iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

incredible piece - for the story itself and the reporting, yes, but also for the sustained and barely-disguised contempt in which the author clearly holds his subject www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"This rare court-sanctioned narrative—sanity, criminal insanity, quick reversion to sanity—might seem like tremendous luck, given that he faced a decade or two in prison. But this isn’t how Barisone has experienced his freedom. It wasn’t surprising to hear him mourn what he’d lost since shooting someone in the chest twice. But it was striking to hear how fiercely he resented having lost anything at all. (He has lost time and money, and he can no longer compete in dressage.) “I want my dignity back,” he told me. “I want my reputation back.”"

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

any historians/philosophers of science who've been writing/researching the impact of AI? looking to speak to people for a piece if anyone has any suggestions...

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Gregk Foley @gregk.co.uk · 16/09/2026

Thinking of/with antiwar activist A. J. Muste:

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Once a reporter asked him, "Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?" A.J. Muste replied softly: "Oh I don't do this to change the country. I do this so the country won't change me.

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"The US military acknowledged for the first time on Monday that it has weapons in space, as China and Russia grow their military programmes in orbit."

ft.com

US military reveals it has weapons in space

Security experts warn announcement could result in the proliferation of weapons by other governments

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

fascinating translated essay seemingly written by a deepseek engineer - first half is him contemplating his own replacement by AI; conclusion is geopolitical, saying US winning AI race is "no less than letting Hitler master atomic bomb technology before the Allies” docs.google.com/document/d/1...

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

came across this description ages ago of a French peasant’s dinner and decided to recreate it on a walk yesterday

picture of lunch spread on a teacloth in the woods. the contents of the lunch are in the next picture description

"He carries his dinner with him: a fresh cheese in its wrapper of aromatics; six cloves of garlic; a jug of oil, stopped up with a piece of paper; salt and pepper in an old pill box; a cut of ham; a hunk of bread; wine; a roast rump of rabbit, rolled up in a vine leaf, and a small pot of jam. All these provisions lie pell-mell in his leather pouch."

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Oli Franklin-Wallis @olifranklinwallis.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Revisiting one of the best magazine stories ever written, Tom Junod for Esquire on the falling man image of 9/11 www.esquire.com/news-politic...

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"It’s true that I know at least four guys named Dave and none named Bank of America. At the same time, not one of the Daves I know—nor even Bank of America—has tried to saddle me with a 400 percent APR on a two-figure loan." thebaffler.com/salvos/paid-...

thebaffler.com

Paid Phones | Daniel Kolitz

More and more Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave are here to help—but terms and conditions apply.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

qntm's lena is brilliant, yes - but it missed the mechanism by which digital immortality would actually be achieved... not as some scientific project, but the result of a political assassination followed by an attempted taboo on the reproduction of your image

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

beautiful, mind-bending piece by T.J. Clark arguing that palaoelithic art like the chauvet caves were a reaction to the rising hegemony of language over thought — a counter-proposal that attempted to dissolve the linear, hierarchical structure of language www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"My idea, essentially, is that the cave art of the Upper Palaeolithic was an answer to this deficiency. The answer was unthinkable without the hegemony of language; it came out of language’s power, and specifically its power to reflect on that power’s limits; and the extraordinary flowering of the answer (flowering and then withering, seemingly, in the Neolithic, leaving behind few traces of its brilliance and humility) is the best symptom we have of what it must have been like to live in the new, all-conquering world of speakers, rules, assent, ideas. Depiction was non-language in its full, not ‘first-steps’, being. Revelling in its capacity to not speak back – to be about things in a way that speakers would never be able to approximate."

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I think I noted during the recent Belfast riots that a certain kind of man is not really interested in protecting women & girls; he's interested in protecting the exclusive right of his kind of man to abuse and control women and girls.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

been thinking on this and while the absolute figures are bad more granular numbers would be helpful. how much does cooking, celebrity memoir, puzzles etc account for nonfiction sales? aren’t these activities being eaten by online as much as history fans going to podcasts? bsky.app/profile/thel...

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Lincoln Michel @thelincoln.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Fascinating if depressing piece on the collapsing nonfiction book market dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfic...

Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week—The Calamity Club in its 15th week on-sale and Yesteryear in its 19th week on-sale—sold 52,000 copies. It’s not inconceivable that on the right week, one fiction hardcover with first week sales could outsell the entirety of the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

great thread from terence tao on the openai navier stokes news - on how maths automation diminishes the field. the opacity of AI solutions removes hints to any promising future areas of inquiry, while fear of AI sniping restrains ppl from sharing research mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1172373...

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I’ve spoken with my agent and we’ve decided that my nonfiction books about scientific history are in fact auto fiction in that you auto read them immediately

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

TIL that both “consider” and “desire” reflect a Roman obsession with stars, seen in their incorporation of the Latin sidereus or starry. “considerare” (look closely) literally means “to observe the stars” while “desiderare” (long for) likely means “await what the stars deliver”

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Mr. Chau @srirachachau.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Ladies and gentlemen...this is Woke No. 5

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Coraline Jortay 喬海霖 @qiaoj.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Got a new google scholar notification, so I go check and find this very cool poem by Wang Jibing 王计兵, the recent Lu Xun prize winner, prefacing a PhD thesis on women migrant workers and the gig economy PhD students in all disciplines: more poems in theses please, we love to see them! ✨💫

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

it's cool man all you need to do is slow down refocus attention restore friction embrace inconvenience, cultivate silence nurture craft protect boredom write longhand walk walk walk walk walk - have you thought about walking? - and everything will be o k a y i p r o m i s e

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

how miserable will life be when instead of showing you idealized versions of other people, adverts use AI to show you idealized versions of yourself — scrolling past your face, but more beautiful; your head, on a more attractive body... hopefully the suicides will force standards

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

i find it grimly appropriate that voyager golden record — a collection of sound, data, and images intended to represent the totality of human culture and carry it to the stars — begins with a greeting by then-UN secretary-general kurt waldheim, a suspected war criminal

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

"To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless." - George Steiner

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

here’s a clam and misty morning from wales for your troubles

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

"To say that someone has a strong will means that she desires fiercely. Or it means that she has conquered her desires and is no longer their servant... The person who breaks his diet wishes for two things at once: to eat and to refrain." harpers.org/archive/2026...

"If these two renunciations appeared to be great successes it’s because the story of my life, as I told it for years, conveniently framed them this way. Nietzsche says somewhere that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul that commands, not the part that obeys. It’s possible, in fact, that the problem of the will comes down to a problem of language. It’s baffling to me that we use the same word to describe two seemingly contradictory things. On one hand, the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning “wish” or “desire”). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them. To say that someone has a strong will means that she desires fiercely. Or it means that she has conquered her desires and is no longer their servant. This contradiction in common usage speaks to a contradiction in the self—the “I” who both wants and wants not to want. What is called weakness of will is not a deficit but a surplus. The person who breaks his diet wishes for two things at once: to eat and to refrain."

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

jesus fucking christ

t took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

great piece on gwendoline riley - including the salutary reminder that scorn and contempt allow us to retain our dignity at uncertain costs www.bookforum.com/print/3301/g...

bookforum.com

Grammar of Discontent

Gwendoline Riley breaks free of her phantoms – Hermione Hoby

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

browsing an absolutely wonderful anthology of Akkadian literature, and I find, as ever, the universality of human experience so moving. a 4,000 year old incantation baked into clay, intended to help ease a difficult birth - "bring out the sealed one ... let him come out and see the light!"

THE BABY IS STUCK!
The woman in labor is having a difficult labor, Her labor is difficult, the baby is stuck,
The baby is stuck!
The doorbolt is locked, about to end life, The door is fastened against the suckling kid, ...
The woman giving birth is covered with death's dust, She is covered with the dust of battle, like a chariot, She is covered with the dust of tuffets, like a plow.
She sprawls in her own blood, like a struggling warrior, Her eyesight is waning, she cannot see, Her lips are coated, she cannot open them ...,
Her eyesight is dim, ... she is alarmed, her ears cannot hear!
Her breast is not held in, her headbands are askew, She is not veiled with ..., she has no shame:
Stand by me and keep calling out?), O merciful Marduk,
"Here is the confusion, I'm surrounded, get to me!" Bring out the one sealed up, created by the gods, Created by humankind, let him come out and see the light!

