iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 21h

OK I’m going to give Still Counting a try in the run-up to the US Midterms. I’ll just try to forget all the nonsense Nate Silver has been talking on various subjects in the last few years and concede that he is good at turning polls into a coherent model. I’m mostly there for Clare Malone though.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I think for anyone jaded by all the extremely stupid uses of AI in the context of history (chat with Abraham Lincoln! make people in prison mugshots smile! draw spurious links and conclusions!), this might be interesting. How professionals, volunteers and an LLM can make real progress.

makingfamilyhistory.com

Untangling The Victoria Police Charge Books With Fable 5 AI

How Anthropic's Fable 5 AI helped a stalled indexing project came back to life by consolidating 18,000 records from Victoria's 1870s.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s only a sham deal if it’s from the Shampagne region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling fabrication.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Publishers should offer deals where if you buy/are gifted a new hardback in the initial, undiscounted release period, you get an ebook copy thrown in too. Ideally it wouldn’t be in their own stupid DRM version either.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Twitter and now Bluesky have not been good for The Economist's reputation imv. As a lot of their writers started posting in their own names and, too often, showed themselves to be ill-informed and shallow, it really dented the veneer of cool objectivity that the house style gives them.

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Laura McInerney @missmc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Someone recently said a thing that’s really made me think: Why should everyone pay so that some people can inherit more? It’s a fair and challenging question.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Amusing moment in De Gaulle: Liberation where, in the hours before D Day, with the rain pouring, Simon Russell Beale as Churchill demands to speak to the weatherman again as he’s promised a break in the weather. Felt like there should have been a caption: “Pressure! Also showing in this cinema!”

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Two more: All Aboard…The Ghan (and other Slow TV shows) Ros Atkins’ explainers and Outside Source

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

After stuff this week from Jim Ratcliff, the Hargreaves Lansdown bloke and now Paul Ovenden, I’m getting increasingly fed up at narrow, self-serving assertions about who “creates wealth” and therefore should be given special treatment and treated as sages.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Best (British) TV of the 21st Century I have watched: 1 QI 2 Taskmaster 3 London 2012 Opening Ceremony 4 The Architecture The Railways Built 5 2016 Wipe 6 Everything and Nothing (a fab Jim al Khalili doc) 7 The Trap (the best of the Adam Curtis docs) 8 Timeshift 9 Human (Ella Al-Shamahi) Etc

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Also, it’s kind of weird that they’ve not restricted themselves to drama and comedy (Bake Off and, err, Survivor are there) but then there are no documentaries. The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Vietnam series for example.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Who knew that only the US and UK made television programmes.

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Samira Ahmed @samiraahmeduk.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

All the talk about reviving Playschool, you ought to listen to this… Our recent chat with the woman who created it back in 1964, the amazing Pioneering Joy Whitby.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Bruce Kent once came and did his standard CND stump speech. My friend Doug rather bravely took him on in the Q&A. Magenta Devine was also supposed to give us a talk once (God knows what on) but she was so late she missed the assembly.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I still want to see a decent low-carbon solution for central heating of the vast stock of houses subdivided into flats in London (and other) suburbs. It never was especially sensible for each flat to have its own gas boiler; its certainly not sensible for each to have its own heat pump.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Given that folding phones are now possible, I’m slightly surprised that there is no such thing as a folding travel monitor/screen. It would be a niche product but I’d buy one. I have a 16” portable screen and stand to go with my Mac Mini, wireless keyboard and mouse. Proving to be a great set up.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Wow. I hadn’t realised how much LLMs had killed StackOverflow (the site where coders traditionally go to ask questions when they’re stuck): “Just before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there were more than 100,000 monthly questions asked on the site; last month, there were fewer than 1,500.”

ft.com

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

There's a danger in nostalgia about the quality of the BBC's website 20 years ago and of its broadcast news output at any point in its history. But the quality and objectivity has, I think, declined sharply over the last decade. Which is dangerous when it still has a lot of inherited public trust.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This is brilliant. And I can already hear the Very Rational EA adherents refusing to engage with it because it’s “in bad faith”.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

@elysiacb.bsky.social This is a great summary of my theory about Per Stensen’s motivations.

