iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 1h

Tune in tomorrow to find out how they voted ... BUT AT WHAT TIME??? www.timeanddate.com/news/astrono... edition.cnn.com/2026/10/13/s... www.bipm.org/en/member-st... www.bipm.org/documents/d/...

timeanddate.com

Are We About to Abandon Leap Seconds?

On October 16, 2026, the General Conference on Weights and Measures may change the rules that govern UTC—the time standard for clocks across the world.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 1h

So Oct. 15, they vote. They could replace current system with leap hour: a safe discrepancy window of up to 1 hour. Won't be violated for a few thousand years, letting humans ignore slight mismatch between solar & civil time caused by Earth's changing rotation speed (incl. due to melting ice caps).

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 1h

then leap second must be added or subtracted to minimize the discrepancy to within permitted 1-sec window. But leap seconds were intro'd in 1972, when computery sub-second timings weren't as much a thing. Experts also fear a possibly forthcoming, novel negative leap second might cause systemic probs

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 1h

Tomorrow in Paris, 69 member states of Int'l. Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) vote on whether to abandon the leap second. The current rule is, if there's more than a second deviation between UTC (civil time based on atomic clocks) and UT1 (solar time based on position of Sun in sky),

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Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com · 3h

Military patrolling the Columbia Heights ballot box at 6:44 pm "It's a public sidewalk" the lead soldier said when reminded of the law. Photo by self

One of a troop of three soldiers patrolling the Columbia Heights ballot box, October 14, 2026

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 6h

Whenever I want to type something like "uncountable" or "infinite", I stop and start thinking of metaphysics and epistemology concerns. Thus I never get anything written.

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American Library Association @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social · 7h

NEW: ALA submitted comments to the FCC defending the E-Rate program's discounts for broadband at libraries. We have fought for digital connectivity at the library for over 30 years. We're not backing down now. More: www.ala.org/news/2026/10/ala-showca…

Show up for E-Rate. ALA American Library Association

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 8h

Now these military implements are to be used to image space. Swords into ploughshares. www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/w... space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/fia... www.jalopnik.com/2280101/grac... www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

jalopnik.com

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Began Life As A Spy Satellite That Never Launched - Jalopnik

The National Reconnaissance Office planned to deploy a spy-telescope satellite with a huge mirror. But cost overruns sent the mirror to NASA instead.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 8h

Lockheed took over the mirror part of the contract and made a different optical technology. Contract's remainder--for the non-mirror portions--stayed with Boeing. What about the mirrors Boeing had developed? They were stashed in a Rochester, NY warehouse until NRO agreed to give them to NASA.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 8h

The mirror's development was part of the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellites program (aka Topaz), a part the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office contracted to Boeing in 1999. When Boeing was late and overrunning by billions of dollars, the government cancelled its mirror contract in 2005.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 8h

The primary mirror for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman telescope, launched Aug. 30, now on its way to Earth's Lagrange Point 2--where gravitational forces balance, allowing the telescope to be "parked" in #space (with regular course corrections)--began life as a mirror for the Topaz spy satellite program.

Nancy Grace Roman, pictured here, was NASA’s first chief astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1970s. Roman was known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in developing orbital observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

New: an AI company now lets cops identify specific houses, using data from Zillow and Airbnb, based on a single photo. It's part of Raven, previously called Geospy. Company previously demoed its tools to catch people vandalizing Flock cameras or protesters www.404media.co/ai-company-l...

404media.co

AI Company Lets Cops Pinpoint Specific Houses Based on a Single Interior Photo

Raven, previously called GeoSpy, lets cops figure out what specific Airbnb or Zillow property a photo was taken in.

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The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 14/10/2026

The Modi government has removed more than a hundred million people from voter rolls and is cracking down on a vigorous protest movement. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

newyorker.com

Is This the Beginning of the End of Indian Democracy?

The Modi government has removed more than a hundred million people from voter rolls and is cracking down on a vigorous protest movement.

