iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Fred Benenson

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · 20/02/2026

thinking today about how if AI takes the easy parts of our jobs then we'll just spend all day doing hard tasks instead! maybe first written about by @fredbenenson.com www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

theatlantic.com

AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks

As AI gets better at performing routine tasks traditionally done by humans, only stressful ones will be left. The work experience could suffer.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 27/06/2025

iOS autocomplete corrects “bsky” to “bait” 🤔

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/05/2025

There's this thing that's been bugging me about Claude Code: besides being addictive, LLM coding agents are incentivized to generate *more* code vs. better code. Unfortunately, this seems like a problem for the economic model as there are perverse incentives at play: medium.com/p/23efbaf75aee

medium.com

The Perverse Incentives of Vibe Coding

I’ve been using AI coding assistants like Claude Code for a while now, and I’m here to say (with all due respect to people who have…

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 19/03/2025

I am thinking about adoptiong kittens again (RIP Catberry & Horatio 🥲), and I am almost certainly going to adopt two rescues in NYC. But I realized I didn't know a lot about cat breeds, so I decided to build a tool using PCA and Threes.js fredbenenson.github.io/cat-c…

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Reposted by Fred Benenson

Fagatha Harkness @dominiconline.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

No one has been asking for my opinion on it, but this, from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social’s Garbage Day is spot on, imo

I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don't know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don't feel like
publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings.
But I'm also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they're acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere
- or proper health insurance — l'd feel different.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 08/12/2024

I’m fascinated (and admittedly a bit repulsed) by the idea of blocklists enumerating people who follow a certain account. On the one hand, they have the potential to be a kind of decentralized hell banning, but on the other it encourages herding and siloing since it’s blocking innocent users

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 30/11/2024

So how is everyone recovering from Thanksgiving?

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 30/11/2024

Corollary to Godwin's law: when someone calls you a nazi you can turn off replies

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 29/11/2024

This is an extremely important point about what kind of populism liberals need to be considering if we are going to win back huge swaths of the electorate. tl;dr: economic populism isn’t going to be enough

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 26/11/2024

Interesting to find myself on a blocklist on here because I happen to follow a controversial journalist. This means I'm accumulating 1-2 blocks a day from people who I don't know but who block everyone on the list. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 23/11/2024

Isn’t the problem that their echo chamber is just bigger than ours?

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 21/11/2024

Our film “The Apprentice” is in such a funny place. Trump hates it and doesn't want you to see it. And yet Hollywood is also afraid of it: actors are shunning Sebastian Stan for playing Trump. If you haven't seen it – go make up your mind for yourself! www.thecut.com/article/seba...

thecut.com

Celebrities Do Not Want to Talk About Trump Anymore

Sebastian Stan says publicists are scared to let their clients talk to him about the movie The Apprentice.

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Reposted by Fred Benenson

Molly Jong-Fast @mollyjongfast.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Red state voters voting to take away their own stuff to own the libs

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Reposted by Fred Benenson

Gabriel Sherman @gabrielsherman.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Holy shit. I just read that Sebastian Stan won’t be doing the Variety Actors on Actors awards season panel because other actors’ publicists wouldn’t let their clients talk to Sebastian about playing Donald Trump in THE APPRENTICE movie. This is outrageous!

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 19/11/2024

So what do like ... people like to post on here? I can't decide if the delta in engagement I get on here vs. Threads is because I'm accidentally more centrist than the median skeeter or because I'm not getting weird enough or because bsky's algo is more parsimonious or ...

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Reposted by Fred Benenson

aka.farm @akafarm.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

lots of good local (NYC) area reporting from @hellgateny.bsky.social and @thecity.bsky.social

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/11/2024

So who is the most non-echo chamber person you follow on here? (Am I doing this right?)

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/11/2024

Apple’s emoji suggestions used to be extremely narrow and only based on an exact text match of the emoji name (e.g. “Smiling” returned only 😁) Over the last couple years they’ve broadened it to be much fuzzier. Now “death” returns 🌵 and 🏜️ among the others. Maybe because of Death Valley?

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/11/2024

Hi everyone! Now that things are hopping over here, please help me welcome in my girlfriend and recovering Twitter expat @lmacfadyen.bsky.social 🥰 She’s a senior product designer at Microsoft working on Copilot. Give her a follow when you get the chance!

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 16/11/2024

This is the best bot* on Bluesky *and the only one anyone has pointed out to me

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/11/2024

One of the only funny things I can remember Andy Borowitz posting

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/11/2024

So who is building interesting stuff on top of Bluesky? Where are the good / weird bots? What's the deal with the API?

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/11/2024

I had a dumb idea about American politics (i.e., that the binary nature of most divisive topics is the cause of an intractable two party system) and asked Claude to challenge me. It's response was remarkably good.

I have a naive idea about American politics, and I'm wondering if it's channeling any theories that I don't know about.

