iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Well crap. I'm currently at my usage limits for multiple LLM sites (including a paid subscription) and simultaneously running a local LLM on my gaming PC. At some point, I became an AI guy.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

When AI concludes that humans make mistakes and thus the world would have fewer mistakes without humans, you all are going to treat it like some inevitable techno facial endgame This is wrong Aquinas got there 600+ years ago But he still gets a pass on calling for the termination of our species

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Develop a product with no possible pathway to profitability. …* Profit * simultaneously convince people your product is the foundation of civilization and that it is rapidly morphing into an angry god requiring the nationalization (buy out) and regulation of the entire industry by government.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Alternatively we are seeing the schelling k-group for less in demand public goods production contract dramatically so that we can finance projects with Patreons. That makes niche public goods that can’t turn a profit but are still might be super useful possible.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Jesus the guy who famously was like “stop fishing, leave your nets behind, we’ve got bigger fish to fry…human fish…metaphorically…but also stop actual fishing.”

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Attended a really good session on the state of ai adoption at universities that polled the audience for stories and anecdotes in different areas and generated state of the industry take aways in real time. Got me thinking about generating slides for class in real time. Need to sit with that…

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

People would benefit from studying game theory. An equilibrium outcome doesn’t have to be good it only has to be better than how people assess the alternatives they control. Promising a better outcome if everyone shifts is a heavy lift.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This has been my read of this “movement”. It isn’t an anti-AI backlash. it is the same anger that blocks wind and solar farms and more mundane development. When people are feeling vulnerable they hate change…which frequently keeps them in the same precarious place. Less a virtue than a tragedy.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I spent 5 hours today networking. I’m not getting good but I am getting better. This has been a rollercoaster of existential crisis as I’ve tried to work out if I’m capable of doing this. Turns out I’m pretty experienced at nodding along and drinking wine.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

First draft is done. 92k words (76k written in the past 12 months). I have some editing to do over the next two weeks, but every chunk has now been written.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

What is the term for citations that pile up in your works cited as you write but end up not being needed in the final version of the paper? We have the term "missing citation" for the opposite problem. Maybe "legacy citation"?

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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 09/08/2026

actually HTML is pronounced "hotmail"

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I have a very complicated relationship with my dad, who passed away in 2019. I hate so much about him: his anger, his stone-cold eyes, his hair-trigger temper. But recently my son was in the hospital under the care of a surgeon who didn't believe in pain management...and I needed my dad.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

You know you are an academic when your child spends 3 weeks in the hospital with a collapsed lung, and you somehow knock out 100 hours of work on your book project because people don't expect you to work and therefore cancel all your meetings. He is fine. Worst 3 weeks of my life. It was bad!

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Steve Huntsman @stevehuntsman.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Prospect that LLMs will be a failed tech for a long time is underestimated. Nobody is doing the fundamental work necessary to build reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Math and coding scale weirdly and not all well. After a trough of disillusionment we *may* get the Enterprise computer

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Trump restarted bombing, and what did he get for it? -Hormuz closed, more economic damage -Lost Oman, which was working with the US before -A vote of no confidence from Saudis -Worsened munitions shortage -More US casualties -No concessions from Iran -Now poised to surrender My latest, in @ms.now

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Opinion | Iran’s Hormuz deal with Oman has Trump poised for the big surrender

Nicholas Grossman: Trump started bombing Iran again to keep it from having control over the Strait of Hormuz. That gambit failed — again.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

It is probably not great when the barista at the hospital Starbucks greets you with “the usual?” And it only took 15 straight days standing watch over a kid with a collapsed lung.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Today I crossed the projected word count for my book project. I've got maybe 1500 more words to write, which is a surprisingly accurate projection on a 92k word manuscript.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Being an academic means having a half-baked idea in your early 20s (before your brain has fully formed and you don't know anything about the world) and spending the next 40 years trying to figure out the ways you might have been right but were mostly wrong.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

When I die, I want people to say three things about me. 1) he was kind when he didn't have to be, 2) he was relentlessly (even pathologically) optimistic, 3) he could write one banger of a footnote. The slideshow should be just screenshots of footnotes and my kids.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

At this point one of 2 things are happening. 1) OpenAI is prompting for this behavior 2) OpenAI is lying about model behavior. Regardless this whole story is a headline generating op by OpenAI that makes it sound like they invented consciousness.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Sometimes writing goes faster when you obsessively document every single thing you do. 11 months ago, I started a book project with 30k of crap notes. I've worked like mad this year and now have 90k of polished social science prose for an August 31st deadline. Will it matter? 🤷‍♂️ Did I do it? 👍

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I’ve recently downloaded grammarly (setting aside all sorts of reservations out of a desperate need to stop humiliating myself in public). So many more mistakes than I ever realized. Such a gut punch…but it spell checks in Excel so I can’t go back.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Reminded of a Fox News screed from 20 years ago on poor people with refrigerators. It was wildly out of touch with 2005…but a good chunk of their audience grew up before the great society and in the shadow of rural electrification so in an objective sense near universal refrigeration is a big deal!

