iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Sure vacations from work are great, but have you ever tried a holiday from the ceaseless imperative to will and desire 🫥

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/08/2026

what does @tonychemero.bsky.social's new book 'Intertwined Creatures' have to offer to the “AI consciousness” debate? here is my take on it www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Can AI ever be conscious? The question stems from a misconception

A book outlines how the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology and philosophy have neglected a key aspect of consciousness: the body.

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Tired: Replaced by AI Wired*: replaced by a plastic tube. Johnathan Gagne's low intervention 10 min Aeropress recipe craps on all my V60 faffing. (* lit.) (Guy in Computer Science dept. in "is tedious about coffee" shock)

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Ben Hanowell @hanowell.me · 06/08/2026

Does anyone in #computerscience or #electricalengineering know the origin of the term "latency" as in "lag" as it is used in the industry today? I ask because I am writing an essay where I'm discussing the etymology of the term "latent" in scientific parlance.

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I used to have nightmares about recursion and infinity. One about "the old woman who swallowed a fly", but getting faster and faster. Another where I set up a company that bought shipping containers in a way that enabled it to buy more shipping containers until it ran out of control.

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown @enbrown.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

My 4-year/old just learned about the concept of infinity and is now throwing a tantrum over it. “It’s weird! I don’t like it. I just want numbers to stop!”

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Just finished Transcription by Ben Lerner. First Lerner I've read but probably the best fiction I've read this year. People called it a "technology novel", which suggests it's a slightly polemical "issue" piece. It's not. It does capture the pandemic better than other writing & films I've seen.

cover of the book Transcription by Ben Lerner. Red circle centre bottom, like a recording light. Title and author at top in white bold caps sans serfi

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Picked this up today. From a quick skim I haven't been so interested to read an unfamiliar author in quite a while. Tempted to post summaries as I go. Missing research discussion I guess.

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Fovea Hex @foveahex.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

One of the truest and most heart-stoppingly beautiful voices I ever heard..... three years gone today. Unforgettable.

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Author fam. Yr prose is extremely oxidised, no cap. Aura is very Linkedin. Giving hydroxyl radicals, cellular damage. Man needs to get off that Claude stack. Slorch some Goffman ASAP. Seriously fam, get on some Suchman, Hofstadter even, Vuong

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Every time I play Pat Metheny's smooth jazz classic Phase Dance, I remember the time I put it on as chill background sound while setting up for a lecture (weird dead room), and a student came in horrified and said "whoa! this is a bit intense". www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwk...

youtube.com

Phase Dance

YouTube video by Pat Metheny Group - Topic

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Accepted @ #chiplay2026 w @elisamekler.bsky.social & Roosa Piitulainen Can gamepad input tell you about skill-challenge balance? Our results say yes! Points to scalable methods for game adaptation & player-experience research osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Such a great book, I had no idea there could be so many different approaches to observing John Berger.

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Why does BlueSky keep centering American and more broadly Western voices whenever we do AI discourse?

Polling showing that Americans lead many other countries in negativity about AI. The US is the country with the highest net share of people who say AI is making society worse, while Nigeria, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia are above 40% net AI is making society better.

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👻 🎃 🦇 Bela Lughosti's Dad 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸 @belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Fantastic turnout for this last night. Despite having only 24hours notice, @bristolantifascist.bsky.social and other antifascists mobilised around 200 people. The fash, meanwhile, either too disorganised, or intimidated by the numbers, managed only 5 people. Bristol is always antifascist.

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William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Nigel Cabourn’s peculiar visionary turn, directed at tattered racks of surplus and workwear, had nothing whatever to do with fashion — in the most admirable possible way!

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Byline Times @bylinetimes.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

🔴 BREAKING: “My Personal Pride and Joy”: Mandelson’s UK Palantir Deal The former US Ambassador considered a £750m MOD deal with the US tech company his landmark achievement. But how was it achieved?

bylinetimes.com

“My Personal Pride and Joy”: Mandelson’s UK Palantir Deal

The former US Ambassador considered a £750m MOD deal with the US tech company his landmark achievement. But how was it achieved?

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Today I listened to Music for 18 Musicians and Proverb for the first time in about 20 years. M418 is clearly the great work, but Proverb was the first piece of modern classical I really listened to properly, and I Stan'd Ludwig. Big deal. Weird to hear it again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5lg...

youtube.com

Steve Reich - Proverb

YouTube video by eternal feedback loop

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

"“searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans." Who will want to write anything under those conditions? Would a chef cook well for someone who gets someone to blends all their food then reconstitute it? techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g...

techcrunch.com

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce t...

