iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 12/09/2026

Some kinda bug got at a squash so we let Gertie try it

A grey/black standard poodle lies in grass. The view is from the front. She is licking her snout and holds a partly shredded yellow summer squash between her front paws.

Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 29/08/2026

Turns out GIFs posted directly get squashed to one frame. The BlueSky client transcodes to video and posts with a special GIF flag to enable autoplay and looping. Should be fixed, and this post should prove that old GIFs get transcoded as needed, no specific update process required

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 27/08/2026

posting live from @chicago.at will it go disastrously wrong?

Michael Jackson eating popcorn and staring ahead, presumably at a movie screen (animated)

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 25/08/2026

it's true though! -- straight outta "Understanding Comics"

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 24/08/2026

Getting into open source was huge for my professional development. I learned so much from reading code and observing the maintainers. We can and must develop social norms that don't overwhelm these ecosystems. (partly: AI coding agents succeed largely because they can use these open source tools!)

Even if the change is correct, what's the point in responding? At that point I may as well copy the issue into my own agent and fix it myself, without the overhead of dealing with someone else's agent. That's the part that should worry us: the most rational move is to cut the other person out entirely, and I don't think anyone actually wants an ecosystem where that's true.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 22/08/2026

I like Jill LePore’s take on the “AI is inevitable” frame

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 11/08/2026

From June but new to me... bestfitmusic.substack.com/p/the-monday...

So, no: we are not living in a time where the algorithm has rotted creativity and culture has come to a standstill. We weren't in 2001, we weren't in 2010, and we're not now. Not even close. But we are suffering from a lack of tools within large sections of journalism and academia who still haven't learned the lessons of Napster, more than a quarter of a century later. Revolutions in who gets to be heard, how they reach their audiences, the way we curate, the very way we hear - and radical, brilliant albums, shows, festivals, online rabbit holes, experiences that couldn't exist were those revolutions not taking place
- have been happening right in front of our eyes. These are revolutions that affect orders of magnitude more people, and involve more music and lived experience, than punk or acid house ever did at their crux moments. They are what define the current moment, and yet they don't generate headlines or critical excitement... and THAT is a problem.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 05/08/2026

"Thinking about care could also make us think about Al in new ways." humanistreview.ai/issue-1/gopn...

Thinking about care could also make us think about Al in new ways.
One of the deep dilemmas of artificial intelligence is the alignment problem. Suppose we did create an autonomous, exploratory robot, a kind of digient, that acted in the world to accomplish its goals? How could we make sure that it would want the same things we do?

The obvious idea is to train the computer to recognize human goals, and to make sure that they help humans to accomplish those goals.
But humans are often not very good at recognizing our own goals, and those goals are often contradictory. How could a computer figure out what we really want when we don't know ourselves?

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 05/08/2026

more from humanistreview.ai/issue-1/gopn...

If so much of what we know is the result of cultural transmission, doesn't something like a large model have all the intelligence we need?
Don't those billions of words encapsulate all human knowledge?
What's missing?

[begin highlighting] Cultural transmission has two sides-imitation and innovation. Each generation can use imitation to take advantage of the discoveries of previous ones, and large models are incredibly powerful imitation engines; they infer and reproduce the statistical patterns in texts and pictures. But there would be no point to imitation if each new generation didn't also innovate. [end highlighting] We go beyond the words of others and the wisdom of the past to observe a changing world and make new discoveries about it. We explore and experiment to discover new things about the world, we use imagination to conceive new models of the world and test whether they are true-and we combine both these abilities with cultural transmission.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 02/08/2026

I'm trying the BlackSky app and for a second I thought you'd solved this! then realized I was actually on the "For You" feed and the same UX spot for my Smart Mix shows the "ot:" feed ID. Understandable if you assumed no one would ever see that!

Screenshot of the bottom part of a post in a feed, with typical controls like"reply" and "repost". At the bottom left corner in small type is a string of text: "ot:ded1ae12-6ab8-…."

