iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Oh, my apologies, I hadn't opened bluesky today, I just crossposted from tumblr when it came up! <is guilt>

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Warning, the antisemitism is pretty bad in this guy.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

www.democracynow.org/2026/10/1/ti... The main risk of LLMs has never been skynet, it's always been regulatory capture, corporate overreach, financial crisis, and that all the main movers and shakers are neofascists or next door to neofascists.

democracynow.org

The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru

We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind...

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean, you can just place them on the chopping board for that even if you're using the knife method.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Maps of beauty, and doom, because at some point someone in govt will always say 'Why do we bother maintaining the levees, the river hasn't flooded for decades'. And also the trap of confining rivers to the path they had when you turned up, because sediment has to go somewhere.

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 02/10/2026

This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

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Art Of Coop @artofcoop.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

mods are asleep, post bean hole

diagram of method to cook pork & beans in a pot covered in embers and buried in a bean hole

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Dave Petley @davepetley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Examination of @planet.com satellite imagery before the 26 August 2026 Langtang Lirung landslide in Nepal, which initiated the massive debris flow and flood, suggests that there were surprisingly few signs of incipient failure:- eos.org/thelandslide...

Satellite image draped onto the Google Earth DEM for the Langtung Lirung landslide. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 25 August 2026.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also, don't let your authoritarian politicos override the geologists when choosing dam sites: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_D... (We had one in Aotearoa/NZ too, but in that case we just had to engineer the dam to be able to move if the fault under it moved, and stabilise 20 km or so of landslides.)

en.wikipedia.org

Mosul Dam - Wikipedia

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Agentic Software as a surveilance doxxing service:

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

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Luke Ontario @coolhand.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Oh shit. THAT is worse than I realized

We are spending almost five billion more on AI related construction and ten billion dollars less on other private construction since 2024

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Yell In a War @jelenawoehr.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

it really needs to be more openly discussed that all the people advocating for “we should be fine with losing basic skills if we get more systems thinking” are men, meaning socialized to expect to be able to offload basic tasks of daily living onto a wife as part of their compensation for existing

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I had a realisation Context: In our Reclaiming AI paper we argued that AI systems cannot scale up to human-level cognition without consuming astronomical amounts of resources My realisation: The AI industry is determined to burn through the earth’s resources just to prove us right *empirically*

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Prof Chris Jackson @seismatters.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

So I didn’t do a shit job, earlier this year I went down to 4 days a week from my regular job. The idea of writing this and scoping figures during evenings and weekends did *not* appeal 😅 Kudos to people who write actual books and do that alongside the rest of their professional/personal lives 👏🏾

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Felix Geiringer @barristernz.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“It is ironic, to say the least, that if Jordan Williams had not publicised the non-existent book, these inside sources would most likely never have contacted me and the book we are here to launch today would not have been written.”

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Rayna @queenrayna1337.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Can confirm ;-;

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Eddie Clark @dreddieclark.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Who are the voters Labour thinks they're marketing themselves to? And where does if think it's going to get the revenue for the services it has promised them? I'm genuinely confused.

thepost.co.nz

Labour will not reverse what it called a ‘landlord tax cut’

Chris Hipkins says his party will not remove interest deductibility for residential landlords.

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Dr Keith 🎃 Wilson @keithwilson.eu · 20/09/2026

This take would fail any undergraduate intro to philosophy of mind course. Also a textbook example of a false dichotomy!

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The NZ First "Health" policy contains what I, in my personal opinion, would describe as cloning the US Administration Wellness Anti-Vax program of work. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Fund New Zealand scientists to assess nutritional interventions for preventing and treating mental illness
Remove Medsafe and Pharmac barriers to "recognised safe nutrients"
Invest in hospital trials to assess the effectiveness of intravenous vitamin C pre- and post-surgery for preventing and treating infections
Fund a review of vitamin D and determine optimal levels for maintaining health
Invest in agriculture to improve productivity, soil health, sustainability and resilience while researching practical alternatives to potentially harmful agricultural sprays
Provide more support for organic food producers.

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Sven-Erik Volberg @volberg.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Funny part? The hacked via the exact library mentioned in the xkcd comic. The prophecy is fulfilled!

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

(As a geologist I don't really care where the fault line is, I care how often you see strong shaking from _what_ever_ fault line. It's only news to me in NZ if you dig a hole and you _don't_ find a fault.)

