iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 16h

Everybody put your helmets on

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There are some things The Engineers can't optimize

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

All Western Mass Lesbian Bar discourse must take the 3d alignment cube into account

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 22/09/2026

Just go to therapy, bro.

DAVID JIANG, COFOUNDER and CEO of smart glasses company Viture, tells me about how he used to yell at his kid.

His 10-year-old son played tennis. During tournaments, Jiang says he had a habit of shouting and criticizing his son’s mistakes as he played. He wanted to apply pressure to make him succeed—it was the way he’d been taught to raise kids, after all. It made sense.

But then, unprompted, his smart glasses sent him a message. The AI assistant in his company’s newest wearable had picked up on what he was doing, recognized that his behavior wasn’t helpful, and messaged him about what he should do differently. Stop shouting. Stop criticizing. Just be there, be present, and show that you support your son. That worked, Jiang says, and being called out like that has supposedly made him a better father and improved the relationship with his kid, all thanks to his yet-to-be-released Vonder AI glasses.

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

* PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE CORP. HAS REACHED A SETTLEMENT WITH CALIFORNIA AND OTHER STATES SUING TO BLOCK ITS PROPOSED ACQUISITION OF WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY INC. -- BLOOMBERG NEWS @reuters.com @bloomberg.com $PSKY

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

oh look, more evidence the streaming era is getting TV'd!

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Steven (with a PH) @sjksalisbury.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Christening a baby is nothing like christening a ship. I know that now. Once again I can only apologise.

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Not gonna lie, I thought this was the guy from Channel 5 just by the still

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This is the same Cybertruck that went on a 360° ‘I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy’ bumper sticker counteroffensive after it had dog poo smeared on it several times last year

Two stickers on a cyber truck that say “Anti-Elon Tesla Club” and “I bought this before Elon went crazy”

Another sticker below the Bought this before Elon Went Crazy with a community note saying that Tesla only started selling cybertrucks after Elon Went crazy

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Jeremy NT @jeremynt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Well put

Here’s the thing: I think these guys (and they often tend to be guys) really do believe what they say. Their own A.I. freaks them out. But having followed their internecine discourses for years now, I also have to emphasize this: The majority of these folks are weirdos who got into A.I. because they ingested all types of speculative doomsday fantasies from the jump. Then they locked themselves into claustrophobic Silicon Valley echo chambers populated exclusively by fellow catastrophists and lost their grip on other ways to perceive the real world (and their own tech).

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

How do I articulate that I want to be understanding of the various ways people process and react to the world while also never hearing the term 'neurospicy' ever again?

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I've been seeing some edits from this movie casting Coyote and Roadrunner as characters in a doomed yaoi dynamic If that's part of Ketchup's marketing strategy, it's totally brilliant

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

True ball knowledge would be highlighting Digimon Season 3 (Digimon Tamers), which was written by the guy who created Serial Experiments Lain

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

There's always something uncanny about how the audio and video match up in Apple events Like, do they record the video and then have the execs do ADR during post?

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Sean O’Kane @okane.fyi · 08/09/2026

How are we supposed to know what mattress to buy these days when every podcast ad is for ChatGPT or Claude

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Today is August 27 3:23pm. Google Maps still says Lake Ontario, let's see if that changes

Google Maps screenshot of Lake Ontario billed as "Lake Ontario"

AP News headline: Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ in the United States

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I think this graph is gonna be important to remember in the next 18 months

A graph from Bloomberg showing NVIDIA's 2026 stock gains lagging far behind the past 3 years. To be fair, the Y-axis scale goes from 0 to 50% gains.

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

(U.S.) National: Somehow I remember my mom's reaction to Jerry Garcia's death more than the Oklahoma City Bombing, even though they were 4 months apart. European: Princess Diana's death True global importance: Hong Kong handover 1997

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The one weekend I can't be at Riis Dang

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I would be remiss if I didn't post the radio connection

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gwen howerton @kissphoria.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I think that Dolly Parton was, for a lot of people, an ambassador of the "good" values people think of about the South: kindness, hospitality, can-do spirit, sharp and witty and down to earth. I think for a segment of people, too, she was theantithesis of a lot of noxious masculine country stuff.

