iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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julia 🌋 @hypv.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

endnotes are a plot by big bookmark to sell twice as many bookmarks

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I would add that these numbers aren’t so low, in context. GWB hit the bottom at 25%, after Katrina and in the midst of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars *and* the financial crisis of 2008. That’s maybe not as bad as Trump right now, but it is bad. And the idea of the “crazification factor” is real

kfmonkey.blogspot.com

Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor

John: ... I mean, what will it take? That last speech literally made no sense . It was crazy drunken bar talk! Islamic radicals are lik...

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

2 is more famous, 1 is much funnier

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Paul Cohen @paulecohen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"A theocracy, if you can keep it"

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.

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Mollie Katzen @molliekatzen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There are more Cornell frat boys accused of raping one woman than there are trans athletes competing in all of NCAA sports.

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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

He is also a constant cheerleader for “age-gap relationships.” Hanania doesn’t seem to believe any man should be denied a teenager they find attractive. www.liberalcurrents.com/richard-hana...

Allow me, if you can stomach it, to quote him at length:

There is no way to call attraction to 17-year-olds pedophilia without also stigmatizing attraction to women who are slightly older than that. We have an age of consent, and it used to be recognized that it was an arbitrary line that we have to set somewhere. But before the last decade or two, there wasn't this idea that men whose sexual preferences did not exactly line up with the legal minimum in the jurisdiction that they happen to live in were disordered or somehow abnormal. This is a bizarre idea that is frankly inconsistent with people being able to develop realistic understandings of sex differences and human biology.
If men who are attracted to 17-year-olds are disordered, on what basis can those who like
20-year-olds be considered normal? I've noticed that most of the women who are mad at age gap relationships are aggressive middle age types who seem to have a deep personal interest in the issue.

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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Hanania has gone out of his way to try and persuade the mainstream media types and readers he wants to woo that he is no longer a racist. I don’t buy that, but he is at least putting on *the act.* So it’s extremely telling that this is how he continues to talk about women, rape, and even Epstein.

This manifests in Hanania's contempt for victims of rape and trafficking and his repeated support for age-gap relationships, even those that would constitute statutory rape in many jurisdictions. When The Bulwark broke news on Monday that Gen-Z looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular had been accused of rape, Hanania sprung into action discrediting the allegations. On X, he posted
Women who claim to be sexually assaulted or raped and then continue associating with their alleged attackers deserve zero sympathy.
They re either
1) liars; or
2) making it impossible to differentiate between real and fake allegations, hurting other men and women and society as a whole
A sane legal system would take this into account and not trust such women in criminal or civil lawsuits. They should also be socially stigmatized as bad people.

It's no mistake that this is all entangled with Hanania's horrific defenses of Jeffrey Epstein and the abuses on his private island. Hanania has posted that "Hating Epstein represents the essence of antisemitism. The resentment of mediocrities, conspiracy thinking, and chud moralism."
He went so far as to baldly assert that some of the women not only had it coming but even benefited in the end from Epstein's systemic rape operation:
One of the Epstein "trafficking victims" is a prostitute who he met when she was in her twenties, who had sex with him and reported that he gave her an orgasm.
There's more evidence of Epstein being a stud than there is he's what conspiracy theorists
claim.

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Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

IMO it’s clear from Richard Hanania’s own words that he believes that rape, both statutory and violent, is the right of a certain kind of man. Elite men It’s appalling that this man is given a drop of ink or a second of interview time in our media. My latest: www.liberalcurrents.com/richard-hana...

liberalcurrents.com

Richard Hanania Doesn't Even Try to Hide His Male Supremacism

Hanania is a reminder of the dangers of rehabilitating extremist intellectuals.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

You suck. You really do. You’re never going to win the Dem nomination, let alone become president. Retire and do your shitty podcast.

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The Serfs (youtube.com/theserfstv) @theserfstv.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is the most masculine video on the internet right now

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Trip Kirkpatrick @triplingual.myatproto.social · 19/09/2026

Yes and . . . It's all people. People are responsible for killing these children. And lying about it. And dehumanizing them. And writing a whole report that says it was the fault of putatively non-human factors like "intel" and "A.i."

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Rex Huppke @rexhuppke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is spectacular, folks. We live in a moment in American history when the president and his administration are so racist and dumb that a toy company has to put out a statement saying: "OUR GIANT ROBOT THAT TURNS INTO A TRUCK DENOUNCES RACISM AND HAS NO CONNECTION TO THE CURRENT PRESIDENT."

