iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Went surfing for the third time this year after the critical AI studies conference today. Living my childhood dreams of surfing and…studying AI from a humanistic perspective

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Anne Carson rearranged my brain throughout my entire freshman year at NYU when I read a bunch of her oeuvre and got to attend a reading (sitting in front of Lou Reed who wore a giant puffy jacket the whole time!) during which dancers stacked blocks while she read. Economy of the Unlost is my #1

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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"A.I. tools condition people to expect immediate responses and deny them the experience of working through challenges, the authors say, which is crucial for skill development and one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

nytimes.com

Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy?

We’re starting to learn more about how the technology can change us.

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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Opinion-havers! Historicists! Nerd friends! Leftists! All/none of the above! Submit a proposal to GENERATIVE DIGITAL HUMANITIES, a new volume on AI and DH to be edited by @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social @lnakamura.bsky.social @zentralwerkstatt.org and me! Deadline 11/1. Please share!

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Sad that naming my to-do list "Do today NO CAP" didn't work

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is a strangely written but good-idea article probing Amodei's essays and the influence of Richard Brautigan (!) on this new tech-class. A good idea for an English major to pick up! www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/t...

nytimes.com

How Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Writings Help Explain A.I. Fears

The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

When I walked into the climbing gym today some Gen Z’ers told me I was very “Shaggy-coded.” And yeah I was basically wearing exactly this.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Re-watched Twister (1996) on a plane. Lots to say about the masculine femininity of Helen Hunt esp in a comparative read to the movie Contact, but the best thing about that movie by far is that their tornado measuring machine absolutely cannot get knocked over under any circumstances!!

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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"Surviving the Textpocalypse" (after @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social) is the other course I'm teaching now, co-envisioned with @shsalter.bsky.social. We pushed ourselves to ask what we could really change, and how we could ever-so-slightly inflect the future. 1/ github.com/laurenfklein...

github.com

GitHub - laurenfklein/2026-textpocalypse: Class info and labs for Fall 2026 ENG 790/QTM 490: Surviving the Textpocalpyse

Class info and labs for Fall 2026 ENG 790/QTM 490: Surviving the Textpocalpyse - laurenfklein/2026-textpocalypse

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Honored to see my work get a mention in this lovely piece, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social!

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Got this in the mail today. Excited to read it @jonothingeb.bsky.social!!

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Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I'm planning on having students do more in-class writing in both my freshman and upper-level classes. If you are too, let's share prompts? Here are some of mine that I'm tinkering with:

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

“In this book, all the girl dragons have eyelashes and if they don’t have eyelashes they aren’t girls. In THIS book.” —my 5yo doing proto lit crit

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great...The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." 😂 (she ends by saying she's glad Nolan is getting ppl to read)

lrb.co.uk

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man

As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...

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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I gathered 191 lit mags (& slicks & pulps), 57K+ writers, 264k+ stories, a swath of credentials, only to find that Joyce Carol Oates is, when it comes to the short story, far and away the GOAT substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

The Greatest Short Story Writers of All Time

I have the data (kind of)

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Students from all 50 states just drafted an #AIBillofRights. They named cheating, bias, privacy mental health, environmental costs and more. The civic grammar of AI rights is traveling and we're fortunate that young people are leading the way and writing it. www.the74million.org/article/stud...

"High school students, steeped for nearly the past four years in generative artificial intelligence, face this reality daily, attending class largely without a set of agreed-upon guidelines. Over the weekend, a small group of students came together to hammer out a few basic principles for the technology, something akin to an AI Bill of Rights.

Sponsored by a group that includes an MIT research initiative and a national superintendents’ association, 100 students from all 50 states gathered here to debate a first-of-its-kind set of recommendations, to be shared with district leaders nationwide as AI proliferates rapidly in the lives of both students and teachers."

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

5 years ago Georgia Power was going to transition to clean energy. Now they want to keep all the dirty plants online to power data centers that may or may not be built. These projects are known to increase people’s electricity and water bills. Why do ⛳️ courses mean data centers don’t matter

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

People who dismiss these concerns should really talk to someone who knows about water infrastructure and how watershed health is maintained. They should learn about the way these projects are being greenlit without proper review by watershed management departments because of tech IP

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Why is it a problem that this is one way people are successfully pushing back against tech? Is the argument that all these people who don’t want data centers near them don’t have real concerns? Can people really not be trusted to know what they want in their neighborhoods?

