iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Josh

“A college in Illinois tried to cancel its Flock contract—Flock refused to take its cameras down so Elgin Community College covered them. The company snuck back to uncover them” www.theverge.com/tech/1009411...

theverge.com

A college in Illinois tried to cancel its Flock contract and it refused

Flock refused to take its cameras down so Elgin Community College covered them. The company snuck back to undo it.

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Todd Woody @toddwoody.bsky.social · 9h

New: AI data centers’ indirect water use - water consumed by power plants to generate electricity for power-hungry server farms - is magnitudes larger than the facilities’ onsite water consumption and is largely undisclosed. Free link. With @mchediak.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.com

AI's Water Strain Includes Surging Demand From Electricity Use

It takes a lot of water to generate the power consumed by server farms.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 15h

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

So the next time someone who is not an expert in the field concerned loses their mind over some supposedly revolutionary finding…bear this in mind. Whether this has to do with AI or not, it’s just a good rule of thumb. Don’t be someone else’s hype man if you don’t understand what you’re hyping.

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Boxo McFoxo @boxobark.ing · 11/10/2026

An interesting fact about this facility: you will not find it on Epoch AI's list because it's colocation, i.e. the tenants bring their own GPUs, which does not count under their methodology. Epoch AI is the favoured source of effective altruists. Notably, it is the list that Andy Masley uses.

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Billie Jean Sweeney @billiejsweeney.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

“Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault.”

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

AI stans and their huckster daddys are bad for everyone. You lazy dipshits are rubes and your computer girlfriend is ruining the country for the rest of us, you selfish dicks

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 11/10/2026

I don’t understand why there are so many people eager to ignore this in order to get the left “onboard” with AI

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Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com · 10/10/2026

My god. A Virginia data center ran backup diesel generators full blast for 24 hours, creating a giant cloud of toxic smoke that choked its human neighbors. The government claimed there was nothing they could do.

gadgetreview.com

Virginia Data Center Ran Diesel Generators for 24 Hours. Residents Fled Their Homes

Virginia data center diesel generators ran nearly 24 hours during a Code Red alert, leaving neighbors with no regulatory recourse under current state permits.

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Daniel José Older @djolder.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Very dystopian that on the article about a A.I. data center poisoning the air, there's a little rainbow A.I. chatbot button just lurking at the edge, waiting to poison the air some more to answer your banal question

The article below with a rainbow tab on the side which initiates a chat bot
Text:
Gadget Revieu_

HOME Y

EMERGING TECH / AI

Virginia Data Center Ran
Diesel Generators for 24
Hours. Residents Fled Their

Homes

+

Sterling residents had no legal recourse as
189 of Virginia's 197 data-center air permits
allow emergency diesel runs without public

review

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Ross A. Lincoln @rossalincoln.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Incidentally, the fact they are still rolling out scams like this is all the proof any of us should need that the OH NO OUR AI WENT ROGUE stories this industry keep 'disclosing' are bullshit.

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Ross A. Lincoln @rossalincoln.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Simpson's writer: I wrote the wallet inspector gag as a cautionary tale about con artists, bullies and the stupid idiots and cowards who help them thrive. Tech Oligarch: At long last, we have created the Wallet Inspector...

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump

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Aaron Radney COMMISSIONS OPEN (3/7 slots left) @aaronradney.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

There are stories I've heard that some folks believed as the cotton gin was developed it would lead to the south needing slavery less. The exact opposite happened. Slavers doubled down on the necessity of it and worked folks just as much if not more.

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Mike Riverso @mikeriverso.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think I’ve recently seen first-hand just how AI actually makes more work, as people create unnecessary projects and tasks with AI that could be handled by existing materials and systems just fine. “We could use AI to do X!” Yes, but if you didn’t have an LLM, you’d be happy with what you had.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

In the vein of "public libraries could never be created today," a pitch for a calculator would get you thrown out of the boardroom. What do you mean, it just maths? Where are the ads supposed to go? How does it send usage telemetry back if it doesn't even have wifi? There isn't even a leaderboard.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 10/10/2026

some potential usefulness here for the ai / cigarettes analogy

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It doesn’t help that for years it was hard to find anyone who would question if the money was actually there. He’s been harping on Softbank and Oracle for a while and it doesn’t look amazing for them right now.

