iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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It seems reasonable to argue that the next great web/social protocol/network is going to have a metric fuck tonne of agents in the mix

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Askme @askme99.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

You have to appreciate the fact that these idiots always make these comments and never realize the context and facts.

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Yeah, but what about the buggy whip industry?

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Anthropic wrote the Agent code, they could stop this happening

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

You really have to ask the question, who came up with the questions that AI is apparently solving?

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Chump Strait might be more accurate

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

100%, I've never plucked up the courage/been stupid enough to tell someone, but feel I should in a PSA way. I think that retailers should have a duty to explain this.

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Prospect Magazine @prospectmagazine.co.uk · 09/10/2026

“We can choose to stop seeing AI developers as untouchable geniuses. We can push back against their grandiosity, evasions and fantasies,” writes Philip Ball:

prospectmagazine.co.uk

We’re all going to die, but not from AI

That artificial intelligence could destroy humanity is a story imposed by the AI industry itself. It’s time to challenge it

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is more like it #totp Sade still underrated imho

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This was all we ever got of "Soul Train" #totp performances Missed out big time

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And this is a good thing? How?

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Does polymarket have a prediction that it will be Trump? (most 2926 take I could think of)

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matty @mattio.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is wild - somebody did a deep dive into the real stories behind this famous XKCD: sheets.works/data-viz/hol...

an XKCD comic showing a precariously assembled tower of blocks. much is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure." a thin leg down at the bottom is labelled "A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003."

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Forever Louise Brooks @foreverlouiseb1.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper for Morocco (1930). From a portrait by Eugene Robert Richee.

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Doll @dollspace.gay · 08/10/2026

We should tax the shit out of them, and also fund public inference

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).

Screencap

"“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process,” Hamilton told El Pais in 2018. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”"

Source: https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

We should also remember that the UK property market over the past 25+ years has sucked investment out of equities (productive assets) into property (non-productive assets) #r4today

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

And we wonder why US markets are booming

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Every time you pay VAT, you are being taxed twice, the same with all other consumption taxes #r4today

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Chronic Illness Humor @chronicillness.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Artist: Roz Chast from The New Yorker

The image shows a black-and-white cartoon titled "The Mind-Body Problem" drawn by Roz Chast for The New Yorker.
It depicts a person slouching on a couch who says "No" in a speech bubble while their mind or head, leaning back, says "Get up."

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Once again we have the nonsensical argument that people who get paid a lot of money "work harder" "What we want to see is that people who work harder don't get punished for doing so," Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch tells Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yeah -- if you're selling a system that you call an LLM and you're sick of being embarrassed by the fact that next-token prediction is a terrible way to do arithmetic, you run a little text classifier up front and shunt math problems to an actual calculator.

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Sean Jones KC @seanjones.org · 03/10/2026

I am not very worried about about the Tory Tapestry’s misuse of “doth”. What worries me much more is this sequence of panels which seems to show a small boat full of brown-skinned people followed by a plague of rats running riot and then a lot of dead white people labelled tax payers.

Detail from Conservative Party mock Bayeux Tapestry showing 1. A boat full of brown skinned people. 2. Enormous rats chasing cats. 3. White-skinned “tax payers” dead in the streets.

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Early evening drinks at Gastrosor in Belgrade, Al Green on the music

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One of these where go, "that explains it" I have long wondered about this, without seeing the obvious

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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent

Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range

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The Daily Tism @thedailytism.com · 02/10/2026

Dr. Karen Hoyland, a researcher at the Institute for Tea, Biccies and ITV, made the statement explaining that neurotypicalism is a serious condition and explaining that it’s impossible to tell from someone’s public persona whether or not they have it.

thedailytism.com

Public warned to stop armchair diagnosing celebrities as neurotypical

The general public has been asked to stop assuming all celebrities are people with neurotypicalism, as it’s impossible to make that judgment without proper qualifications. Dr. Karen Hoyland, a…

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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

A tweet by SarahStarberry that says "oh god read the vertical axis" on top of a chart measuring AI models' release dates and model numbers rather than any real capabilities

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That's why we have built a fully compliant RESTful platform, a prime audience is AI

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Can someone remind me when the last time "investment grade" turned out not to be 🤔

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"You're absolutely right: I incorrectly described a Chinese cargo in the Middle East as 'nuclear' when in fact it was 'unclear'. You deployed the Navy Seals. That's on me." "Is there another cargo that I can help you with? Or perhaps I can declare intercontinental thermonuclear war for you?" #LLM

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Al Kennedy @alkennedy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The BBC does genuinely seem to be trying to save money where it can; they scrapped an undercover investigation where Amol Rajan went out clubbing with a view to exposing the easy access to poppers because they didn't want to pay for the Amol night rate

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I'm not sure about everyone else, but my style tip is Lurex is back

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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you need to explain to someone why the ‘Rogue AI’ framing is both wrong and harmful, actually blocking our view of what safety and responsibility requires in AI, this will help:

noemamag.com

The AIs Are Not Going Rogue | NOEMA

But they still pose risks.

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Of course they were, more pieces click into place

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James Downes @james-downes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If Man City are going to be punished, shouldn't it be for 9 seasons in a row?

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 30/09/2026

Humanists UK mourns Dame Esther Rantzen (1940–2026) Esther was a great champion of human dignity. She approached her final years with the same fearless determination that defined her career of advocacy, using her own experience to shine a light on the suffering caused by our outdated laws.

Esther Rantzen smiling wearing a blue-and-red feathered fascinator and red coat, with headline text noting her years (1940–2026).

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David Henig @davidheniguk.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Heck, go mad, engage with @simonusherwood.bsky.social, me, and other embittered old hands of UK-EU relations. Personally I'm reading this morning of Turkey's problems with Made in Europe, which despatches easily the idea a customs union solves much.

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Aatish Bhatia @aatishb.com · 23/09/2026

NEW blog post about AI’s ‘jagged intelligence’: I trained an AI model from scratch to play a simple children’s puzzle. Unlike a human player, it can solve the hardest puzzles, but it fails to solve the easiest ones. aatishb.com/blog/2026/ai...

aatishb.com

How a Simple Puzzle Reveals the Jagged Edge of AI’s Abilities

An interactive explanation of how AI can fail in surprising ways.

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