iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We cannot buy what is not done when it comes to the creation of knowledge and expertise and what is not done puts us as risk of exploitation, manipulation, and control when we don't constrain technology intended to replace the possession of knowledge and expertise. www.hbcompass.io/we-cannot-bu...

hbcompass.io

We cannot buy what is not done

The danger in a society that has embraced unchecked capitalism is that it becomes ignorant of the limitations in attempting to use capital to address every problem. Capital itself is a tool for managi...

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It is essential in the discourse about AI that we do not conflate being a customer with being literate about AI and we do not conflate its capability to surface things we haven't yet manually surfaced from our data as invention by AI. AI inextricably exists in the context of capitalism.

Screenshot of essay excerpt: "Capitalism is a self-protecting system that will tolerate a limited population with a deep well of skills, knowledge, and expertise that it can commodify but it requires a broad population with limited knowledge in order to continue unchecked. The moment capitalists can replace the well of intelligence and skills or believe they can extract it and separate it from a human being that comes with demands and the ability to vote, then they will no longer indulge the continued development of skills and intelligence within the population and will treat it as a threat.** Thus we find ourselves hearing people say things like "We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter," tech CEOs are lining up to discourage higher education after building their companies off the expertise of thousands of college-educated engineers and scientists, and the Department of Education is being dismantled."

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Anyone else got one of those pen holders that decides whether or not you get to use the pen?

Cat holding a pen between his front legs with one foot crossed over the other leg.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Group projects are an important part of college but higher ed desperately needs to rethink how group projects are designed, facilitated, and evaluated when there are students who actually do the work and students using AI. It is a whole different ballgame than the cliché slacker.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When artists encourage people to make any kind of art, but to do it themselves and not having a machine do it for them; that's not gatekeeping art. When the government says it's going to remove eligibility for federal loans to pursue art and music degrees; that is gatekeeping art.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This was one of the VHS on constant rotation in our household. And later the sequel too.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Tech companies painting tunnels on the side of cliffs and declaring them the exclusive and inevitable path to innovation, revenue, the future, etc does not actually obligate the rest of us to slam ourselves face first into a rock wall.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

When I write an essay trying to explore something complex and nuanced and I find myself at ~2k words there's a part of me that goes "oh shit, I need to shorten the hell out of this or no one will read it" and another part thinking that shortening the exploration of complex things is how we got here.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

One of the ways that I know social media has gone terribly wrong in its design and incentives is that I encounter far more accounts that need to be blocked than ones that I would want to follow.

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When the powerful playact powerlessness it is always a ploy to avoid accountability.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

One must first have some knowledge or skill in a domain to be able to exercise judgment and know when and how to properly apply tools and technology to problems and evaluate whether they are effective and accurate.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Universities allowing or encouraging students to use consumer AI products for their coursework aren't creating future thinkers capable of critical evaluation and thoughtful application of AI technology, they're creating future customers of consumer AI platforms.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Hey, so a thing can't be both a democratizing force that eliminates gatekeeping AND something that people can be left behind from if they don't immediately become customers. Those are mutually exclusive traits...

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

It would cost less for us all to just take care of each other compared to what we're doing now.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I love that it didn't really affect the quality either. As in the results are not of bad looking houseplants which makes it all the more useful. Some of the posts are about harder to care for plants, but that's easy enough to scroll past. It's definitely something to play around with more.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Not me! I saw comments about this going around yesterday and tried it. Someone else figured it out.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

That adding curse words to search queries in Pinterest removes the ads and reduces the AI posts fuckin delights me.

Screenshot of pinterest search for "house plants" where there is a promo for featured boards and 15 results on screen and half of them are shop posts or sponsored.

Screenshot of pinterest search for "bullshit house plants" where there are 18 results on screen and none of them are shop posts or sponsored.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I only have so many years. I only get to use so much of those years to experience the creative efforts of myself and others. There exists more genuine, authentic, human creativity than I could experience in 1,000 lifetimes. I have no interest in wasting the one lifetime I have on machine imitations.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

We created a society where we have to have various pieces of personally identifying information in order to securely do basic life tasks such as interacting with the government, banking, commerce, etc and also haven't made it illegal across the board for that information to be sold.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

"Publicly perform the doing of your work and post the evidence of your process to prove your authenticity" is basically peer-to-peer CAPTCHA and we should not encourage yet another vector by which people are encouraged to be divided and mistrustful while a small group of people benefit from it.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Watching longtime writers and creators suddenly be like "I have to use AI to create graphics for my posts, I can't afford an artist" as if we never illustrated anything prior to 2022. Poor lil guys, forgot how to license images or source CC graphics.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

The more insidious way that performance culture and AI contribute to a surveillance state is that individuals now expect other individuals to surveil, record, and provide footage of themselves to prove authenticity.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

It's been a while since I've regularly coded anything and I've since gotten a new laptop which also meant setting up a dev environment from scratch and wow, that process is not any less annoying than I remember it.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

One of the reasons to read more is that when you find yourself in a really, really dumb conversation, you are less likely to be the reason it's dumb.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

One of the funnier varieties of Gen AI users are the ones who prompt something and then share it while proclaiming nothing like it has existed before and as soon as you look at it you know the person doesn't read books, watch movies, or look at art.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

New login detected, if this was you... Here's your code. If this wasn't you... You have five minutes to use this link to sign in... Check your phone for a verification... Enter the code from your authentication app...

