iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 4h

Attention all Starfleet personnel. #Spocktober is now in effect. You are requested to share and repost images & memes of everyone's favourite Star Trek character, Mr. Spock. Keep on Trekin'. Message ends. #StarTrek60 #MrSpock

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Helmy @pnwdweller.bsky.social · 11h

Describing Pete’s size.

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Rick @calder12.bsky.social · 8h

1. Cognitive decline is real. 2. Model collapse is not only real, but inevitable as point 1 gets worse. 3. Model manipulation is very real. They can, and do, manipulate the responses AI can give. We are hurtling headlong towards Idiocracy mixed with 1984. A stupid population, that knows nothing.

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Gerry Anderson @gerryanderson.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Mobile Control, this is Thunderbird 2. I'm ready." Begin your mission with the new Thunderbird 2 Limited Edition Premium Collectible! Featuring a removable Pod 5 and two recovery vehicles... Launch now for a special pre-order price (TODAY ONLY) 🚀 gerryanderson.com/products/thu...

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 22h

How it started vs. How it's meowing:

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The Spaceshipper 🚀 @thespaceshipper.com · 30/09/2026

5 4 3 2 1 Thunderbirds Are Go! Filmed in VIDECOLOR and SUPERMARIONATION. Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds started 61 years ago today on ITV. @gerryanderson.bsky.social

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DrCrlsnPEJD @drcrlsnpe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"Described by the director of applied science at Microsoft, another defendant in the case, as the 'largest theft of labor in human history.'” OpenAI’s co-founder and president: “Ah nice.”

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 23h

If you replaced half these college kids with AIs, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference ... and the other half wouldn't notice.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Also known as Star Trek Season 4. Anyone who doesn't consider ST:TAS to be canon should hand in their phaser & communicator then resign from Starfleet. "It's canon." – David Gerrold "It's canon." – D.C. Fontana "Of course it's canon." – Leonard Nimoy "I had a blast." – Larry Niven

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Kara Jane Adams @ghostinexile.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Watching politicians talk about AI is a little like watching an elderly relative explain the benefits of the scam they've just fallen for.

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Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In 1972 this was the sort of gig you could go to at a Pub in suburban London. Incredible.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"First to the egg!" "First to the keys!"

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oracle is on the hook for $300 billion in construction costs & says it can't pay the lease on this one that's supposed to be finished in 2028 because they're waiting for the building to be done, so that OpenAI can start paying them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJdP...

youtube.com

Oracle invokes force majeure on AI data centre

YouTube video by BNN Bloomberg

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404 Media @404media.co · 28/09/2026

Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, 404 Media has learned. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI images. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Sccop here by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/humans-readi...

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The Spaceshipper 🚀 @thespaceshipper.com · 28/09/2026

Star Trek: The Next Generation started 39 years ago today. The future began again at this (Encounter at Far)point.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I was standing, lost in my thoughts, when spuddenly the bus arrived.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A helpful guide to Star Wars vs. Star Trek.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"When a service is free, the users are the product." "But it's free." "They know everything about you." "But it's free." "They SELL what they know about you." "But it's free." "Anyone can find you, find out about you." "But it's free." "Even stalkers & axe-murderers." "But it's—seriously?"

static.klipy.com

Star Trek Facepalm Reaction

ALT: Star Trek Facepalm Reaction

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G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 28/09/2026

I've been on the internet a very long time, and I've had more "what on god's green earth are you even talking about" moments in the last 2 years than in the previous 20. Just absolutely baffling non sequiturs, straw men, logical fallacies, malicious misconstructions, you name it. We are unwell.

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Greg Jericho @grogsgamut.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The amount of bullshit produced by those suggesting AI will deliver high-value add to either our economy or even just productivity could fertilize the entire nation.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Being told our child was talented enough to be considered a special needs student was one thing, having that qualified with 'starting with exorcism' kind of ruined the moment."

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Sam Altman is the son of a dermatologist and a real estate broker, which is why he makes your skin crawl." And it only gets better from there.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

When OpenAI's models 'escaped' to hack Hugging Face, did they also scatter self-replicating copies of themselves elsewhere on the internet? According to what Andrew Yang was told, yes they did. officechai.com/ai/andrew-ya...

officechai.com

Andrew Yang Says An AI Lab Head Told Him Rogue Bots "Polluted" The Internet With Self-Replicating Code

Andrew Yang, who’d run for the Democrat Presidential nomination in 2020, has made a striking claim in a new interview: that the head...

