iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

fantastic. I wonder if they ever pull it out of storage.

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There is an entire presumed life history with genuine pathos behind the making of that claim. The "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn" of the New York Times factchecking process.

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also, quite literally from @greatdismal.bsky.social Gernsback Continuum. A 1933 LA Times illustration reprinted in Hugo Gernsback's magazine, Technocracy Review, Vol.1, no.1.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

good lord I would love to possess the original of that illustration.

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it's telling me that you can't be messaged - could this be some weird Bluesky 'we do not know that you are older than 18 and we think you are in the UK where we has legal risk and therefore we are cutting you off' thing? Anyways, email me at henry.farrell@gmail.com if you want a quick PDF.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 5h

How did you get damnatio memoriae through the Times' editorial process?

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 5h

The angels too are deliberately Crowley inflected, but from Aegypt obvs. If you want a PDF of the essay, feel free to DM.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 6h

The “crusader march” would be more historically accurate if instead of going to the palestine fest they just robbed and torched a random church bsky.app/profile/unra...

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 6h

His old essay on Gibson/Sterling's Difference Engine with bits on Crowley's Great Work of Time is very helpful (a chunk of Crowley appears unannounced in the middle of Nonesuch).

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 6h

The "WOW crucial. Go authorization has arrived!" scenarios are going to be hilarious. Although maybe not so hilarious for those who are on the hook in some way.

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 02/10/2026

coincidentally, this just arrived

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This is a better epilogue to my January story about the private equity firm profiting off of ICE's cruelest flights than I could have ever possibly hoped for. CHICAGO: You went to the mat and protected (at a minimum!) thousands of immigrants from torture. Take a bow. prospect.org/2026/10/02/i...

prospect.org

The City That Brought Down an ICE Airline - The American Prospect

In Chicago, progressive alderpeople held up a contract until a private equity firm was forced to dispatch Omni Air International, protecting thousands of immigrants from deportation.

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from my actually-being-written-right-now @colmweb.org slide deck (final version may of course be different)

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I think it's less 'does the text seem good to you' than 'what unexpected uses can you put a text generation engine to, especially when you RLVR it and stick a harness on it'? This of course (a) is far from universally effective, and (b) renders some problems of AI much more rather than less urgent.

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just this. and my vague sense (without knowing any of them personally) is that certain of the paper's authors see this more clearly.

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there is some very useful early discussion and framing in the stochastic parrots paper. But the parrot itself is pining for the Norwegian fjords.

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it would be awfully nice if soi-disant classical liberals actually _read_ some actual classical liberalism (Hume e.g.), and reflected on the political problems it set out to solve.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

top right corner - see yiz there.

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Also, from Irish civil war and war of independence experience, Who Gets That Field. A whole lot of land changing hands under murky circumstances

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

a very decent chance we get the Voynich manuscript solved in the next year or so, if not sooner. AI is also an excellent paleographic tool; we're going to have a whole bunch of archives searchable and better deciphered in the next few years.

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Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

After watching the first episode of this season of Slow Horses, I'm dreaming of a show that actually does follow the daring adventures of transit authority operatives, fixing potholes and thinking about many kinds of vehicles. Rescuing pedestrians! Making protected bike lines! Reducing traffic!

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just took the lovely Maeve out for an afternoon. She gets agitated by other dogs, but is otherwise the biggest sweetheart you will ever meet. If you’re in the DC area you can adopt her here: bvspca.org/dc

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Jonathan Bernstein @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We'll see...but in addition to how (extremely!) important this kind of thing is locally, it sure seems like there are going to be a lot of obstacles in a lot of states to another round of late-decade GOP gerrymandering.

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They get a bit formulaic after the first few imo. Comfy slippers rather than cut and thrust. But the beginning of the series is good!

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this looks as though it is going to be fun.

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www.programmablemutter.com/p/in-praise-... Like O'Brien, the prospect of being completely forgotten gives me hope and a sense of peace.

Striving to be a Dorothea is a noble vocation, and likely the best we can hope for in any event; sooner or later, we will all be forgotten. In the long course of time, all of our arguments and ideas will be broken down and decomposed. At best we may hope, if we are very lucky, that they will contribute in some minute way to a rich humus, from which plants that we will never see or understand might spring.

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My sense is that there is a genuinely huge divergence between think tanks (where there are varying levels of pay-to-play) and academia, where people with real understanding of the region have their political druthers, but are typically independent and ornery about it.

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the average "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" guy is close friends with a bunch of people who are e/acc, works for an AI firm, and is implacable enemies with anyone who believes that Future Claude cannot psychically negotiate with Future ChatGPT simply by imagning what it wants very intensely.

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Chris Bertram @crookedfootball.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Radical Philosophy (Winter 1979)

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Abe and I have literally listened to US officials _insisting_ that the US doesn't "do economic coercion." Only China does economic coercion.

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

one thing that isn't accounted for in the SuperPAC discussion is that it changes the economics for partisan media firms from "pick the ads most likely to elect your principal, donald trump" to "pick the ads which are most likely to induce further donations by your principal, elon musk"

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Drew Engelhardt @amengel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Quite the figure from @tesler.bsky.social in this @goodauth.bsky.social piece. goodauthority.substack.com/p/republican...

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The US dollar system as a source of international disorder

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social and I have a @britishacademy.bsky.social paper on how the US is now somehow managing to combine gross overuse of dollar power (e.g. upcoming ICC sanctions) with genial complaisance about the use of crypto to circumvent ordinary controls

thebritishacademy.ac.uk

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My alma mater, and from talking to people it is doing just great these days.

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there was a moment in the early 1970s when Borges met Herbert Simon to discuss their different understandings of labyrinths

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"On Another Man's Wound" is one of the great books of war.

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"Megan McArdle believes that we would all benefit from more intellectual charity in the exciting cut and thrust of the blogosphere. There is indeed a plausible case for this. What there is not a plausible case for, in my opinion, is more intellectual charity towards Megan McArdle." I stand by this.

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ChatGPT is an engine of cultural transmission

mix www.programmablemutter.com/p/chatgpt-is... with bactra.org/research/202... and you'll have some sense

programmablemutter.com

LLMs and Gopnikism

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