iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Love

the literacy crisis in this country is out of control

I can recall meeting older scholars, long ago, who said that when they were young they had a hard time getting their hands on a copy of Shiji or Han shu. If they were lucky enough to get one, they thought nothing of copying the entire text out by hand, so they could recite it day and night. In recent years merchants engrave and print all manner of books belonging to the hundred schools, and produce ten thousand pages a day. With books so readily available, you would think that students' writing and scholarship would be many times better than what they were in earlier generations. Yet, to the contrary, young men and examination candidates leave their books tied shut and never look at them, preferring to amuse themselves with baseless chatter. Why is this?

Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Was in the waiting room at the doctor's office, I saw 6 consecutive campaign ads during the commercial break and honestly by ad number 4 they had completely canceled each other out so I feel like all of these people are wasting their money

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

So I found this photo of a Great Blue Heron I took in Alaska (at what I'm led to understand is a time / location you don't normally see them) on my camera roll and I'm pretty sure it's the best wildlife photo I have ever taken by a sizable margin.

Grayish-brown great blue heron on a rock in front of water, the background lines up with it almost perfectly but is blurred to keep the bird in focus (yes I'm bragging about my own photo sorry)

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

CJK characters with 5 strokes beginning with 横, like 玉

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I’d forgotten about this map; we’re now ahead in 3 of the “solid rep” states, have serious chances at winning 6 more, and even have an outside shot at a couple of others

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Summers was denying the existence of gender bias in higher education back in 2005, right around the time cops started investigating his bestie in Florida; the fact that he continued to be treated a respected Ivy elder statesman until *this year* is a massive indictment of the whole system

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Everybody’s dunking on “not an AI influencer” but wrt the Pope specifically “shut the f*ck up about matters you do not understand” is probably an even more idiotic statement

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I think the end state of higher education is going to be locking young adults in cubicles to write essays on philosophy all day à la the Chinese imperial examination system

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The amazing thing about this is that even if he's calling it a Medicare thing it's actually going to be interpreted by voters as a stimulus check, and given the magnitude of current price spikes / econ misery and the size of previous stimulus checks, it's going to seem like an insultingly tiny one.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

“I’m going to ignore the doomsayers and be a successful leader, like Oedipus”

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Honestly if Elizabeth Holmes had come along just a couple of years later, her fake AI medical testing startup would have made a lot more money and lasted a lot longer, and when it eventually did unravel, she would have been held largely blameless + left free to pursue her next scam

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Reposted by Michael Love

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 01/10/2026

Want to learn about the history of our city? Well you’re in luck. This month, we’re hosting a massive scavenger hunt across the city — all about the history of organizing in NYC. Sign up at organize.nyc.gov and come see the city through the eyes of the people who built it.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So the sex cult stuff has now gotten to a point where the sex cultists are performing industrial espionage at the behest of their sex cult leaders?

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

He’s literally Grandpa Simpson at this point

Yes, exactly. Do you still disagree with his views on what he calls Al safety?
I spoke to him about his views, and they're much different, I think, than what is portrayed in the media. First of all, I liked him and his wife a lot. They had dinner, and we were going to meet at 7:00. But I was at the big Presidents Cup. I was the chairman of it in Chicago at Marion, which is great. Actually, that was yeah, Medinah, at Medinah, last year, Marion, this time of year, it was really great, and so I called, I said, "Could we make it a little bit later?" He actually saw the helicopter land, so we made it a little bit later. We got in at about 10. We stayed for more than two hours, talked about a lot of things. Very smart guy. Maybe different than I thought, a little bit. Really a little bit different. But no, he understands.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Does any one know where the love of God goes When you're sailing a barge through Wisconsin?

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"You're not culturally literate if you haven't listened to Choosin' Texas" dude literally everything I know about Texas comes from the Reading Rainbow book "Gila Monsters Meet You At The Airport"

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Concentrated power is bad, and every step on the long downward slope from the internet of the early ‘90s to now has involved some asshole or group of assholes exercising proprietary control over a big important chunk of it

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Other countries - including China - obviously have their own pathologies, but any time you hear someone spout a bunch of trade-war garbage about American innovation culture or whatever, just remember that this - not universities or NASA or Stardew Valley - is what they’re trying to protect.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Constitutional amendment requiring Senators and Representatives to spend the majority of days that Congress is not in session in their home states / districts would decimate the GOP caucus, none of whom have any interest in living in those places

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

“You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you’re just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him.” —Mel Brooks

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

We keep blowing our chances and nature + history keep giving us new ones and I really hope we get our act together before that stops happening

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This seems like something that they could fix by passing a simple, popular, uncontroversial law so of course it’ll never happen (much like banning telemarketing)

