iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I have had two bad culinary misfires in the past month, despite recipes from people I thought of as near-infallible: Marcella Hazan and Madhur Jaffrey.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Hey, Democrats, I know you have people to write your talking points for you, but they suck. You're welcome to use some of mine. I'm not any sort of fancy politics-talking person, but I think I can do better than the fancy people you have.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Does any app have a hamburger button that looks like a literal hamburger, i.e 🍔 instead of ≡? Seems like a great opportunity to invent a sort of reverse skeumorphism.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Stick a fork in this trend; it's done. I predict that in about three years legacy newspaper cartoons will discover the "6-7" trend and incorporate it into strips to the befuddlement of their three remaining readers (@jfruh.bsky.social and two other poor souls, presumably).

A freezer case at Aldi full of bags of Soules Kitchen "67" chicken nuggets. The front of the bag features a cartoon of a happy tow-headed moppet and an image of hands holding six- and seven-shaped chicken nuggets, with arrows suggesting the juggling motion associated with the whole "6-7" thing.

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Adam Rawnsley @arawnsley.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I'm not Hasan Piker's biggest fan but if he can exorcise the malignant spirit of James Carville from the Democratic Party then he can't be _all_ bad.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Between this and the discovery that solar panel shade can actually _increase_ certain crop yields, people are discovering that there are truly extraordinary opportunities to make better use of the earth's surface area with solar panels. There's so much power waiting to be harnessed!

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Passing thought for the morning: slow-blinking at a cat and playing peekaboo with a baby are essentially the same thing. "My eyes were gone, and now they're back! This demonstrates my trustworthiness and/or entertainment value!"

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Huh, I had somehow missed the news that, since 2021, Maryland no longer had a state song, which is actually good news, since "Maryland, My Maryland" was the worst set of lyrics ever to be graced with the name. But it ought to have a new one. One that doesn't suck.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Opera goes hard: "In Elena Doria Winell's operatic adaptation, on the other hand, the psychological weight of unrecognized labor takes a toll on the Hen and she, in a final mad scene, murders the other farm animals, chokes on the bread, and dies."

en.wikipedia.org

The Little Red Hen - Wikipedia

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Catherine Frieman @cjfrieman.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I've told this story before but as a little kid i told everyone i was going to be a garbage truck driver when i grew up. when i became an archaeologist, my parents told me they were proud that i had held onto my childhood dream of collecting other people's rubbish

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

ICE is not about immigration. ICE is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets. Abolish ICE.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

I'm using OpenAI Whisper to subtitle a video and am pleasantly surprised by the accuracy. I probably shouldn't be, because AFAICT Whisper uses a trained neural-net model like most cool "AI" did from, oh, 2002 through 2019. It's only the injection of LLM that makes modern "AI" horseshit.

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Eize Basa @eizebasa.baby · 20/04/2026

BLOOB FOR THE BLOOB GOD!

Bus typo: Help us score the gift of life, DONATE BLOOB

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Listening to the America cover of "I Don't Believe in Miracles", thinking, "Colin Blunstone went harder." It's hard to imagine going less hard than Blunstone, but America pulled it off.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Szép Magyarország, édes hazátok!

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

(Reposting because image upload failed the first time for some reason) Today I was nearly brained by falling hardware while teaching! OK, I exaggerate. I was a good 10 feet away, but on any given day, I quite reasonably could have been near or under the projector screen as it fell.

A photograph of a classroom at the University of Louisville, specifically NS 212C, with a thumb drive and key ring sitting on a desk in the near foreground. In the background the closest ceiling panels to the white board have fallen in, with conduits and support structures hanging loosely on the ceiling. An automated projector screen , a speaker, and miscellaneous mounting hardware are strewn under and in front of the fallen ceiling.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

So, it looks for all the world like the administration's next move on Iran is "declare victory and run away as fast as possible, leaving the mess for other people to clean up". It's giving credit where it's very much not due, but it looks like that might be the best move under these circumstances?

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Having a PhD doesn’t mean you’re always right, but it does mean that you unlock new and more powerful ways to be wrong.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

All you need to know about ballot fraud is that it is, and for several decades has been, vanishingly rare. If you really want to dig deeper, then historical information is that over a century ago, ballot fraud was _rampant_, but almost all technological developments since then have improved matters.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

It may be frivolous to do so, but it's been surprisingly effective to view the Iran war through the lens of EU5 mechanics, as encountered by a recklessly ignorant player: * Declare war without even fabricating a casus belli, take a huge stability hit.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Listening to Hobo Blues Band's 2008 _Bolondvadászat_ parallel to the 1984 original, mostly thinking of the remake as an overproduced mess that was an ill-conceived idea, but in spite of it all that bizarre disco-funk arrangement of "Mesél az erdő" is growing on me.