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Okay, @adguard.bsky.social - add Apple Intelligence to the list. Everyone else: More of this, please.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The pi-hole people (in fact, any company or OSS project making an internet router) should add a blocker to all the different AI systems so that if a computing-device tries to connect to one, they get this as a response:

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thanks to all the microplastics in our bodies these days, we're going to have to re-certify humans as 99.2% ℮ organic.

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Ricardo B�nffy @rbanffy.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Repeat with me: “Boring is good. Boring is the goal. I’ll always optimise for boring.” Dan McKinley :: Choose Boring Technology mcfunley.com/choose-borin...

mcfunley.com

Choose Boring Technology

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Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Facebook really doesn't want you to see the new documentary exposing Elon Musk Neither do TikTok or Google or the eX social media site. Since they won't accept paid advertising, let's do some free advertising. Go see Musk in theaters October 9 www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

hollywoodreporter.com

The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ (Exclusive)

YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down the trailer for the Oct. 9 doc, citing “political” content. X won't even take Bleecker Street's calls. The distributor is appealing.

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Harry McCracken @harrymccracken.com · 26/09/2026

I wrote about the tech industry’s love of anthropomorphizing AI—seen most recently in Muse’s adorable avatar—and why it might be better to intentionally rob it of any personality. www.fastcompany.com/91612364/mus...

fastcompany.com

The case for embracing AI's inhumanity

The tech industry loves to slather AI in anthropomorphism. What if it was proudly mechanical?

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Got one or more Macs suffering inexplicable kernel panics? Look for a Windows 10 or 11 machine on the same network. #macOS #Windows11

Following up on my post about editing Macs kernel panicking on 10 GbE SMB: we think we've found the cause. It reads like a murder mystery, so here's the story.

The crime scene. Since late June, our editors' Macs had been kernel panicking several times a day, often several at once. It hit Mac Studios and 2019 Mac Pros on three different macOS 26 builds. Every panic report had the same assertion deep in the kernel's network buffer code (m->m_flags & M_PKTHDR, in dlil_input). They only happened on machines mounting our NAS over 10 GbE with jumbo frames.

The obvious suspect. An EDR system extension had installed on those Macs the same evening the panics started. It was the only system change common to every machine that was crashing, so it looked guilty, and we (and the vendor) went after it hard. We turned off its network filter and the Macs still panicked. We uninstalled it completely and they still panicked. The timing was a coincidence. It was simply the one change we could see, because we were only looking at the Macs.

Ruling people out. Server-side packet captures showed the Macs dying mid-SMB-read, which pointed at the SMB client. Changing a macOS networking setting didn't help. macOS 26.7 didn't help. The switch log gave us the key clue: in each event, only the Macs' ports went down, often within seconds of each other, across different hardware and OS builds. Something was hitting all of them at the same moment, and it wasn't coming from inside any one of them.

The stakeout. Server-side captures only show traffic to and from the server. What we needed was everything a Mac receives from anyone on the network. So we set up port mirroring on the switch: the port for one of the most-affected Macs was copied to a spare Mac running tcpdump (headers only, in a rolling set of files). Then we waited. The panics are bursty, so of course it went quiet as soon as we started watching.

The reveal. Friday evening it finally panicked while being recorded. The Mac was idle, with no SMB traffic for ten minutes. The last thing it received, about one second before its link dropped, was a burst of about 60 mDNS packets in 25 milliseconds from a Windows 11 PC on the same network, many of them over 4 KB (jumbo frames). The PC was running Windows Delivery Optimization's local peer discovery (_dosvc._tcp), apparently stuck in a name-conflict loop. Looking back across the whole capture, every panic lined up with that PC's mDNS traffic, including a routine every-5-minutes announcement that took out Macs as fast as they reconnected. When the PC went quiet for five hours, nothing crashed.

That's the twist. We had spent weeks examining the victims, and nothing on the Macs was the culprit. The killer was a machine that had nothing to do with editing: a Windows PC on the same network, sending poison packets to every Mac at once. You'd never find it by looking at the Macs, only by watching the wire.

Our working theory: large multicast packets arriving at a Mac with an active SMB session hit a macOS kernel bug. The SMB session is the precondition, and the Windows PC's mDNS traffic is the trigger.

The fix (for now). On the PC we set Delivery Optimization to Simple mode (DODownloadMode = 99), and the announcements stopped. We're watching to confirm the panics stop too, and it's all been reported to Apple.