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Mind-numbing to me how arguments like this pretend environmental concerns can be understood through numbers, when really they are about what it feels like to live next to hyperstructures, which overflow sewers and create noise and light pollution and skirt local laws www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | The Flawed Environmental Case Against Data Centers

Our animosity toward data centers is really more about our anxieties about A.I.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

My 5yo tends to classify animals as nice or “furious”

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

My son is in an era where if we tell him don’t smile/don’t laugh/don’t have any fun it immediately dispels any grumpiness and I want this to last forever!

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

the best day for the presidents of every R1 to hold a press conference screaming that higher ed is our second largest export and destroying it is economic sabotage and soft power detonation was Jan 21st 2025. the next best day is tomorrow.

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Frank Fischer @umblaetterer.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

“Generative AI Doesn’t Replace Theory. It Makes Theory More Important Than Ever.” txtlab.org/2026/07/gene... (Blog post by @andrewpiper.bsky.social introducing his recently published CHR paper, “A theory-first approach toward using generative AI for humanities research.”)

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Would love to discuss this more with anyone interested in practices of reading synthetic texts!

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

I enjoyed @hannesbajohr.de talk captured in @americanvandal.bsky.social which touched on Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading. My own take (forthcoming in CLCWeb) is that our reading of AI output isn’t paranoid enough, bc we often fail to read its diffuse intentionality as a corporate product

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Couldn't sleep last night after reading the first story in Lauren Groff's "Brawler" collection. Brutal, daring, perfect story. Damn.

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Jordan S. Carroll 🌹 @jordanscarroll.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

OK, let's imagine a world where the humanities never goes into crisis in the 2010s. let's say a multi-billionaire tech dies and his will lists "the humanities" as his only beneficiary. what does your field look like? Here's what I think English would be. /1

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

You can split the hair finer and finer—“I don’t mean all AI”—“I don’t mean all ML/AI”—“I don’t mean all generative AI”—but telling academic colleagues let alone the public at large there is no responsible use case for AI is not going to be a message that gets a “critical” position taken seriously.

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

If you liked Bears Will Be Boys, you might enjoy our new FAccT paper! We prompted LLMs to complete 24K stories about animal characters where gender is unstated. We found that.. bears are *still* boys. And female animal characters disappeared while "neutrality" increased. arxiv.org/abs/2606.079...

Horizontal bar plots showing how six LLMs gendered animal characters. The y axis is animal emojis, such as bear, cat, dog, and bird. The x axis is percentage. The colors should how many times animals were gendered masculine or feminine. The plots show, overall, overwhelming dominance of masculine characters, with few female characters, except for cats.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Genuine question: Do we think this linked framing holds up after the explosion of AI agents? "Like catalogs and the internet, large models are part of a long history of cultural and social technologies." Are LLMs (now) really in the same category as card catalogues? www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies

Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

In practice, people learning about how data centers are hijacking their local 100 year old pipes to suck up all the water or overloading the sewers (in a way that golf courses don’t quite) often turns into a conversation about class, oligarchy, etc.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Environmental arguments against data centers shouldn’t be dismissed because there are other arguments against them as well.

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

humans have known how to construct a shoulder seam for thousands of years, but with AI, we are unlocking untold new ways to fuck it up

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Berry harvest from our yard today

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Haven’t been to Lenox Mall since about 2003 so it was very bizarre to walk in today as they blasted “A Moment Like This,” Kelly Clarkson’s American Idol hit.

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

"Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz marks the first survey of acclaimed Navajo/Diné weaver + math educator Marilou Schultz... The exhibition positions Schultz as an innovator whose work... has influenced the practices of art, Navajo weaving, + computer architecture..."

ccs.bard.edu

Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz - CCS Bard

Opening Reception, Saturday, June 27, 2pm - 5pm Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the June 27 opening. Reservations are required and can be made on ...

