iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Wanna see my smilin’ face illustrating a culture-war opinion piece on page 27 of the Rolling Stone

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 31/07/2026

My car went rogue after I turned on cruise control and jumped out

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Left positive comments about the new confraflow bike lane in my neighborhood on the city FB post about it, and a bike lane hater with a motorcycle profile banner image told me to “be careful” going “the wrong way down the street”

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, and it’s not close

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Everyone’s sharing their opinions about data centers, meanwhile no-one is paying attention to the data crust

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Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Every time Vance is interviewed on any subject he should be asked, "Why should we believe anything you say, when you admitted that you invented a racist story about Haitian eating pets just so you could stoke a panic about immigration? Do you think that makes you good and trustworthy?"

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 01/09/2026

A fundamental problem with "oh it's useful for coding" is that "generating more software faster" has, if anything, negative marginal utility in itself. The world is not suffering from a software shortage. The world is suffering from a software quality crisis, which LLMs seem more likely to worsen.

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Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

“It’s wrong. All of it. The Senate needs to pass the House-approved 3 year TPS extension for Haitian refugees. Immediately.” — @repgreglandsman.bsky.social, who is tracking this stuff, says to @zeteo.com today

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt singing Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” on Letterman in 1999, accompanied by piano, synthesizer, and glass armonica. “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st Century.”

youtu.be

Harris, Parton, Ronstadt on Late Show, March 24, 1999 (full, stereo)

YouTube video by Don Giller

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Return of the Cmonstermacques @cmonmaque.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

People ask “how could you bring a child into a world this sick” and I always answer “simple, my child shall have superpowers like laser beam eyes”

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

86 [EIGHTY-SIX] Short Films About Glenn Gould

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Stellbound: Stellraiser II @antlervel.vet · 23/11/2024

The only thing worse than living in unprecedented times is discovering the times are actually highly precedented

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 21/08/2026

The most crucial part in each "AI Winter," & the thing that I genuinely think cannot come soon enough, is when we as a culture remember that we're able to disambiguate the term "AI" & we go back to actually descriptively naming the process(es) we mean. Really can't wait for that to come around again

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Mo Ryan @moryan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Me: I *won* overthinking, actually, if you think about it therapist: we talked about this Me: OK, but I *did* win, right??

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Lots of your posts are not increasing shareholder value

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

look, as someone who has literally attended a microbrew meetup on a pirate ship, I don’t know where anyone would get the idea that it would be a sad scene. it’s obviously a rip-roaring, jolly time

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I wonder if the people losing their minds over NYC-run grocery stores know about New Hampshire state liquor stores.

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

“Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” (2026)

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

If you combine Alden Ehrenreich’s performances in Solo and in the new Jeremy O. Harris-directed Carly Rae Jepsen video (“Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor”) then you get Sandy Kreja from CJ Cherryh’s “Merchanter’s Luck” and not giving it a film adaptation is leaving a lot of money on the table

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

It’s going to be something when US ratification of Geneva I & II and signing the ICC treaty becomes a condition of peace talks

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Our age of bronzer is ending

Matt Damon as Scott Thorson in Behind the Candelabra (2013)

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I was a bit confused by the reviews of the Slate truck that argued “but you can get a vehicle with a lot more features for only slightly more money!” Yes, but people are beginning to want *less* and are willing to pay more to get it. And this sort of offering is why.

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Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

This is one of the best things I've read in a while about the psychology of car supremacy, and how those of us who even *question* it are viewed as heretics. Thanks to @pflax1.bsky.social for sending this my way.

medium.com

We Don’t Have a Culture of Convenience in North America. We Have a CULT of Convenience.

And you can tell the difference by what happens when you question it.

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

*standing up on the plane* Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace…

Image of the first paragraph if a magazine article, Within the Context of No Context by George WS Trow, The New Yorker, 1980.

WONDER

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?

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Caræsten 🇵🇸 @cara.city · 28/07/2026

we are absolutely missing a critical culture right now, it's been subsumed by fandom, and reading a knowledgeable, high brow critique of a film like Emily Wilson wrote is just so *refreshing*

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Wow people are really unfamiliar with the distinct pleasures of simultaneously enjoying Nolan movies as cinematic spectacle while also enjoying picking apart their paper-thin intellectual architectures, a phenomenon that is now old enough to vote

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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

*whispers* you know we can do this cultural debate about art thing all the time, right? Websites and news organizations used to have culture critics on staff whose entire job was writing about books, movies, and TV. People read them and then discussed them. We have the technology to do this again.

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Moby Dick is simultaneously the Odyssey of the 19th Century and the Oppenheimer of the 19th Century

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The racist backlash to Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a kind of stolen valor, an attempt by the right to claim credit for achievements they had nothing to do with in order to justify racial hierarchy in the present. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

theatlantic.com

The Fear of Black Greeks

White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece.

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

“It's not bull-leaps-into-stands, it's not Cheyenne-Arapaho / It's ‘Morning, Ralph,’ ‘Morning, Sam,’ see you tomorrow” youtu.be/d06lXE2yjKk

youtu.be

Drapetomania

YouTube video by Beauty Pill - Topic

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

This was all so dumb and could have been avoided.

