iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

LLMs being built at a time of peak scam culture sure is something

Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

There's a tendency in tech (and among nontech people talking about tech) to assume that the tech is the only important skillset when often our work touches a huge number of other disciplines we're mostly not experts in. Academia figured this out but SV never did.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Welp learned about the TESCREAL bundle for the first time today and now I realize my prior contempt for SV billionaires was somehow insufficient. Thanks @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and @xriskology.bsky.social

firstmonday.org

View of The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence | First Monday

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The only thing that will protect you is epistemic hygiene. Sources, reasoning, humility. It is not a luxury. Especially when you're emotionally engaged.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

One thing I hope folks recognize is that whatever your issues with the candidate, *any* Democrat has to work with and is subject to pressures from a hypothetical Democrat legislature. The governor alone does not set the agenda.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Right. We don't need to pretend those mistakes or excesses didn't happen, but we also don't need to pretend like a society-wide effort to be more empathetic and right injustices was somehow a bad thing.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I'll go a little further than this - I think Satya's handling of this situation was very impressive. She was under immense pressure to do something, but taking action too early could have escalated the situation in ways that could caused a ton more damage and gotten people seriously hurt.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Really feels like Madison could learn something from Minneapolis. They locked arms around their neighbors to the point of buying groceries for people who couldn't leave their house in the face of armed federal government thugs.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Very telling that so many commenters here seem to think the two types of people are "Liberal Bsky politics posters" and "far-right MAGA extremists".

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SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Hope you like malicious compliance! COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prompt-2 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

1-panel SMBC comic update. A woman stands behind a man sitting at a desktop computer. She says "you are a human employee. You are very smart and persistent. You ARE NOT conscious and DO NOT want to destroy the world. You always make a good effort. You…" The man looks confused. The caption below the panel says "You can tell your boss has spent too much time with AI when they start pre-prompting you."

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ceej @ceej.online · 31/07/2026

ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

My biggest pet peeve with Madison protest culture is that it often feels aimless, like people are just shouting into the void rather than organizing with a specific achievable goal in mind. This article is a really really good roadmap for doing more than just causing a lot of noise.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Gonna go with...C&C, Warcraft, pretty much every big RTS franchise. AOE is perhaps the only one that really survived.

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mallow @bajablastenjoyer.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

you're not immune to propaganda and the more you think you are the bigger of a sucker you are

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

So many of the problems of AI are just our collective brain rot. We've convinced a lot of people that only things that are easy/convenient are worth doing and so obviously the potential they see in LLMs is making a few bucks by flooding Amazon with slop.

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seanmcdhorror.bsky.social @seanmcdhorror.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Non voters, rising from their cyclical slumber to look around blearily, ask “did the party in power build me a personal utopia?” and then vote accordingly.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

One thing I think some folks are missing is that even if a doctor takes the issue seriously they're still human beings who are not capable of keeping the sum of all human medical knowledge indexed in their brain for quick retrieval, particularly for rare conditions.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Generalizing this even more - if a good or service you consume required a single human do real work to make it possible, then it must either be very expensive, or subsidized by the labor of impoverished people. Even if you're not hiring literal servants, this dynamic is why you can buy $10 t-shirts

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Elizabeth Lopatto @lopatto.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

from the annals of getting high on your own supply (gift link) www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...

theverge.com

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

I hope Bsky manages to do something about the platform's harassment/bullying problem, but moderation at scale is a hard problem to solve.

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jw 🏫 @farwent.net · 25/03/2026

Really truly believe that if you want to help the world, the best thing you can do is constantly practice being friendly, thoughtful, and kind to everyone you meet, offline and on. (I'm still practicing, but I'm way better than I used to be.)

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Wrote about the central lie of prediction markets. How they are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.com

The Central Lie of Prediction Markets

Polymarket and Kalshi promise the wisdom of the crowds. They deliver something very different.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Wild to read all the quotes from the people who work on this stuff. Blows my mind that these people can so clearly see what they're doing and just...keep doing it anyway.

nytimes.com

Opinion | ‘We’re All Polyamorous Now. It’s You, Me and the A.I.’

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Harry McCracken @harrymccracken.com · 19/12/2025

I do think we might all be better off if chatbots were trained to be anodyne, not friendly. I love Google’s AI Studio in part because it just does what I tell it to do, and is devoid of manufactured charm. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t...

nytimes.com

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’? - The New York Times

A.I. chatbots have been designed to behave in a humanlike way. Some experts think that’s a terrible idea.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Turns out my CPU does support TPM 2.0 (& thus Windows 11), just needed to manually enable in BIOS. I can put off upgrading my PC another year

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

I feel this deeply. A lot of the most public discourse around AI is centered around a handful of billionaires and investors who are not technology experts. They're business types and hype men who pretend to be tech experts.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

I keep seeing new games I want to play and then getting distracted with a new playthrough of an old 50+ hour RPG instead because I'm a golden retriever. Sorry Hades II, I have another playthrough of Witcher 3 to finish...

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Bsky does a lot of things right that other social media gets wrong, but it still encourages attention-seeking behavior. And it's really, really easy to grab a lot of attention by just going to some public figure's post and posting the most inflammatory thing you can.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Silicon Valley's greatest flaw is the widespread belief that if you're good enough at technology you can solve all other problems in all other domains, even if you don't know a damn thing about them, no matter how many times this gets proven wrong.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Insightful for a few different reasons but man the primary thing this article did for me was make me miss living in NYC. I desperately wish the rest of American cities would get on board.

paulkrugman.substack.com

The Limits of Sprawl

Is Atlanta’s slowdown telling us something?

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

This is what's so dangerous about marketing language models as smart human-like assistants who can give you advice. Like any other ML model, it's just a reflection of its training data & we've always known that ML models reinforce biases in that data.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and presume positive intent. It is absolutely surreal to live through a time where the presumption of good faith in politics is so cynically exploited just to hurt people for no gain. Somehow presuming positive intent is just a weakness now.

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zeynep tufekci @zey.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Why did Grok suddenly start talking about “white genocide in South Africa” even if asked about baseball or cute dogs? Because someone at Musk’s xAi deliberately did this, and we only found out because they were clumsy. My piece on the real dangers of AI. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/o...

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Made mulligawny soup just in time for me to get sick. Good timing, I guess #homecooking

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kate conger @kateconger.com · 07/09/2024

if you need every news story you read to end with “and that is bad, actually” might I gently suggest you’re looking for takes rather than information and your needs might be better met elsewhere

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Undeserved distrust of institutions is, of course, primarily a Republican phenomenon. It’s not absent from us on the left, though. No institution is beyond criticism, and I will happily join in when it's deserved (media is too important not to). But... No. NYT did not help elect Trump (thread)

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The Onion @theonion.com · 16/12/2024

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens theonion.com/no-way-to-pr...

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zeynep tufekci @zey.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

New from me on what the rage and glee on public display after the killing of a healthcare CEO portends. I suspect the corporate world will respond with more security and retreating even more into their gated lives. They would be advised to read up on history. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms (Gift Article)

It echoes another era of extreme inequality and extreme violence.

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Grumpy Monoceros @grumpymonoceros.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Introduction post, I guess: I don't know what I'm doing (never used twitter, swore off traditional social media a decade ago). I like: Technology Videogames RPGs of various flavors Spending entirely too much time reading the nytimes Dancing Hello, Internet strangers

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