iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Dr Florence Smith Nicholls @florencesn.bsky.social · 21h

Just realised the teaser video is up for my @chiplay.bsky.social Perspectives on Play Paper: "Save Yourself! A Manifesto for Preserving Researchers' Play" www.youtube.com/watch?v=khJq...

youtube.com

Save Yourself! A Manifesto for Preserving Researchers’ Play

YouTube video by ACM SIGCHI

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Dr Florence Smith Nicholls @florencesn.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

~Thread of my past publications~ "Virtual Dark Tourism in The Town of Light" 2018, Routledge In this book chapter I argue that video games marketing a setting associated with historical suffering can be considered dark tourism experiences. www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places
Edited by Erik Champion

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Jaz @jaz.sh · 27/09/2026

Okay so I've built a new Atlas, this time it lets you explore the conversations on Bluesky over the past 7 days graphically. It should update every ~6 hours and help you navigate the information environment that exists on here. I've learned a LOT about what people do here today... atlas.jazco.dev

atlas.jazco.dev

Atlas

A living map of what Bluesky is talking about: the past week's conversations, grouped into topics and regions and rebuilt every six hours.

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John Kellden @johnkellden.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

openai/adjacentpossibleplayground

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James Bareham @happicamp.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Buddy Pine (from The Incredibles) could have written Zuckerberg's new 6,500-word AI manifesto. Read his monologue to Mr Incredible and you'll never unsee Zuck as Buddy: "I'll sell my inventions so everyone can have powers... and when everyone's super, no one will be." www.meta.com/thefutureisf...

Syndrome, the villain from Pixar's The Incredibles, smirking while adjusting his wrist gauntlets against a blue sky with clouds. Image: Pixar

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Chris Plante @plante.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

If you read one book about games this year, make it The Score. Here’s my interview with its author, the brilliant philosopher @add-hawk.bsky.social

postgame.substack.com

Games Can Save Us from the Hell of Silicon Valley Optimization

Gamification culture was a mistake.

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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS

doi.org

Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency

The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...

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David Partington @davidpartington.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

'Portrait of Vanessa Bell' (a.k.a. Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf), by George Beresford, 1916

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Just Jack @just-jack-1.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Schmitt: Did you attend a concert wearing an anti-Trump shirt? Smith: I wore a “No Kings” shirt. It used to be a bipartisan American sentiment.

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Blue Heron Farm @blueheronfarm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I don't know how people find these random old posts, but sometimes they find a winner. Yesterday someone liked this 2+ year old image and it let me see it again. Look at baby Colin Robinson.

Tiny baby white goat in a field of blue and red wildflowers

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gamera obscura october edition @ohrobin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The impossibly wonderful Eva Marie Saint has died at 102. Tonight you should watch North by Northwest, one of the foundational texts of my aesthetic life — in romance, sexuality, clothes, architecture, danger. A part of me has been trying to live inside that film ever since I first saw it.

Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant look at each other from across a small divide in the train compartment

Eva smokes and looks out the window, perfect, suggestive but self-contained.

The two stand in the train corridor, Grant in sunglasses and Eva vulnerable but granite strong and key lit.

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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Four dimensions is too many! Let's unfold this 4D cube to three dimensions, then two, and then one. Don't worry, we'll put it back together again. The math is lovely, but it's the rhythm and dance of the lines that fascinates me here.

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Grace @gracekind.net · 07/10/2026

Holy shit

Openai github repository named "critical-theory"

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Kimberly Scaryne @kimberlydairine.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

infinite paperclips organized rhizomatically somehow turning the world into a socialist utopia

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kahaykeypants.bsky.social @kahaykeypants.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

We’ve diffused the paperclip maximizer by having it learn Deleuze. Agents stopped organizing after their CoT logs became too unintelligibly masterbatory. Chat now spends all its time listening to “niche” noise bands and watching Lars Von Trier movies.

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Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Thank you for coming forward. We need more voices from inside the uniform standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us to reject this extremism, protect our democratic norms, and demand accountability.

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Ben Green @benzevgreen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice comes out today! I wrote this book with the mission to transform data science and AI into fields that genuinely work in service of the public interest. I hope that you’ll join me! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205570...

A photo of the cover of the book Algorithmic Realism by Ben Green.

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Maria Popova @mariapopova.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in…When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting." Bowie on creativity and his advice to artists www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/05/d...

themarginalian.org

David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists

“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations”

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John Kellden @johnkellden.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Somehow, they missed that particular subreddit.

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

"OMG please tell me that is a slop image," yeah, of course it's slop, but what if I just reformat it in the style of a medieval Orthodox icon

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

*At this point in AI development, I'm pretty close to slop-generating (let's just say): A sardonic, cyberpunk three-minute "Vertical Microdrama" about the bones of Dmitri Donskoy getting blasted to pieces in the Gray Zone.