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

That modern life involves having to regularly create accounts to do basic things and then having to spend time almost daily protecting one or more of those accounts from data breaches, hackers, or the incompetence/greed of the platforms themselves is an indicator that we have failed as a species.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Before a new technology, system, or process becomes irreversibly entrenched in society is exactly when you are supposed to be the most critical, cautious, and circumspect about it.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Being literate in AI and being a customer of consumer gen AI are two entirely different things and there are a lot of people urging everyone to become customers and calling it becoming literate.

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 29/04/2026

This is both evil and boring.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

One of the reasons we have people swear an oath to uphold the duties of their position is because the Constitution is a rule book not an airbag, fire sprinkler, or autocorrect. It cannot automatically mitigate, stop, or fix anything. People have to actually take steps to enforce it.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Clawed assistant > Claude assistant

Photo of a black cat in front of a computer monitor touching the screen with a Stack Overflow page open.

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Michael Schulman @michaelschulman.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

We're on track for a chaotic summer and fall weather season, intense heat waves that will result in massive fires, and a rough hurricane season. This year is ripe for an unpredictable mix of chaotic events that will make voting more difficult and stressful. Planning needs to include that too.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

If a thing is so incredible and valuable because it eliminates the burden of people needing to skill up or get up to speed in order to do something, then it cannot also be a thing in which not using it right away would cause someone to be "left behind". Those are mutually exclusive characteristics.

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

404media.co

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

We're not just in a subscription economy, we're in a subscription democracy. Some are getting a higher tier of benefits while the rest are locked into the basic plan we were signed up for at birth where the cost only ever rises and they keep removing benefits or turning them into premium add-ons.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

"Use AI or get left behind" is rugged individualism applied to technology. It's a fantasy that a person could be "good enough" with AI to not be affected by global shifts in labor and information. It's propaganda for individual survival over collective action on behalf of the collective welfare.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Historical context for these jobs...one of the last people convicted for their role in the Holocaust was a secretary at a camp. She claimed as a secretary she wasn't responsible. She was found guilty because she could not deny that she knew what was actually happening. www.mlive.com/news/detroit...

mlive.com

ICE buys Romulus detention facility, projects 1,458 jobs as local officials push back

The agency said the Romulus facility and its construction are expected to generate 1,458 jobs, nearly $150 million in economic activity and more than $33 million in projected tax revenue.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I'm not worried about a future in which I'm left behind because I don't use certain technologies. I'm worried about a future in which everyone is expected to do even more than we already are and those things aren't actually useful, necessary, or good for us — individually or collectively.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

It's wild to have 2 pro-AI people in the same article, one saying that authors need to use AI or get left behind AND the other saying if readers know a book is AI they won't read it. "Do the thing that your target customer will boycott you for if they know you are doing it." Wow. Great advice.

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are a test for every MSM member with a platform. If you are not voicing your outrage at this blatant violation of the First Amendment, you are utterly discredited as a journalist.

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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning I was sent this video of agents at her door:

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Reposted by Heather Bryant

Evan Simko-Bednarski @simko-bednarski.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

INBOX: @freedom.press on the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

> “The government’s arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are naked attacks on freedom of the press. Two federal courts flatly rejected prosecuting Lemon because the evidence for these vindictive and unconstitutional charges was insufficient, and Lemon has every right to document news and inform the public. Instead of accepting that humiliating defeat, the government has now doubled down.
>
> “These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists. The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them. Fort’s arrest is meant to instill the same fear in local independent journalists as big names like Lemon.
>
> “The answer to this outrageous attack is not fear or self-censorship. It’s an even stronger commitment to journalism, the truth, and the First Amendment. If the Trump administration thinks it can bully journalists into submission, it is wrong. We’ve recently seen that even in the Trump era, public pressure still can work. It’s time to do it again. News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend Lemon’s and Fort’s rights. Journalists are not making themselves the story, Trump is.”

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

We've built a system in which the penalties and settlements for lying and cheating cost far less than what companies can make when they lie and cheat and then we act shocked that they lie and cheat.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Cough media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/...

Screenshot of Department of War AI Strategy memo: Speed Wins. We must internalize that Military AI is going to be a race for the foreseeable future, and therefore speed wins. We must weaponize learning speed, and measure and manage cycle time and adoption rates as decisive variables in the Al era. We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment. I direct CDAO to establish deployment velocity and operational cycle-time metrics for all PSPs, to be a focus of their monthly reporting to the Deputy Secretary and USW(R&E).

AI Model Parity. We are seeing unprecedented velocity in the evolution of the frontier AI models. These models are becoming smarter and more robust every day. The Department cannot be working off models that are months or years old. We must have the latest and greatest AI models deployed for our warfighters. Deploying these capabilities across all echelons is simply not enough, we must be able to support and sustain rapid model updates across all echelons. I direct CDAO to establish a delivery and integration cadence with AI vendors that enables the latest models to be deployed within 30 days of public release. This shall be a primary procurement criterion for future model acquisition.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

...you don't get to deny responsibility for your actions or words because you were manipulated. The judgement of your character isn't because you were manipulated, it's because of why you were vulnerable to that kind of manipulation in the first place.

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