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Brooke Harrington @ebharrington.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

When I tell you this is one of the most riveting, concise and accurate depictions of the catastrophically defective thought processes behind Effective Altruism and the larger Broligarch Epistemic Universe... Run, don't walk, to read the whole thing (link below), which concludes thus:

Example of the problematic thinking behind Effective Altruism.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I would like to know if I'm the only person watching Silo who has linked Per Stensen's worldview to the AI Safety, Effective Altruist and Longtermist ideas that have suddenly been getting a lot more interest this week.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Is there a TfL page where they explain what’s going in with particular lines - eg why have service frequencies on the Wimbledon Branch in rush hour dropped so badly?

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The combination of the District Line Wimbledon Branch and the Piccadilly Line is not making for a fun commute at present. Delays, service suspensions or planned engineering works seemingly every day.

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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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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Oh my God, I was just reading the RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism for reasons, and just found this:

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This does make a lot of sense to me. The campaign to secure Four Digital Rights For Memory Institutions. ourfuturememory.org

1. COLLECT MATERIALS IN DIGITAL FORM, whether through digitization of physical collections, purchase on the open market, or other legal means.

2. PRESERVE DIGITAL MATERIALS, and where necessary repair, back up, or reformat them, to ensure their long-term existence and availability.

3. PROVIDE CONTROLLED
ACCESS TO DIGITAL
MATERIALS to enable advanced research techniques and to meet patrons where they are-online.

4. COOPERATE WITH OTHER MEMORY
INSTITUTIONS by sharing or transferring digital collections, so as to aid preservation and access.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I do enjoy the entirely gratuitous drone shots of Cambridge in Ludwig.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Oh my God, I was just reading the RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism for reasons, and just found this:

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Aretha’s cover of The Long And Winding Road is good isn’t it?

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Is it me who finds almost all of the Guardian’s TV writing irritating to the point of unreadability? It’s not just Lucy Mangan, it’s all of them.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Traffic flowing down Putney Hill and on to the High Street as well as usual then - I didn’t count but there were more than a dozen buses stationary. Root cause is the lights by Putney Bridge and also, I guess, the Wandsworth Bridge works and the ongoing lack of Hammersmith Bridge.

A queue of stationary buses waiting on Putney Hill (northbound).

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Internet Archive @archive.org · 08/09/2026

Knitting machine punch cards are a living form of computing history. 🧶💾 In "Punch Card Knitting," Nichole Misako Nomura explores how these binary codes are still used today, and the challenges of preserving them. 📚 Read it in VANISHING CULTURE, FREE: archive.org/details/vani...

What can knitting machines teach us about the history of computing?

"They're an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn't only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use

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Gareth Millward @millieqed.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

They're going to have to get an actor to say Donald Trump's words on the news.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Ooh, something else to read: “This book documents practical AI design patterns for information professionals — librarians, archivists, journalists, charity analysts, records managers, and anyone working with large collections of documents or data without a dedicated machine learning team.”

danielvanstrien.xyz

AI Design Patterns for Information Professionals

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Well it led to the deeply irritating habit of men who spend too much time debating politics and economics in online forums to use “motte and bailey” as a metaphor about positions in arguments. Can’t blame the Normans for strawman and steelman though.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 10/09/2026

FWIW I don’t think that AI is an existential threat, nor on track to become one. I do however think that the leaders of the biggest AI companies, AI’s strongest boosters, and some of the folks who are most adept at using it to exploit others are actively hastening along OTHER existential threats.

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James Elder @jameselder.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I still don’t understand why the BBC didn’t take the very popular successful explainer model developed by Ros Atkins and run with it on YouTube. I think it could have really helped with credibility and relevance. Instead they have ceded that ground to the likes of TLDR News.

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Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Team Torment Nexus disdains literature and art but is embarrassed that the PlagiarismApp ripped off a math proof b/c STEM is sacred

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Aaron Huertas @aaronhuertas.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I interviewed for a low six-figure comms job focused on AI safety once and they asked me what challenges I saw for explaining singularity / extinction risks and I said they needed examples of how advanced AI systems — on their own — could get to nukes or bioweapons. They were like “huh, okay.”

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