iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 12h

After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

In other professors’ syllabi, the bot flagged the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, essays by the Mexican American MacArthur genius grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, and materials related to a class about the Holocaust (that professor was told to drop material regarding Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people).

Putting aside the ideological slant of the new rules, the bot, like many large language models, seems to “hallucinate,” or make mistakes. The AAUP lawsuit lists texts banned for their “sex-based ecofeminist framework” and “gendered ecofeminist frameworks.” These phrases might sound persuasively like academese, but the academics behind the lawsuit had never heard of them; these concepts “do not exist,” the complaint says. Matthew Pehl, a history professor at Tech, told me that he knew several people who’d received reports from the system that were “plainly written by an AI that had hallucinated content or confused content from one class to another.”

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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 11h

Newsom rejecting the billionaire wealth tax is one thing. Supporting the billionaires' poison pill alternative which would ban taxes on assets permanently, end any chance to fix stepped-up basis, & could be used by an enterprising lawyer to invalidate vehicle fee or other tax changes is another.

wsj.com

Newsom Backs Measure That Could Invalidate Billionaire Tax

The California governor opposes the proposed levy on ultrawealthy that goes before voters on Nov. 3.

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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 09/10/2026

literally every one of us has to decide when we will say NO

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think people should listen to what the administration trying to bring back spectacle lynchings, race riots, and middle passage-esque deportation voyages are trying to tell you about themselves. bsky.app/profile/bren...

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W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Like 5 companies have completely hijacked the American economy and are driving a massively overleveraged bubble that even AI enthusiasts know is going to burst. If doesn’t strike me as a bad idea for the left to be the ones standing against that as 100 million workers are told AI will replace them.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Part of why I don't like the AI-or-bust economy is the constant flopsweat of people on the news who say this HAS to work. Quit making everyone so anxious. Goddamn. If this is the next Google then why are you acting like this? I don't remember being told to buy an iPhone at gunpoint.

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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It's opening day of the Supreme Court session. A new book by @nikobowie.bsky.social & @daphnarenan.bsky.social demonstrate beyond question that the Constitution did not mean to establish a system of judicial supremacy in which the Court exercises dictatorial powers. @ryanlcooper.com has a review.

prospect.org

The Supreme Court’s Power Is Based on the Lie of Its Supremacy - The American Prospect

The Constitution does not establish a judicial dictatorship.

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Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The pundit view of the world is skewed by many things, one of which is a refusal/inability to understand geographic spaces that exist outside their own neighborhoods. It's all based on stereotypes and conjecture—even when they go to other places, and their columns are essentially bad travel writing.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/10/2026

it's such a perfect example of what is actually alito's hallmark as a justice, shoddy, sub-undergraduate thinking dressed up with five dollar words.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/10/2026

the other thing is that this is a totally incoherent and arbitrary standard for deciding who has rights and who doesn't. you could say the same, for instance, of alito's vision of inviolate "religious liberty" or expansive gun rights.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/10/2026

what an asshole

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

When my father was faculty at Cornell he was stopped by the police chief in the street & asked who he was & where he was going. When he balked at the fact that no one but him, an Arab man, was being asked, the chief said “I’m just protecting students” Same guy failed to investigate 7 rapists.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 02/10/2026

not that you should expect anything more than rank idiocy from this pair of racists, but the idea that whiteness means a "high trust" society of "social cohesion" is some of the stupidest shit i have ever heard. these people live in a fantasy land that you could dispel by simply opening a book.

talkingpointsmemo.com

Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing

To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in...

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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

They're holding up a major escalation in Iran and a crackdown on abortion until after the midterms to limit political damage. To the extent that the last two years have been a right-wing smash-and-grab operation, the next two will be worse.

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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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Zoe TunnHELL ➡️ NYCC @zoewithasword.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The idea that Newsom is even remotely a serious candidate for president is so goddamn clown shoes at this point In the past month he's vetoed LGBTQ+ rights measures, pushed the Paramount merger through, further cozied up to AI barons and now this. Dude couldn't even win a Governor reelection now

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Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The only refugees we let in were white South Africans fleeing an imaginary genocide.

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James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Somehow not everyone is aware of fact alluded to below. So one more time: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett were all on GWBush 2000 'Florida Recount' team. (Which made GWB first prez in 112 yrs to 'win' after losing popular vote. Now they 'impartially' rule on our future.)

