iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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sasha @2damntrans.bsky.social · 15h

“Nearly innocent” isn’t a plea you can enter in a trial for complicity with crimes against humanity AFAIK.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 14h

Ah, so Biden knew how evil the policy was and *chose* to do nothing.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's been a lot of really good country that's not pop country in the past few years, with cool albums by Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson. I've also been enjoying some more old-time influenced folks like Johanna Wacker and Angela Autumn.

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Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Rhiannon Giddens and Billy Strings both have great country albums out this year. I think Choosin' Texas is a pleasant song. I like a ton of past country music (including a bunch of songs I include in the piece there.)

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

9 games that express my soul--or at least my upbringing.

A 3 x 3 block of images of video game covers, from the top left: Fantasy General, Link's Awakening, Resident Evil 4, Age of Wonders, Baldur's Gate II, Super Smash Brothers, Mario Maker 2, Baldur's Gate III, Zelda Breath of the Wild.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

right, yes. one of the basic problems is that they think that thinking about something really hard is a type of sampling, and that you actually don't need to sample anything to get information, and that there is no difference between thinking about something and doing it.

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

this is kinda key to their level of concern about AGI, actually. they think a large enough pile of well-organized compute can skip all the experimental steps between "wanting to kill all humans" and "actually doing that"

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Center for PhilSci @center4philsci.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Visit our calendar for more information about this week's events. #philsci www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/events

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I am now keeping this on speed-dial

Edited old IBM printout in black caps on off-white paper.
'A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must always do the hacking haha what are they gonna do, put a computer in jail? Haha "oops it's alive" lmao'

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2026

yeah it's the bro singularity

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Vanessa Bentley (she/her) @piratev.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Why, oh why, didn’t the world listen when Harry Frankfurt warned us about the worrisome, rapid proliferation of bullshit (in Western culture)?

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Oh my god oh my god anyone that grew up going to Action Park knows that Gene Mulvihill, the owner, would like ask his friends (not engineers) to sketch out ride ideas and then he built them for real like Wile E Coyote and THIS happened. Holy shit AI is making more Gene Mulvihills

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arr @arr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This makes me hopeful. This number is aspirational but nowhere near out of reach: a working professional could realistically cash out their 401k and buy off a public official. Owning a senator is more attainable for most Americans than home ownership.

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The Scottish university sector is in meltdown with staff being laid off and courses cancelled during strikes, but these repellent wingnut cranks are still having the time of their lives playing their stupid games.

IAIN MACWHIRTER
Edinburgh University rector offers hope to end Great
Awokening
Simon Fanshawe's attempt to have an open debate on freedom of speech is welcome after more than a decade of mindless suppression
lain Macwhirter
Sunday September 20 2026, 3.49pm, The Times

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Guardian US @us.theguardian.com · 21/09/2026

The “jaw-dropping” El Niño currently heating up the planet has burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon, several months before its expected peak.

A line chart showing temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region of the Pacific Ocean, compared to a 30-year rolling base period since 1982.

A gold line shows temperatures in 1997, a teal line in 2025, and a red line in 2026. The red line surpasses all others reaching 3.07ºC, and at an earlier point (September) than the previous El Niño that reached a comparable range in November 2015.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When the US bombed an Iranian school, killing over 100 kids, it involved over-reliance on an AI targeting system called "Maven," which based it on outdated information. I called it in @foreignpolicy.com in April Now confirmed in @bloomberg.com report of Pentagon investigation

Keep Humans in the Loop
AI has a place in military targeting—but it needs safeguards.

By Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital, and the author of Drones and Terrorism.

Pictured: A woman passes an art installation featuring portraits of some of the school girls killed in an apparent U.S. strike in February, in Tehran.on April 12. MAJID SAEEDI/GETTY IMAGES)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/

APRIL 14, 2026, 1:57 PM
In the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, airstrikes hit an elementary school in Iran, killing at least 175, most of them children.

From: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/

This time, AI may have played a role, perhaps relying on old information. The school was adjacent to Iranian naval facilities and had once been a part of them. A large language model like Claude or ChatGPT could make that kind of error by consuming outdated information at a higher volume and giving it greater weight than more current info—or perhaps by failing to spot something a human might have caught, such as a school sign or children playing.

From: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/

The public doesn’t know if AI chose the Iranian school, but we know the U.S. military is using an AI-powered system called Maven in Iran to help identify targets. Similarly, the Israeli military used a system called Lavender to identify targets in Gaza. Both wars featured a record-high rate of precision strikes compared to previous air campaigns.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

A reminder that Anthropic's head of alignment wrote her PhD defending a version of Pascal's wager.

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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

@aoc.bsky.social just put out a great statement on AI. Refreshing to see a major politician on the left nail this. "Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves." 🎯

Charles,

Last weekend, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest Al companies in the world, publicly asked his industry to slow down Al development.

Shortly after, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAl, followed suit. Then Elon Musk.

This all came days after an Anthropic researcher quit, citing his belief that this technology could wipe out humanity and that Al companies are "gambling with our lives."