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 02/08/2026

TIL among the popular lexicon that inspired college mascots like Ohio Buckeyes, Indiana Hoosiers and Wisconsin Badgers we had Illinois Suckers and Missouri Pukes h/t @barrypopik.bsky.social barrypopik.com/blog/puke_st... www.northernpublicradio.org/illinois/202... www.loc.gov/pictures/res...

Detail of a printed map of the US from the 19th century showing Midwestern states. Each state has a nickname and an illustration of an animal, almost all pigs.

The states shown, with their nicknames:
Minnesota gopher
Wisconsin badger
Michigan wolverine
Iowa hawkeye
Illinois sucker
Indiana hoosier
Ohio buckeye
Missouri puke
Kentucky corn cracker

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 20/07/2026

a classic example of the alt-weekly style in "Disaster rehearsal: Bartering for scars and faking death at O’Hare’s triennial airplane crash simulator." chicagoreader.com/city-life/di...

I was assigned the character of Tonya Lighthorse at the sign-in table. According to my lanyard, I was a 65-year-old woman with deep lesions on her right leg and a lower-than-average heart rate—satisfyingly dramatic, I thought, though others were disappointed by the mildness of their conditions. They haggled for more wounds from staff and volunteers. One woman pressed a small, intimidated teenager to trade assignments so that she could have her own head done up in blood. Later, in the staging area, the same woman asked the moulage artists if she could have propeller blades stuck into her head.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 19/07/2026

Love you @semble.so but this design has got to go. This does not signal "click me to edit" especially the checkmark!

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 18/07/2026

Well, Bluesky did not come through but /r/chicagofood did! We set out today to run down some suggestions. Delightful Pastries and Montrose Deli did not have jagodzianki but Deli 4 You in Niles did! The real winner was the rose pączek from Montrose Deli (far left).

A pink plate with several pieces of pastry, including a half of a rose pączek, a piece of a pistachio stuffed croissant with some chocolate coating and a sprinkle of crushed pistachios; half of a "sweet pretzel", and half of a jagodzianka (polish blueberry bun)

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 28/06/2026

Meta always serving the best interests of its users apple.news/Ab-AsnenpSfe...

MOST OF THE PEOPLE I SPOKE WITH said they wouldn't bother subscribing to Instagram Plus. But a number of them said that they would feel differently if they'd
recently gone through a breakup. Both Tracy and Begg worried about the app preying on vulnerable people in exactly that situation, as well as those who struggle with attachment disorders, OCD, or sensitivity to rejection.
It's not good for anyone, Tracy said, to "know where people are, what they're doing, who they're with; it can create these obsessive tendencies where it's just a lot healthier to have some blank canvas in your mind." She predicted the features would "increase anxiety, stalking behaviors, and time on social media, which is obviously what the platforms are going for."

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 19/06/2026

Does there need to be a PR?

Screenshot from the Slingshot documentation reading:

Current status
A Slingshot is currently in a v.0, pre-release state. There is one production instance and you can use it!
Expect short downtimes for restarts as development progresses and lower cache hit-rates as the internal storage caches are adjusted and reset.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 13/06/2026

Atmosphere curiosity: sifa.id counts over 60M accounts while Jaz's stats bsky.jazco.dev/stats say fewer than 45M. Why such a large difference? Is it possible that Jaz is only counting Bsky PDSes? Even if so, seems like a much larger number of independent accounts than I'd have guessed.

Do you already have a Bluesky or other Atmosphere account, like 61,807, 379 others?
New profiles every minute. Real people, real activity.

Bluesky Post Count and Author
Stats
Aggregate stats for all posts in Jaz's Bluesky index.
44,808,621 Users
3.701B Total Follows
2.886B Total Posts
15.940B Total Likes

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 10/06/2026

Since I just visited and since BlueSky now supports lots of images... views from the Washington DC installation of the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 05/06/2026

Check out this cool virtual workshop series from @citybureau.bsky.social "Documenting as Power: Media Literacy for Civic Life" www.citybureau.org/events/found...