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

TIL that "omicron" in the greek alphabet means "little o" and "omega" means "large o." little and large; micro and mega

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

nice argument. however, i've already depicted myself as the chad boethius, smiling over my hindu-arabic numerals, and you as the soyjack pythagoras, struggling to match my calculations with your reckoning board

a 1503 woodcut showing a contest between boethius and pythagoras, representing the algorists and abacists respectively; the former using the new hindu-arabic numerals, and the latter counting boards

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

very much enjoyed that the bible of relativity, the 1973 textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, ends with this helpful illustration:

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

This is bombshell stuff.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

advertising has really reached some transcendent peak over on X, the everything app

screenshot of a tweet/post from twitter/x showing a deepfaked image of nigel farage covered in slime running through the studio of BBC's question time

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

for some reason i had not seen this animation of DESI before and i find it very beautiful - it's amazing how we've essentially recreated a compound eye, with a focal plane formed of 5,000 individually articulated fiberoptic strands, all shimmering under the night's sky

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

had a conversation with a writer friend and we concluded that the worst thing that could happen as a result of AI text generation - the very worst - is if people lose the will to write; if we begin to believe that there is simply no need, no reason to try, and elect to stay mute

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

i i often wake up early against my will, around 4am, and response is to soften the blow by making pancakes, strong coffee, and listen to something soothing, usually radio 3's The Essay. anyway, i can really recommend this recent one on insect noises: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

bbc.co.uk

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Insect Singers, 1. Let Those Bugs Sing

The Essay celebrates the sheer musicality and beautiful noise of Earth’s insect singers.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

entranced by this unfinished canvas from Turner. the subject is unknown but i like the interpretation that it was inspired by Shelley's Masque of Anarchy, which reframes the biblical rider on a pale horse as the anarchic violence of the state unleashed at the Peterloo Massacre

an oil painting, only half finished. the bottom right corner is a pale cloud; in the top left quadrant we see a skeletal torso astride the white silhouette of a horse. the torso is headless and reaches out with one skeletal hand

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

bought a huge bottle of dr bonner’s almond shower wash on a whim and now realising I’m going to spend the rest of summer smelling like battenberg

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

someone told me this today and I didn’t believe them: the dashboard of a car originally referred to a barrier at the front of carriages that shielded the occupants from dirt “dashed” by the horse’s hooves

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Chris Baraniuk @chrisbaraniuk.com · 26/05/2026

! This is fab. Might not be 100% accurate. I checked some places I know definitely have AC and they're on there. One that does was listed as "likely" though. But v helpful to have an indicator, and to see a list for every postcode etc.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

It’s hard to overstate how up Marc Andreessen’s ass the media was in the early ‘90s. He was 24 on the cover of Time. I think it’s helpful to understand him like a child TV star or an athletic prodigy. A boy wonder for whom fame came early, & in the wake of it there is a hollow man.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

lol - "I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is corner and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams"" bsky.app/profile/sara...

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warrior cop @wyattprivilege.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I GET LOGGED OUT. BUT I LOG IN AGAIN

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

re: guardian top 100 novels, i'm really curious what the equivalent top 100 from le monde, el pais, la repubblica, etc, would be — and then what novels would have the greatest overlap (proust? mann? hugo? the latter weirdly not appearing in the guardian at all...)

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

just remembered some of my favourite recent poetry: journals of medical students dosed with ketamine and accompanying explanatory notes

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

"Eatherly began filming himself berating black people in public. It’s a strange way to make a living, even in 2026. But it’s not unique to Eatherly." the odious, depressing nexus of resurgent racism and an online ecosystems that incentivizes extreme content: www.thebulwark.com/p/the-rights...

thebulwark.com

The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone

Meet “Chud the Builder.”

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

carlo rovelli making an argument against the hard problem of consciousness, which I might mushily summarize as: it's all qualia, therefore nothing is www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-...

noemamag.com

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ | NOEMA

Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

"What is different here is the drone unit commander mentions repeatedly that there is no time lag in the video link [...] Operators can be based in another area, or on the other side of the world." - how long until we see offshored drone warfare? www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

forbes.com

Ukrainian FPV Operators Pilot Drones From Long Range

Ukrainian drone pilots use a remote system to operate FPVs, bombers and other drones from long distances with negligible time delay. This could change drone warfare.

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James Vincent @jjvincent.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I’d never noticed before that the nebra sky disc is also a winky smiley face and now I can’t unsee it

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