It goes like this: Maybe the reason we're stuck with a two party system is that it's congruent with the fact that most difficult topics have two sides to them. For example, should we have gone to war in Iraq? That largely boils down to a binary answer. Even abortion has this binary nature (you're either pro-life or pro-choice, despite policies having lots of nuance in terms of implementation, etc.)

I think this is important because it makes it harder to argue that a two party system is a fundamentally broken way of doing politics. It may actually just be the natural order of things since third party positions tend to be hard to stake out on divisive topics which seems to inspire so much of politics.

This is a fascinating hypothesis that touches on some deep questions in political science. Let me break down a few key considerations:

First, while many political issues can be framed as binary choices, this framing might be more a consequence of our two-party system rather than a natural feature of the issues themselves. Take the Iraq War example - beyond just "yes/no," there were positions like:

Yes, but only with UN approval
Yes, but focused on counter-terrorism rather than regime change
No, but maintain aggressive containment
No, and pursue active diplomatic engagement
Similarly with abortion, many European countries have developed more nuanced political consensuses that don't map neatly onto the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy.

Second, there's a well-established political science theory called "Duverger's Law" that suggests two-party systems emerge naturally from first-past-the-post voting systems (where the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority). This happens because voters learn not to "waste" their votes on third parties that can't win, leading to strategic voting for the "lesser evil" among the two major parties.
...

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 14/11/2024

Hi everyone! So fun to see so many new / old faces. What are you working on today? What is on your mind? Introduce yourself. Especially if we don't know each other already. I'm super excited to get more involved on here.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 13/11/2024

Potentially offensive idea: Aside from the obvious (X is a hellhole, Threads has finally bored everyone to death), I wonder if Bluesky's resurgence could be tied to a certain type of personality feeling more chaste after the election, which has the effect of turning the temperature down here a bit.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/11/2024

OH in NY: “What kind of lead time do you really need for 5lbs of pastrami??”

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/11/2024

I donated to George and am so happy he won!

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/11/2024

Oh hi everyone. Haven’t posted on here for a while. Have things gotten less insufferable? *ducks*

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 01/07/2023

remember when Campfire crashed and everyone cut over to Slack and it was kind of their big moment?? I think Bluesky needs to just let invitations rip and make it happen

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 02/06/2023

meanwhile on the other place

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 23/05/2023

What’s the difference, metaphorically speaking, between a roach motel and a rat trap? Wrong answers only.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 23/05/2023

ah yes, it is the queers we must be afraid of

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 15/05/2023

just saw someone describe their relationship as “mutually exclusive” on Reddit and I can’t stop thinking about it

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 14/05/2023

Do people still post their Wordles? Wordle 694 2/6* 🟨⬛🟩🟨⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 (trying to post like I normally would and avoid the meta conversation about this website)

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 13/05/2023

Headed to Just Like Heaven @ The Rose Bowl today courtesy of a friend w/ an extra ticket. It's been ages since I've done a music fest like this! Anyone else going? Line up is geriatric millennial++

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 13/05/2023

Best case scenario: AI generated content becomes the autotune of the net - when it’s bad it’s obvious, but it’s still probably more pervasive than you think Worst case scenario: AI trains continuously on AI generated content acclimating us to a feedback loop of nonsense; there is no bottom

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/05/2023

End of an era (at least according to my iPhone just now).

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 12/05/2023

The next couple of days on here are going to be interesting as the big swell of users (including yours truly) who joined two weeks ago get our one (1) invite ration.

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 11/05/2023

do they think we wouldn't notice

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 11/05/2023

So did anyone actually buy the idea that the CNN thing was going to be a disaster for Trump? The dude has made being an asshole on TV his career defining achievement, of course this was going to happen

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 10/05/2023

It's interesting to see so many people arguing so ardently over Bluesky's AT Protocol and whether it's technically a good thing or better than ActivityPub, etc. It's as if they're trying to argue with Bluesky's (early) success on technical grounds. But like, it's not really about the protocol.

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Reposted by Fred Benenson

Colin @yesitscolin.bsky.social · 08/05/2023

I’ve noticed lots of journalists on Bluesky say things like “Is it cool yet to share my own stories here?” Can we get past that? I love the shitposting and fun vibes here too, but we should also be encouraging this to become a place where people can get and share news, like how Twitter USED to be...

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 08/05/2023

Someone needs to make that Gardner hype curve thing but for social networks where it transitions from nascent /unknown to invite-the-cool-kids to hand-wringing-about-content-moderation, etc. Put another way, I wish there was a content setting for meta conversations like there is for NSFW, etc

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 08/05/2023

so, uh, it's been a week and don't want to be that guy, but what did I do wrong, @jay.bsky.team? or did the +1-a-week-invite ration get nixed? i promise my invite tree will only consist of people who I'm willing to pledge my first born to

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Fred Benenson @fredbenenson.com · 07/05/2023

This has been asked in a million different ways, but what would a social network look like that rewarded nuance? It’s interesting to think what that moderation policy would look like. (Admittedly this is a stated value of HN’s excellent moderators, but the community is a special interest group)

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