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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

> "we democratized a thing" > look inside > they are raising the noise floor

That one cat that's really close to the camera for the look inside meme. I wish I knew their name!

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Course correction is only possible once you can see the trajectory for what it actually is. As long as people continue to claim that abuse isn't tolerated or that being abusive can't make someone well-liked/popular/successful, we can't actually change the fact that it is and it does.

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

If sexual abuse was really considered a terrible thing, the world's richest and most powerful people wouldn't be abusers. The most valued technology wouldn't produce sexual abuse on demand. And allegations of abuse wouldn't be framed as positive depictions of masculinity. Our culture rewards abuse.

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Mat Johnson @matjohnson.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Congratulations to everyone who said it would get this bad. Your prize is watching everyone who disagreed now claim no one could have predicted it would get this bad.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 30/05/2026

text model predicts text, using data recklessly scraped from everywhere, to answer questions that are not about the frequency of text? that seems very dangerous

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 30/05/2026

if you want to improve public discussion call these things predictive models. it leads immediately to useful questions: what do they predict? using what data? for what purpose? weather model predicts weather, using carefully gathered weather data, to help people make weather decisions? great

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ddɐ˙ʎʞsʞɔɐlq˙uǝʌs@ @sven.blacksky.app · 25/05/2026

One *cannot* just move on from the Anthropic question when the very substance of this encyclical letter was written with the tech industry talking point. One simple example below: 👇 www.vatican.va/content/leo-....

98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding Al risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current Al systems are more "cultivated" than "built," for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within
which the intelligence "grows." As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 25/05/2026

Kind of interesting to see mainstream tech commentary come around to the idea that Google's search was built around a social contract that they've now broken Here's how I described it three years ago, in 2023, www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/tech-br...

baldurbjarnason.com

Writing when tech has broken the web's social contract

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

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Daniel Suitor @danielsuitor.com · 25/05/2026

As someone who had a kid in 2022, my wife and I often joke that we bet wrong on the moral arc of our country. But this kind of doomerism is loser shit. Basically every parent I know is raising their kids to be part of the solution. It just takes time. Why should we quit, they're the ones that suck.

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Dewb @dewb.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

People on the Internet will say anything. “Charlie Brown had theosis.”

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 08/05/2026

Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/

Understanding Artificial Neural Networks:
Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism
Olivia Guest1,2, Nancy Abigail Nuñez Hernández3, and Mark Blokpoel1,2
1Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University, The Netherlands
2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
Mysterianism is the idea that human cognition, mind, cannot be understood. Taking this
concept and applying it to known mechanism — such that claims are made that we do not
know how engineered systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), work, or that they
constitute black boxes that we can only open with difficulty — is inappropriate at best and
malicious at worst. We do know the mechanistic structure of such models because we designed
and built them. We also do know their functional role (what they are for) as well as the
mathematical function they are asked to approximate (map inputs to target outputs). Because
mysterianist beliefs about known systems, such as ANNs, are often expressed, scientists need
to sit up and take notice. We provide an error theory as to what is going on to help unpick
this metatheoretical blunder. Ultimately, the problem is that ‘understanding’ is not a technical
term in these cases: the word is co-opted for a specific narrative to sell ‘artificial intelligence’
through mystification. All computational systems, from pendulums to databases, will behave
in ways we cannot predict or control — this is not a unique property of ANNs — and experts
do indeed grasp the computational properties of these systems nonetheless.
Keywords: artificial neural networks; mechanism; black box; epistemology; artificial
intelligence; understanding

4 GUEST, NUÑEZ HERNÁNDEZ, & BLOKPOEL≈
ANNs are equiva-
lent to or inspired
by humans.
α
≡
ANNs are a black
box or unknowable,
even if opened.
β
≡
Humans are a black
box or unknowable.
γ
Figure 1
Three co-occurring (latent) assertions in the context of con-
temporary reasoning on AI and cognition. While they may
appear to hang together in “reflective equilibrium” (Elgin 2017),
their metatheoretical examination brings their contradictions to
light. Starting from the top, and moving clockwise: 𝛼) represents
the typical assertion of so-called cognitive, neural, or otherwise
biological plausibility or inspiration presented for ANNs; 𝛽) is
the claim we tackle head on here — both in terms of analysing
the constituent terms and in how it relates to the other two
assumptions; and 𝛾) exemplifies a type of mysterianism, which
while not always explicitly expressed, plays a background role
and importantly comes into conflict with the other two claims
in important ways

MYSTERIANISM ABOUT KNOWN MECHANISM IS MYSTICISM 11World
?Di
Data?Si
ANN
Figure 3
Not all systems, 𝑆𝑖 relate to their relevant data, 𝐷𝑖 and world
phenomena this way, but ANN models (as many inferential
statistical models) do when used without scientific understand-
ing of the data-generating process or without verbal or formal
theory to match (Guest and Martin 2025b, 2021, 2023). As we
move from left to right above, we move from full understanding
of engineered systems, 𝑆𝑖 to less or even possibly none of the
data, 𝐷𝑖 to the world which can be thought of as the set of
phenomena to be understood.

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