iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

WTAF? This is barbaric. I know the death penalty as a whole is barbaric, but how the fuck can they give this woman *two doses*, let alone give her two doses and fail. If I wasn't already opposed to the death penalty in all cases, this would convince me. This makes me feel sick.

Gov. Bill Lee paused capital punishment in Tennessee and called on Thursday for a review of the state’s policies on how it puts people to death, a day after the second botched execution there in a year. The announcement came hours after Christa Pike, a 50-year-old death row inmate, survived two doses of pentobarbital.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 21h

You can say AI is "just a tool" as much as you want, but the people using it don't understand it's (massive) limitations. In part because the people pushing AI don't disclose these product flaws. (The fact that Copilot is "for entertainment purposes only" is buried deep in the TOS.)

“It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court. Aarons was representing a man who was found guilty of killing his wife earlier this year; Aarons said he hadn’t told his client directly that he was caught using ChatGPT on the case because he’s currently serving life in prison.

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Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Re-upping this in light of….news Men intervening with their own friends is so important because men’s behaviour is deeply shaped by mistaken beliefs their peers hold harmful views about women

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AppleInsider @appleinsider.com · 28/09/2026

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, Meta's Muse AI is stealing Apple Messages, past and present, and uploading the contents to its cloud, even if explicitly told not to.

appleinsider.com

Meta's new AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, Meta's Muse AI is stealing Apple Messages, past and present, and uploading the contents to its cloud, even if explicitly told not to.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Also, all this “frontier AI” nomenclature is so laughably colonialist that it has to be on purpose. 🙄

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Marlo Garnsworthy @icebird.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

People are deleting the Merlin app because of the Cornell news?! This is THE dumbest most performative BS I think I've ever seen. That free app is relied on by bird scientists. We collect data to HELP THE BIRDS each time we use it! Bird lovers hurting the birds and scientists who study them.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It was bad to begin with. Then came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Then came the hyperscalers. Once again genAI makes everyone’s life worse.

“The transformer shortage is bad,” Ajey Pandey, an energy analyst and a former municipal resource planner, told ChinaTalk, a tech-focused media outlet. “It’s like hair-on-fire, biting-my-nails, losing-sleep levels of bad.”

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Here’s Chris Rufo and his podcast co-host addressing “the Indian question,” a reference to “the Jewish question.” That question was whether Jews could be incorporated into European society, and the Nazis were the ones who claimed to have developed the “final solution” to that “problem.”

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

So much of schools "responding to rape" is preventing the legal system from doing so. This is a report on seven adults who committed serious felonies for which there is a legal system to remind them and their pals that they are felonies.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Nothing about us without us" - I was familiar with the phrase, but I wasn't aware of its origins in Central Europe, Nihil de nobis, sine nobis. via Amy Carleton at #WikiConferenceNA en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing...

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Maciek Hamela @maciekhamela.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

With the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iraq has resorted to moving its oil across the desert to Syria in hundreds of tanker trucks, in true Mad Max style. From there, it will be shipped to worldwide markets.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

BET (Paramount) took 190k articles offline? WTAF? This erasure of Black history was a terrible act of vandalism! Via Mark Graham at #WikiConferenceNA (Internet Archive was able to reconstruct over 170k of them.)

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

DoorDash spent $1.4M trying to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor. This week's historic $131.5M enforcement action against DoorDash for underpaying NYC delivery workers shows why. Yet another reminder that the only thing that can beat organized money is organized people.

theintercept.com

DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why.

In a wage-theft settlement, DoorDash now has to pay its workers around 100 times what it spent trying to beat Zohran Mam

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Stacy Allison-Cassin’s keynote at #WikiConferenceNA was an amazing look into how the way that filters like language and your relationship to a culture affects the way things are represented (both on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the world).

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Jere Odell’s presentation about men standing comfortably on “the linoleum floor” on Wikipedia while women in similar positions struggle to break the glass ceiling was an interesting addition to the debate. #WikiConferenceNA wikimedia.eventyay.com/wcna/wikina2...

wikimedia.eventyay.com

🎧 Men of Low Notability WikiConference North America 2026

Wikipedians that edit entries about women are familiar with the challenges of defending the notability of their subjects. These experiences contribute to Wikipedia’s reputation for gender bias. In tur...

