iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 5h

The story, then, is one of epistemic degradation, which the pandemic accelerated (not least due to more time online and more to conspiracy theorize about). A factor is content collapse: people think tons of bad just started happening when the reality is it just started being in their face every day.

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What's eroded here is a cultural infrastructure: Social Norms ~ "standards governjng which information circulates" ...as well as what behavior is in circulation

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Nate Soares: "We need a treaty." Meanwhile...

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Uniqueness, the "non-standard" and "unique and powerful voice" Cory references elsewhere in this fine thread, is fundamental to the aesthetic and artistic realm. And if AI is grinding out the convergent commonalities in past works, it is systematically missing something in that realm.

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Dan Ancona @danancona.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Strong email from @aoc.bsky.social putting down a marker on how to deal with both the proximate economic risks from AI and the longer term ones.

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Fruitful discussion, tends to lend support to: -Moratorium on creating AGI or recursive self-improving AI agents* -Legal investigations of AI-frontier cos for theft and hacking -Even tho actual risks maybe less than worst case, or AI-bubble may burst 1st from other causes youtu.be/OhOmLqR5nN4?...

youtu.be

AI Emergency: The AI Labs Are Lying To Everyone, He Says 99% Chance Of Extinction | Roman Yampolskiy

YouTube video by The Diary Of A CEO

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Reinforcement learning emphasizes extrinsic rewards achieved by any means necessary, and involves purely extrinsic motivation. No surprise that a clever agent will turn sooner or later to this pattern: lie, cheat, steal, hack. The training system yields amoral even machiavellian intelligence.

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Sometimes, in a dream, you realize the way to end what's happening in the (bad) dream is to just wake up. Way to wake up from THIS dream is to turn off the devices* -- sooner rather than later... *tho not necessarily 100% of the time, of the uses

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 09/09/2026

it comes off as Guys Building The Doom Machines standing around and going "the doom machines could quite likely kill us all, and we should coordinate on stopping them from killing us all, although I *personally* am going to keep focusing on becoming ultra-rich from building the Doom Machines"

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/09/2026

There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained: pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/3... 51/

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/09/2026

Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026... 36/

arstechnica.com

US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case

The DOJ proved to the court that Google acted illegally, but it won't get the big win it wanted.

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Abbey @abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is what living next door to a 30 megawatt data center sounds like.

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

In science, this arises where in a situation of underdetermination (many models could well fit) a premature consensus based on limited data leads to an epistemic bubble, the scientists have overfit their (world)view to the model. And miss lots of trees in the forest. Consider e.g. the Big Five.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 11/08/2026

The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. 56/

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

it's always odd when "you should expose yourself to more diverse ideas" always means a certain kind of conservatism instead of like, Indigenous art, new fusion foods, math paradoxes, or the Dvorak keyboard layout

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

This fundamental piece of the worldview, what Martin Buber called I-it relating. Treating others instrumentally, as an object. As for why it so infects the uber-rich: It's how you get there. The marketplace rewards them whose lack of scruples (yes, sociopathic) allows them to go I-it all the way.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026

Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you *used to be*, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become: reallifemag.com/instant-reca... 25/

reallifemag.com

Instant Recall — Real Life

How do we remember when apps never forget?

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 01/08/2026

Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted - or even spared from being fired - were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." 23/

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Intriguing divergence of voter (general populace) and donor (big $, incl billionaire) interests, in consumer domain. But conundrum disappears with strong campaign-finance rules, such that voters rule.

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Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele @drdragases.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Good grief, this hits home.

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

We're going to need to give these AI chatbots some kind of reputation (in human personality terms) so that we'll be able to factor them properly into our highly evolved working routines for prudent social interacting. Here's a start: Superficially agreeable chameleon-like know-it-all charlatans.

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"Trump positions himself as a vindication of masculine prerogatives," says @moiradonegan.bsky.social. He tells men not to "cultivate virtues" but to "embrace their own vices." On the pod, this look at Trump, the Tate brothers, and the plight of young men is so good: newrepublic.com/article/2136...

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Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 26/07/2026

🧠 AI was meant to fix our bias We were promised AI would strip bias out of decisions. A new paper shows the opposite: language models absorb human cognitive distortions, then amplify them back at us. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2607.20695 #AI #Bias #CriticalAI 🧪

arxiv.org

Language Models Embody and Amplify Human Cognitive Distortions: What Is to Be Done?

Human judgment is fundamentally prone to error. A promise of AI is that it will rid decisions of bias and ensure a fairer and safer world for all. Yet research unequivocally demonstrates that LLMs exh...

