iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Peter Sachs Collopy

professor tools for commensality (red scare edition) @inquiline.myatproto.social · 18h

spooky bats say trans rights

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 08/10/2026

As a result of my job I know people who know people, and that’s also weird.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 07/10/2026

“It’s not horseshoe theory, it’s that there’s a similar impetus towards the hatred of the existent” is so good!

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 05/10/2026

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the autonomous vehicle developers who most vocally argued that society must accept a certain number of deaths to enjoy the technology's safety benefits (Tesla & Uber ATG) were the only ones who killed people and never actually delivered on their promises

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Margaret Killjoy @margaret.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Those who build walls are their own prisoners." --Ursula le Guin

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/10/2026

Remember when us phil-tech types said effective altruism was just utilitarianism taken to its worst possible extents? This is what we meant: Real harm for unquantifiable potential benefit. "…'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology….'"

politico.com

Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.

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Margaret Killjoy @margaret.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Reading, and writing, are holy. I love reading novels because they tell me something. They say: "this is what someone believed enough to dedicate months or years of their life to say." This is just as true for the trashiest pulp as it is for the highest literature.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.

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Laine Nooney @ 🔥🗑️🔥 @lainenooney.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is such an unbelievably, historically unserious bad take from Steven Levy, the light from bad takes would take a million billion years to reach it. www.wired.com/story/war-br...

wired.com

War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley

Some say that tech was always about the money and the military. Don’t buy that argument.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 27/09/2026

I would describe this problem as a conflation of counterculture and New Left. There’s a connection between them, but it was (and is) absolutely possible to be both hip and capitalist, pro-war, etc.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026

like I suspect many of you on This Website, I think a core reason why I find Eliezer Yudkowsky and his rationalist and effective altruist satellites so intensely annoying is because I had a VERY similar “being a super weird, pretentious, hyper-literate kid” experience - I just, you know, grew up.

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Ideologically, generative AI is a 19th century technology: the flawed dream that once you have assembled a supposedly total archive of culture via technical media, you can use it to statistically derive new meaning from patterns of the past

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Lindsey Barrett @lambarrett.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

there is some desperate core of me that cannot accept this armando iannuci-scripted hellscape as reality

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Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Jim Henson was a visionary. He imagined what I call a monstrofuturist utopia: a place where everyone's uniqueness was welcome.

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magnolia siddell ✨ @magnoliapearl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Saw someone say on Twitter, of Jane Schoenbrun, “At some point you have to make a movie that isn’t about yourself.” No you don’t. That isn’t true

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 22/09/2026

I think he combined “left” and “neocon” and got “New Left,” a phrase he had heard but never understood.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 21/09/2026

(A half-in-jest attempt to console myself as I listen to Gender Reveal and wish I read more zines, but also sincere analysis.)

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 21/09/2026

Blogs are digital zines. Podcast are audio blogs. Ergo, podcasts are zines.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Historically, automation tech has commonly made more work for people: the issue is WHICH people. Whether as an excuse for owners to increase the requirements for expectations in a given day, lessen the labor expected of men while raising the expectations for women, etc. "AI" isn't exceptional.

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Quinn Daedal @quinnanya.me · 19/09/2026

Of all the ways I imagined Google Scholar going up in flames, being made inaccessible from university IP addresses due to AI-driven scraping wasn't at the top of my list.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/09/2026

RFK Jr. wants people to get sick. He wants them to get sick and he thinks it is a good thing if they die, since those who live will have "natural immunity" and emerge stronger and fitter.

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Dick Zoutman @dickzoutman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

VERY important paper! This study detected SARS-CoV-2 in the air of common areas of 4 big US airports. SARS-CoV-2 detected in 98% of samples through the year. Influenza A was found during flu season. That’s why you want to wear an N95 respirator in an airport! And all indoor public spaces all year!

journals.plos.org

Multimodal genomic surveillance for respiratory pathogens at four U.S. international airports: A comparison of air, wastewater, clinical, and national surveillance data

Early detection of outbreaks and emerging pathogens is critical for public health and global biosecurity. Airports, as major international travel hubs with dense, enclosed populations, are high-risk s...

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17/09/2026

i’m sorry but this entire worldview seems not just evil but deeply stupid? the far future is fake! it doesn’t exist! what matters are people here and now!

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 16/09/2026

Unfortunately the great book Escape from Earth made him feel less fun to me and more predatory. Definitely more interesting, though.

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Michael Barany @mbarany.com · 12/09/2026

the admin paperwork is the ghost of an eviscerated faculty governance 💯

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 15/09/2026

I’m not saying that computational models can’t do mathematical explanation that people can follow, just as I wouldn’t say they can’t do illustration—but it is a different goal from producing accurate representation, at least.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 15/09/2026

Whether machines are following the rules or not, making mathematics make sense is different from making it valid, and I suspect a lot of making it make sense is emphasis, on parts that are evocative, on parts that are difficult, on parts that are likely sources of error.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 15/09/2026

I have seen mathematicians writing about needing to parse computer-generated math painstakingly because machines make different leaps than people do, so the errors don’t fit the kinds of human error mathematicians are used to looking for.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 14/09/2026

I really like this thread and model, and I also want to suggest another answer regarding the second rationale. Technical illustration maintained a role, in textbooks for example, because illustrators were better at emphasis than photographers. I think this too might be a model for mathematics.