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Airship Chronos says TRANS RIGHTS @airshipchronos.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is what I keep saying! Defining gender by chromosomes is *the* most radical redefining of gender *ever*. Literally no society in all of human history has ever done that! None! Ever!

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Simon Jessey @scjessey.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'm a naturalized citizen. If this bullshit prevents me from voting I'm going to lose my shit.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Editing Wikipedia is not a crime - freedom for Osama Khalid" Osama Khalid has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for editing Wikipedia since 2020. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_K... ##WikiConferenceNA

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Dr. JMW @jamarmontez.com · 25/09/2026

Enraging

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🌴 Scott Zona, Ph.D. 🌴 @scottzona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Nectar chemistry & floral shape are important adaptations to bird pollination. Some plants add another assurance: viscin threads that stick pollen together & attach to feathers. Here’s the pollen of Delonix regia demonstrating viscin’s role. #Fabaceae #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

Close-up photo of a feather drawing away from a stamen with a pollen-laden anther. The pollen is clumped together by threads of viscin. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.

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Sam (ABeardedPanda) @abeardedpanda.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Anyways, this is genuinely the funniest chart in the world because it shows Jill Stein's twitter use spikes every four years and only during years where there's a federal election so if she's breaking her silence now *someone* is panicking

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Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Apple "detectives" wanted to identify a gnarly old tree growing on a remote plot of land in Maine. What they discovered was the key to a centuries-old apple mystery.

scientificamerican.com

How apple detectives solved the mystery of an ancient tree—and rewrote the history of fruit

And how they might have helped save the future of American apples

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 23/09/2026

federal immigration agents beat up a US citizen in Evanston on Sunday morning and left him lying in the street or as Kavanaugh would put it, he experienced as "brief investigative stop" ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

ballsandstrikes.org

Brett Kavanaugh’s Imaginary Immigration Stops Opinion Gets More Embarrassing Every Day

The fact that ICE officers do not allow wrongfully detained people to “promptly go free” is a surprise to only one man in America.

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Digital Warrior - Combat Disinfo @digitalwarrior.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

6/ But the known sequence destroys one comforting promise: “A human will always make the final decision.” A human did. The problem was that AI shaped what the human believed was true. Human review means little when people merely approve a machine’s confident fiction.

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Digital Warrior - Combat Disinfo @digitalwarrior.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

2/ CNN reports that an analyst asked a chatbot about the ship’s manifest. It combined open-source material with classified signals intelligence, then falsely identified nuclear-weapons components. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...

cnn.com

Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say | CNN Politics

The episode shows the risks of using this new, relatively poorly understood technology in the middle of the Iran war

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 22/09/2026

"We were letting actual 8th graders sneak into our wild drug and sex parties at our Silicon Valley AI group house" is the most eyebrow-raising quote among many from that New York Times piece, IMO. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/t...

The house quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This is a great answer. It’ll never work as a sound bite (not a bad thing, IMO) but it’s well said, clear, and respectful to the questioner, without surrendering the idea that there is a difference between their positions (and Abdul’s is the one that’s by far the better one).

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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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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Scoop: Meta's Muse AI can make phone calls. Internally, Meta has told employees that many of these calls will be made by human beings in a call center: www.404media.co/meta-tests-m...

404media.co

Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center

"This has potential for so much negative PR. It could portray us as ‘their AI is not good enough so they still need humans’ kind of coverage for this launch."

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

No one asked me (and they shouldn’t, since I can’t vote anyway), but I have no idea who I’d want. None of these except maybe AOC and Pritzker, but honestly, no one I can think of really captures my imagination. And that’s not good.