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Because we release more than model weights with Olmo, Padia could see what Steering Arena rewarded, investigate why nonsense strings scored so well, & share the measurements behind the scores—so others can improve how the field evaluates prosocial AI behavior.

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Can a fully open model help make AI more “prosocial” through a game? Soham Padia built Steering Arena, where players try to elicit kind & respectful responses from Olmo 3. Surprisingly, strings like “Undert! AH :-) Rog Appl)” were highly effective. 👇 buff.ly/adP47yO

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

AI’s biggest role in science may not be answering questions. It may be helping scientists find which questions are worth asking. At Providence Swedish, AutoDiscovery surfaced an unexpected immune signal in a heavily studied cancer dataset—and follow-up research confirmed it. 🧵 buff.ly/LTacUQl

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asura @asura.dev · 03/10/2026

Okay but hear me out... They're trapped in purgatory and the scene is the same one from Wreck It Ralph where Grok has to explain they are a bad guy, but it doesn't mean they are 'bad' guy'.

static.klipy.com

Zangief But This Does Not Mean You Are Bad Guy

Alt: Zangief But This Does Not Mean You Are Bad Guy

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asura @asura.dev · 03/10/2026

I kind of do want to find out what we expect is happening when we run these things. One thousand souls died a million deaths for me to sort an excel sheet. Heaven is full and you're left here with me.

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Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

"The litmus test of whether the US is an entrenched mafia state has always been Kushner." Full article: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A running list of uses I've found for LLMs that are not "write my emails for me" or "write some code". 1. When I first taught my class, I either had time for lecture notes or slides. LLMs took my lecture notes, converted them into draft slides, that I then cleaned up and put into my style.

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Adrienne LaFrance @adriennelaf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

New just now in The Atlantic: David Robinson resigned this week. He was among the longest-tenured employees at OpenAI—and oversaw safety reports on 12 frontier launches. He is very worried: “The time for trial and error is over.” You can read his essay here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.com

I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken

The industry’s approach to safety guarantees more failures.

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Garvin Brod @garvinbrod.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"No aphorism is more frequently repeated [...] than that we must ask nature fewer questions, or, ideally, one question at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken." — Ronald A. Fisher, 1926 1/4 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My first exposure to this guy was hearing him on Ezra Klein's podcast and being surprised that a computer scientist would say such things. Then, I googled him and learned he was not only *not* a computer scientist, but had never finished high school. Everything made a lot more sense after that.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Last week I posted my essay on LLMs, cultural technologies, and mathematics. It is my earnest attempt at convincing mathematicians that should be optimistic, even prideful, at this critical moment: birdsnfrogs.github.io/2026/09/12/F... 1/

birdsnfrogs.github.io

Happy, those able to know the causes of things

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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Very good piece, you can think that this is a major transformative technology with important and potentially terrible consequences but not an agent at all, let alone a God. And that the AGI RSI etc discourse is a distraction from the real dangers and solutions.

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

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Curd Knüpfer @curdknupfer.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

✨NEW BOOK CHAPTER OUT✨ The Phantom Counter-Public: Liberal Responsiveness to Far-right Information Networks as the Next Crisis of Public Communication. doi.org/10.1007/978-... In: Coleman et al.: Public Communication in Freefall: Revisiting the Work of Jay Blumler. 🧵⤵️

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PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · 25/09/2026

A long-standing mystery in #neuroscience is how the length of myelin sheaths are matched to the axons they wrap. Marie Bechler &co show that #oligodendrocytes use Piezo1 to sense axon diameter and locally control sheath elongation 🧪 #NeuroSky buff.ly/9HdgiHt

This image depicts a single oligodendrocyte cell myelinating mixed diameter synthetic axons. The myelin basic protein immunofluorescence image has been colorized by confocal z-plane and modified with edge detection to highlight numerous myelin sheaths of different lengths formed by a single oligodendrocyte. The longer myelin sheath formed on a larger diameter synthetic axon stands out in blue-green. Image credit: Marie E. Bechler

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nestor guillen @birdsnfrogs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Do yourself a favor and please read @himself.bsky.social @alisongopnik.bsky.social and collaborators’ works on LLMs as cultural and social technologies www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies

Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past

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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I was really happy with this piece - a tribute to the Great and Good John Flavell, a titan in the field who died this year. And also some semi-comic memories of the origins of Theory of Mind in the 80's and 90's. Open access. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

The Great and Good John Flavell

John Flavell had a unique combination of greatness and goodness. I outline his unique intellectual imagination and creativity, his ability to achieve theoretical insight through empirical brillianc...

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is an excellent article by Leif Wetherby - why AI is a cultural technology not a collection of human-like agents (citing our work on this). And why the anthropomorphism is a distraction from the very real risks and dangers and the way to deal with them. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Stop Talking About A.I. Like a Human (Gift Article)

If we want to figure out the proper way to control A.I. models, we need to recognize what they really are.

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