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 04/05/2026

Cool soundsystem at the Land School for a screening of "Happy Today", a concert film of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 03/05/2026

Maybe the neighborhood coyote dropped by this afternoon because we have a "wildlife habitat" sign in the front yard?

A coyote sits in a suburban front yard, next to a young oak tree and with its head and shoulders visible from behind a yard sign. The sign reads "All we can do is take care of each other." In the background is a small set of wind chimes, the front door of the house, a small sign reading "wildlife habitat" and the edge of a US flag.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 01/05/2026

Michael Pollan is blowing my mind with these xenobots (describing the work of Michael Levin)

Ebook screenshot:

He has demonstrated that by simply messing with the bioelectric field, he can overturn that division of labor to create all sorts of freak crea-tures: planaria with two heads and no tails, or two tails and no heads; tadpoles with eyes on the tips of their tails (which can see nonetheless!); and a creature never before seen in evolution that he calls a Xenobot.

The recipe for a Xenobot is simple: Scrape some cells from the skin of a tadpole, and put them in a solution with nutrients. Freed from their "boring day job as 2-D skin cells" (the role assigned to them by the frog's bioelectric field), the cells will clump together, forming a tiny round proto-organism; a new bioelec-tric field will then emerge, linking the cells and allowing them to cooperate.

Why do cells left to their own devices spontaneously get together? There is safety and predictability in numbers, Levin explained, as well as the added benefit of "collective intelligence," which arises when the boundary of self expands from the individual cell membrane to the collective's outermost edge. A multicellular creature can do all sorts of things that a unicellular one cannot. It can step up from the simple "metabolic space" in which cells operate to the three-dimensional space of animals, allowing it to form more ambitious goals. For example, tadpole skin cells have cilia to protect the animal from infection; the Xenobots "repurpose" the cilia to function as a mode of locomotion, allowing them to swim around and even navigate mazes.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 08/04/2026

In this week’s @sayswhopodcast.com @dansinker.com truly nails the voice of that particular type of BlueSky scold who jumps on posters for suggesting that democrats should visibly act as an opposition party. (Slightly truncated because of Overcast’s clip limit)

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 06/04/2026

lazyweb remind me to look for public traces of the upcoming Frictional Design in Hybrid Human-AI Systems conference sites.google.com/view/frictio...

"In its third edition, this workshop builds on and expands its exploration of friction-in-design in AI systems, hosting a full-day event that challenges the pursuit of seamless, rapid interactions. In contrast to the conventional narrative that human over-reliance on AI stems solely from cognitive biases, we emphasize the critical role of designers and developers in fostering user empowerment, skill retention, and ethical responsibility.

This approach advocates for a balanced perspective on Human-AI interaction: one that harmonizes operational efficiency with the demands of meaningful, mindful, and effective human knowledge work.

Central to our discussion is the concept of friction-in-design or frictional protocols in AI systems, which are deliberate design choices that introduce moments of reflection and cognitive engagement, even at the expense of speed. The main aim of these protocols is reducing risks of overreliance on AI."

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 16/03/2026

There's these weird little guys drawn by Nell Irvin Painter based on medieval transcriptions of Pliny the Elder but to the original topic of the thread, Painter's "The History of White People" is 90% colonial era and later

Photo of page 26 of "The History of White People". The caption reads "Figs. 2.1-4. Monstrous people: Cyclops, Dog-Head, Sciopod, drawn by Nell Painter from Thomas de Cantimpré; Panotii, drawn by Nell Painter, after the Cotton Tiberius MS of the British Library." The top-left image, Cyclops, is a tall, skinny humanoid figure holding its right hand over its groin. It has a single large eye in the center of its face and shaggy hair and beard. The top-right image, sciopod: a humanoid lying on its back. From the waist down, it has a single leg and large foot, aloft and casting a shadow over the torso. Bottom left: Dog-Head, a creature with human arms and legs on "all-fours", with a very furry torso and a sort of dog-shaped head. Bottom right: panotii, a humanoid figure with long tentacle-like features which I guess are supposed to be ears dangling and wrapping around its arms; if they were free-hanging, they would probably be as long as the figure.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 01/03/2026

dunno how much this = that but: Shukongojin "Known also as the Thunderbolt Deity, this fierce protector of the Law of Buddhism brandishes a vajra that symbolizes the power of wisdom to penetrate ignorance and destroy evil." I always stop and pay my respects when I go to Art institute of Chicago

