iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 13h

Also labour from the people mining rare Earth minerals, the people in the Global South who toil to clean the data and supervise models live as human-in-the-loop, the people building/ cleaning data centers... the labour theft is so extensive it's not realistic that this would have been feasible.

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Erica Ifill @wickdchiq.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The French police are so militarized they blew up a 15-yr-old’s hand and took the eye of another one. Why are grenades being used to quell student protestors who are unarmed? Now the labour unions are stepping in to protect the students

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 07/10/2026

In the spirit of this counter push, I'll share this strategy guide I created for understanding and resisting the imposition of MS Copilot in your org: padlet.com/verdigris21/...

padlet.com

Microsoft 365 Copilot: An Analysis

An analysis of Microsoft 365 Copilot: Risks and Issues

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Erica Ifill @wickdchiq.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, literally used himself as a human shield to protect students from police violence

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/10/2026

One of the most upsetting things for people trained in formal computational theory, who are not AI boosters, to witness is how claims about the outputs of systems with no formal specification are taken as if they are indicative of formally linked capacities, such as the ability to add; see thread:

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

The tech sector of capital has declared war on all other segments and areas of activity. We must adjust our thinking accordingly

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 06/10/2026

"Software developers are not okay" www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/05-soft... The software industry is becoming increasingly hostile to those who work in it. The uncertainty is affecting even those who believe in the promises of tech. Direct link to the essay: www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/05-soft...

baldurbjarnason.com

Software developers are not okay

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

Indeed. I suggest people study the military history of the US tech industry (for ex. digital computation's first serious application was aiding Teller, Ulam et al in calculating H-bomb mathematics). I recommend the curious start here: yashalevine.com/surveillance...

yashalevine.com

Surveillance Valley

Surveillance Valley, a book about the secret military history of the Internet. In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine traces the history of the internet back to its beginnings as a Vietnam-era tool for ...

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/10/2026

> Cryptogyny is the systematic obfuscation of women's contributions to, or of their very existence in, a field of study.

olivia.science

Cryptogyny

On the systematic obfuscation of women's contributions.

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 05/10/2026

Journalists, in the main, will not report on this. They are both bought off and in full agreement with the white supremacist ideas at the core of TESCREAL ideology (which is not an innovation, but continuation of the fascist ideas at the heart of western thought).

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 04/10/2026

I write, and sometimes speak, about the tech industry. My point of view isn't that of an academic or journalist but of a veteran technologist who has designed and deployed systems 'at scale' in the US and Europe.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“For months, Anthropic has been hosting private meetings like this one, shuttling in dozens of religious scholars from across the world, papering them with nondisclosure agreements and demanding that key aspects of many conversations remain confidential.“ www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/u...

nytimes.com

Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Quest to Instill Morality Into Its A.I. Models (Gift Article)

In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 01/10/2026

Whenever a tech propagandist says 'AI' will kill us all (or, as Gates recently said, a billion people) they're lying as part of a profit gambit *but also* telling everyone that western elites are willing to wage nuclear war rather than relinquish a micron of power.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s also really clear to me this week that the people telling us that AI will transform work…haven’t seen a lot of jobs where people work.

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

Tagging @samanthasketches.bsky.social and @ddclaxton.bsky.social who weren't properly tagged the first go round (for some reason).

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

Among other things, I co-host a film podcast with @samanthasketches.bsky.social and @ddclaxton.bsky.social - in this episode, we continue our dissection of the film industry, using 'The Odyssey' as the focus: youtu.be/kG1UorZq7cQ?...

youtu.be

Film Conversations The Odyssey 2026 Part 2

YouTube video by Film Conversations

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 26/09/2026

Events at the UN general assembly, in which there were boasts of annihilation and the brazen platforming of genocidaires, cement the resurrection of force in geopolitical discourse. 1/9

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 26/09/2026

Extremely sexist and unhinged superficially so-called anti AI people and spaces exist. Probably because loads of sexists exist, but we don't have to tolerate them. Being anti-fascist should be a low bar, and being against sexism isn't difficult to maintain at a community-level unless it's tolerated.

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Aurelien Mondon @aurelmondon.com · 23/09/2026

The far right in France has accused Thélyson Orélien, a Haitian writer whose novel has been widely acclaimed, to have used AI to write it The accusation is, unsurprisingly, based on shaky grounds as described in this excellent article but the damage is done www.mediapart.fr/journal/cult...

mediapart.fr

Thélyson Orélien : mécanique d’une polémique

La campagne accusant l’écrivain canado-haïtien d’avoir eu recours à l’IA est orchestrée depuis l’extrême droite médiatique. Mais elle prend aussi son essor dans le vertige de ce que l’usage des outil…

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/09/2026

Well friends (and adversaries) we've lived to see the first Oil World War

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/09/2026

It is surely no accident that, at this moment, when the global system established after WW2, (imperialist, with a liberal patina of 'learning lessons') is collapsing, we are encouraged to 'debate' about mythical thinking machines.

