iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 10/09/2026

My preschooler tells me Live Long and Prosper at bedtime. Happy 60th Anniversary to Star Trek.

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 29/08/2026

If this were happening somewhere else, we would call them what they are: Internally Displaced People.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 29/08/2026

Part of the film is in chronological order.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 17/08/2026

That's pretty much all I do already.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 13/08/2026

Amazingly, kids eventually learn to read. Eventually they must memorize the invisible patterns of English letter sounds, and then memorizing whole words. But educational content that I've seen so far does not do them any favors when it comes to vowels.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 13/08/2026

I've been consuming a lot of phonics and reading content over the last few years and it is interesting that never does any of it grapple with English vowel letters not mapping sensibly to sounds, always pretending it's obvious. (At least consonant letters generally have only one or two sounds.)

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Peter Rojas @roj.as · 13/08/2026

Would it shock anyone to learn that the creator of the notorious Forbes 30 Under 30 list engaged in sketchy behavior?

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Birds Are Dinosaurs @birdsaredinosaurs.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

At the time, Lemoine probably knew more about language transformer technology than anyone alive and it still consumed his sanity. Google fired the engineer but pressed on with the technology. And now it's installed on your computer whether you want it or not.

theguardian.com

Google fires software engineer who claims AI chatbot is sentient

Company said Blake Lemoine violated Google policies and that his claims were ‘wholly unfounded’

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 31/07/2026

AI makes it more obvious when you don't care. I guess you can care and use AI, maybe?, but the bullshitters are easier to spot now, I guess.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 22/07/2026

OpenAI lets you target users for ads based on their email address or phone number. Is that common in online ad bidding?

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 21/07/2026

I'm always interested in FAANG advertising policies because there's always some sort of privileged power structure embedded in there. In OpenAI's new ad policy, "race, religion, gender identity" are "sensitive social issues." Existing is not a social issue. openai.com/policies/ad-...

openai.com

Ad policies

OpenAI’s Ad Policies outline standards for ad placement and content in ChatGPT, including brand safety rules, sensitive contexts, and disallowed categories.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 16/07/2026

Unless you're at a wedding or bar/bat mitzvah where kippahs are provided, nobody wears the same kippah, though. :)

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 15/07/2026

Btw, I sent you something to edit on gdocs, in case you didn't see it yet.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 15/07/2026

That's not her name. Oh she wants to go by a different name. Is that how she wants to be identified. Oh really. Should GovTrack show her legal last name or the last name she wants to go by, her maiden name?

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 11/07/2026

Bloomberg is reporting based on my own data that my count is totally wrong. Oops.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 10/07/2026

This would be the 8th time in the last 50+ years, with the last time being 30 years ago.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 10/07/2026

Jesus christ if this causes GovTrack to crash, I am going to be annoyed. The number of times the 10 Day rule has occurred is so small that it's a personal insult to all legislative data people everywhere.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 05/07/2026

A Jewish president who did this would be impeached within weeks. A Muslim president who did this would be assassinated the next day. The Republican agenda is showing that Christian nationalists dominate.

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Mark Jacob @markjacob.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It’s outrageous that a government whose Constitution forbids the “establishment of religion” has been hijacked by Christofascists.

Official White House post on X shows a crucifix and says “faith is worth protecting” and “there is no great American republic without faith.”

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alexis simpson @amutepiggy.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

you guys remember that scene from Independence Day when all the kooks went to the top of that building to "greet our new alien friends" and got instantly evaporated. thinking of that scene again for no reason

11 minutes ago

Aishvarya Kavi

Reporting from the

National Mall

It is a chaotic scene on the National Mall. Several hundred people have refused to leave despite an order to evacuate because of severe inclement weather that is approaching. Some are even arguing with Secret Service agents. At one point, a crowd of people began running back toward the stage.

An officer is sternly repeating the order over a bullhorn and the crowd is booing. Many have begun chanting "U.S.A., U.S.A." A federal law enforcement officer is trying to assure people that the event has not been canceled. Many are not convinced.

One man walking by blamed the situation on "liberals in the weather service," adding, "I think this is baloney."

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Arthur Delaney @delaneyrules.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

The fighter jets flying over my house today really enhance the "military occupation" vibe we've had from the soldiers walking around

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 03/07/2026

This makes me so sad, as I hear them passing over my house. Any use of military force is violence, it's a failure, and honoring it is a failure for civilization.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 02/07/2026

This weekend is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That preceded the formation of the United States by many years. A whole war of Independence happened. This weekend is not the 250th birthday of the country. We have another shot at a good 250 party in 2039.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 30/06/2026

We want justices to include justice in their decisions, we want them to avoid truly inhumane results, and that's why we have a living Constitution.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 30/06/2026

And not that anyone buys the "originalism" schtick anymore, but how can you follow originalism and also care whether the end result is just? If the answer comes from the text itself only, this shows his prejudice to the issue before it came to his desk.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 30/06/2026

In his dissent, Justice Alito calls the majority's ruling "inhumane" and "grotesque." It's transparent that what he means is the wrong kind of people are sub-human.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 30/06/2026

Looking forward to seeing how the Supreme Court's conservative majority Roberts, Ginni, the flag over Alito's house, McConnell, Squee, and Barrett split on birthright citizenship.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 29/06/2026

It depends on Congress's spine, if they never present the bill.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 28/06/2026

We need Substack but you get posts printed and sent to you in the mail. Like a magazine. But smaller. Like a zine. Exactly like a zine.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 16/06/2026

I voted in DC's primaries and I'm glad to have so many qualified candidates to choose from. Ward 1 can't go wrong.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 06/06/2026

60 Minutes is the one and only news outlet where the viewers have an attachment to an ensemble of journalists. That's it's whole schtick. Change the faces and long-time viewers will lose interest.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 31/05/2026

Exactly exactly. The loss of unwritten knowledge due to time is one of my top concerns at my day job.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 26/05/2026

The dominant theory of consciousness is that brains alone couldn't possibly make people conscious. Contrary to all available evidence. That's the sort of anti-scientific thinking that leads to people saying LLMs cannot be a part of the mechanism of intelligence.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 26/05/2026

I despise LLM AI deeply and will be the last person on the planet to adopt AI (outside of disability accessibility and and a few other unprofitable use cases). But those who say LLMs fundamentally cannot model true intelligence are bullshitting themselves too. Nobody knows what cognition really is.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 15/05/2026

The world needs children's books that read well on eink devices and open source hardware devices to read them on. My house is slowly transforming into merely a library for my toddler.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 12/05/2026

I should just start saying GovTrack is powered by AI and the press attention will roll in again.

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 07/05/2026

Fucking racist complains people are mean to him for being a fucking racist

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 30/04/2026

Republicans are such fuckers they refused to take the win 35 days ago when Ds abandoned their ICE reform demands and essentially wasted a month of time without advancing any of their priorities. Only to accept the same deal now.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 27/04/2026

If this ballroom gets built, the first dance goes to Obama in his tan suit.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 14/04/2026

Heh. I walked out of a restaurant forgetting to pay this weekend, while we're on embarassment.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 14/04/2026

*replacement Before I did this regularly, I Instacart'ed a single square battery in the middle of the night so I could sleep. Learned later you can press the button to silence the warning.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 14/04/2026

Well until the lifespan of the detector itself is reached. Which is around 10 years. But 10 year replar would be so much better than yearly.

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Joshua Tauberer @joshdata.me · 14/04/2026

I don't want to deal with chirps in the middle of the night so I replace all my batteries on a schedule. But there's power there already! Please dear Maintenance Gods, enable smoke detectors to recharge rechargeable batteries so they never need to be replaced.

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