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It *is ironic that he would fuck up by using an LLM thing. I also know he mentioned trying the Bloomberg LLM and finding it lackluster if not useless.

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

He’s certainly never said anything other than negative things about them. He generally dismisses the x-risk p(doom) stuff, to the point that a common criticism of him is he thinks the tech is worse than it is; he definitely doesn’t think “The Singularity” is real.

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I’m sorry, Ed is part of the Rationalist-EA cult??? That’s a hell of a claim…

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Reposted by Josh

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The group that got all of that coverage for investigating the Hugging Face attack (METR) wrote a paper where "evidence" consisted of "An Anthropic co-founder said so"

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I could right now set up a motion sensor in my apartment and write custom code to automatically fill out that form, as if it were me, if it detects something when I’m not home. If it repeatedly malfunctioned and sent in false reports the cops would not have trouble figuring out who’s at fault!

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Feature not a bug. A big piece of the "AI thinks for itself" is getting morons (apparently a lot of them already here, more than I expected) to believe this is true so when the Musk/Altman/Amodei put their thumb on the scale to get the results they (or whomever is paying) want, their hands are clean

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jenny tightpants @jtp.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"windows is fine just run these scripts"

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logan ☄️ @lokarhu.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

i keep seeing folks in both of these threads being like "linux isn't ready for the primetime" and i have no idea what that means i, a blue collar factory worker, installed linux (mint) on my laptop two years ago, with only minimal linux experience from my Steam Deck, and have had zero (0) issues!

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Reposted by Josh

The Associated Press @apnews.com · 09/10/2026

A U.S. charity in Gaza is worried that teachers at its schools might stray from a curriculum it says promotes peace and tolerance, so it plans to record classroom conversations and use artificial intelligence to flag speech deemed “hateful” or “inciting.”

bit.ly

A US charity plans to use AI to monitor its Gaza classrooms for 'hateful' speech

A U.S. charity in Gaza is worried that teachers at its schools might stray from a curriculum it says promotes peace and tolerance.

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jenny tightpants @jtp.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

i know i'm being the smug linux stereotype at this point but i'm sorry windows users are so cucked. you control the OS you have on your computer

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Reposted by Josh

Talia "ATTACK DOGS is out now!" Bhatt ⚢ @taliabhatt.itch.io · 08/10/2026

The future as imagined by men lacking the vital spark, who see no value in others' lives, who cannot envision the internalities of anyone unlike them, and who truly believe that everyone wants life to be an endless parade of flattery and yes-men just as they do.

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Brian T. Rice @briantrice.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It would be great if journalists asked how much money was spent on this and compare it to the effect of a grant to the mathematicians currently working in the field, even using the same tooling.

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Reposted by Josh

tante @tante.cc · 08/10/2026

Anthropic does not apply the same protections to the data labelers they use to clean their training data from the worst shit in the world. But those are just mostly poor people, what do effective altruists care about th em?

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

OpenAI yesterday: LOOK! 700 MATH PAPERS! OpenAI today: we actually made $20 billion less than we said we would. We understand what’s going on here right folks?

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What? No way! If only there was someone on here pointing out how obvious it was that they were lying about the money the whole time…

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Reposted by Josh

David Gerard @davidgerard.circumstances.run.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

LWN says Nate Graham has backed off on the KDE pro-AI policy for the moment: lwn.net/Articles/1096518 > However, Martin warned that he was starting to see ""an increase of purely LLM-generated merge requests"" where it was clear that the description and code were entirely […]

circumstances.run

Original post on circumstances.run

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Reposted by Josh

ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 06/12/2024

hi, i wrote a post - "Defining AI". ali-alkhatib.com/blog/definin...

ali-alkhatib.com

Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI

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John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A lot of AI assistants seem to have been built around the assumption that the rest of the world is not actually real nymag.com/intelligence...