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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

bonkers

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Lila Byock @lbyock.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Proud to be a designated spokesperson for the anti-AI humanist movement in this excellent @newyorker.com piece. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Paragraph from linked New Yorker article reads: This is not A.I. populism, as Sun describes it, so much as anti-A.I. humanism; its champions worry about what would be left if human pursuits became pointless. I was struck by how many A.I. skeptics converged on the same formulation: what is this activity for? When I called Lila Byock, a mother of two and the founder of Schools Beyond Screens, a coalition fighting the influence of big tech in schools, she said, “I think that we just need to ask ourselves, like, what is school for? What is education for? One of the really basic problems with using A.I. in education is that it is designed to make tasks easier and to reduce friction, and friction is how learning happens.”

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Schools Beyond Screens @schoolsbeyond.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In the words of SBS founder @lbyock.bsky.social: "What is school for? What is education for? One of the really basic problems with using A.I. in education is that it is designed to make tasks easier and to reduce friction, and friction is how learning happens.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

newyorker.com

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AI Moratorium for NYC Schools @aimoratoriumnyc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

“We learned nothing from social media,” said Nataliya Kosmyna, a visiting researcher at Google with a doctorate in human-computer interactions….Kosmyna believes based on her brain research that AI, like alcohol, should be restricted to ages 21 and over”

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Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

At no point while reading this sentence did I correctly predict what was coming next.

Twitter screenshot: New: Kyrsten Sinema's ex-boyfriend and former bodyguard said he threw her paintings into her swimming pool in part because he felt disillusioned by her relationship with a major
U.S. Artificial Intelligence software developer amid the war in Gaza

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”

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Brian Clevinger @bclev.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Starting to think the destruction of facts and knowledge serves the fascist agenda…! 🤔

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Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026

This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I like that in becoming a nazi, you get glowing coverage as a brave iconoclast, and then when you stop being a nazi, you’re get glowing coverage as a brave dissident. Money coming and going. Only way you lose is having normal opinions like “racism bad” bsky.app/profile/trac...

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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Elites that surrended to Trump in 2025 miscalculated, letting his imagined cultural dominance spook them into inflating the price of getting on his bad side. But now the logic of collective resistance has been confirmed as sound. Should have realized this earlier! newrepublic.com/article/2158...

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Trump's tirade at the media for boycotting Xi's arrival actually gives away the game in an interesting way: He basically admits straight out that he badly needs the media's attention. In some ways he's powerless without it: newrepublic.com/article/2158...

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Trump is raging at news orgs for refusing to cover his reception of Xi after he banned three from the White House. The real lesson here: When institutions join together to resist his abuses of power it actually works, sending him into a helpless fury. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2158...

newrepublic.com

Trump’s Angry Tirade Over Failing Press Ban Reveals His Achilles’ Heel

Trump is furious that news organizations are fighting back against his vile efforts to punish their colleagues—because collective resistance to his authoritarianism actually works.

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Cannonball Adderall @echoloop.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The institutions involved here—businesses, universities, law firms, etc—need to take a hard look at their leadership in the wake of such a massive strategic miscalculation. To paraphrase Anton Chigurh: If the leaders you followed brought you to this, of what use are those leaders?

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Pause AI in BC Schools @aicaution.ca · 26/09/2026

Name another technology that is universally acknowledged by scientific research as being harmful to children, but that somehow _must_ be put in schools. "Well some kids drink underage at home, so we need to teach them how to drink in moderation at school."

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 09/05/2026

hating ai is a pro-social activity

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 25/09/2026

imagine telling people that you prefer the output of a computer to experiencing the wonder of another human's imagination like you're announcing that you are an anti-social asshole with bad taste, just to be clear

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Matt Baume 🏳️‍🌈 @mattbaume.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Me sticking a knife in a toaster: The silverware’s gone rogue again

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Claire Zagorski, PhD, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I hate it so much. This can happen to you too. A year ago, almost everyone doubted this would happen. I had faculty at other schools telling me I was hysterical. (Irony!) Watch for the installation of right wing figureheads without an academic background. Watch for assaults on faculty governance.

BREAKING NEWS
UT cuts all Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies courses from core curriculum

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The fantasy that you can make an existential threat to the earth worse in the short term because maybe somehow magically in the long term it will solve it in some magical way already dismissed is part of artificial idiocy. We have the solutions. We just need to implement them.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I think of the climate harm AI poses the same way: the threats are not theoretical or in the future, but unfolding all around us now.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Raise your hand if you already own and carry around a small holdable device that you can pick up

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It’s really rare how few contemporary politicians are talented at doing what I am calling “Mayor Quimby shit”

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Obama’s charisma often gets put in terms of speeches but I think it was much more stuff like this, if he saw some little kid he’d be like oh hey there dude in a way that didn’t make him seem like a maniac and 90% of politicians can’t do that anymore

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Iron Spike @ironspike.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's like they WANT people to go "welp" and fire up Bittorrent again.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 21/09/2026

congratulations to everyone on reinventing Worse Cable

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