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And I sketched them on a napkin, Wairau, Awatere, Clarence, Hope, Porters Pass-Oxford, and then I put a finger on the map at Darfield and said 'The next one will be about here', and it introduced itself 12 hours later.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Heh. Nah, not really. Look, the day before the Darfield quake, I was sitting in the tea room at GNS with a bunch of the best seismologists in the country, and I drew the north canterbury fault lines, we looked at the kinematics of the transfer of motion between the alpine fault and the rest (1/2)

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Nah. If you pay attention to quake frequency, ChCh before 2010 had the same earthquake risk as Welly, basically. ChCh got hit with significant damage in the mid 19th century, late 19th century, early 20th century, mid 20th century, and the 2010-12 sequence. Same risk, more fragile non wood builds

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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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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 02/11/2025

> The Rationalist subculture and its spin-offs are an often racist cult. Sam Altman is a fraud; Peter Thiel is play-acting as a supervillain. [...] I can’t tell you if AI will one day kill us all, but Eliezer Yudkowsky was never writing about that... www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/1...

newstatesman.com

The guru of the AI apocalypse

Eliezer Yudkowsky is confusing a very human obsession with death and a very modern fear of a techno-deity

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

More destruction of science by the fash:

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Rory Blank @roryblank.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I saw a post earlier saying I need to integrate AI into my workflow as an artist or I'll be left behind. Sure I've seen dozens of posts like this before, but I'm really seriously thinking about it now and I am at a total loss as to what it would possibly do to improve my work.

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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x

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Dr Eleanor Janega @goingmedieval.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Me too bitch, you're not special.

A Guardian headline which reads "Indonesian forager may have sucked on mond-altwring nuts 25,000 years ago, research finds"

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm just fundamentally surprised that these people think that even if they get a runaway AI (hah!), it can get out of the box it's in. Off switches exist. Wires can be cut. Doesn't matter what it hacks, it can't actually bootstrap itself out of the substrate it's in, because physics says no.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 10/09/2026

Even after four years of technological development, AI slop posts on social media still *feel* fundamentally mushy and soulless. They only generate returns for the poster when they're used as a sort of stressful firehose of vaguely thought-shaped spam.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Vimes your Boots! Well, really, Duchess Sybil your Boots, because her and Willikins the butler keep sneaking Sam's boots away and having them repaired. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_t...

en.wikipedia.org

Boots theory - Wikipedia

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm getting around this by learning to cobble and repairing old boots, usually full welt construction workboots or army boots made in older styles that are repairable:

A full welt construction workboot that has had the heel replaced, and replacement sole is about to be glued on.

A full welt construction workboot with the heel repaired, sole replaced, and new hobnails being added.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A note left on the grave of General Ross in Halifax:

A photograph of a note and Bic lighter left at the grave of General Ross in Halifax: The note reads 'General Ross, thankyou for your service. You are needed again, RIP.'
Major General Ross was the British officer who burned the White House in 1814.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It seems like there's a new round of "stochastic parrots has been proven wrong" discourse going on, so I'm going to re-up this: medium.com/@emilymenonb... >>

medium.com

Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions

It’s been a bit over five years since the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) was published (and somewhat longer since…

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Of course, then I spent 6 years writing the damn thing.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Heh. I didn't get a PhD 'cos it was a good job qualification, it was clear to me that Academia insofar as climbing your way up to tenure was a pyramid scheme with gatekeeping and was being defunded by neoliberals anyway. I did the PhD cos I was 21 and offered 3 summers paid fieldwork in Patagonia.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Almost certainly bollocks/scam, but if not, and the chimp isn't drugged, muzzled and otherwise nobbled, the MMA guy is just going to get any or all, of his face, arm(s), leg(s) and dick, torn off, and then beaten to death with the soggy end:

Screenshot of a Polymarket post reading 'Just in, MMA fighter, Cole Johnson, announces he will be fighting an adult chimpanzee on 9/11'

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It's particularly interesting to see how I probably spent a lot of time self sabotaging my employment career to stay in relatively entry level/fieldwork heavy positions. I needed the variety/novelty, and whenever an employer tried to promote me to a desk/office/management roll, I'd generally quit.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I held that mixed geotech laboratory/field geotech/engineering seismology position with GNS Science for around 15 years before the neoliberals cut the position. Just as it finished, I got the ADHD diagnosis, which explains a lot, especially why I never, ever enjoyed the post phd research attempts.

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Zane Bruce @iarnulfr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

So I completely bounced off research after my geology PhD, and instead spent around a decade working either exploration geology, laboratory positions with a heavy fieldwork component, before ending up in a mix of geotechnical laboratory work with heavy emergency response component.

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