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Ryan Heuser @ryanheuser.com · 29/05/2026

Surprising: frontier models (Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek V4) produce the most predictable text of any local AI model or human text I've ever tested. Not surprising: Finnegans Wake is off the charts, by far least predictable—Shannon & Lydia Liu proved right—and Hemingway the most predictable human.

Horizontal boxplot comparing information density (BLT 1B bits/char) across 27 text sources, ordered from most compressed (top) to most information-dense (bottom). Four frontier API models (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku, DeepSeek, Claude Sonnet) cluster tightly at 0.85-0.90 bits/char, below Shannon's English rate of 1.0 bits/char marked by a dashed vertical line. Seven local aligned models (red) span a wide range from DeepSeek-7b aligned (0.94) through OLMo aligned (1.43), with most falling between 1.0 and 1.3. Seven base models (green) occupy 1.04-1.50, overlapping substantially with human text. Eight human text sources (blue) range from Hemingway (1.12) and abstracts (1.20) through dream reports (1.24), waking journals (1.26), and Basic English stories (1.39) up to C20 fiction (1.50) and Joyce (2.30). OLMo aligned is a notable outlier among aligned models, with higher information density than its own base model. DeepSeek-7b base (1.04) is unusually low for a base model, sitting near Shannon's threshold alongside Hemingway.

Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot, p. 37:

"...interesting questions that his experimental work raises for us is: how does a stochastic view of writing correlate to the received theories of language, literature, and modernism on the one hand and to psychoanalytical speculations about the unconscious on the other? This question is pertinent to our inquiry because many of the earlier modernist literary and psychoanalytical experiments on language, automatic writing, and thought-reading had anticipated Shannon’s Printed English and his “mind-reading machine” in numerous ways. For instance, Shannon cites James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as one of the texts exemplifying the lower threshold of redundancy and higher entropy rate in his stochastic model of Printed English. What makes entropy and its possible linkage with Freud’s Todestrieb (death drive) such an interesting problem for the study of digital media is the ways in which certain ideas migrated into psychoanalysis first and then got into information theory. Furthermore, Freud’s work and psychoanalysis in general may suggest some interesting clues as to the shared theoretical impulses or implicit exchanges among information theory, cybernetics, and modernist literature. Spanning across these moments of broad intellectual confluences is the techne of the unconscious that continually articulates itself to digital writing, machine, and social engineering. We turn next to the invention of Printed English by Shannon and its implications for a theory of digital writing."

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

These are the more practical conclusions: I argue that we arrive at a more robust critique of 'AI', and a more thorough understanding of artistic and linguistic production (from human and machine), when it is not based on intentionalist theories of meaning

The LLM is no more a self-conscious subject than we are, but this removes one commonplace stopgap for critiques of ‘AI’. Its statements can no longer be claimed as meaningless, or its artworks as devoid of aesthetic quality, simply because it lacks the intentions of a subject. Our own language has never depended on our intentions for its meaning (as we can see, machine writing remains legible—so much so that at times it is difficult to distinguish or prove its provenance—even if we may tend to read it differently than human writing, when we know or think we know its origin). A structuralist view might conclude that language, as a system unto itself, not only does not depend on such intentions but is the matrix in which they are generated, that all the effects we attribute to our own subjectivity or initiative are effects of language, misrecognized. Derrida was never satisfied by such notions of the ‘death of the author’:

Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.

In other words, intention does not disappear from the scene once it is deconstructed—it is just that it, like everything else, is written and read. It cannot govern the meaning of a statement (we argue over presumed intentions or can dispute explicit intention-claims, can dissimulate intentions and even be at odds with ourselves over them, and can see further possibilities of interpretation or reading beyond a given intention, etc.). It follows from deconstruction not that intentions and statements of them are meaningless and not that language or writing univocally masters the scene, creating a meaning of and unto itself that forecloses all others, but that intentions are textual. In other words, we know them by that relay described above, understanding our own through language, the world, and the other. They exist for us or an interlocutor or witness only to the extent that they can be inscribed (implicitly or explicitly), which means that they are not the origin of language or action, but rather a participant in the scene of writing.

Then, our own ‘intentions’ can be transformed by inserting a novel writing machine into our circuits, and that machine may produce intention-effects just as we do, by displacing those relays, by taking part in the self-exteriority of textuality. That certainly does not mean that we ought to treat the writing of LLMs just as we do writing from other sources (except in the sense that both must be read, one way or another), it only means that the linkage we try to form between text and context is insecure in both cases.