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

every day of my life I think about the people using “she” to describe this computer program who still need to be convinced to use it for trans women

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 19/09/2026

Precisely. My message to my fellow US'ians, among the most heavily propagandized people on Earth, is to see the tech industry in its totality: military, capital, i.e. the political economy. I suggest starting here: yashalevine.com/surveillance...

yashalevine.com

Surveillance Valley

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Want an example of successful pushback on "AI" (surveillance) ed tech? This story is uplifting and amazing. @ifeoma.bsky.social is absolutely amazing. Thank you @alixdunn.com and @themaybe.org for this episode. www.themaybe.org/podcast/meet...

themaybe.org

Meet the Mom Winning Against AI in Schools w/ Ifeoma Ozoma

In New Mexico, kids are required to read aloud to an AI avatar named Amira—and it records their voices without consent. Ifeoma Ozoma fights back.

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ddɐ˙ʎʞsʞɔɐlq˙uǝʌs@ @sven.blacksky.app · 17/09/2026

The Gyges and Rev. Ars(e)on of the world are deranged bullies. They may post some "truth" occasionally, but don't be fooled, as they care more about their likes, RTs and follower counts than about the truth itself.

X everywhere meme showing two characters from Toys story, one of them pointing at something with a smile, the other looking very worried.
The caption is "Gish GALLOP, Gish GALLOP EVERYWHERE"

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 18/09/2026

I'm glad more people are noticing because the accounts like the example mentioned below, and others, who are very obviously boosters and extremely heavy AI users aren't sharing this information for straightforward reasons. These are AI people infighting and not actually taking some moral stand.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 17/09/2026

Online Open Session: Ethical and Epistemic Questions in the Era of AI Date: 7 October Time: 17:00 "the session invites participants to critically reflect on the language, assumptions, and material structures surrounding so-called artificial intelligence" melcilab.cicant.ulusofona.pt/news/ethical...

Online Open Session: Ethical and Epistemic Questions in the Era of AI
Date: 7 October
Time: 17:00
Venue: Link Online via Microsoft Teams

On 7 October at 17:00, MeLCi Lab will host the online session Ethical and Epistemic Questions in the Era of AI, featuring Dr Daniel Cardoso. Held via Microsoft Teams, the session invites participants to critically reflect on the language, assumptions, and material structures surrounding so-called artificial intelligence. The talk will examine the ethical, epistemic, political, and economic implications of generative technologies, challenging technologically deterministic understandings of their development and use.
Abstract

Epistemology – understood as a precondition to the attribution of truth value to any given statement – requires us to understand the constraints and traditions that different words bring to a debate, just as ethics requires us to consider the symbolic and material impacts of our actions, including the performativity of the words we use.
Engaging with two of the most complex concepts in both the Social Sciences and Humanities – ‘Artificial’ and ‘Intelligence’ – this talk joins a growing number of academic work that argues for scholars to stop using this misnomer, in the name of both ethics, and scientific accuracy.
It then moves to consider the materiality of probabilistic generative models as deeply reliant on embodied human activity, and on maximising extractive processes that involve both human and more-than-human processes, while simultaneously working to obfuscate that dependency.
In this sense, “critical AI literacies” can be perceived as an oxymoron, but also as a conceptual artefact produced through the attempted epistemic shifts brought about by the neoliberal deployment of probabilistic generative models.
Emphasising the political, material and economic context of the deployment of any technology is fundamental to preclude tecnodeterministic facile analyses – and, equally so, to understand how the sam…

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Lol -- over on X Nate Silver is apparently holding me up as an example of how "the Left" is anti-AI regulation, and proving his point by posting screen caps of ch 7 of The AI Con, where @alexhanna.bsky.social and I outline some proposals for what to do about the harms done in the name of "AI". >>

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 11/09/2026

I'm excited to share this preprint by my wonderful MSc student Yihsin who's thought deeply about how psychological & neurocognitive theories relate to different types of evidence. Beyond Empirical Success: Evaluating Theoretical Virtue Across the Computational Modeling Chain doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Beyond Empirical Success: Evaluating Theoretical Virtue Across the Computational Modeling Chain
Authors/Creators

Chuang, Yihsin
ORCID icon
Guest, Olivia1
ORCID icon

Description

Computational models in psychology are typically judged by a single standard: empirical fit. Unfortunately, fit is insufficient, even misleading as a sole criterion, as the same result can arise from fundamentally different situations: theoretically faithful models, mathematically flexible ones, miscalibrated operationalizations, or implementations that compute something other than intended. Distinguishing between these is vital. Our evaluative metatheoretical account recognises that models stand in three distinct relations: a) toward the theory whose causal commitments it purports to capture, b) toward the specification and implementation it purports to compute, and c) toward the phenomenon it purports to explain. Each relation can succeed or fail independently, governed by criteria local to that stage. Importantly, relations are ordered such that theoretical content is transmitted or lost, and losses at earlier transitions are irrecoverable downstream. What a model's empirical success implicates about its theoretical commitments, therefore, depends on whether transitions are secured. Some success or failure profiles support explanatory claims; others only prediction; others establish theoretical coherence without empirical contact. Our account diagnoses what a given model shows, replacing the implicit assumption that empirical success transfers automatically to theoretical understanding with an explicit conditional rendition of what models can and cannot establish.

a figure that looks like a cloud that stays "cognitive capacity" with an arrow pointing to a lozenge with "theory" which points to a lozenge with "specification" which points to the same with "data" which is pointed to by a cloud that says "phenomenon"

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 16/09/2026

> one single missile could kill more people than every cyber attack in history combined. But for some reason, they always just come back to focusing on cyber security. [I]t's because they're just so out of touch that they really cannot imagine harm beyond some computer systems getting hacked.

