iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ian McCullough

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 25/09/2026

Science fiction is currently roughly six percent of the current fiction market in North America and fantasy is (again, roughly) four times that. There's definitely more money in fantasy. In all genres, I will note, the money is very unequally distributed. (Horror... fluctuates)

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

With CNN and CBS in the hands of the Ellisons and Fox in the hands of the Murdochs, pressure mounts on NBC to sell itself to either Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This might be the most entertaining preseason game I’ve seen. Some very lazy early season play turned good when the end of the bench came in and try-harded their way to a comeback. 4 point game with 30 seconds left? Yeah, sign me up. (Pistons Suns)

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Craig Calcaterra @craigcalcaterra.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The early internet didn't suck up my life's work without permission or compensation, use it for its own profit, condition people to accuse me of aping the style of the thief, and then yell at me and call me a luddite when I objected to it. bsky.app/profile/gold...

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is an important thread to read.

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Laika L. Gagarin @laikalgagarin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

if you have 10 nazis and 100 normal people in a bar, its still a nazi bar.

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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Mike Rogers is a corporate sellout who moves back to Michigan every few years to run for office to take another swing at the revolving door of corporate politics.

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I am thrilled to announce that the American Studies Program at Boston University will be accepting new PhD Students for the 27/28 academic year. These are fully funded, unionized, 5-year positions, with 4 semesters of guaranteed dissertation fellowship in years 4 & 5.

Application Deadline: December 15, 2026
The American Studies Program at Boston University is a nationally recognized leader in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Our students and faculty study the disparate yet interconnected cultures of colonial North America and the United States as seen in the ideas and actions of its people, and as expressed in a range of forms, especially culture, the arts, media, literature, and institutions - often seen through a global or transnational lens. Formerly known as the American & New England Studies Program, we maintain active collaborations with many cultural institutions in the region, especially in the Boston Area. Our large PhD program has produced tenure-track protessors, public historians, museum curators, and directors at major universities, museums, and other cultural and historical institutions.
Funding Opportunities
PhD students receive full funding for up to five years (12 months a year) under a collective bargaining agreement. During this time, they take courses, teach in their fields and disciplines of interest, and develop and write dissertations. The fellowship package guarantees four semesters of dissertation fellowship in years 4 and 5, with no service obligations Additional funding is available from Boston University for travel to conferences, for archival research, and for internships.
Current students have recently received outside fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Beinecke Library, the Corning Museum of Glass, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the American Historical Association.
Graduate Student Association
The Program's own independent Graduate Student Association (GSA) is comprised of elected PhD students who sponsor events and programs for developing professional skills, while representing our students' interests to the governing faculty.

A list of affiliate faculty, available also on the program’s webpage

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My tenured union faculty position was eliminated during Covid due to loose wording in our CBA’s “force majeure” clause. Union folk - have very explicit language here and don’t just accept management’s words. These clauses can obviate every other section in a contract.

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Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This aired just the once in 1998 on the live SNL show for which McKay wrote it. It was effectively banned as it never aired again. I wonder why. MEDIA-OPOLY

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 22/09/2026

This is the "force majeure" clause, which is not like a normal force majeure clause (which allows the parties to back out of their commitment in case of war, wildfires, etc). *This* force majeure clause lets Warnermount tear up the entire agreement if there's a *strike* or a *recession*.

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Patrick De Haan @gasbuddyguy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

oil prices taking a breather today on hopes of new talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting, gasoline spots down 3-7c/gal, diesel though is where the real drop is- spots down 17-27c/gal. this means gasoline prices could dip slightly, diesel will see needed relief

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Patrick De Haan @gasbuddyguy.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

BREAKING: according to live GasBuddy data, 10% of the nation's stations are now seeing diesel over $7 per gallon... $7.01/gal, while the bottom 10% average $5.83/gal. Median price of diesel $6.39/gal. Expecting further increases to all of these metrics.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hey @jacobsberg.bsky.social or other beer seers - why are these Omnipollo beers so expensive?

Three Omnipollo beers on a market shelf - Miami Madness, Three Times Three, and 3 Scoops - front and back shown for each. Price is $20.99 for a single can of Three Times Three and $19.99 for a single can of the other two.

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Sherrod Brown @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Ohioans are asking, “Who is Jon Husted?” Let me tell you.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One of my friends is an English professor. He said most novels written by American men between 1945-85 are unassignable because of the genuinely unpleasant sexism in them.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

When I say I've been working on this debunking for *years* that includes academic publications. Here's a quick thread:

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

5. Finally, beware of mathiness. If some Anthropic defector gains notoreity for claming a 10% chance of "AI" annihilating humanity within the decade ... I mean this shouldn't be news, but at the very least someone should ask him how he calculated that. >>

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IllCaesar @illcaesar.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Not to put too fine a point on it but if you're telling a trans person that they should go visit Texas to do literally anything in 2026 you're not well-versed enough to speak about trans issues.

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bites u @snuffbait.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

bro what if we could just work for a living and be paid fair value for our work and decide what happens to our surplus labor value in a democratic process instead of having it decided for us by a cabal of senile pedophilic failsons

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victoria scott @victoriascott.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

As I was standing by this gas pump filling up my truck with six dollar gas I couldn’t help but think that this was a small price to pay so that every child wanting to play sports in elementary school has to submit to mandatory genital inspections

My jeep with a gas pump in her fuel filler

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My grandma was a polio survivor. The only reason people question vaccines is they haven’t seen the alternative.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

In the 90s I had a sports accident while off insurance. I had to wait two and a half years after the accident once I was on insurance again to get treatment. Torn rotator cuff for almost three years because of private insurance and “preexisting conditions” - something the ACA eliminated.