If you're seeing something similar: Macs panicking together on a jumbo-frame network with Windows 10/11 PCs on it? Check for _dosvc mDNS traffic. More broadly, if your crashing machines don't share an obvious cause, look at what else is on the network. A managed switch's port mirroring to a spare machine running tcpdump is an underrated way to see what really reaches a client before it dies.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thanks to all the microplastics in our bodies these days, we're going to have to re-certify humans as 99.2% ℮ organic.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Now, where have I seen this design before ...

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Chenxin Li, PhD @chenxinli2.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

We are basically like this in research already. Postdocs and PhD students growing plants, doing tissue culture, and pipetting, while AI chat bots doing the analyses, writing proposals and papers. Humans having to do the menial tasks, while AI chat bots took over the creative work.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

So I missed this nice little 60th tribute: CBS-P gave Anson Mount's onscreen command insignia badge (used during season 2 of Star Trek SNW) to ESA flight engineer Sophie Adenot to wear on the ISS. arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

arstechnica.com

The universal language of space is... Star Trek? Mais oui.

A small piece of "Star Trek" history was revealed aboard the International Space Station 60 years (to the day) after the Starship Enterprise premiered.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Yesterday MS quietly dropped their whole "Copilot+PC" branding program. A friend visited Dell's site to see if they were still selling their Copilot+PC laptops. Some wag added $480 million to the prices before taking the page down.

A screen-grab from Dell's no-longer-available "Copilot+PC" co-branded laptops. The prices have had US$480,000,000 added to them. The page was taken off-line minutes later.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Mix some Fifth Element and Bioshock in a bowl with a dash of Bladerunner, glaze with The Incredibles and bake in a hot genius for thirty years: Brad Bird's dream project "Ray Gunn" hits the big and small screens this December: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL-x...

youtube.com

Ray Gunn | Official Trailer | Netflix

YouTube video by Netflix

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Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling @rubenbolling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

🔵 This week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic - 🤖 ELON MUSK AND HIS DOGE PALS vs. GIANT A.I. ROBOTS!! - Brought to you by the Inner Hive, including long-time member B.T. Robinson and new member Terry Kimber (bit.ly/theInnerHive) - READ IT RIGHT HERE👇

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𝙷𝚎𝚗𝚜 𝙱𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚝 🎨 @hensbreet.art · 25/09/2026

OpenAI wants you to send them a photo of your room. No thanks. Remember: the only profitable use for “AI” is fraud, disinfo, and surveillance.

Screenshot of a "Dorm redesign" photo-editing feature. A photo of a cozy dorm room (twin bed with green bedding, botanical wall art, desk, bookshelf) appears in a preview card. Below it: heading "Dorm redesign," a short description about transforming room photos, and two buttons: "Take a photo" and "Choose a photo."

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Attention all Starfleet personnel. #Spocktober beckons. It is logical to be prepared.

A stock-footage cel of Spock beginning to run, from Star Trek : The Animated Series. Here, Spock is superimposed on a corridor of the USS Enterprise. The image bears Leonard Nimoy's autograph.

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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The AI that powers Meta's new Muse isn't actually just a machine - it is a massive team of human contractors doing most of the actual work. Do you really want someone in Senegal helping you switch car insurance, or a Nigerian balancing your credit cards? www.404media.co/meta-tests-m...

404media.co

Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center

"This has potential for so much negative PR. It could portray us as ‘their AI is not good enough so they still need humans’ kind of coverage for this launch."

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I see Apple are opening their own live-music venue at the revamped Battersea Power Station next week on the 28th. Frankly, if they don't bring in 'The Pink Floyd Experience' to open the first show, they're doing everything wrong. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV-M...

youtube.com

Welcome to the Machine

YouTube video by The Pink Floyd Experience

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Friend, my grandson's lemonade stand is more profitable than OpenAI.

Sexy Skeletor says "WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI"

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Patrick Stokes @patrickstokes.com · 22/09/2026

Been thinking of this poem a LOT today

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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

In the entirety of movie & television, only one person can be directly attributed for writing the stories that defined the longest-running, most financially successful franchise of all time. Dorothy "D.C." Fontana. The franchise is, of course, Star Trek.

Dorothy Fontana appearing on "The Writer Speaks" for The Writers Guild Foundation, talking about her career as a screen writer, story editor and eventually executive producer for multiple Star Trek series.

Of course it took another female screen writer - the legendary Lucille Ball - to recognise the strengths of 'Star Trek' and put her own money on the line, twice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCSp8TnnbNU

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