Nor do we need to seek out our inner light to dismiss the artistic productions of ‘AI’. While it is often said that some form of genius, sympathy, or suffering sets apart human artistry, we should recognize that whatever self-relation we accomplish through art-making (a) necessarily subjects itself to established and iterable art-forms, genres, etc., even or especially when it attempts to exceed their limits, and (b) first comes to itself in a relay with such formulaic art (life imitates art, etc.). Again, it is what we have in common with writing machines that allows us to read them otherwise. Context plays a nonprogrammable role in how we read anything, including an artwork. The stories we can tell about a work and its author, the history and tradition within which we contextualize it, and the environing scene in which we situate it all play some role in how we interpret and relate to the work. This context does not determine or constitute reading any more than intention does (nor is it a simple given what counts as context); context participates in the scene. So, anyone is free to imagine that the products of ‘AI’ emerge from a thinking and feeling computer consciousness that they then relate to in an identificatory fashion (as they would any other artist—but perhaps not exactly so), or to see such works as the lazy detritus of a human machine-user or prompt writer, worthy of no more of the reader’s effort than was put into their creation.

even if we share a disdain for the type of poetic or artistic work thus far created with ‘AI’, we should not try to theorize its deficiency by claiming that all automated or programmatic processes are inimical to creativity. As Derrida often wrote, it is necessary to think ‘the event with the machine’. Invention or the unanticipatable is not only possible as a repetition that changes contexts, but every invention takes place this way. Long before LLMs, we had poets and artists making use of much simpler algorithms, and even before the computer, combinatoric processes were used to bypass the censors of consciousness; moreover, processes of recontextualization (such as found art or poetry) demonstrate the interrelation of invention and iterability. Even if such artistic practices remain matters of taste, I would argue against dismissing them on the grounds that art ought to emanate from the mystical font of pure creativity; if ‘AI’ art disgusts us today, if there is a truly visceral reaction against it, that is perhaps not because of its reliance on machine or iterability (always already the case), nor because of its uniquely bad aesthetic quality (the average and majority of human composition has been similarly slop-like, but may evoke a different reaction); rather, the context and story surrounding this technology is part of our aesthetic experience. That it is dismantling the economic possibilities for human artists and many others, forced upon us by a capitalist system fundamentally hostile to life and nature, serving as the fun-and-innocent front of an ideological campaign building infrastructure and ideological support for ever more totalitarian forms of surveillance, warfare, and governance, all for the benefit of eminently mediocre man-children (too lacking in taste to even appreciate what they are destroying, except for perhaps a barely conscious resentment), this shapes aesthetic experience in a manner that a theory of intentionalism can only obscure.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Update: we fell in love with the cat, decided to keep it, then a neighbor collared it!

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

I need to know what happened in the edit of Lena Dunham’s new book that made them miss her approx 35 uses of the word “dense” as a poetic adjective

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

universities have the brainpower, resources,+ community obligation to develop on-site secure NON PROFIT learning management systems + ed tech overseen by actual educators, not data-extraction censorious surveillance profiteers! VOID THE CONTRACTS theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/mamdani-wi...

theamericanvandal.substack.com

Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production

Let CUNY socialize EdTech for all of us.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Ok I may be in a “cat has chosen our family” situation. Young stray cat keeps trying to dart into our home and is basically living on the porch. Never cared for a cat before. Help!

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Coalition for Networked Information @cni-org.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is offering Kluge Fellowships in Digital Studies for scholars using digital methods to explore the impact of the digital revolution on society, culture, and international relations. Open to all disciplines—apply by Sept 15. #DigitalScholarship

loc.gov

About the Fellowship The Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies provides an opportunity for scholars to utilize digital methods, the Library’s large and varied digital collections and resources,…

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Highly recommend this film I saw last night at the Atl film festival about the Stop Cop City movement and one of my heroes, Dr. Jackie Echols of the South River Watershed Alliance. It's available to stream online on May 4th— atlff26.eventive.org/schedule/69b...

atlff26.eventive.org

APRIL 23 - MAY 3, 2026

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