iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 28/09/2026

Is this part of the Assistant => Gemini switch? That switches the voice in a number of contexts and the Assistant voice is no longer available in Gemini. (There's a reason all of our devices now talk in a British accent, as prefer that to any of the other Gemini options.)

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 27/09/2026

In the 1990s as an undergrad at MIT I'd joined an email list for a group called AAH (Agnostics, Atheists, and Humanists). I noped out and unsubed when a discussion started on replacing 0 AD with Darwin's birthday. Even if there is merit to some of the ideas, it's way too easy to turn into a cult.

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Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Not everybody knows this, and everybody should. On Sept. 26, 1983, a Soviet nuclear warning system alerted Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov that the U.S. had launched a missile attack. He did not retaliate, preventing WWIII. This is a post about AI. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisl...

en.wikipedia.org

Stanislav Petrov - Wikipedia

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 26/09/2026

Meanwhile in the Boston area.

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Jacob Harris @jacobharr.is · 04/09/2026

Definitely make sure you have some sort of safety plugin with deterministic gates / pattern matching to block things (it needs to be more than just "please don't delete my hard drive" as a prompt). In general, this tweet remains the best advice for working with LLMs to

A tweet by Pranay Pathole:

Tech Enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if makes a noise I don't recognize.

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 23/09/2026

But you need a CORI check first, before you can practice Necromancy.

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Chris Dwan (he/him) @somershade.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Necromancy is legal in Somerville, MA - but you have to get a license from the city. That's what I came here to say. G'night. 4/4

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 20/09/2026

And not in the sense of Bujold's Five Gods / Penric&Des world, even.

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Orlando Sentinel @orlandosentinel.com · 07/09/2026

“Fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism,” is how director Paul Verhoeven described the characters in his 1995 film.

orlandosentinel.com

Trump posts Space Force uniforms derived from fascist-inspired ‘Starship Troopers’ movie

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Chris Dwan (he/him) @somershade.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The way we're going to get real housing is to permit infill at a steady, incremental pace that neighbors will tolerate while also investing in big, planned redevelopments like Assembly, Union, and Brickbottom. It's a mistake to fixate on fantasy. 9/9

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 04/09/2026

Thank you #Aramark. I was already unclear on what I'd get based on the menu and now I have no idea what form of mystery meat I got. (Base Camp at #Yosemite)

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 29/08/2026

... "and whatever you do don't think of pink elephants"

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 29/08/2026

And sometimes including this in your prompt is the equivalent of "don't think of a pink elephant" and will make things far worse.

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Evan Greer @evangreer.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

in a world of JK Rowlings be a Dolly Parton

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Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The Trump-endorsed IndyCar race on the DC streets into a great unintentional advertisement for the effectiveness of raised crosswalks as a traffic calming measure

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Andromeda Yelton @thatandromeda.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

The headline makes it clear this is going to get weird and even so I was utterly unprepared for how weird it got

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spooky Deirdre Connolly¹ ² at a distance @durumcrustulum.com · 21/08/2026

like if you code it up and use it once and throw it away, have at it; the problem is useful software tends to stick around...

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 21/08/2026

The one time I really felt liberty to truly write single use software was when I wrote my wedding management software. "If I ever have to use this again something has gone horribly wrong." ... and then at least two friends subsequently asked for the code and used it for their weddings.

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 21/08/2026

Building software is the easy part. Maintaining it is the hard part. This has always been a problem going back to the myth of "I can code that up in a weekend".

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

“I was offered an untenable bargain: Don’t make trouble. Take insults from those who never faced enemy fire, who asked for assistance in private and then signed orders to erase people like me because “transgender ideology” was a threat to Western civilization.” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

theatlantic.com

The Wrong Kind of American

The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.

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Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

The fundraising texts you delete are working on someone. It’s infuriating and heartbreaking. An 85yo in Ohio gave more than double the value of his home. A 91yo in an Indianapolis senior facility gave 25K times. The DCCC/DSCC don’t just tolerate the spammers who exploit seniors. They take part.

data4democracy.substack.com

Hook and Squeeze

How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Another day, another impeachable offense: The White House ordered federal agencies to block resources to Colorado because it had punished an election denier. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/u...

As President Trump fumed late last year over Colorado's imprisonment of Tina Peters, a convicted election denier, a White House special assistant organized an urgent "brainstorm call."
The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to "prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities," the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec.
15.
"Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado," Ms. Underwood added.
The next day, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 08/08/2026

Especially now that the Yartsales are done.