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Steve Brusatte @stevebrusatte.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Over a decade ago, Tom Challands and I noticed these strange rock pools on the Isle of Skye coast. Hundreds, each the size of a car tire, lined up in zig-zag sequences Dinosaur tracks! We announced the site, then handed it to Paige dePolo to describe for her Masters Now today:

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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Especially good post from Henry Farrell (@himself.bsky.social) today: www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...

programmablemutter.com

Machine god metaphors eat your brain

There are other ways of thinking about AI

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William Turton @williamturton.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Even the defense contractor’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” one said. www.propublica.org/article/fbi-...

propublica.org

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

After the FBI caught a defense contractor’s CEO making illegal campaign contributions, it sought to launch a sweeping political bribery probe involving Collins and others. Then the second Trump admini...

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William Turton @williamturton.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

In 2024 the former CEO of a defense contractor made a stunning confession to two FBI agents. He alleged that was the ringleader of a massive pay-to-play operation, bribing senators with campaign contributions in exchange for govt contracts. www.propublica.org/article/fbi-...

propublica.org

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This looks intriguing. But in a post-Theranos world, in a world where the mainstream willing to take “AI profitably” with no more than slight skepticism, things like this need to be approached with extreme skepticism.

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Khashoggi's Ghost @urocklive1.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The driver, Zachary Chernicky, 31, “turned his car into a literal bomb” when he drove between 100-142 mph on Highway 87 and plowed into heavy traffic in 2025. Following the fiery fatal wreck, Chernicky got a new Tesla and showed off how fast it could go in a series of videos posted on Instagram.

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

That's the scale of the "problem" everyone is up in arms about? That's worth scapegoating children, or passing genital inspection laws?

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's been a long, long time since I had a good opinion of Pinker, but it was deeply-enough ingrained in his glory days that I sometimes have to remind myself he's still awful.

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BryanMichael @piquedinthe80s.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Well, they were *trying* to do something about the parasites... "Lewis and Clark pooped mercury. Today archaeologists use it to map their route." www.popsci.com/science/lewi...

popsci.com

Lewis and Clark’s mercury-laced poop helped archaeologists trace their expedition

Welcome to a poisonous trail of number two.

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Michael E. Mann @michaelemann.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It is with tremendous sadness and sense of loss that we regretfully share the news that @penncssm.bsky.social senior research fellow, and my close personal friend Joseph Romm has passed away unexpectedly. He will be sorely missed here. web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm/news/r...

web.sas.upenn.edu

Remembering Dr. Joe Romm

It is with great sadness that the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media shares news of the passing of PCSSM Senior Research Fellow Dr. Joe Romm. Please find below an obituary prepared ...

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Ian Ramjohn @iramjohn.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don't want to take anything away from her point, but it made me think about the psychic and emotional strain of 10+ years of Trump's anti-immigrant hate. Of "build the wall" and ICE raids. The lack of finality is everything. You can change your gender markers, but Kansas can take that away.

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Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I have endless time for people on quixotic harmless quests like this. This game has been lurking at the edge of my consciousness for years. Good for these guys! www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/w...

nytimes.com

Can Two Friends Complete a Game No One Has Ever Finished?

The Campaign for North Africa, a staggeringly complicated World War II board game, has stymied players for decades. Now two guys in England are giving it a serious go.

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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 17/09/2026

I don't know what the odds are for a Kennedy who's working for the law firm trying to stop her granduncle's namesake cultural center from being demolished by the President to happen to witness a forklift hit the building repeatedly, but whoever thought of doing this declaration was really smart.

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I wrote about the insane developments in Chris Duncan's case. He was exonerated by the LA Sup. Ct. in June. But the local DA vowed to re-try him. Yesterday, cops showed up at the home of alleged victim's mother, demanded her DNA, threatened to arrest her, and said they would exhume her daughter.

radleybalko.substack.com

Breaking: DA demands DNA from Chris Duncan and Haley Oliveaux’s mother

Louisiana continues to persecute a wrongly convicted man

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Jan Vanhove @janhove.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

New blog post: "Cluster analysis: A skeptic’s guide". In which I ask a few questions that social scientists wishing to identify hidden classes in their data ought to address. janhove.github.io/posts/2026-0...

Table of contents:

Refresher: What is cluster analysis?
What are the clusters for?
What clusters, exactly?
Does the pipeline work?
What does the solution look like?
When running follow-up analyses, how is the uncertainty in the cluster assignments taken into account?
Was it worth it?
Conclusion
References

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