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There is no definition of slop, either formal or informal, that just means unreliable source or dubious quality. I'm going to die on this hill. That is not what the critical response to new media forms of knowledge was about.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Criticism of the other new media forms were quite infamously about these forms being TOO human -- biased, uncredentialed, etc — and not about scale or automation ant all.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Slop does not refer to criticism or mere dislike. You can use even the most colloquial of definitions for slop and all of them at least minimally refer to volume and machine produced.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Feels like someone who didn’t have a driver’s license when Daily Kos was founded doesn’t have the best memory here on what “we” think. No, we are memory holing. Because blogs were never considered that. No one certainly ever saw them the way they see AI slop, mostly because it was human made.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It’s amazing they could carry him with the tears in their eyes streaming out as they said “Sir, we are worried it will all come down on you.”

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Colin Danby @cdanby.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

If someone wants to put on an AI course and they can show it's rigrous and find a place for it in the curriculum, I got no problem. But no, your half-baked theories are not a reason to screw up everyone else's classes.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This movie is just so amazing. There can be only one.

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Spooky Sara (Endless Halloween🔪🩸🪦) @pashion.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Apply directly to the forehead

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

gotta bring this classic over here

a tweet from my old twitter account reading “[historian voice] it has always sucked ass to be alive”

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It's Pipes, Mum! Pipes is here! @scriblit.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

RIP to all the managers who will now starve to death, sobbing 'what do I want to eat?' at an uncaring phone

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A Bloody Woodstake @tenderbeefsteak.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

My SIL is teaching remotely at a school in southern Illinois and I was not ready to learn about the mascot

A mascot painted on the wall of a high school. It says “cornjerkers” and the mascot is an awful ear of corn with brown hair holding a football and kicking, I want to say, a soccer ball.

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Jimmy Two Heads 💀🎃 @jimmytwohands.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I know exactly why, poindexter. It’s because it looks cool as fuck

This 11,000-Year-Old Statue from Turkey Shows a Man Riding a Leopard.
Archaeologists Aren't Sure
Why
The strange sculpture reverses a recurring Stone Age motif of humans confronting dangerous predators.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

This doesn’t surprise me. Seth Moulton is a coward without convictions. He led a push to keep Nancy Pelosi from being speaker, but was unwilling to take her place of the putsch worked. “We need new leadership—just not me!” Real profile in courage.

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Brian Honan @brianhonan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Happy Skynet day to all those who celebrate

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

He then said, “don’t worry, I’m trying as hard as I can to push that 1.2 million number up by this time next year.”

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Walking Eagle News @theeagleist.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

BREAKING: sucks to have stuff renamed by white people, doesn’t it?

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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

jed york use your billions of dollars to support decriminalizing sex work

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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Ted didn’t notice the name of the account who posted this Dolly clip he retweeted until it was much too late. He finally deleted it after he was made aware.

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bowie deschanel @raisingonebrow.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It's gonna be a no for me, dawg

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

I have to say, it’s tough when @defector.com’s WYTS gets scooped. But this happened just hours after they published one on the Chargers! Samer Kalef could have made some hay with this. defector.com/why-your-tea...

Chargers DC Chris O’Leary with a play calling sheet with Psalm 139:14 on it

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Natalie Harp is a year older than Martin Luther King Jr. was when he gave his I Have a Dream speech. She has agency and is running the propaganda operation that serves to put people in concentration camps. She does not get a pass because she looks like a dipshit teenager.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Threads truly encompasses all the tapestry of expression, from the bot to what may be just a bit

Threads user andrew_of_mistwovoa posting:
Frank Herbert literally wrote a sci fi world, he would have supported ai

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Would find ”we should teach students about the Bible” a lot more convincing if we weren’t on a twenty-year run of closing down religious studies programs.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

All genAI responses are fabricated. Not in the sense that all writing, etc is fabricated, but in the sense that they’re made without any discrimination*. GenAI predicts, it doesn’t deliberate. It can’t. Fabricated isn’t a synonym for inaccurate. Why would you use it as such?

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Another point here worth making, I think. The more national attention Ossoff gets here, the better for national Dems. If you listen to Ossoff, he does a great job (IMO) of linking Trump and his corruption and failings to “kitchen table” issues. Trump makes billions in crypto, you can’t afford gas.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I grew up in the same hometown as Christine O’Donnell. Please trust me that the media was far too kind to her. She for 40% of the vote in a red wave year. Any other year and she might have been looking at crazification numbers.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Teaching the Bible is not the same as teaching American religious history. Full stop. Doing the latter requires examining the Bible in historical context—it means treating it as a historical document with multiple meanings. That is the *opposite* of what many of these Texans here want.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

This is a “Sir” story from 2017. Why are you assuming it’s true? There’s no reason to believe Trump wasn’t making this up, either then or the several other times he’s told the story.

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John Smolenski @jsmolenski.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Wow. It’s almost like Nichols is out of touch. His first post mentioned New Hampshire, b/c he worked at Dartmouth, an Ivy League school with 4400 undergrads in a town of 12k. Most students have wildly different experiences! We have over 20k students living off campus here (which is most, by far).

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Jeremy Pober-geist 👻 @jpober.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Everything I don't like is woke bourgeois decadence by Tyler Austin Harper

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