Photo of a bronze sculpture of Shukongojin, a muscular humanoid form with a fierce facial expression and a third eye in the middle of the forehead. It brandishes a short rod, the vajra, in one raised hand. The hair is flames standing upright.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 28/02/2026

Starting my morning catching up on the overnight attacks.

Screenshot of a news aggregator app. The three headlines are:

Reuters: US-Israeli attack triggers fear and panic in Iran

ABC News: Iran live updates: Trump announces 'major combat operations,' could last for days

Business Insider: US forces are locked in air-defense battles, fending off attacks on American bases amid the fighting with Iran, official says

Above the headlines is an advertisement for We the People 250th Anniversary whiskey. There is no text, just a bottle shown next to a gift box. The bottle top is a tiny Liberty Bell.

At the bottom of the label is an image of the US Capitol. At either end of the wings is an array of revolutionary soldiers around a cannon with an American flag. On the either side of the Capitol dome is the text "E Pluribus Unum". (This full text is repeated on each side.)

At the bottom left off the images is a clip art American flag.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 15/02/2026

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Text: I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool water on my feet and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good. At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them away I was trying to give not just my jam – which was admittedly runny and seedy – but something of the peace of that creek, of summer itself.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 30/01/2026

Almost 30 years later, my first web application is a clue in today's Puzzmo crossword!

text: 2) Online judicial archive named after a courtroom call

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 21/01/2026

Gift link if you need it www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/o...

Text: It’s one thing to tank or slow-walk an investigation. It’s quite another to publicly declare that no investigation will happen on any level and then announce that you’ll be investigating the victim’s partner and supporters instead. Both paths are unethical and corrupt. Undermining an investigation at least pays lip service to the idea of accountability and public trust. The administration’s actions in Ms. Good’s case are a declaration that there will be no accountability and that it would prefer to instill fear rather than trust.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 09/01/2026

I love this so much @/tuyo.art on insta www.instagram.com/p/DSXmrKqgmUG/

A painting, black on white, bold, flat style, portrait orientation.

On the right, a full length view of a smiling person wearing a poncho or similar full-body shapeless garment, with alternating black and white vertical stripes. On the person's head is a hat that is made of two symmetrical bird heads facing opposite directions.

To the left off the figure, text:

THROW
YOUR
FEARS
INTO
THE
RIVER

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 29/12/2025

You live in Chicago (North side). Your Christmas tree is done for the season. I got a guy (two guys actually) who can take care of that for you. Through January 16

A holiday themed image advertising a service. Text: Two college students will remove your tree and clean around the area — then we'll drop it off at Warren Park to recycle. Text 773-550-0418 $25 @chitowntrees on insta

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 30/11/2025

Good closer to this segment from @onthemedia.bsky.social (repeated from earlier this year)

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 02/11/2025

More in this vein from @eryk.bsky.social mail.cyberneticforests.com/thoughts-on-...

Rather than asserting that the language machine is a thinking machine, we might step back from this conflation of thought and language. We can begin to cultivate a literacy that immunizes us against the persuasion of a chatbot, which is steered by statistical probability but also by design decisions — the fine-tuning and system prompting of the commercial enterprises that sell them. AI won't “decide” to persuade people to do harmful things on a global scale any time soon; but AI companies are persuading us to do harmful things on a global scale already. This stems from believing AI is “intelligent.”

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 01/11/2025

This New Yorker cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson neatly combines two of my idiosyncratic enthusiasms

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 07/10/2025

From 404 Media: Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime www.404media.co/police-said-...

In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.

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Joe Germuska @joe.germuska.com · 30/09/2025

Your tax dollars at work (you bet I left website feedback) www.hud.gov

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