I wanted to hear about this weird new phenomenon from the other side. The Colorado plumber laughed and once again hung up the phone. The woman at the karaoke place was more patient but sounded confused:
Was I AI? Was I selling AI? Could she speak to a real person? No and no, I said, and yes: I was a cold-calling human being who wanted to hear about her experience getting cold-called by bots. (After failing to book a room with Muse, the customer dispatched another agentic solution for the job and claims to have gotten through.)
"Ah," she said. "Okay. We don't like AI calling our restaurant. We hate it." End of call.

There is something to this - computers really do work differently now and can be asked to handle tasks that used to require a human touch (or at least a cursor). But in addition to expanding the boundaries of automation, the agent-assisted power users of today are also mowing down soft and unsuspecting targets - websites, interfaces, services, and people who haven't decided how, or if, they want to respond to the replacement of customers, clients, and even friends with agents - with the advantages that come with deploying them first. Once everyone has, as Mark Zuckerberg describes it, an "exceptionally capable personal agent," does anyone?

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Septima P. Snark @drsubini.blacksky.app · 31/07/2026

Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard put her body on the line to protect students fighting for Gaza & police assaulted her. Instead of protecting her, UC Irvine has stripped her faculty role & her health benefits. Please sign petition, write a letter, signal boost robindgkelley.substack.com/p/in-support...

robindgkelley.substack.com

In Support of Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Most academics in the U.S., as well as activists resisting the genocide in Gaza, are familiar with the case of Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a renowned Global Studies scholar at the University ...

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Reposted by Josh

Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 08/10/2026

🌍 Tech optimism cools climate action A survey of scientists in 115 countries found the most tech-optimistic were 23% less likely to protest or lobby on climate, and 18% less likely to make big lifestyle changes. 🔗 doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aea4c7 #Climate #Science #ClimateChange 🧪

doi.org

Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions

Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions, Dablander, Fabian, Cologna, Viktoria, Sachisthal, Maien, Haslbeck, Jonas

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Josh @jman4747.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

People won't tend to use LLMs the "right" way. They'll tend use them in whatever way accords with the path of least resistance. Any future where these are widely used is one where the harms continue to outweigh the benefits.

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Eric Harris Bernstein @ehbinmn.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

They started texting with a 16-year-old. After two years, they offered to sell him a gun. They consider that "stopping a terrorist attack." And they are calling it heroic. What an absolute embarrassment.

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

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The Ken In Yellow @kenlowery.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I will simply say I am seeing exactly this situation play out right now in a different field. Work that would have taken about 3 weeks start to finish via traditional methods is now into week 6 and still in what amounts to first draft territory

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ddɐ˙ʎʞsʞɔɐlq˙uǝʌs@ @sven.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

« But Mythos did find important bugs, right? Not really. The website downloading tool Curl says Glasswing found a grand total of one new vulnerability that was a real vulnerability. A minor one. One is better than none! But wasting a lot of other people’s time checking on it. »

youtube.com

Mythos: not the magical AI hacking tool after all

YouTube video by Pivot to AI

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Reposted by Josh

Aaahh!!! bstract Tesseract @abstracttesseract.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I feel like we need to be loud and rude about this, because the way media attention works, everyone's going to remember the early hype stories and nobody remembers "weeeelllll now that we took the time to look into it, it's kinda meh"

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Antonio E. Porreca 🐳 @aeporreca.org · 07/10/2026

The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements

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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 08/10/2026

I hate living in a time where empathy is seen as a vice. Empathy is literally the most important virtue there is. Nothing else comes close.

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Nick @seahawksnerd75.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Entire ownership group filled with the dumbest motherfuckers ever I’m crying

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