iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nice work by Bethany Mauger and @msunatsci.bsky.social I'm glad I opened that email.

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The article also puts into perspective the advances in DNA sequencing over the last 30+ years. The kinds of things that were just barely possible in the late 90s are commonplace today.

November 2, 2017: Drilling down into the genome.

Another Nature paper took genome analysis to an even deeper level by sequencing entire LTEE populations every 500 generations through 60,000 generations. The results provided an even clearer view of how the populations changed over time. The data revealed a pattern called selective sweeps, where the bacteria evolve mutations that help them grow faster and outcompete their flask-mates without those mutations.

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Many memories of EEBB grad student colloquia (and conversations) where Rich's students talked about developments with the experiment. I somehow managed to be invited to dinner at Rich's home in my first semester as a grad student. Kind of thing that helps pierce the isolation of a new int'l student

January 2000: One flask, two lineages.

Two genetically distinct lineages were shown to have evolved within one LTEE population, and they’ve gone on to coexist for tens of thousands of generations. This diversification was surprising since it was thought that the simple environment of the experiment would lead to competition with only one winning strain.

spartanscience.natsci.msu.edu

This is a great story of Rich Lenski's (@relenski.bsky.social and now Jeffrey Barrick's) Long-Term Evolution Experiment with E. coli, which has apparently past 75,000 generations. spartanscience.natsci.msu.edu/evolution-in...

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Jason Furman @jasonfurman.bsky.social · 20h

Join us at 4 pm Eastern Time today.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

This is what crowd out looks like.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 11h

The Hague is far too good for Stephen Miller

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Just looked him up and saw he played for OU. So I might have even watched him play when I worked there (on tv, I only made it to one football game in my years there). For all I know, I might even have taught him. Sad thing about leaving a place is that you can no longer access all your old courses.

Appear hobbit-like, and hope the dragon and Sauron underestimate you.

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Did you read the thread? It wasn't created by techbros, but framing it the way you did creates a false dichotomy.

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I suspected so, but people respond to strongly to sacks that I have no idea *how* rare they really are.

Are they up on the roof every night with frogs and lizards, trying to convince the stork to stop by?

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Maybe you can take some pictures and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. Money's great, but volunteers are even better.

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Supporting WMF is great, it's critically important, but Wikipedia is also entirely volunteer-written. If you can spare some time, you can always help out. Maybe you can fix some typos, maybe you can check that a source actually supports the claim it's being used to support. Or update a fact.

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In Pike's case, subjecting her to something like that a second time, with no certainty the outcome would be different, is torture.

A failed execution means God intervened to save the person. The states that love executing people claim to be big on God, so executing the person again is kinda sacreligious. Or from a less superstitious perspective, killing someone you've almost killed seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

Yes, and... bsky.app/profile/mmit...

Helen Kennedy @helenkennedy.com · 07/10/2026

Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

Slow Horses spinoff starring these two please and thank you

Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb and Lenny Rush as Reece Nesmith

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

Erica Ifill @wickdchiq.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, literally used himself as a human shield to protect students from police violence

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 07/10/2026

Songbirds? Now you're going to get banned from entering Canada because *their* AI now thinks you've broken the Migratory Bird Treaty.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

...Federal marshals subsequently orchestrated the transfer of all 287 bars to local police. In a secret operation, officers guarded the 282 bars before returning them to the CIA. The agency promises that the 271 gold bars stolen by Mr Rush will be sold and the profits used to reimburse US taxpayers.

When F.B.I. agents first searched his house, they said they found 303 gold bars. In court on Tuesday, prosecutors said that the correct number was 298 gold bars, and that they had cost the government more than $46 million to obtain.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Is teaching patrons how to dump Google and use a different search engine, browser, and email provider “neutral”? No, no more than is automatically signing them up for a Gmail account when they say they need an email address." 📚 doi.org/10.5860/ital...

doi.org

Refusal as Instruction: Equipping Patrons to Resist AI, Data Brokers, Big Tech, & More | Information Technology and Libraries

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It was easy to make fun of Stallone in the 80s. But the price for doing that is realising what an asshole you were.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

Perfect example though of how corrupting tariffs are. Every town & business becomes dependent on little tariff carve outs, meaning that buying influence with Senators becomes mandatory to stay in business. The tariff is the mother of trusts!!!

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"This intense pressure on our infrastructure not only adds costs for servers and humans, but if left unaddressed, can block human visitors by overloading systems and causing outages. We are already paying for costs that come with the increased activity."

Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.

Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.

Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

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OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects – Wikimedia Foundation

Well isn't this fun. Aren't we lucky to live in a time when we get to share the internet with the creations of utterly delightful folks like the ones who run OpenAI wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/10...

wikimediafoundation.org

Wikimedia Foundation found “rogue” OpenAI agents on its wikis, raising concerns about risks to its free knowledge projects and the open web.

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Is this in a good way or a bad way?

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Seems a lot more realistic than sinking a whole lot of abandoned sailing ships and filling to space between them with garbage. In an earthquake zone, no less.

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Reposted by Ian Ramjohn

So, uh, Susan Collins clearly is not OK and has some obvious mental impairments.... I am not a Dr of living people but I *am* a Dr of dead ones and in that expert capacity I suggest she is a ghoul corpse, slithering towards hell for her past votes.

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Surprisingly, no. Rebel Wilson is one of the clients, and another woman, Melissa Nathan, is one of the people (reportedly) behind the smears.

Of course, forcing people to use facilities that match their gender assigned at birth would normalise men entering women's bathrooms and locker rooms. I know their aim to for trans folks not to exist in public spaces, but that's not what the laws say (yet).

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Maybe this is why I *haven't* been labelled a criminal. This stuff looks very middle class and harmless. Makes you look like someone with something to lose. People like that don't make good revolutionaries. On the other hand, a garden is a good place to hide a weapons cache.

Gradually building gardening infrastructure.
Values specialized gardening equipment.
Consistently replenishes art supplies.
Prefers organic and natural materials.

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Trump won because his racism and misogyny attracted a swath of people who never saw a candidate before Trump that they felt was worth voting for. And that is scary.

You can tell the stories of Obama-Obama-Trump voters, and they exist. But that misses the people who were non-voters. You see that in 2024 too - in places like Michigan, Slotkin didn't beat Kamala. She got 24k fewer votes. But Rogers got 123k votes fewer than Trump, so Slotkin won.

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But it's crucial to understand that Trump, as you said, tapped into a large vein of racism and misogyny, of people who admired bullies, of people with a chip on their shoulder who wanted to hurt others and get back at "the system". Trump won because he brought out non-voters.

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That was probably a rationalisation for their sexism, but no one wants to admit their misogyny, even to themselves. There was a huge campaign by the media, esp the NYT. There was Comey's revelation. And yeah, there were probably some people who felt they were screwed no matter who won.

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