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Reactor Magazine @reactorsff.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon is a fixup novel done right, a book that explores profound themes through poetic prose. If Sturgeon's Law is true, than it's always nice to have a chance to celebrate a work that falls into the other 10%

reactormag.com

Gifted Outcasts: More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon - Reactor

A powerful, poetic work that explores what it means to be human.

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The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 13/10/2026

Forget age or swag or social status—the most important relationship gap, Amy Carleton argues, is also one of the least discussed:

bit.ly

Why the Intelligence Gap Really Matters

From John Milton to Prince, great thinkers and artists have argued that you can’t have true romance without a meeting of the minds.

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Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com · 13/10/2026

Folks in DC have seen the shift in the National Guard occupation - @duffomatic.bsky.social has found the ONLY mention of this change in the press

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Mylo Minderbinder @duffomatic.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The only reporting of Phase 2 I’ve seen was buried in a Stars and Stripes story: “Troops will . . begin transitioning to the next phase. Though few details were shared, the next step includes transitioning into neighborhoods such as Anacostia and Trinidad.” www.stripes.com/theaters/us/... 10/

stripes.com

‘A significant impact’: National Guard wraps up first year of deployment to DC

More than 9,700 troops have deployed to the city for the past year as part of an effort to reduce crime in the nation’s capital.

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Mylo Minderbinder @duffomatic.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

WaPo has failed to cover the Guard’s secretive Phase 2 when there’s a huge opportunity for real investigative journalism - or at least asking their Federal sources some tough questions. The public has almost no information about what the Guard’s operational plans are. In fact . . 9/

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Mylo Minderbinder @duffomatic.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Here’s where it gets much darker. My letter also criticized WaPo for missing the larger story, failing to cover how the 3,000+ Guard troops in DC have quietly shifted into Phase 2 of their deployment, pulling out of touristy areas and aggressively moving in to residential neighborhoods. 8/

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Mylo Minderbinder @duffomatic.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

WaPo published my letter, but first they censored it. Here’s the story . . 1/

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Anonymous @youranonjd.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

🚨THIS IS A FIVE-ALARM FIRE. Federal agents have raided the home of a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, after the president and vice president publicly targeted her. Twenty-two days before an election. Every American should understand the constitutional gravity of what is unfolding.

politico.com

DHS agents search Rep. Ilhan Omar's home

The raid came after the president announced in January on Truth Social that the Justice Department was investigating Omar.

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Anonymous @youranonjd.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

When the executive branch uses federal law enforcement against a member of a coequal branch of government, the burden of transparency is enormous. Congress must demand immediate oversight. Political retaliation must be investigated. The independence of our democracy is at stake. Putin’s playbook.

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Ilhan Omar @ilhanmn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.

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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Flávio Bolsonaro is trying to get the Electoral Supreme Court to take down this site that provides info on what social services Flávio will cut if he becomes president. He wants this court to help him hide his policy agenda from the public before the 10/25 election. oqueestaemjogo.ascaribe.tech

oqueestaemjogo.ascaribe.tech

O que está em jogo na sua cidade

Digite sua cidade ou CEP e veja os serviços públicos do seu município que dependem de programas federais, com as provas de que estão em risco.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

To give a sense of scale, Musk is spending more on the midterms than he was on the 2024 election, and he was the biggest donor in that election. In 2025 he promised to pull back from politics and do much less political spending. Another lie.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

There was no accountability for DOGE so he is going to keep doing it. Dems should promise to minimize contracts with clearly partisan government contractors and to impose more regulatory scrutiny on Musk. At this point, nothing to lose. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/u...

nytimes.com

Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans

The world’s richest person has quietly become by far the biggest known midterm donor, trying to save Republicans’ Senate majority with some of the largest donations in American political history.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

#Oregon deadline to register to #vote is tomorrow end of day.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

3 major #AI literary scandals this year: the winning story for Caine Prize for African Writing, the winner for the Commonwealth Prize, & a finalist for the Prix Goncourt are all suspected of having been generated in some significant part by artificial intellience. www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/1...

theatlantic.com

Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI

The prestigious Caine Prize, announced last week, went to a story with many red flags.