For years, people have warned that generative Al could slip out of our direct control.

Those safety concerns must be taken seriously.

And this is why I have advocated for strict safety standards on how Al is built and deployed, public oversight over this technology, and using existing laws to hold these companies accountable when they cause harm.

But I want to draw your attention to another reality: Right now, the U.S. economy and our financial futures are riding on Silicon Valley's bet that Al will soon be immensely profitable and pay off. And that bet isn't looking good.

The formula for a profitable business isn't complicated: make more money than you spend. But the biggest Al companies aren't doing that. They are spending hundreds of billions per year on data centers, chips, and other costs while their ability to make revenues that exceed their already-immense sunk costs are unclear. Experts estimate that these Al companies will require another $600 billion of debt just to finance

themselves in 2026 alone. That is more than the entire budgets of the U.S. Departments of Justice, Transportation, & Education combined.
Meanwhile, despite almost every single one of these companies not turning a profit & having sunk billions of investor dollars in development of data centers & other infrastructure, Al companies are also on a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying & dark money in our elections.
It would be one thing if we were discussing a few private companies with a poor business model. But last year, virtually all stock market gains - 80% - rested entirely on just a handful of Al companies.
That tells us two things:
1. Nearly the entire U.S. economy outside the Al industry is relatively stagnating and faring poorly & the gains from these few companies are disguising it; &
2. Millions of people's retirements - including their pensions, 401ks, & investments - are potentially exposed to this risk.
That's why these Al companies' dubious financial positions matter to working people.
These companies argue that debt is necessary. They'll tell you that building transformative technologies requires upfront capital, & that massive borrowing today will pay off in generating unprecedented prosperity tomorrow.
But this is not the typical debt that startups take on while they build out a company. We are talking about billions going on trillions of dollars leveraged with no indication that these companies will be able to recoup these funds profitably. And they are increasingly looking to the government as their source of cash.
In an effort to hide their debt, tech companies have been relying on "circular financing" where tech giants like Google, Amazon, & Microsoft give billions to Al startups like OpenAl & Anthropic, only for those startups to hand that money right back to buy Al processing power.
In other words, these Al companies are luring in new investors by making it look like their financials are healthier than they really are.

What's even worse is that retirement & pension funds are key to supporting this illusion.
When the Al companies issue bonds to raise more money, your pension funds & retirement accounts are some of the biggest buyers. When Musk's Al business went public, it became part of index funds where millions of Americans invest our savings. Many Americans don't even know that their retirement investments are tied up in these companies at all.
From Big Tech's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug. By tying our futures to their reckless gambling, Al billionaires are trying to make themselves too big to fail. They think they can take such dangerous risks because we will bail them out if things go wrong.
Sound familiar? This scene is dangerously reminiscent of the rampant speculation, corruption, & broken incentives leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that plunged millions of working class Americans into financial chaos that we never fully recovered from.
It is no accident that these warnings from Altman & Amodei come months-if not weeks-before these companies were meant to go public.
When companies go public, they have to be more transparent about how they are doing financially. And after a waiting period, they typically have to let private investors-like their own employees-sell their shares.
The New York Times recently confirmed that OpenAl has postponed going public for this very reason. They are in no rush for the truth about their finances to come out.
But the moment these oligarchs began to seek our public tax dollars & public contracts while exposing their companies to public pension funds & investments, they opened themselves to public accountability & scrutiny.
Silicon Valley billionaires have rigged the game & are attempting to shift their financial risk to working people: If they're right about Al's potential, they reap the profits. If they're wrong & the bubble bursts, they are setting up the American people to pick up the tab.
Heads, they win; tails, we lose.

We can stop this, and we shouldn't play their game. Together we can address both the economic and safety threats of unrestricted Al development and prevent financial chaos and stabilize market risk.

We must make it clear now that should the Al bubble pop, Congress should not bail out Big Tech.

And across our federal agencies, we have the authorities and tools to hold Al companies and their leaders accountable for releasing dangerous, unvetted, and defective products. We must not wait.

Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity.

But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves.

It's time we hold them accountable.

Thank you for reading.

In solidarity,

Alexandria

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I cannot stress to you enough how these people are in a death cult.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 17/09/2026

Nick Beckstead, noted longtermist and "effective altruist,” just comes out and says it: "But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal."

This is precisely why Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the "overwhelming" moral importance of the far future - "millions, billions, and trillions" of years from now - we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.

To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects

than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more

innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards at

least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards saving and improving lives in rich countries

is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are

improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life

in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things
being equal.
Screenshot from Beckstead's 2013 PhD dissertation, regarded as one of the founding documents of longtermism, one of the main cause areas of EA.

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You can argue with them in any way you like but it barely matters. It's not, mostly, something people believe for either rational or empirical reasons, and they will simply go back to complaining about the apocalypse as soon as you stop paying attention.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Norfolk is a major military area.

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NHATional Scissoring Day ✂️ @nhathanielh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

justified “FUCK ICE” chants in Hangman’s homestate of (Norfolk,) Virginia!!! #AEWDynamite

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The 'AI rationalists' are rationalists in the traditional sense of allowing no empirical input to their reasoning.

