iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ian M Rountree

The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I get why gatekeeping in its negative sense is bad but also it feels an awful lot like gatekeeping in the positive sense was a load bearing pillar of society.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 26/09/2026

I feel like there's got to be some kind of "Stickers on your laptop?" litmus test question list that I didn't pass to be A Tech Guy (career).

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 25/09/2026

"Never demonstrate competence in a task you're unwilling to repeat" is Grey's whole problem. Rook's problem is a kind of terminal curiosity.

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Guy Gavriel Kay @guygavrielkay.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This evokes, for me, Scott McNealy, head of Sun Microsystems, way back (20-25 years?), saying ‘You have no privacy, get over it.’

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Rami Ismail (رامي) @ramiismail.com · 25/09/2026

I honestly have never considered switching from Google Pixel phones until they sent me a "wanna celebrate destroying the lives of trans people" as a system update.

Android Pixel system update screen, showing Harry Potter customizations as a bullet point.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 25/09/2026

Age verification is an egregious privacy violation, an inexcusable form of surveillance, and… it’s also voodoo bullshit that doesn’t work. It’s one of the reasons I’m proudest to support @eff.org, who have been leading the fight against the horrible practice for years: www.eff.org/issues/age-v...

eff.org

Age Verification and Age Gating: Resource Hub

Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “ag...

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 22/09/2026

We don't know much about googlebooks (the new laptops) yet, but what I'm seeing makes me want the version of android they're running on my existing tablet, instead of buying a new device.

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Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.xyz · 21/09/2026

boycotts don't work if they have an expiration date!

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Clarkesworld @clarkesworldmagazine.com · 21/09/2026

Updating the "AI" community's own words for short fiction marketing: Short stories won’t replace humans, but humans who read short stories will replace those who don’t. The true power of short stories lies not in replacing humans, but in working alongside us to achieve what neither can do alone.

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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 21/09/2026

I can only imagine how much discussion and behind-the-scenes labor this took, but this is absolutely the right thing to do.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 19/09/2026

You know. He's right. I will never hand it to him. But in this quote without context or elaboration, he's right.

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barryrichards.bsky.social @barryrichards.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is a prime example of what @doctorow.pluralistic.net would term ‘criti-hype’. There are real damages from LLMs & genAI, e.g. the power & water used; how they’ve pushed up memory prices making phones, laptops etc more expensive; the trillions of $ wasted. But AI isn’t going to wipe out humans.

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Bartley Kives @bkives.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This morning at Winnipeg’s Victoria Inn, there was both a harm-reduction conference and a defence-industry gathering. The two events did not cancel each other out.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 16/09/2026

In putting normie definitions on emerging language, we ended up reinforcing the normie terms in ways I now disagree with pretty thoroughly. I'm sure someone's doing the academics on this, but it sure feels like a lot of the avoidance language we have now came out of this too.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 16/09/2026

Keyword stuffing avoidance also resulted in a significant amount of survivor bias in written language. We had to pick words that fit trends, acting prescriptivist and in a lot of places stripping out descriptive language use. We killed a lot of slang with 'natural language's definitions for it.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 16/09/2026

Was keyword stuffing bad? Yes, for a lot of reasons. But the workarounds for every piece of tech Google put in to kill the practice are part of how LLMs got the sheer word count they have in their training data now.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 16/09/2026

Still mad about this. It's extra bothersome that a lot of what people see as "AI tells" came in part from optimising for search twenty years ago, which is part of what resulted in, for lack of a better term, "blogger's verbosity" in the first place.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 15/09/2026

I'm convinced my sleep quality is worse with my smartwatch on for tracking, but how would I ever be able to prove it.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 14/09/2026

This feels hugely unfair. Word count was a major search signal for years, "thin content" killed websites. That "gotta hit 300+" push was a plague on copy when I was writing it because it reduced readability and clarity in some weird ways. Now the machine does it the way we all could have all along.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 14/09/2026

There's exactly one thing I like in the writing style for Google's AI search results, but hate Google for because it's an issue they created. Succinct answers. No website writer has been encouraged to develop a style of brevity in twenty years, the incentives don't line up. Yet they do for AI.

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Very forceful statement by Terry Tao about AI and math. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a... Note, he is not claiming the models aren't real and powerful. He's talking about how that power should be used. This, I believe, is what all AI discussions should center.

terrytao.wordpress.com

A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 11/09/2026

Steven Erikson and Guy Gavriel Kay come to mind. Wildly different styles I know, but if you like them, my writing ought to feel very familiar.

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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

🚨 BEWARE of VoteSafe.org 🚨 While it bills itself as a “safe” way to register to vote, it is actually a digital surveillance machine created by Elon Musk’s super PAC.

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NDP @ndp.ca · 07/09/2026

1/ Happy Labour Day! Workers built this country and keep it running every day. No matter where you work, you deserve good wages, strong protections and benefits that help you afford a good life.

Canada belongs to the workers who built it

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 04/09/2026

The number of stray numerals @doctorow.pluralistic.net alone is going to save with this will be legendary.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 04/09/2026

Live your life so that you never get this rekt by chess.com

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 03/09/2026

One of the worst plagues of the "AI" season has to be the automated captions every youtube channel and news network is now using. The error rate is so atrocious it's distracting.

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 02/09/2026

Trade xkcd.com/3290/

Comic. [Person standing holding hammer above raised knee.] PERSON: Listen up, leg. I’ve been sending you rich, oxygenated blood for years, while you send me worthless used-up blood with no oxygen. Time to teach you a lesson about not ripping me off! [caption] Tariffs

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Working on a newsletter issue about the costs of hypervigilance in every software-mediated interaction nowadays, but this pretty much sums it up

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Nome @nome.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Live in such a way that this affects your life not one iota.

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 02/09/2026

I feel almost blasphemous for saying this, but taking the screen protector off my phone feels right for once. The taps. They happen accurately. Goodness.

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ALW @wazoowazny.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

2026 Winnipeg mayoral election ballot

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Caroline Bartman @cbartman.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Just passed the most existential door

Door says “not an entrance, not an exit”

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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 30/08/2026

The critical perspective on counter-arguments about Google and GNIS is that a society organized around blindly following automation and treating any information that is extruded by an information system as de facto authoritative is exactly the problem that critical tech scholars are raising about AI

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Ian M Rountree @ianmrountree.com · 29/08/2026

My new favorite YT channel: Man (appears to) kidnap random people off the street and give them very concise and effective solo lectures about current issues. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jDE...

youtube.com

Data center protesters are misunderstood

YouTube video by Jack Ferg

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McNally Robinson Booksellers @mcnallyrobinson.com · 28/08/2026

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT: Friday October 9 at 7pm, join bestselling Enshittification author & activist Cory Doctorow (@doctorow.pluralistic.net) for a presentation on The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, followed by a book signing. www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/... @fsgbooks.bsky.social