iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 03/02/2026

French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the platform, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

rte.ie

French cybercrime authorities search X offices

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

It's very interesting in the age of Claude Cowork to look back a year or two to see "sensible, anti-hype" articles which were wrong at the time but are now demonstrated to be wrong. A lesson for all people who think anti-hype is automatically sensible. Example: cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/how...

cacm.acm.org

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 15/01/2026

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a... pls repost

$About the PhD: Audits and evaluation of AI systems — and the broader context that AI systems operate in — have become central to conceptualising, quantifying, measuring and understanding the operations, failures, limitations, underlying assumptions, and downstream societal implications of AI systems. Existing AI audit and evaluation efforts are fractured, done in a siloed and ad-hoc manner, and with little deliberation and reflection around conceptual rigour and methodological validity. This PhD is for a candidate that is passionate about exploring what a conceptually cogent, methodologically sound, and well-founded AI evaluation and safety research might look like. This requires grappling with questions such as: What does it mean to represent “ground truth” in proxies, synthetic data, or computational simulation? How do we reliably measure abstract and complex phenomena? What are the epistemological or methodological implications of quantification and measurement approaches we choose to employ? Particularly, what underlying presuppositions, values, or perspectives do they entail? How do we ensure the lived experiences of impacted communities play a critical role in the development and justification of measurement metrics and proxies? Through exploration of these questions, the candidate is expected to engage with core concepts in the philosophy of science, history of science, Black feminist epistemologies, and similar schools of thought to develop an in-depth understanding of existing practices with the aim of applying it to advance shared standards and best practice in AI evaluation. The candidate is expected to integrate empirical (for example, through analysis or evaluation of existing benchmarks) or practical (for example, by executing evaluation of AI systems) components into the overall work.$

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Bill Tozier @vaguery.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below. Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

ebay.com

Items for sale by cornersbumpedbooksandantiques | eBay

Shop eBay for great deals from cornersbumpedbooksandantiques!

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

GECCO call for papers - abstract deadline Jan 21st! gecco-2026.sigevo.org/Tracks @skapedin.bsky.social @folivetti.bsky.social

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The HUMIES are the annual competition at #GECCO for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods. ***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results*** Submit by Friday May 29, 2026 See www.human-competitive.org for more

A cartoon of a strand of DNA, arm-wrestling a scientist

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Gavan Reilly @gavreilly.com · 05/10/2025

Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll: Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

open.substack.com

Today's opinion poll merely shows how close this Áras race actually is

Giving the Google Sheets treatment to the Sunday Times/Ireland Thinks poll

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design! Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

New book review, freely available in GPEM: “Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Kenichi Morita: Reversible world of cellular automata - Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines -

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GPEM journal @gpem.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"! Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan. Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/... Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

Special Issue on Twenty-Five Years of Grammatical Evolution

By invitation only- GECCO conference ("GEWS2023 — Grammatical Evolution Workshop)

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Plausible Knowledge Notation: "a notation and model for imperfect knowledge, such as everyday knowledge that is uncertain, context sensitive, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and likely to change" w3c.github.io/cogai/pkn.html

w3c.github.io

Plausible Knowledge Notation (PKN)

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Dr Robert Bohan @robertbohan.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

eci.ec.europa.eu

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Hold Radboud University accountable for the wrongful arrest of staff and students

To the Radboud College van Bestuur, On Monday December 16, six staff and students from the Radboud University were wrongfully accused of property damage and held overnight in jail on the grounds of s...

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Jacob @tullamore-jew.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I could write an essay on this image Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent

Caricature of an Irish man done in the style of old antisemitic cartoons. He has bright ginger hair, is haunched over with clenched hands together. He is holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Hamas headband.

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Carlos Cotta @ccottap.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

The GECCO 2025 conference will be held in Málaga, 14-18 July 2025. You won't miss it, will you? gecco-2025.sigevo.org/HomePage

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Happy to announce differential operators for PySR + SymbolicRegression.jl! This means you can literally just... evolve an integral:

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tal yarkoni @talyarkoni.com · 16/12/2024

i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.

For six months we watched the pigeons building their civilization on top of the skyscrapers. First came the architecture: nests made not just of twigs and paper, but of lost earbuds, expired credit cards, and the tiny silver bells from cat collars. Then came their laws.

"They have a supreme court," said Dr. Fernandez, who'd been studying them since the beginning. "Nine pigeons who sit on the ledge of the Chrysler Building and coo about justice." We didn't believe her at first, but then we didn't believe a lot of things that turned out to be true.

The pigeons developed a currency based on blue bottle caps. They established schools where young pigeons learned to dodge taxi cabs and identify the most generous hot dog vendors. Some of us tried to join their society, climbing to rooftops with offerings of breadcrumbs and philosophy textbooks, but the pigeons regarded us with the kind of pity usually reserved for very small children or very old cats.

"They're planning something," the conspiracy theorists said, but they always say that. Still, we noticed the pigeons holding what looked like town halls, thousands of them gathered on the roof of the public library, bobbing their heads in what might have been voting or might have been prayer.

Our own civilization continued below theirs. We went to work, fell in love, lost keys, found keys, forgot anniversaries, remembered too late, all while the pigeons above us built something that looked suspiciously like a scaled-down replica of the United Nations building out of discarded takeout containers and stolen Christmas lights.

Sometimes they dropped things on us: rejection letters for poetry we'd never submitted, tax returns from years that hadn't happened yet, photographs of ourselves sleeping that we couldn't explain. Dr. Fernandez said this was their way of communicating. We said Dr. Fernandez had been spending too much time on rooftops.

