track of how you and Other M are doing — how are you doing?

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Emily Higgs Kopin @ehkopin.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

There are plenty of horrible proprietary legacy formats but FileMaker databases from the first few versions of the software have absolutely no business being so complicated to convert. This is probably why god abandoned us tbh

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Maureen Johnson @maureenjohnsonbooks.com · 13/07/2026

JKR and her new org apparently helped get the new Amnesty International report on how TERF organizations destroy lives taken down from their site. Well, guess what? The Streisand Effect is real. Here's the entire report in a thread. Read it. Share it.

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

so I know I'm 20+ years late to the party but ICYMI Angélica Gorodischer's KALPA IMPERIAL is brilliant and hilarious, thank you @kellylink.bsky.social and @gavingrant.bsky.social for bringing it to el mundo angloparlante

photo of part of a yellowing paperback page, reading, in Spanish:

"…eran los años de la dinastía de los Hehvrontes, esos gobernantes rígidos y orgullosos, altos y bellos, de piel blanca y ojos y pelo muy negros, que caminaban sin mover los hombros ni la cintura, con la cabeza alta y la mirada puesta más arriba del horizonte, sin mirar a los costados aunque allí estuviera su propia madre en agonía, ni para abajo aunque el camino se hiciera irregular e incómodo, cayéndose en un pozo si pozo había y manteniendo allá en el fondo, de pie, la dignidad de reyes del mundo."

Translation (mine; Le Guin's, from Small Beer Press, is surely better): "…because these were the years of the dynasty of the Hehvrontes, those rigid, haughty rulers, tall and handsome, their skins white and their eyes and hair very black, who walked without moving with the head high and the gaze fixed above the horizon; not looking aside, though their own mothers might be there in agony; nor down, though the road might be uneven and uncomfortable; falling down wells, where wells there were, and maintaining there, at the bottom, still standing, the dignity of the kings of the world."

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Gautam Bhatia @gautambhatia88.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

With every successive instance of the weaponisation of food in India to serve violent ends, I grow more and more uncomfortable with this book's choice to invoke a referent seemingly without doing any research into the role it plays in India today.

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Crystal Fleming クリスタル @alwaystheself.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

As I walked away, I had another funny feeling. What if this "book" and his entire "experiment" is funded by an AI company? This is exactly the kind of "scholarship" tech bro overlords want -- influential academics, preferably men, telling the rest of us that we are now useless in the age of AI.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 14/06/2026

going to laugh forever about the Knicks only losing the Trump Game immaculate scriptwriting, no notes

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 10/06/2026

18th century "cat contract" (納貓兒契式; based on a Yuan-dynasty original), laying out the cat's duties and responsibilities: tirelessly guarding the grain, repelling the "mousey bandits" (鼠賊), not messing with the livestock, not stealing numnums "of any kind whatsoever" (不得偷盜食諸般).

Scan of a two-page spread with an illustration of a rather pissed off-looking cat and the text of a 納貓兒契式 'Cat Acquisition Contract Template' surrounding it in a spiral. From 銜蟬小錄 Xianchan xiaolu, "A Record of Cicada-Nommers," a Qing-dynasty compendium of all things cat.

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

British documentary voice: but the Grogu led Genesis lacked both the artistic ambition of Gabriel as well as the hitmaking prowess of Phil Collins Collins: strange bloke. No one understood what he said. We all agreed he had a look but at the end of the day what do you have? A frog hooked on cocaine

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

“The difference in measured productivity growth between California and the rest of the US is wider than the difference between the US and Europe, yet that difference isn’t the source of constant agonizing by U.S. states worried that they are falling behind.” paulkrugman.substack.com/p/challengin...

paulkrugman.substack.com

Challenging the Narrative of European Decline: Revised, Free Repost

I do not think that word “productivity” means what people think it means

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Thing I had to tell a (local) LLM today: "Be very certain in your fruit identification. If you're not completely sure what fruit it is, just say 'some kind of fruit'." 🍑≠🍋

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Code for Science & Society is looking for a senior Rails developer on a two-year, grant-funded contract with potential extension, working (remotely or hybrid) out of the California Digital Library on connecting field research work to research outputs: codeforsociety.org/jobs/fair-st...

codeforsociety.org

Code for Science & Society

Advancing the power of data to improve the social and economic lives of all people.

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Josephine beckbook.com Riesman @josie.zone · 16/05/2026

Guys. The Ancient Greeks weren't white. They were more like cephalopods than modern humans -- their skin was bioluminescent and constantly shifting its color. And they didn't live in in idyllic seaside villages; they could only survive near deep-ocean vents. They DID have Matt Damon accents, though

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David Moles @chronodm.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

J.J. Abrams’ Koyaanisqatsi

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