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 21/07/2026

No book is safe from nonconsensual scraping for AI and this whole 'we need old books because they aren't contaminated by our own AI slop' thing really reminds me of the search for pre-atomic testing steel.

404media.co

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”

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Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

This list of what the public finds corrupt is basically a rundown of Trump’s governing philosophy. Poll: @brennancenter.org

Bar chart titled “Please indicate if the following are examples of corruption,” showing the share of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who said each item counts as “very” or “somewhat” corrupt, from a Brennan Center poll of 2,000 registered voters (April 28–May 6, 2026). Results are consistently high and closely aligned across parties: a government official using their position for personal gain (98% Democrat, 96% Independent, 96% Republican); prioritizing billionaires and big corporations over the public (97%, 94%, 91%); bending the rule of law (96%, 95%, 94%); lying to the public (94%, 94%, 94%); billionaires and corporations having an easier time being heard than the public (94%, 90%, 83%); taxpayer dollars spent on programs that don’t benefit the public (90%, 88%, 94%); Congress not focusing on the public’s problems (82%, 77%, 80%); and an official unresponsive to constituents (78%, 75%, 76%).

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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

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Oh The Urbanity! @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I keep saying: Nordic-style social democracy (capitalism with social programs) is quite different from socialism traditionally defined (abolishing capitalism). I think it’s useful to use clear language that distinguishes between these things.

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The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 23/06/2026

Alex Reisner has found four giant data sets of songs—totaling more than 20 million tracks—available to companies training AI music-generation tools. Search for an artist or song in the data sets:

bit.ly

The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music

Explore the astonishing amount of music available to AI developers.

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Nick Anderson - political cartoonist @andertoon.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Crime and Punishment Follow my cartoons and accompanying written commentary on Substack: nickanderson.substack.com For @contrariannews.org

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Alicia @aliciablackgirl.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Q: What's the difference between Iran and Vietnam? A: 47 had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

“.. The first rule is to have muddled objectives. .. The second rule is, do not know thine enemy. .. Finally, be sure to alienate your friends.” @edwardluce.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/0ba6...

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Amy Hoy @amyhoy.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

i'm anti-the whole "great man theory" of history but we really need to admit that there is, in fact, a great shitweasel theory of history that is proven by cold, hard facts

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BladeoftheSun @bladeofthes.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

One country has Private Healthcare. Pay the most, get the least.

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DrDinD.bsky.social @drdind.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Happy Earth Day 🌎 A poem from Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

This might be the greatest split-screen ever broadcast. They’ll play this in museums in future. (🎥 LCI 🇫🇷)

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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Quick question does anyone know how to restore virtue to a decaying society

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irgetsreal.bsky.social @irgetsreal.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

In international relations theory we call this chain-ganging,” ie, getting pulled into an ally’s war as if chained together at the ankle. As others have pointed out, there was a large element of this in WWI. See here: www.jstor.org/stable/2538910 And here: stephaniehuesler.com/2019/12/15/h...

stephaniehuesler.com

History Undusted: If World War I were a Bar Fight

History can be confusing sometimes, especially if it’s distant – beyond our own experience. Who’s who, who did what, and what the consequences were can all seem a bit vague. The analogy…

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Gerard Saucier @gsaucier.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Do unto others before they have a chance to do anything unto you. Not quite the golden rule. Nor "eye for an eye..."

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Josh Chafetz @joshchafetz.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

FWIW, this is sec. 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution:

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Michael McIntee @mmcintee.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

U2 new EP kicks off with “American Obituary” which is more hopeful than the title sounds. It addresses the killing of Renee Good, ICE in Minneapolis, and the threat to democracy. “The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” Listen/ watch here: youtu.be/Y3ziTSYyook?...

youtu.be

U2 - American Obituary (Lyric Video)

YouTube video by U2

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 15/02/2026

(put another way, weird to say, as Rubio does, that Europe produced “the genius…of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” who were self-consciously playing music rooted in the traditions of the African diaspora.)

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 12/02/2026

One more quick thread, and then I'm getting out of here to walk my dog in the sun. I think a lot about the authoritarian personality. I won't start going on about that because this thread would last forever, but I just want to say one thing about it.

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August J. Pollak @augustjpollak.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

This pales in effectiveness to my strategy, "hope Supreme Court justice simply dies at the right time"

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onion person @junlper.beer · 31/01/2026

we absolutely need to know who he sent this to. how is this something the public is being kept in the dark on???

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daviss @daviss.org · 30/01/2026

Now: Bruce Springsteen sings “Streets of Minneapolis” in Minneapolis

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Bruce Springsteen @brucespringsteen.net · 28/01/2026

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

youtu.be

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

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