The pigeons started their own newspapers, printed on leaves that fell upward instead…

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people

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Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at the #NeurIPS2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop Check out our preprint "Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems" at arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02273!

arxiv.org

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I do not know why The Whole of the Moon has such power, but by god it has. But plugging it into a singing schoolhallfull of Irish children *exactly as old as I was then* is a supercharger event.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

I refuse to read the article but I wonder what scenario people like this imagine, when they hear we're running out of data. Do they think it's used up, or deleted?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Important illustration of the difference between the design stance, the generalisation stance, and the scientific stance (for want of better terms). 1/2

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Diarmuid Ferriter for president www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024...

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

YES, now we're thinking with portals. Bad news for those clinging to the hope we would run out of data. Or that LLMs can't reason.

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RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 13/12/2024

Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part"

rte.ie

'No findings of misconduct' against Nolan - SFI

Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part".

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 12/12/2024

Over 30 prominent scientists call for a ban on the creation of a "mirror cell"--a microbe made of molecules that are mirror images of their natural forms. It could cause a mind-boggling global disaster. Here's my story [gift link] 🧪https://nyti.ms/3OUCXp6

nyti.ms

A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn (Gift Article)

Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Visual auto-regressive modelling. Start with a tiny image, and the model iteratively predicts a larger one, adding detail. Similar to diffusion, which starts with a large but noisy image, and the model iteratively predicts a less-noisy one, adding detail. neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Would it be fair to divide the AI world into "techbros" and "tech anti-bros"?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

SMBC is on Bluesky! AI discussion in the 98th percentile, in four panels, with jokes! And often sex!

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

The original sin of the modern left is conflating morality with truth. You see it all the time here and on Twitter, and increasingly in real life. To escape it, we need to be able to imagine: *a bad person who is still correct*. A weird, unthinkable thought.

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Andrei Bursuc @abursuc.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Not even a trace of mercy for people staying at home in big cities in boring plains, Lucas?

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Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

"Sora is a data-driven physics engine." x.com/chrisoffner3...

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Of course the dichotomy "AI is fake and sucks" v "AI is real and dangerous" is a bit too simple. But anyone who uses terms like "AI booster" (which Marcus used in his response), "TESCREAL", or "techbro" is in no position to criticise.

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Anne Carpenter @drannecarpenter.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Highly recommend (long) read for anyone who's been leading a lab 10+ years!

I suppose, then, I am well qualified to say something about staying in the game. I have done it for over
twenty years. I have contributed to research on several topics in biology and the social sciences. I hold
a full professorship in a decent research-intensive university. I get some very nice academic invitations.
So it seems I have avoided the ‘exit academia’ arrows, possibly even with aplomb. But—and this is
what qualifies me—I haven’t avoided them nearly as easily as you probably think. If it looks that way
from the outside, that’s only because you lack the data I have. You don’t see the failures, the false
starts, the wasted time, or the awkward conversations with the Dean. (These are ubiquitous, by the
way, just not well written up in the literature.) And opposite the Scylla of the ‘exit academia’ arrows
has always lurked the Charybdis of my own demoralization: walking away from the game even if the
game does not eject me. I gave up completely once, for several years, then eventually clawed my way
back in; a second time I partly gave up but left myself attached by a lifeline, a lifeline I duly climbed up
within a year or so; and probably two or three more times over the years I reached the point of starting
to make other plans. Periodic demoralization and depression are not rare amongst researchers. It’s
not not caring any more, or not being able to be bothered, as depression is often and erroneously
characterized. It is caring so much, being so bothered, that one cannot advance on any front. One
drowns in one’s own disorganized and gradually souring passion. This feeling is probably near-
ubiquitous too.

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Altmetric @altmetric.com · 03/12/2024

BLUESKY MEGA-THREAD Altmetric is thrilled and also LITERALLY RELIEVED to officially announce: We are now tracking research attention as it happens on Bluesky! We have been picking up posts on the site since late Oct. Our team is on Bluesky all day answering questions. Let's get into it!

Blueksy Mentions are now in Altmetric.

It's been 84 years meme

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #MedSky #HMSky #Altmetrics #Medlibs #Metascience

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Miles Cranmer @milescranmer.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

🧵 Today with @polymathicai.bsky.social and others we're releasing two massive datasets that span dozens of fields - from bacterial growth to supernova! We want this to enable multi-disciplinary foundation model research.

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

New essay: "How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?" michaelnotebook.com/optimism/ind...

michaelnotebook.com

How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

I think intelligence is the ability to reify patterns

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 28/11/2024

Friends, this week marks a monumental step forward in my path towards pushing for a greater ecology of accountability in the age of AI. Thrilled to officially announce the AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) @theaial.bsky.social at Trinity College Dublin is launching today, Thursday Nov 28, 2024 aial.ie

aial.ie

AI Accountability Lab

Stewarding a greater ecology of accountability in the age of AI

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Gavan Reilly @gavreilly.com · 26/11/2024

Worth another share, for the week that's in it… How Ireland's PR-STV electoral system works, explained with a 🔴specific 🟠 (#notspon) 🟡 brand 🟢 of 🔵 popular 🟣 colourful 🟤 chocolate confectionery. @virginmedianews.bsky.social #ge24 (Part 1 of 4)

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Jack Chambers echoing Martin's line about SF being anti-EU. That was true a long time ago. But Chambers has learned his line and says it as if it's current, and isn't thinking too hard about it. #GE24

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

My kids' class had a #GE24 general election today here in Galway West, with STV and everything! The winners were: Noel Grealish (Ind) Sean Kyne (FG) Catherine Connolly (Ind) Gráinne Seoige (FF) John Connolly (FF) I think Hildegarde is probably safe, otherwise could be accurate :-/

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James McDermott @jmmcd.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

There are a lot of misunderstandings and skill issues in this thread But possibly the deepest is this attitude that there is basically one AI system. If free ChatGPT does something, then that's an eternal characteristic of AI.

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