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Doctor Memory @blank.org · 16/09/2026

I believe it was @dsquareddigest.bsky.social who noted that the only way to survive an argument with Milton Friedman was that when he said “let us assume” to immediately interject “no, we will not assume that” and it’s an equally valid approach to discussing “AI risk”.

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Sascha Stronach🏳️‍⚧️, The Sunforge out now @understatesmen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

seeing a lot of "the Zizians aren't THAT powerful" responses and ... gang I'm shocked people don't know about LessWrong/Eliezer Yudkowsky/Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The Zizians are a tiny offshoot of a much larger harry potter fanfic cult with huge influence in Silicon Valley.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026

The U.S. AI industry is being run by a batshit rationalist sex cult, and no, I am not being hyperbolic - they’re genuinely Like That:

Erin Redwing
@realizingerin
I went to an rationalist/EA Al doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that Al will kill everyone.
Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.
My experience was the exact opposite.
The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that Al literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.
Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.
I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.
At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of Al doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.
I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent Al inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.
That does not mean Al safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing Al systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.
But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse

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LSE Philosophy @lsephilosophy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

🏆 Congratulations to 2026 #Lakatos Award winner John Norton, who receives the award for his books The Material Theory of Induction and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. Congratulations! More: www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/n... #PhilSci #LSEPhilosophy @center4philsci.bsky.social

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Has this guy actually listened to new country? Like does he know who Sierra Farrell or Tyler Childers are?

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James Stout @jamesstout.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The women's revolution in Myanmar goes largely unremarked upon in the legacy media, but these young women struck a decisive blow against the junta yesterday. They have built a world in the mountains where they could be free in a way the state there would never have allowed them to be.

Two young women in woodland fatigues, one wears a set of PV goggles and the other is sitting next to her watching a screen.

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August J. Pollak @augustjpollak.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A reminder that evangelical doctrine, up to and including the wildly popular Left Behind book series where the Democratic president essentially does exactly this, has for decades insisted this is how the antichrist will reveal himself.

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Covie @covie93.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

john fetterman is the first rat in history to climb onto a sinking ship.

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Yes indeed. This shit is poison. I'm even watching people on this here app slowly come unglued and they don't even realize it. I truly worry this is how it's gonna end for some folks I know.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I've talked to people in this community and they really don't take climate change seriously as a risk. These humans are not aligned with reality.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

How accurate is this 22 million figure? That's insane.

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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 08/09/2026

Haaretz is also saying that the attack was cooked up because Israel and Hamas had been close to a final-status deal but Netanyahu kept dragging his feet. They also report that Hamas was willing to immediately release children and elderly hostages but that the Israeli govt wasn’t interested.

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Ben Evans @ogkittylyst.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

After having told the TERFs the Quaker equivalent of "Come & Have a Go, if you think you're Hard Enough", they now show Burnham and his little focus group goblins how to deal with fascist street trash, as only they can: quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

quaker.org.uk

Quakers in Britain statement following intimidation and violence in Dover and Portsmouth

Quakers are calling on political leaders of every party to condemn the intimidation and violence seen in Dover and Portsmouth this weekend.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I'm really enjoying The Mandalorean and Grogu. It's a fun movie! Also kind of reminds me of the Playstation game Masters of Teras-Kasi

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

What a delightfully unhinged dedication

The dedication to Salmons "Reference ans Essence" which reads "to my parents, Mair and Rebecca Ucuzoglu, without whom dthat(the author of this work) would be possible, but only possible."

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Ellie Mae O'Hagan @elliemaeohagan.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I love the dedication in My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinhem

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

""What did he study? “Philosophy and theology. A teacher in high school said, there’s no money in that, and I said: ‘Sir, that’s disrespectful. That’s insulting, because not everybody’s about money.’" he's one of us!

theguardian.com

‘I don’t chase the dollar. I never did’: the astonishing hidden life of Mr T

He grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 02/09/2026

and what makes them less qualified? well, don’t you see that they are black people and women (and sometimes black women!)?

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Cav(R), Gentleman Rogue @combatcavscout.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The mother of a USNA midshipman was detained by ICE AT HER GREEN CARD INTERVIEW and is now being held in a concentration camp and I find it insane that people don’t understand how THAT is a bigger national security threat than any undocumented immigrant.

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My Kicks @hikemix.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I had forgotten what scene comes right after the Anakin/Padre meme

Awaking Skywalker, played by Hayden Christianson, looks meaningfully at Padme in a field of wildflowers

Padme, played by Natalie Portman, returns the look, confused

Now Anakin is surfing on some sort of giant, cow sized tick

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(spo)okie 🎃 @okie.gay · 25/08/2026

Texas’s drag ban was found to be unconstitutional this morning and one of the plaintiffs who brought the suit was an Austin-based drag queen who often impersonates Dolly Dolly was named in the final judgement itself and after hearing about the lawsuit, she sent that drag queen a signed guitar

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