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026

This, I propose, is produced by the matrix of maleness as performed in our, 'society', whiteness, as performed across 'the west' and colonized regions, and the baleful influence of podcast and YouTube'ism (which encourages content creators with no real project to pretend to be universal experts)

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 15/09/2026

Finance capital, the most sinister form (yet, data driven within its narrow frame) is at long last, concluding that only the 'dumb money' is still chasing the 'AI' dream. Next up, diesel and other shortfalls and data center reduction. Winter is coming.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 15/09/2026

If old white guys are saying the AI hype bubble is popping, does that mean it's finally happening? 🫨

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 15/09/2026

It is time to play "guess when this letter was written" again? > In January 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and dozens of artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence calling for research on the societal impacts of AI. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_le...

(If you have questions about this letter, please contact tegmark@mit.edu)
Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: an Open Letter

Artificial intelligence (AI) research has explored a variety of problems and approaches since its inception, but for the last 20 years or so has been focused on the problems surrounding the construction of intelligent agents – systems that perceive and act in some environment. In this context, “intelligence” is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality – colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences. The adoption of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations and statistical learning methods has led to a large degree of integration and cross-fertilization among AI, machine learning, statistics, control theory, neuroscience, and other fields. The establishment of shared theoretical frameworks, combined with the availability of data and processing power, has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.

As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research. There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

The p…

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 14/09/2026

I'm honestly so sick of constantly saying it's not an algorithmic system really because it's got human-in-the-loop and people being like "but it's automated"

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 14/09/2026

In the current AI hype cycle, notice they first "attacked" the game Go, then protein folding (which they shuttered recently completely: www.engadget.com/2225849/goog...), and now they are focused on mathematics — these harmful insertions of this industry into human cognitive activities and labour...

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Shell @risu.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The problem today is that you need the public to understand data harms. And there is a big effort you meet that prevents that. But that’s where we should go. Not screens are bad, or AI ruins your brain, but “your kids can’t get jobs because of the dataset about them”

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 13/09/2026

Also I really liked and so used this quote too: “[m]achinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making [them] superfluous. It is a power inimical to [them], and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it” It's from:

morningstaronline.co.uk

Is ‘artificial intelligence’ a threat or a promise?

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/09/2026

Marx's work is so rich that such application is always rewarding.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026

Have we discussed "AI" doomsday cults + Epstein? “parachuting humanity into a different evolutionary era...even obsoleting the human race as we know it...is a running theme in the Epstein files, and...tech evangelists...“It’s eugenics all the way down” www.codastory.com/authoritaria...

codastory.com

"All my fundees have blue eyes." Epstein and the tech world's dark ideology - Coda Story

The Epstein files reveal beliefs about race, eugenics, and engineering humans that run to the heart of Silicon Valley.

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 13/09/2026

If you're tempted to take anything published in supposedly leftist magazine Jacobin about 'AI' seriously, watch this: youtu.be/RNViRuZqgeM?...

youtu.be

The Left is Missing Out on AI: A Weary Response

YouTube video by Microsoft - A Materialist Approach

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 11/09/2026

OpenAI did not "lose control", the agents did not go "rogue" and there is no "swarm" that "escaped". all control and responsibility remains firmly in the hands of these "frontier" labs. most importantly this "rogue" narrative is an intentional and strategic marketing PR

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 07/09/2026

They are indeed. For those curious to understand why I suggest 'Settlers' by J. Sakai: archive.org/details/sett...

archive.org

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

Socialism, Communism, Leftism, Marxism

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Dwayne Monroe @cloudquistador.eurosky.social · 07/09/2026

In this edition of the Dialectical House Party podcast, we welcome filmmaker and artist Samantha Youssef to apply the materialist dialectics toolkit to the film industry: youtu.be/6VcZnOP8Gec

youtu.be

Film Materialism - Episode One

YouTube video by Dialectical House Party

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2026

if somebody is behaving in narcissistic ways, sadly common academia — regardless of any diagnosis, which is orthogonal to my point here — it may be useful to read about gray rocking... > In the gray rock method, a person does not respond emotionally to any of a narcissist's manipulation attempts.

psychologytoday.com

When Dealing With a Narcissist, the “Gray Rock” Approach Might Help

Is dealing with a narcissist becoming too difficult? This method may help.

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