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is bad but I think it's www.scotusblog.com/2026/09/citi... rather than the post office one - it's their use of a particular DHS database to confirm citizenship if requested by states

scotusblog.com

Citing election-fraud concerns, Trump administration brings dispute over voter database to the Supreme Court

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The terrifying thing about the last 2 years is that Trump absolutely *could* have had a dictatorship if he was remotely competent; nobody was really standing in his way, no external forces created the current economic mess, he had a clear glide path and - lucky for us - f*cked up the landing.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I think it needs to be emphasized here that Chinese politics includes a *tremendous* amount of sitting on stage with a blank expression while other people make stupid speeches, and that coming up through the Chinese political hierarchy makes you absolutely S-Tier at that.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The next administration needs to subject every country that agreed to participate in this to utterly ruinous trade sanctions; you don’t get a pass on systemically violating Americans’ rights just because one specific administration was cool with it

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This of course begs the question “why were sensitive aircraft parts being shipped in such a way that this could happen” and I suspect the answer is that security is quite slapdash and it happens all the time and this incident is mostly notable because somebody in China screwed up and we found out

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

AM is pristine golden long-distance radio spectrum, the waves bounce off the ionosphere and you can cover an area the size of Connecticut with one simple transmitter, it should absolutely remain available for emergencies - if aliens invade Earth, AM is how we're going to coordinate our response

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yeah “the kids act like little shits all the time and nobody stops them” is a much bigger private school problem nowadays than “the kids are too boring and studious”

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It occurs to me that companies are absolutely going to start using AIs to make personalized debt collection messages / calls / etc and that it would be really great if we ban that practice before it takes off

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Really feeling glad today that we managed to push out Platner

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New Yorkers on the UN every other week: that’s nice, New York should be the world’s capitol New Yorkers on the UN this week: go ahead and relocate, assholes, let Belgium or whoever deal with this bullshit

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If his approval rating drops a few more points Trump will start hitting on it

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’m feeling optimistic about the Mamdani-Trump meeting because Trump is easily persuadable and loves buildings

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Cool, I'm sure importing this bulk good from a landlocked country across the Atlantic ocean will be fast and cheap

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Honestly I hope the whole visit is like this; if Xi snuck up behind Trump and pulled his pants down, US public opinion of China would go up by several points

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The really fun thing about this is that the desperate push for "AI safety" is an attempt to solve the frontier labs' biggest problem from 6 months ago, one that will only make things worse with their new biggest problem.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Having formerly had my kids in a rich white Connecticut district: those places have their own set of pathologies (from social snobbery to literal swastika graffiti in bathrooms) - not to mention a staggering over-reliance on tutoring to prop up scores - and would genuinely be better off w/busing.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If Democrats were better at messaging, the unfolding omnicrisis - which is going to be bigger and longer-lasting than the Iran war itself - could be repeatedly blamed on Trump and Republicans and we could win a good 3 or 4 election cycles on it; with the current party I just hope we eke out 2028

cnn.com

‘Crisis even bigger than Covid’: American business owners are barely getting by | CNN Business

The historic supply chain struggles that America’s business owners face show why resurgent inflation will not be easily resolved – even if the war ended.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The two biggest failings of the Mamdani administration so far are a) failing to develop a serious platform re schools and b) letting Tisch do whatever dumb shit she wants with NYPD

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I've posted a few times about how insane it felt as a New Englander to just park and walk out onto the beach in Carmel without paying anything, and I think I should add that Carmel specifically feels like the sort of town which in Connecticut would hire people with sniper rifles to prevent that

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Bernie is doing no such thing, he's echoing the particular subset of AI grifters whose vibes happen to align well with his own

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

My neighbor told me Houthis keep eating his F-15s so I asked how many F-15s he has and he said he just goes to the United States Department of Defense and gets a new F-15 afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding F-15s to Houthis and then his crown prince started crying.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"Builds an AI empire" he was driven out of the market early and none of his subsequent AI efforts have caught on, this is like talking about King John building a French empire

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Idiot on an e-bike ran a red light through a crosswalk full of kids on their way to school (including mine) this morning and I think the solution to 1% of bikers being giant frothing assholes is not to restrict bikes for the other 99% but to issue ruinous fines to bikers caught being assholes.

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I just found out that the simple little gradebook app my kid's middle school uses costs them $20k/year to license and I think to the extent we're looking at "AI in schools" a great place to start would be "using AI-coded tools to put price pressure on overpriced educational software"

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Ahahahahahahahaha <pause> Hahahahahahahaha Oh wait, she's serious

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Michael Love @elkmovie.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Congratulations Senator El-Sayed

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