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Sen. Lemon Gogurt @ugarles.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

DHS keeps the fuck plane. Lewandowski stays on it and he has to fuck. Markwayne's problem now.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

My daddy always told me, "Never bet on anything that can talk." With that dictum in mind, I have a question about the constant string of reports of insider bets winning big on prediction markets: who are they winning _from_? Who are the dumb marks placing bets in pools with known insiders?

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

The Iranian regime was horrifically unpopular with their people mere months ago, and our response to that is... surprise attacks? I'm not any sort of student of history, but I get the impression nothing juices a government's legitimacy like foreign aggression. We've fucked the revolution so hard.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

To triumph in a swordfight, you have to at some point do something your opponent won't expect, but despite its high success rate, the Surprise Blowjob never became a popular fencing technique.

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SlacktivistFred @slacktivistfred.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Customer in Aisle 1 (loudly, into cellphone): Yes, I’m here, and I found it, but they have a bunch of different kinds and I don’t know which one to get. Me: Hi, can I help you? Customer: I need some rat poison for my husband. Me: OK, no problem. How big is your husband? (This really happened.)

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

So, evidently @jaketapper.bsky.social has kicked off a conversation about exactly what is a "concentration camp". This sort of thing _should_ be basic knowledge, but a lot of people have the same misunderstanding of how the Konzentrationslager system worked which I'll call "the Auschwitz effect".

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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 13/02/2026

In incredible news, the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women." Even the center-right European People's Party voted for the declaration. It will form a foundation for their position at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Our latest.

erininthemorning.com

European Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly For "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women"

The resolution, though nonbinding, is a significant shot at those who seek to erode transgender rights on the continent.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Apropos of nothing, remembering that one highly regarded fantasy work of the 70s was "the saga of the guy whose first act in fantasyland is to rape a teenager, and then spends three books punctuating bouts of self-pity by occasionally being sad he's a rapist." Man, I do not miss "the good old days".

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

The College of Arts and Sciences gave mugs away to us with Sharpies to complete them at some event a few years back. I still have mine. Maybe there's a reason I don't get invited to A&S social functions anymore.

Photograph of a white mug, with the text "I think therefore I" followed by a blank space with an underline. All text is in black except the word "think" in red. In the provided blank space, I have written, in black Sharpie, the completion "am thad I don't know how to thwim."

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Every day Mamdani comes out and is like "hey guys, I turned off the orphan-crushing machine. Literally just had to flip a switch. Took less than 5 minutes." After decades of dem leadership pissing and moaning and fundraising about how complex an issue it is and how difficult the process is etc

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Our memorial candle for Alex was still burning this morning, despite snow and wind. There are always lights in the darkness, and eventually dawn.

A view from the porch of a house towards a snowy street in early dawn. The snow is undisturbed and there is a car parked on the far side of the street. In the foreground, at the middle edge of the top step to the porch, a candle is burning inside an octagonal glass enclosure.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Fuck, I take an hour off to listen to music and the feds execute another citizen. Terrible shit needs to stop happening (and those responsible need to be prosecuted).

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

I only recently learned that the Moody Blues' "Days of Future Passed" had to be basically remixed from the ground up in 1978, because the 1967 masters had deteriorated. But in 2017 the original mix was rediscovered, remastered, and rereleased.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Today I learned that there is Ea-Naṣir/Nanni slashfic, Newton/Leibniz slashfic, and Bertrand Russell/T.S. Eli... oh, wait, that last one is the real world, nevermind.

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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up. Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵

old couple (Robert and his wife Inga), dressed in smart clothes. both look unassuming and like they could be anybodies' grandparents.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

My belief that Battlestar Galactica (original series) episodes' quality is inversely proportional to their amount of Boxey and Muffit content is borne out pretty well by episode 14 ("Fire in Space"), although most of the egregious things wrong with it aren't actually Boxey and Muffit's fault.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

A bit of macabre from Frog and Toad Bot. I'm sure in the story tihs is taken from Toad is doing something pleasant and wholesome with that rope, but in isolation the line is kinda dark.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

I have been rendered completely helpless by illness at the worst possible time. Missed my talk at #jmm2026, likely also going to miss a Mathemalchemy reunion and the knitting circle.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Today I learned there's a kitchen appliance called a "jerky gun". It's nothing extraordinary — basically a caulking tool you fill with meat — but it would be hard to find a more masculine-coded name for an appliance than "jerky gun", unless there's a kitchen tool called a "steak truck" or something.

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

My wife, this morning: "We should all speak Finnish. Then everyone would be able to use a comfortable pronoun." Me: "Yes, but then we'd all have to learn the partitive case. That might be even more frustrating than butting heads with gender-policing assholes."

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Jake Wildstrom @dwildstr.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I just got an XTEINK X4. It's a ridiculous device, not actually a good e-reader as such things are evaluated, but after installing the CrossPoint third-party firmware, it's much better than it has any right to be, with quick refresh and crisp text. Having no backlight is a bummer, but it's so cute.

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