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Seán Clancy @seanlclancy.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

New album was out last week… give it a shot this weekend. You might like it… seanclancy.bandcamp.com/album/se-n-c...

seanclancy.bandcamp.com

Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End, by Sean Clancy

10 track album

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Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 10/04/2026

New paper out in Adaptive Behavior! On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii).
A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).

This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017).
This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Genuinely inspiring guy in any case, but especially in a world where so many edgy young dudes will need to move on beyond the stupid shit they said on the internet. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

rollingstone.com

The Radical Life and Surprising Reinvention of Steve Albini

Friends and family remember the complex legacy of Steve Albini, the legendary engineer who died in 2024 after working with Nirvana, Pixies, and more

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Brian Hughes @bmhughes.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Overheard at lunch: “You’re exhausting my tokens”

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

"beautiful worlds can be mere marketing, lofty deeds can be irksome impositions, but the human bad - why should that ever be abandoned?" Ziporyn's Daodejing Ch 62

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

RIP J.H. Prynne. Renowned for his difficulty and single-mindedness (I personally struggle with the last couple of decades) but that forgets how beautiful and lyrical much of his poetry is. "Love" is one of the few poems I could recite by heart

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.

—Jeremy Prynne, “Love,” from White Stones

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Louise Glück, born on this day in 1943

TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

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Seiara Imanova @seiaraimanova.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

What if mental disorders aren’t just brain problems, but disruptions in how we make sense of the world? I enjoyed speaking with Professor Sanneke de Haan about her work on the enactive approach to psychiatry in the latest Behind the Stigma episode :) Listen here: www.buzzsprout.com/1402324/epis...

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Simon Hammann @simonhammann.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Corollary: Conservatism is just virtue signalling to dead people.

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Elisa Mekler @elisamekler.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Not into the AI-generated podcast summaries of #chi2026 paper sessions – that authors *cannot* opt out of. But was thinking that perhaps this could make papers more accessible to the general public. Turns out the AI-podcasts are only available to ACM premium members... wtf...

Landing page for the AI-generated summary podcast for the "Identity, Culture, and Games for Social Impact" session at CHI. The top menu bar displays that this is the "Premium Edition" of the ACM digital library

Same landing page for the "basic edition" of the ACM digital library. The basic edition is free, but also offers no access to the AI-generated podcast summaries.

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Oussama Metatla @ousmet.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

#CHI2026 today 12:03 P1 Room 132 (session: Getting Emotion) Susan Min Li will present Rough Meanings, her first CHI paper (!) on how tiny surface features shape emotion, colour, and language associations, moving cross-sensory interaction towards the realm of micro-structures #inclusiveXplay

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Oussama Metatla @ousmet.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

and if you or someone you know is interesting in this sort of stuff and looking for a postdoc in cross-sensory fabrication and playful interaction? Ping me or anyone from the #inclusiveXplay project team for a chat: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

bristol.ac.uk

Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol

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Robert Ross @robert-m-ross.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

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Pedro Lopes @pedrolopes.org · 13/04/2026

The ACM CHI 2026 paper program is live on the ACM Digital Library, so please enjoy all the new 1702 pieces of science that #CHI2026 has for you: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi... (cc @acm_chi ). p.s.: You can read our welcome message at dl.acm.org/action/showF...

dl.acm.org

Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | ACM Conferences

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Magdalena Skipper @magdalenaskipper.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

This is quite extraordinary- scientists set a kind of trap for AI chat bots by inventing a fake disease. AI told people it was real and… the deliberately bogus preprints started being cited in peer reviewed literature 🫣 🧪 #MedSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

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Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Art music songs are tough to pull off, but this is an almost perfect piece of music. I ration it out for myself. newworldrecords.bandcamp.com/track/quietn...

newworldrecords.bandcamp.com

Quietness, by Kepler Quartet

from the album Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 6, 7, & 8

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Elisa Mekler @elisamekler.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Folks, if you have 20-30min to spare, please help out my master students! Play their game prototype and fill in a short online survey.

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Antoni Maiovvi @maiovvi.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Digital pre-order for the YG Remix album featuring @mogwai.scot @snowbeasts.bsky.social @ghostcopnyc.bsky.social and a whole bunch of other people who aren't on here! Teasing the Mogwai remix today. Put listening in: yegods.bandcamp.com/album/rebala...

yegods.bandcamp.com

Rebalanced, by Ye Gods

8 track album

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Datta Lab @dattalab.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

cell.com

Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks

Weinreb et al. reveal a hierarchy of timescales in mouse behavior, including low-level syllables and high-level behavioral states. States and syllables are encoded in different brain areas. Prefrontal...

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