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Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Not to be the wokest and most conspiratorial minded person the world has ever seen, but there is something about how the results of the CDC's "corporations can do whatever the fuck they want" policies have gotten turned into "someone from Mexico is shitting in your food"

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

“Familiar claims”. Go to hell Washington Post. Glad I canceled my subscription.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Found a really cool Easter egg (recipe) during a rewatch of Arrested Development. Excited to try this out tonight!

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Twice this month when editing a document in a group, people have attacked my edits because the words are “not real”—basically I’m an idiot using malapropisms. My word use was correct in both instances, but after decades of humiliation over spelling mistakes all I have left is self hatred.

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Note from my notebook from 2016 which I find has only grown in pertinence in the intervening decade.

I know I buy far too many books but I like to think that lining the walls of my house with them wards off evil in some deeply important way.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

It's like an episode of House MD House: What if our patient was injecting himself with gold Cameron: No one is that stupid House: Everyone is stupid Chase: He said he wasn't House: Everyone lies Foreman: He just drowned in Thailand House: Gold is heavy

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

While you all are enjoying the World Cup in some bar somewhere, I’m sitting in 100 degree heat enjoying a street vault organized by my son that has brought some of the best athletes in the country to grand forks, ND. We are not the same

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

One thing I love about hospitals is that when they tell you at 2:00 pm you are being discharged you can still put in your 6:00pm supper order and be confident that you will be able to finish it without being rushed.

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Steven Melendez @smelendez.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

When you owe a university money: We're going to boot your car, repossess your diploma, and retroactively fail you on the swim test When a university owes you money: Sorry, what is money? We think there's a person on the 6th floor who handles that but they're out until January.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

The law school admissions council hasn't updated their letters of rec portal in the 20 years I've been using it. This is kind of good, because I don't want to learn new systems. Also, the system still works well even as the rest of the internet sucks. On the other hand, they are charging a ton!

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

So is the Onion's take on info wars a winner? Meh. Colbert did it better 20 years ago...but I do love the "skip" button during the fake ad that isn't actually clickable. You got me Mr. Onion, you got me good.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

For my book I'm rebuilding a series of 6 conceptual graphs from an 1989 paper...and I realized one of the graphs is wrong. I'm sure the authors were like "fuck, photoshop isn't invented yet. This is super embarasing, but there is litteraly nothing we can do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" Don't worry bro. I got you.

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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 02/07/2024

2nd July 1863. Battle of Gettysburg. For perhaps the only time in the entire war the Confederates seem to be winning. Dan Sickles, commander III Corps, is ordered hold on Cemetery Ridge. For reasons unknown he advances. Broken, his men begin to flee. This is the moment on which the war depends /1

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Ettore Costa @ettorrecos.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Ultra-Traditionalist Catholics: "We are not cafeteria Catholics, we do not pick and choose the doctrines of the Church" Also Ultra-Traditionalist Catholics: "I don't vibe with this Ecumenical Council"

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Sara Mitchell @sbmitche.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

😳

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

One thing I’ve come to realize and even admire about Radiofreetom is he is not votebluenomatterwho. If he was that kind of Dem, he wouldn’t be with us at all. He would have sold his soul to trump like so many others. He shouldn’t define the party but we ignore his warnings at our peril.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Because this country is legitimately bonkers right now, it is semi plausible that we might reverse polarize ourselves into a sort of pol pot type situation in an attempt to repudiate Trump (rather than the current trajectory of reverse polarizing ourselves into a French Revolution type situation.)

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Yes, and: there once was an institutional motive to pay people to do research—I want to know my faculty are keeping current in disciplines I don’t/can’t understand. Why would I pay for faculty to “write” a paper using AI if they are skipping the hundreds of hours of learning a paper represents.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

In the first weeks of the invasion Ukraine used a corrosion strategy to slow and break Russia’s military machine. It feels like they are returning to that approach to war—expanded to include Russia’s economy—and the tide is turning. Putting my marker down: Ukraine is going to win this thing.

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

This is absolutely correct and not at all surprising. CBS’s gambit was destined to alienate anyone who even sort of leans left or just wants good journalism. And no matter what they do they will never be extreme enough to peel away Fox and Newsmax viewers. 🤷‍♂️

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Brian Urlacher (aka Grant Forks) @grantforks.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Wow. End all sanctions immediately, unfreeze and transfer assets immediately, and Iran will negotiate on the nuclear issue while the US coughs up 300 billion in reparations. All so Iran opens the straight and doesn’t charge tolls until it has time to work out a plan with Oman…

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

one of the oldest running dialogues in history is "war is a massively complicated political, bureaucratic, and logistical endeavor" vs. "fuck you pussy, war is when you're a fucking badass, oh shit I lost"

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