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 14/09/2026

Transphobia is a losing strategy. If you’re telling trans people to eat shit for the cause you either know this and want cover for your own transphobia or you don’t know this and think it’s morally acceptable to mark some bodies and lives for death in the name of expediency. Fix your hearts or die.

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A.J. Wilden🏳️‍⚧️ @wcwit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"They're not misunderstanding the film; they're co-opting a message"

Screencap from the interview linked in the quoted post

Marlow Stern (the interviewer): You have one of the most renowned replies in Twitter history. Elon Musk tweeted out, “Take the red pill,” then Ivanka Trump enthusiastically wrote, “Taken!” to him, and then you replied, “Fuck both of you.” I’m curious how you feel about the co-opting of “The Matrix” by those on the right who don’t really seem to understand its messaging.

Lilly Wachowski: I mean, I can’t sit in a room and explain the movie to every single person who watches it. Even if I did sit in a room with Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump — yikes — it doesn’t matter. They’re not misunderstanding the film; they’re co-opting a message. And that’s what fascists do: They co-opt the messages of progressives and use it to their benefit to confuse and obfuscate what is going on and the intention of their ideology. They do it with everything. They do it with Martin Luther King Jr. Look at how they’ve changed the idea of what antisemitism is.

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Bugs, Yaoist @bugsmaytrix.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"fairness in women's sports" is literally just "ethics in games journalism" like this is the same thing this is part of the same playbook dawg

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 12/09/2026

This does feel like a very astute ethnographic insight to me.

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Sean T. Collins @seantcollins.com · 10/09/2026

3 things about Dem politicians who dabble in transphobia: 1. It's wrong, they're wrong, on a moral basis they're being evil 2. It's stupid, they're stupid, they'll never get any credit from the fascists for it 3. It's proof you're not capable of reading or rising to this, and therefore any, moment

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Our society's unfathomable cruelty to homeless people is not just morally unjustifiable, but more expensive than housing people would be. Cruelty against the homeless is an unaffordable luxury. Abandoning homeless people to avoid offending the Protestant work ethic is an unaffordable luxury.

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Believing that other people are real is antifascist praxis.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 06/09/2026

I think we could come to different conclusions if we thought of image models as constructing collages of elements of existing images rather than wholly new images.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/09/2026

We know how to teach books in the age of AI: small classes, close reading, research-engaged learning (which is how you ’let students see you struggle’). The issue is nobody will hire and pay the requisite # of faculty to offer this.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 06/09/2026

My somewhat more contrarian version is “artificial intelligence is an incoherent concept because intelligence is an incoherent concept.” And I agree that it’s a folk belief, but it’s also part of certain (often white supremacist) strains of psychology.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 05/09/2026

This never occurred to me either. That sounds like so much more work than doing the research! Writing is hard.

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Anyway, remember that things are inevitable right up til the moment they’re not. “Inevitable” describes potential, not reality. It is a nightmare of the future coming to bully those who are asleep—not a description of some kind of logical or pragmatic reality, as some would have us believe.

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Lila Byock @lbyock.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Today, America’s two largest school districts sent a message to the rest of the country that AI in schools is far from inevitable. When we organize and fight back, we win.

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Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

i don't think it was chiefly or just the inconvenience, but that they couldn't buy their way out of the safety measures and restrictions everyone else faced (they actually could, but not everyone and not every restriction)

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 02/09/2026

There are endless studies showing this and also the financial and societal benefits of universal basic income and or housing-first policies but the U.S. never goes for any of it because it would require allowing the poor to receive benefits that the rich consider “undeserved”

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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 02/09/2026

The slop factory is now claiming to have invented iterative, abductive research design… 20th century ethnography would like a word, sir.

Alfred Wahlforss in • 3rd+
+ Follow
...
CEO & Co-Founder @ Listen Labs...
Book an appointment
5d • G
Anthropic coined a new research term: "self healing studies."
Historically, it was hard to adapt research studies after they launch. The researcher writes the study guide, the interviews run, and if users raise something new along the way, it has to wait for the next study.
In a "self healing study", there is a continuous feedback loop between interviews and the study guide. Each round of interviews identifies new topics, they are added to the guide, and the next interviews explore them.
Nothing waits for a follow-up study - the guide keeps evolving with the study.
And the researcher sits above all of it as the guardrails.
The study proposes additional topics, and the researcher uses their judgment to decide which ones deserve exploring.
The term comes from Jane Justice Leibrock's team at Anthropic, from their churn interviews on Claude Code.
Before we even had an MCP, Anthropic built its own plugin to run Listen studies because they wanted them running around the clock.
That's the future of research.

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Sarah Werner @wynkenhimself.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

A good thread from Hannah on why the university, higher ed, and the humanities are not in crisis but rather in a slow strategic decline and what it means to reorganize along those terms

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 02/09/2026

You’re welcome! I also wonder if the stuff on Paul Popenoe’s later career as an advice columnist in Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation would be useful.

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Peter Sachs Collopy @collopy.net · 02/09/2026

I might start with a look at Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Penn Press, 2010).

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