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Joshua Rivera @jmrivera.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

dolly was the rare famous person who treated being famous as a means to an end, and that end was actually making the world better. few better uses of celebrity than shaming every other celeb who does less.

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Confession time: After Betty White, I thought about updating Zack Fox's monologue to "RIP Dolly Parton, she's not dead but for when she dies" to use in my social media bios since she was the next most widely beloved white woman in America. ...I didn't do it because I didn't want to jinx her. RIP

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Chance the Lawyer @chancethelawyer.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

say what you will about the myriad valid concerns with current LLMs but I personally will never get over the fact that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted to his literal death for downloading JSTOR and then a decade later, they downloaded & ingested the entire world and our IP laws just went ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

YouTube changed how it counts views and that'll probably effect the podcast business because we've been hitched our wagon to the Youtube recommendation algorithm recently I know they have more granular data for watch time etc, but it kinda obviates the meaning of a view in the business sense

support.google.com

An update to how we count public views across YouTube - YouTube Community

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

This is an incredible bummer and totally changes my opinion of Reggie Watts. Seems like he "didn't not" do stuff that led to his ex-girlfriend's OD death I hope Katherine McCollough's family and friends can find peace after this

rollingstone.com

Reggie Watts Is a Prominent Ketamine Advocate. Was It His Ex's 'Undoing'?

Comedian and musican Reggie Watts is a prominent ketamine advocate. Was it his ex-girlfriend's "undoing"?

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

If this IPO actually happens, set a 6 month timer to see how the bubble's looking after a couple of quarterly earnings calls

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I've been saying this for years: the United States would be genuinely better off with more public media. Prior to the CPB being defunded the US federal government spent something like a third of what the UK spends on the BBC and our population is 4.9x bigger

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Maxwell Yezpitelok @mrmxy.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

"If you don't use AI you'll get left behind" Brother I've sent emails from a Super Nintendo, I fucking love getting left behind

Photo of a CRT monitor next to a Super Famicom console with an XBAND modem inserted. The monitor's screen shows the XBAND's email composing screen. The message being composed has the subject line "I'm writing from a snes :00" and is addressed at a user named "フフフ".

Screenshot of the email composing screen from the previous photo.

Screenshot of the bsnes-plus Super Nintendo emulator open on Ubuntu. The game loaded is identified as "X-Band Modem BIOS (J)" and the emulator window shows the XBAND email inbox screen. There are two emails: one from user "mrmxy" with the subject line "i'm writing from a snes :0" and one from "System" with the subject line "Welcome!!" Behind the emulator window is a terminal window showing the emulator's log (indicating emulated modem activity) and a file explorer window with some Super Nintendo ROMs and save files.

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Eric Migicovsky @ericmigi.com · 19/08/2026

what's next, a 'ladies and gentlemen, the weekend' watchface? apps.repebble.com/9be723f67554...

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Mia Sato @miasato.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I maintain that consumer AI products would have been received very differently if they were launched with promises like, "You can query this to sort through your inbox of 50,000 emails" rather than "What if artists starved in the streets? :)"

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

"So I was like, ok, let's see if he can fight. And he couldn't"

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Roberto Baldwin @strngwys.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

without proper data privacy laws in this country, that company privacy policy isn't worth much when the creditors come calling. Also see 23andMe.

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William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The idea of AI “hallucinating” is one I wish I’d had!

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Ben Ellman @heybellman.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

If I vibe code anything it's going to be a bot that emails me showtimes whenever Mad Max: Fury Road is playing in a theater near me

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August J. Pollak @augustjpollak.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Yes, because it’s A GAMBLING APP, NOT A POLLING FIRM. THAT IS HOW GAMBLING WORKS. YOUR “ANALYSIS” HERE IS BASED ON PRETENDING THIS ISN’T JUST PEOPLE GAMBLING, JESUS CHRIST

Regardless of your view on who's favored, it's pretty clear Kalshi is not actually reading what those drops mean and are reacting to headline changes in raw vote totals. There's no need for this kind of oscillation

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