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Jooooohhhh No! @josefoshea.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

What a weird world we live in - Ukraine hits a data centre deep in Russia - Irish twitter users see racist posts about IPAS centres in Offaly fall off a cliff

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Anonymous @youranoncentral.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Russian bot traffic has dropped to nearly 0 after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia

• Source Network: AS13238 YANDEX – Yandex LLC (Russian Federation)
• Traffic Breakdown: Prior to the drop, bot traffic accounted for roughly 99.6% of requests compared to 0.4% human traffic.
• Event Cause: The sudden plunge to zero on October 11, 2026, corresponds to a reported military/drone attack on Yandex's data center facility in Vladimir, Russia—marking the third reported attack on Yandex data infrastructure since October 8.

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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

NEW: Prime Minister Andy Burnham finally breaks a decade of UK govt silence…& reveals there was ‘clear’ Russian interference in the Brexit vote. 1/

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

that our daydreams are *also constitutive, not just our actions. It can be both. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

If the latter, does that facet-ness devalue them and raise the value of actions? After all, daydreaming can be comforting, but also maladaptive, as in various forms of psychosis. Yet idealizing action seems like turning people into task-completers, mere dishwashers,slaves for some cosmic taskmaster.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Does that mean that we're more than our actions, that our daydreams and innermost feels (which can/do exist quite apart from our actions) are constitutive of who we are? Or are they -- is our mental perspective -- just our little personal single facet-shard of grand universal conscious/knowledge?

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Sometimes it's said, don't identify with rigid labels locking you down; instead, you are your actions! You're changing, dynamic, a force, etc. But often -- always? -- our internal worlds don't map onto our actions. Well, so what?

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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

wikipedia has been ANNIHILATED with AI bot traffic for a while now (because LLMs can't get enough of it) which puts a huge burden on its tech and server costs. and now it looks like bots are making unauthorized edits to pages and trying to hack community tools diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/05/o...

Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WDQS in May.

Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

How about commission real journalists like me instead.

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Colin Oatley @coatley.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Falsely reporting a crime is itself a crime. Hold the company executives responsible for the crime.

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Kevin H Bell @kevinhbell.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Promises of transparency are easy to make and even easier to break. Let's explore how awash every step of FOIA is in bs, starting with the most transparent admin in history's Budget Office telling the NYT on the record that transparency spending is "waste"

In debate to override President Ford’s veto of the 1974 FOIA amendments, Rep. John Dent (D-PA) observed that, in July 1776, our Republic was founded by a people “tired of hearing nothing from Mother England but dictums as to how to conduct their affairs and where they were to send taxes.” Now, 250 Julys later, we come back to government by imperial decrees which rebuke explanation. OMB has explicitly divested the executive branch from transparency. In its own words:

The number of FOIA requests from leftist activist groups has exploded due to Trump Derangement Syndrome and it would not be serving the American peoples’ desire for a smaller, leaner government to waste money hiring additional FOIA processors to address this bourgeoning cottage industry of political activists. In working with limited budgets, we choose to hire ICE officers instead of FOIA processors.

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Perhaps a gravitational lensing superscope mission, akin to that proposed by the late Italian space scientist Claudio Maccone, could resolve exoplanets sufficiently to see continents on them?

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Firing squad for Nidal Hasan, former army psychiatrist who killed 13 at Ft Hood, to be livestreamed Dec. 3. I believe would be first public broadcast of a US execution. 2 decades ago, I wrote science fiction about such: "The First Death of 2057" douglaslucas.com/fiction/fd2057 Reality coming faster

douglaslucas.com

DouglasLucas.com

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Doug Lucas @douglaslucas.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Spent years arguing in person, online that "pedo" or "pedosadist" should be used, not "pedophile." Now #Anonymous who once used former are regressing back to the latter, risking normalizing it, undo-ing effort. What's next? Retreat to "targeted killings" instead of "assassinations"? And what for?

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Indivisible ❌👑 @indivisible.org · 08/10/2026

We have three goals for the next No Kings Day on October 17: 1) Boosting vote turnout to the biggest it’s ever been for the midterms. 2) Getting our communities prepared to organize against election sabotage. 3) Creating a mandate for the reforms and accountability we want to see next year.

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