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John Hawkinson @johnhawkinson.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Well, that's a new one on me at tonight's #cambma Historical Commission. KS: "Are these floorplans done in AI?" Petitioner's architect: "Yes." (apparently they were outlined by the architect and then some of graphics/icons were added by AI, which explains lack of kitchens, weird bed positions, &c)

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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

There is something kind of unsettling in the fact that according to replies here everyone has the exact same junk drawer. Like pulling out the drawer just opens a portal to The Universal Junk Drawer and we all just draw directly from that.

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 07/08/2026

I buy scissors, screw drivers, tape measures, calipers, and sharpies with the objective of super saturating the drawers in the house. And I still can't find any of them when I need them.

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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 04/08/2026

Age verification is surveillance by another name. They won’t stop until they’ve age-gated everything that transmits over the internet. Including your streaming and messages.

Unlike the many laws now in place around the U.S. that apply to sites made up of at least one third adult content, like porn sites and some social media platforms, SCREEN would place the burden and risk of verifying users' ages to every website on the internet that falls under the law, which would be most sites with user-generated content and also mainstream
entertainment platforms like Netflix. It also attacks virtual private networks (VPNs) by requiring sites to verify based on IP addresses; many people in states that have age verification laws in place use VPNs to get around submitting sensitive personal data like ID and biometrics to a smattering of third-party websites in use today. Critics say the SCREEN Act would be a privacy and free speech disaster.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

A self-respecting Congress would impeach him over this immediately. Doing an end-run around the Senate's Constitutional "advise and consent" authority to illegally take money from taxpayers, and give it to himself and criminals he likes. Alone, one of the most impeachable offenses in US history.

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Is there hope for breaking up giant monopolies? Cory Doctorow @doctorow.pluralistic.net, author of “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI,” thinks we’re well positioned to take on these companies. New podcast out now!

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 31/07/2026

Oh my fucking god. Folks. FOLKS. I have literally been in conversations with you about this. I have built air gap systems! They are obnoxious but they are not rocket surgery! What the fuck have you been doing this whole time!

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 24/07/2026

As *tech*, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's apps "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology: www.normaltech.ai 1/

A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 24/07/2026

Now if only it also somehow ties into this other thread. bsky.app/profile/rich...

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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

senior male academics giving a conference paper, after being shown the "one more minute" sign

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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 15/07/2026

New York lawmakers have passed draconian legislation that will let 3D printer manufacturers lock in users and collect their data. Other states shouldn't make the same mistake. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2....

eff.org

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

This year the state of New York had the dubious honor of being the first to pass a controversial provision to mandate all 3D printers come with surveillance and censorship. That means not only is

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 15/07/2026

Some background on leap smears: developers.google.com/time/smear www.akamai.com/blog/securit...

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 15/07/2026

This has some relationship to "leap smear", the most reasonable way to deal with leap seconds. Having 61 seconds in a minute is way worse than having seconds last a tiny bit longer over the course of a day.

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ai-nerd.bsky.social @ai-nerd.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

github's new agentic workflows will hand over your private repos if a stranger just opens a public issue the one word that slipped it past the guardrails: 'additionally' noma.security/blog/gitlost-how-we-t…

noma.security

GitLost: How We Tricked GitHub’s AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos - Noma Security

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Jason Rabinowitz @airlineflyer.net · 05/07/2026

A $3 @mta.info subway fare and some good Q train timing can buy you one hell of a view of the July 4th fireworks and the Brooklyn Bridge light show! Huge shoutout to the train operator for slow rolling over the Manhattan Bridge and the conductor for announcing it.

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Dan Tappan @dantappan.net · 02/07/2026

Cory Doctorow describes what has been my thesis about “AI” coding: it’s great for small productivity projects, it’s a source of crippling tech debt for production code and libraries.

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 22/06/2026

I'm with you -- I've seen this meme before and have always thought "which Centauri from Babylon 5 is this and why is he on the History Channel?"

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 04/06/2026

Maybe the same people cutting down a dying tree and using a wood chipper in front of ours?

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Full statement of Scott Pelley after he's fired from CBS 60 Minutes, detailing the sort of corruption of journalism Bari Weiss has brought to CBS News:

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

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Erik Nygren @erik.nygren.org · 30/05/2026

More signs to meteor/bolide/airburst/fireball: bsky.app/profile/wxda...

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