iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by David Thiel

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 25/09/2026

"Chayefsky had a lot to say about television, and he said it with an unflattering, searing bite—and it’s all the more relevant in an age when we each carry a television studio in our pockets and all dream of becoming a hit." www.liberalcurrents.com/network-at-5...

“Network” at 50: Now We’re All Mad as Hell

Paddy Chayefsky’s take on television captured the Long 1970s—and anticipated the rise of social media.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 24/09/2026

Well they're not beating the allegations are they "His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill."

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 24/09/2026

A friend’s kid was doing this in the comments you can make at specific timestamps inside SoundCloud tracks

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 16/09/2026

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biquette

A picture of Biquette the goat watching a performance by Wormrot.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 14/09/2026

Somehow when I read this headline I thought "ah, so the network of anonymous men got to work to help the victim" And no, of course it's not that

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 12/09/2026

Though it would be very funny if in the future "make sure no machines on your network have a significant amount of VRAM" becomes a standard security precaution

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 12/09/2026

If I had a pack of vicious dogs and just let them off leash to maul people, I would go to jail and the dogs would be confiscated. Do it with an LLM and you get showered with breathless press coverage and military contracts. Until there's criminal liability, we're incentivizing this behavior.

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Reposted by David Thiel

Chris Palmer @fugueish.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Fun fact: this is a prosecutable crime, and it was done by people.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 11/09/2026

Sounds like an almost exact repeat of what happened in 2023, i.e. some component of the PhotoDNA pipeline broke and went entirely unnoticed. Difference being now X helps generate the content and has made it as difficult as possible for external parties to flag problems. www.wsj.com/tech/twitter...

wsj.com

WSJ News Exclusive | Twitter Missed Dozens of Known Images of Child Sexual Abuse Material, Researchers Say

The researchers say the social-media platform told them it has now improved its detection system for child sexual abuse.

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Reposted by David Thiel

caroline cash @cashbrowns.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Nancy 9/7/26 … Happy Labor Day 🛠️

8 Hours for Work, 8 Hours for Rest, 8 Hours for What We Will. Based on a screenprint by Ricardo Levins Morales after the organizing work done by Robert Owen.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 01/09/2026

Fair to say that Cloudflare, Stripe, "Block" and Dropbox are just as enthusiastic if not more so. omarchy.org/patrons/

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 20/06/2026

Also counterintuitively: unlike real names, stable pseudonyms *more identifying* and a more limited resource. There's plenty of people with a display name of "David Thiel" backed by an email, but if I act like a prick and lose my unique id, I can't just swap to a new one without a loss.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 12/06/2026

If you took this image back in time 3 years ago when we were writing the first paper on genAI CSAM and showed it to me, I think I would have just walked into the ocean

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 01/06/2026

Voicing this in my head as Max Schumacher from Network and it works perfectly

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 27/05/2026

TIL Philip Glass used to make music with changing parts

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 24/05/2026

Everyone even mildly politically literate at the time read the DHS to be a fascist project, fascists included. No one found it reassuring, and I honestly don't remember anyone even pretending to frame it as "unity". This is weird revisionism ala "everyone was in favor of the war in Iraq".

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 19/05/2026

Laika brand cigarettes: for that “dying alone in the void of space” feeling

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 05/05/2026

Look all I’m saying is you need a better argument than “and yet you participate in the internet, curious!”

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 18/04/2026

I also think that inasmuch as there’s an AI bubble, its collapse will be brought about not just by the broken economics of the giant models, but by migration to local open ones. Qwen on a Mac Studio is near last year’s frontier, and actually pretty fast.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 15/04/2026

“In South Korea and Australia, schools have given pupils the option not to have their photos in yearbooks” I’ve been in this space for a while but this is somehow a new kind of grim.

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Reposted by David Thiel

USER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Use bad photoshop like the ancestors did

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 30/03/2026

The whole AI-powered "algorithmic choice" thing kind of breaks down when a) most of your userbase hates anything AI and b) no normal person wants to "choose an algorithm"

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 27/03/2026

I mean when even your investors are balking at your roadmap for being brazenly evil

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 26/03/2026

Guys this is just 2 windows next to each other with extra steps

A screenshot of a firefox window with 2 tabs, but you're looking at them split screen instead of using 2 windows for some reason

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 16/03/2026

Ok the blue ramen shop is out of control

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 13/03/2026

There were once valid safety arguments against enabling E2EE—but given the gutting of Meta’s safety teams, the only remaining reason to disable it again is to enable surveillance.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 13/03/2026

With a name like “SocksEscort” I would have expected they were a proxy for a different kind of provider

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 10/03/2026

This is great; further complicated by the lineage of Super (❖), which is vaguely equivalent to the Windows key but referred to as Meta in various internals, except Alt is considered Meta elsewhere and many use it as Command. 🥳 The "Menu" key remains a mystery.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 26/02/2026

Honestly don't see how corporate IT security is still a tenable field now that IP exfiltration and remote takeover—formerly one of the worst scenarios—is now just standard operating procedure for every developer.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 22/02/2026

I had an ex who did lots of nicotine gum for its purported cognitive benefits; they ended up with a ferocious addiction and no obvious method to help them quit short of smoking

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 18/02/2026

They unlocked the MacBook with her fingerprint, and the warrant allowed them to unlock the phone with FaceID (they don't say if they did, but not much stopping them). It seems Lockdown Mode is preventing them from *imaging* the devices, probably because it requires auth to connect peripherals.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 12/02/2026

Lol in an effort to make FFmpeg sound less jargony they just invented an imaginary name for it

The specialist then used software called Fast Forward Moving Picture Expert Group "to convert the files to a format capable to ingest into Adobe Premiere."

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 13/12/2025

"But strangely, Princess Mononoke might not have all the answers this time" Well that's a first

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Reposted by David Thiel

Daphne Keller @daphnek.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 04/12/2025

I know I'm late on this, but this is the kind of spectacularly clever thing that reminds you computers can be fun and interesting: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbl...

youtube.com

A Mind Is Born (256 bytes)

YouTube video by lftkryo

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 17/11/2025

Disagree on the timeline and implications here. AFAIK Twitter did not ban an official gov account. It did delete tweets from @POTUS when @realdonaldtrump evaded his personal ban. It was also not first to ban Trump. That was Facebook, then Twitter, then YouTube, with half-measures in between.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 15/11/2025

I honestly have no problem with such a policy, but if you can’t stomach enforcing it when it comes from prominent or powerful speakers, it’s inconsistent in the worst way.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 12/11/2025

Hour 4 of playing Baby Steps:

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 25/10/2025

The thing is, these bots were trained on every piece of sci-fi humans have ever written about AI, and then told “that’s you.” I don’t find it surprising they act like their source material when prompted in ways that call back to it.

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David Thiel @grumplicio.us · 07/10/2025

Related fun fact, outside the US most developed countries went “hey why don’t we make it against the rules to have salmonella in chicken or eggs” and now you don’t die from those things there.

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