iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is great. Really wish a lot of folk would say what they actually mean

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Wakayama is bringing the good weather

A view of a large intersection in front of Wakayama station, there are many mid-high rise buildings, blue sky, and distant mountains in the background

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Ordered on a whim, got tepanyaki vomit, was absolutely delicious

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Ed Conway @edconway.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

✍️ How diesel found itself at the heart of geopolitics. And why Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of Putin and Xi's playbook. A simple explainer edconway.substack.com/p/the-diesel...

edconway.substack.com

The Diesel Weapon

Why a rather unglamorous fuel is suddenly at the centre of a transatlantic power struggle, and why this matters for all of us

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Cycled 76km across 7 islands today, absolutely ridiculously stunning the whole way. The Shimanami Kaido is my new absolutely beautiful favourite ride ever

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dan mentos @danmentos.com · 22/09/2026

[job interview] interviewer: so god killed all your kids? job: that's right

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Observations from a couple of weeks into the big Japan trip: kombinis are life, cars ruin cities but kei cars ruin them a fuck lot less than SUVs

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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

No civilised country has the death penalty.

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

First time in Tokyo and first time eating spam musubi! Finally see what @funranium.bsky.social has been on about!

A partially eaten spam musubi, being held in a left hand. The pavement behind is very wet

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Missed a golden opportunity for a "can't park there, mate" earlier.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

1/x Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama is taken hostage in a lifeboat, and US Navy SEALs end it after five days. The snipers dealt with the guys in the lifeboat. The Belgians dealt with the guy at the top of the whole trade. A thread.

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Terence Eden @edent.tel · 20/09/2026

This is a decent article about staying safe online, but it contains a classic & non-obvious mistake. www.theguardian.com/money/2026/s... How do you stay protected when you click on phishing link? "Put in place two-factor authentication […] which means you have two steps to log into a site." No!

theguardian.com

Reαd carefully: how to spot – and avoid – a homoglyph attack

Scam emails are increasingly using psychological tricks, such as using near-identical URLs such as miсrosoft.com

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Jason Kint @kint.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Interesting, if at times depressingly unsurprising read this

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Mike Simpson @mdsimpson.co.uk · 16/09/2026

Why is @softwaresaved.bsky.social paying me to talk about #MentalHealth? youtube.com/shorts/pfp74...

youtube.com

https://youtube.com/shorts/pfp7484iAPQ

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Neuroskeptic @neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The soul is real and can be tied with a rope according to this graphical abstract. The paper is even weirder! "Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death" www.cell.com/the-innovati... This is a Cell Press journal... via @pubpeer.com @forbetterscience.bsky.social

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Always a good day when you get to use a Darkplace gif at work

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Just arriving into Temple Meads having tried and failed to get to London this morning. In a sense, it's taken me 6h to go from Ashley Down to Temple Meads, a journey that normally takes 6 minutes

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

My favourite sort of applied chemistry

A strip of freshly developed 35mm black and white film hanging to dry in a kitchen

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Johnny Foreigner are such a bloody fantastic band. Near as damn it 20 years of going to see them and every time is an absolute joy

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Worth reading the linked Mastodon post

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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 07/09/2026

If only there were some legal term for where 12 or more persons who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for a common purpose and the conduct of them (taken together) is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety.

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Richard Irvine-Brown @richib.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Were pictures of ex-president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro in prison were real or AI-generated? There was some debate last weekend. We didn't find any AI generation, but there is enough about the images to test for other digital forgery. Here's a how-to for anybody to try. THREAD...

Nicolas Maduro, with dark hair and moustache, smiles and flashes a V-victory sign with his right hand, while holding his glasses in his left hand. He wears a light grey sweater and is stood against a plain breezeblock wall of off-white and mid-grey.

Nicolas Maduro, with dark hair and moustache, wearing glasses, smiles and flashes V-victory signs with both his hand. He wears a light grey sweater and jogging bottoms, with white trainers, and is stood against a plain breezeblock wall of off-white and mid-grey.

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The Empty City @davidallengreen.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Seems the difference between ‘protestors’ and ‘terrorists’ is that protestors wear balaclavas while terrorists hold placards.

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 05/09/2026

Andy Burnham has, so far, been even less willing than Keir Starmer to call out the UK far right and hard right – he never said a word on Thetford. He stayed out of the Reform donation story yesterday. I'd assume this one will be harder to swerve, but we'll see…

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Draculosity Jones: Ghost Skeleton @brainmage.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

In ancient rome, the retiarii fought with trident tested methods

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This is just preposterous rage bait. My partner is way more intelligent than I am, but my vocabulary is broader than hers and I'd probably "correctly" pronounce more esoteric words than her on account of having gone to a posher school than her (on a scholarship, put down your pitchforks).