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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Prompted by the scandal around Navier-Stokes, Andreas Thom raises the possibility that OpenAI may also have stolen the work on non-sofic groups:

1/3 I want to record a number of points that I realized after reading up on the controversy. In fact it recalls an exchange I had with OpenAI after its non-sofic-group announcement. It exposes a serious, unanswered question about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished mathematics.

I wrote in an email to Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck shortly after the surprising finding of a non-sofic group using the methods of Kun and myself:
“Another point is that I and a colleague in Dresden were discussing the expander matching problem and various extensions of the work with Gabor Kun actively over the last months with ChatGPT, so that we are of course curious if that was part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process. There is a certain (frankly unacceptable) lack of transparency here; and I fear it will damage the communal process of math more than the new AI-generated results will benefit the subject.”

Mark Sellke’s complete answer was: “Regarding your conversations with ChatGPT: that did not happen.”

I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. The categorical answer now looks as though it addressed only direct access under (2). No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given. I take this as dishonesty to say the least.
OpenAI now says in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but adds that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

2/3 OpenAI is drawing a distinction that its answer to me erased, despite the fact that my question explicitly made that distinction.
We are not required to reverse-engineer OpenAI’s internal training pipeline to establish what happened. Only OpenAI has the relevant data for that. If Sellke and Bubeck give a categorical denial, it must disclose the basis: product and privacy settings, relevant datasets and checkpoints, and what “de-identified data derived from usage” means.
I disabled model training on 29 June. That control is still only a promise whose implementation users cannot audit, and it is prospective: it does not answer what happened to earlier conversations or to derivatives already selected. OpenAI’s answer did not mention the setting or any account-specific check.
There is also a mathematical parallel, though a less explicit one. The approach of Kun and myself was not the main line of attack on non-soficity, in fact there were other more promising approaches along the line of quantum games etc. OpenAI’s detailed command of our techniques therefore made me wonder how the model found this route. If nonpublic research supplied by users improved a model and the provider then used that model to race those users to publication - without informed consent, disclosure, or credit - that would be ethically indefensible. De-identification may remove a name; it does not remove the intellectual content of a mathematical idea. Sellke and Bubeck seem to be blind to this simple moral aspect.

3/3 Sellke’s categorical answer was, at minimum, unjustifiably broad and materially misleading; looking back it was plainly dishonest. Bubeck’s acknowledged attacks and his attempt to exclude Alpöge from a proposed OpenAI-proof paper deepen the concern that there is a loss of moral compass. Taken together, this raises serious questions about their judgment and personal integrity.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Protect trans kids.

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Goodnews @goodnews.computer · 04/09/2026

Take a break from being depressed that everything you love is being destroyed by slop for a moment and let me tell you about the beautiful symbiotic relationship between graffiti writers, train yard workers, and model train enthusiasts.

A hand holding a model train with a replica of the same graffiti on the full scale train car behind it.

A model train with two graffiti pieces on opposite sides.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Outstanding book subtitle, 12/10

Picture of the book cover for “Ace of Aces: The Dick Bong Story”

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I’ve never met a single person who didn’t like some aspect of Dolly Parton. Whether as an entertainer, philanthropist, businesswoman, or ally I cannot remember anyone not finding a connection to like. My children benefited from her Imagination Library like thousands of others. RIP legend

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Courts have repeatedly ruled that LLM generated content does not have copyright protection as there is no human creator. Corporations would *love* if LLM slop was granted copyright and authorship rights because right now they cannot protect their slop products from widespread use.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

From what I've read, a Dollar General and three vape shops would provide more jobs than a data center.

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Caitlin Cooper @caitlinmaycooper.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Best plural forms ranked: 1) internal (tours de force, culs-de-sac) 2) ending in -i (magi) 3) is to es (oases) 4) suppletive (people) 5) vowel changes (geese) 6) f to ves (thieves) 7) adding en (oxen) 8) no change (moose) 9) adding es, ies (boxes, babies) 10) adding s

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Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 23/08/2026

I love Minneapolis

Jake Lang, a Nazi asshole, getting his ass picturesquely whooped in downtown Minneapolis by a person dressed as Spider-Man

I cannot overstate how much this photo looks like a comic book cover

Photo credit Chris Juhn Photography

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 20/08/2026

In the meantime, you can access the censored Amnesty reports on gender critical groups here. Make sure they cannot erase these documents from the internet. Like a snowball. dn711306.ca.archive.org/0/items/amne... A growing threat. archive.org/download/rep...

dn711306.ca.archive.org

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

if only mitch mcconnell was alive to respond

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Bear Wilner-Nugent @saltlick.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Today is a wonderful day to interfere with, obstruct, hinder, expose, and decry any ICE or CBP operation that you can touch in any way.

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Fantagraphics @fantagraphics.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

SCAM ALERT: Do not order from www.fantagraphics-us.com, it is not a legitimate website! They have cloned our real website and are stealing people’s credit card information. If you want to order directly from us, please do so at www.fantagraphics.com.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Bookseller here - the details in this story are absolutely enough to identify the bookseller that sent the tracking device and nuke their online business. Great job 404

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Libertarians are the useful idiots of our current fascist turn. Most people grow out of libertarianism by their 30s, but the damage they do as young, earnest, and confident dipshits is vast.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Iain M. Banks is spinning so hard in his grave it could power a small city.

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Ian McCullough @imccullough.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Without downloading any new pics, where are you mentally?

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I’m on vacation but I gotta say, as much fun as it is to debate woke1 and Hasan Piker, the Trump administration is currently engaged in mass murder on the high seas as surely as any serial killer or lynch mob. And viewed from the distance of vacation, The Discourse doesn’t seem to give a shit.

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