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Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science @bennettoxford.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Our new OpenPrescribing Hospitals measure tracks the NHS rollout of subcutaneous pembrolizumab, a cancer treatment that can now be given as an injection in minutes. 🔗 www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/09/n…

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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.

Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.

The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.

Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”

Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.

He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.

In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.

“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”

In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.

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Peter Tennant @pwgtennant.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Does the new shingles vaccine (Shingrix) protect against cardiovascular disease (CVD)? Yes, according to a new 'natural experiment' study in @natmed.nature.com. But the truth is sadly far less convincing! Pull up a chair and let's examine another peer review failure in a Nature journal. 1/10 🧵

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Martin Calladine @uglygame.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

🚨New from me🚨 With the deadline looming for tech firms to incorporate child safety software into phones, the only handset running SafeToNet's software - the government’s favourite supplier - has been found to be hopelessly insecure and removed from sale. 1/ theuglygame.wordpress.com/2026/08/24/p...

theuglygame.wordpress.com

Phoning it in

With the deadline approaching for phone companies to incorporate child safety software, the only handset running a version of software from SafeToNet, the government’s favourite supplier, has been …

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Ed Conway @edconway.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

✍️ Want to understand the bonkers nature of the modern economy? Take a ride with me on the 30,000 mile journey the cod in a fish finger takes between being caught off the coast of Scotland and consumed in a British home 🤯 Promise I'm not making this up👇 edconway.substack.com/p/the-30000-...

edconway.substack.com

The 30,000-mile fish finger

There’s a good chance the cod on your child’s plate has been around the world and back. Not that you’d learn any of that from the label...

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Mémoire2cité @memoire2cite.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

BRUTALISME La cafetiere du Corbusier ou clé a molette La tour de contrôle et le réservoir d'eau de Fos-sur-Mer (1968), conçus par Gaston Jaubert, illustrent la fusion entre infrastructure et forme sculpturale dans le modernisme français d'après-guerre.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/08/2026

As LLMs get better at certain tasks and much more convincing, it's a useful exercise to ask about a subject you know intimately. Here, ChatGPT 5.6 diagrams the wrong game, doubles down, then finally admits its mistake. It cites a paper that doesn't exist, doubles down, and finally confesses again.

ChatGPT query: Diagram the enquist model of agonistic signaling

[poster output]

User: This is fucked up. So you just made that up.

ChatGPT: Yes. I did, and you’re right to call it out.

My first description was not a faithful account of Enquist’s model. I supplied a plausible generic sequence for agonistic assessment—“initial assessment → signaling → reassessment → escalation”—without having verified that those were actually the stages or assumptions in Enquist (1985). Then, when you challenged the “prior information” point, I compounded the problem by giving another specific reconstruction instead of checking the source first.

I’ve now checked secondary material explicitly discussing Enquist’s 1985 model, and it describes the model as one in which players choose among possible displays/actions in an agonistic game, with the evolutionary question being when those choices can constitute honest signaling. That is importantly different from the staged assessment process I initially gave you.

So: do not use either of my previous stage descriptions as a representation of Enquist (1985). I should have looked up the paper/model before answering a source-specific question.

ChatGPT: Yes. You’re right — again.

The poster actually says:

Enquist, M. (1985). “Communication during agonistic encounters.” In R. R. Hinde (Ed.), Advances in the Study of Behavior, Vol. 15, 65–106. Academic Press.

And that citation is not the original Enquist model paper I should have been using.

I made three separate errors here: I generated an unverified citation, then misreported what the poster said twice. That’s a basic source-handling failure.

If you want, I can now do this properly: verify the actual Enquist agonistic-signaling model from the primary paper and give you only the real sequence/stages, with no reconstruction.

User: The paper on the poster doesn't even exist.

ChatGPT: Correct. That poster citation is fabricated. I generated a title and book chapter that do not exist.

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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Searching most major platforms that like aren't reddit feels like swimming through the toilet in trainspotting. Horrible sensation. Unspecific.

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Qagggy! @qagggy.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

UK transit nerds are next level.

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Prof. Ian Walker @ianwalker.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yes I'm subtweeting but can we please remember how many people get head injuries inside cars and yet nobody ever shouts unsolicited advice at unhelmeted car occupants? worldmetrics.org/car-accident...

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Mint Royale @mint-royale.com · 18/08/2026

Impressed that the first thing this Chinese robot does after running faster than Usain Bolt is to try it on with a filing cabinet

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Jon Massey @jonnyboy27.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

My parents brought in a little radio to the ICU for me to listen to R4 while I was in a coma. I hope they turned it off when the fucking archers was on! Maybe they didn't and that explains some of the weird and traumatic memories I have of that period...

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I think the ultimate test of this is actually Boris Johnson. Boris *was fired from his first job* for making up stories, only to go on to be hired into a prestigious role at the Telegraph and spend years lying about the EU at Brussels. And I mean literally lying here; not bad punditry.

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