iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I hope those "fretting" aides get prosecuted, given they're going along with something they know is illegal.

What he's trying to say is that, unlike doctors, AI is trained on all the random bullshit and conspiracy mongering found on the internet, and therefore more likely to agree with his ideas.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 23h

We also need to think of Trump II as the equivalent of IT penetration testing, but for democracy. Someone's just gone through and identified lots of possible exploits. How can we shut them down while preserving the useful stuff?

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Thinking about this a bit: is imposter syndrome the antithesis of Dunning-Kruger?

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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The wrong fucking people have imposter syndrome

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One of the likely results of the midterms will be that we won't have to listen to this yahoo mindlessly lying to us for at least two years. And I am here for that.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

An interesting thing that may be relevant here: If you go to Anthropic's pre-print, they say that they re-ran the analysis and "the array was missed in every rerun." (The array being a diagnostic series of repeats.) So, for whatever reason, the AI mostly misses these.

www-cdn.anthropic.com

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

nyti.ms

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

A great story about one of the cooler organisms on the planet - Paulinella, which I didn't even know existed as recently as a decade or so ago.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Ok, I've quickly gone through the technical doc Anthropic released about its newly-found repeat associated protein. A short summary thread: The AI did a great job of identifying a pattern that humans could easily have overlooked (relatively short repeats with lots of intervening DNA).

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

For the first seven months of 2026, the US saw photovoltaics (both utility and small-scale) generate 72 percent of the electricity produce by burning coal. Barring a dramatic change in trends, we're probably about two years from solar passing coal for annual generation. Data from US EIA.

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 24/09/2026

OMG -- under questioning from Hassan, Trump's FDA nominee Heidi Overton refuses to acknowledge that Trump can ever be wrong about anything even after she's confronted with a specific example of something Trump is clearly wrong about

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Between him and Feinstein, it's pretty clear that we need a rough equivalent of the 25th amendment for Congress. Except one with some objective standards so that a congressional majority can't just ignore the problems.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So, I turned my chaotic little developmental biology rant into an actual article that is hopefully somewhat less chaotic and a bit more approachable.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Appreciating Bluesky this morning after having written a developmental biology lecture in the form of a rant and waking up to find it's one of the more popular things I've ever posted here.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ok, this "there are two separate brains" thing appears to be making the rounds, and I want to be absolutely clear: this is a press office overhyping some perfectly reasonable science that won't come as a surprise to most developmental biologists.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

As much as I'd enjoy reading a good dunking on Pinker, you guys are not going to trick me into reading Virginia Heffernan in order to get one.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Also notable here: Scalise is using Trump's appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner as evidence to claim that Trump is a fan of the press. The people who organized the dinner are being used exactly as predicted.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

On the plus side, attempts to block wind power on national security grounds have been called bullshit multiple times by lower courts, and they don't seem to be even contemplating taking them to the Supreme Court.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Just remember, AI systems were trained on anti-factual gibberish like this, too.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Lies in the first minute alone: Law abiding citizens never have any reason to fear law enforcement. DHS law enforcement is highly qualified. ICE is going after the worst of the worst.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Once again, all the spokespeople and everyone running social media accounts have got to go on day 1 of a new administration.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Turn Park Avenue into an actual park? What a crazy idea! Hopefully Mamdami can shepherd this past the inevitable opposition during his time in office.

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Same people who seem to think it’s bad for China to beat us at AI are perfectly fine with China beating us at high speed rail, solar energy, wind energy, shall we go on

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Hear me out on this one: what if there turn out to be a lot more assholes in rich countries, and we don't want to put them in a position of influencing the far future?

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

For context on this, inflation was nearly 10% for Carter's entire term, which means there were periods within it that were considerably higher. Which suggests the US public has now spent so many years with relatively low inflation that it has limited perspective on what it's experiencing now.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Has anyone totaled up the number of days this Congress has been out of session just because Mike Johnson was afraid of allowing a vote on something?

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Less corruption, more sailing vessels. (This one courtesy of Peru on the 4th)

Image of a large, four masted sailing ship with alternating red and white sails, and an enormous Peruvian flag rippling off the back.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Beginning to think that if I ever want to get caught up on my email, I'm going to have to spend a week trashing every single PR email without reading it.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Reading a paper that includes the phrase "predicted explodability landscape".

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Something weirdly not noted in a lot of the coverage of the extortionate threats to murder the Kennedy Center unless it’s reimagined as a shrine to Trump: There was no dire fiscal crisis until Trump’s goombahs started mucking with it. Its finances were fine. projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/o...

projects.propublica.org

John F Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica

Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from millions of nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as...

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

You know all those videos you've seen of Trump appointees being asked by Senators "who won the 2020 election?" and they squirm and play linguistic gymnastics to avoid giving a real answer? Alito has given every indication he'd put in a similar performance.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Remember guys, it's not the blatant racism that's despicable, it's facing consequences for the racism that's the real problem.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I'm curious what would happen if you asked an AI to scan training data and remove any sources that talk about rogue AIs, essentially creating training data with no bad examples to follow. Would the AI do it? Would an AI trained on the resulting data set have fewer alignment issues?

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Was just looking over the schedule for the Quantum World Congress (a quantum computing expo), and it very oddly is dotted with what look like AI generated graphics featuring... Albert Einstein, who was famously uncomfortable with quantum phenomena that are central to quantum computing.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I don't think there's an actual "strategy" here beyond a desperate plea for votes, but it's sort of accidentally strategic. People whose identity is tied up in voting Republican are going to be looking for ways to justify voting against their interests. This gives them one.

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Matt Steinglass @mattsteinglass.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Title 18 US Code 597: "Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate...if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I have good relationships with a number of people in the PR industry or in house at companies. At the same time, I feel I'm at war with the PR industry.

A screenshot of the following text:
Hi! Following up to see if you’re interested in reviewing the new TUSHY Classic 4.0 Bidet?

Appreciate you considering for coverage!

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

All the major phones are so far past having the features I want from a phone that the factor that now determines whether I'm interested in one is "does it fit in my bike's saddle bag?"

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

There is now such an enormous catalog of unethically manipulated western blot data images - has anyone tried to train an AI model to recognize them? It seems like such an obvious thing to do but I don't recall hearing about it.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Today on WaPo opinions: can we really believe numbers?

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I'll add that the local news for months afterwards was a steady flow of bodies being ID'ed, memorial services, funerals, babies being born that would never know their fathers, etc. If you are at all empathetic, it was devastating. He isn't empathetic, so he had to make up some drama.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

A few days back, I made reference to the "peak bullshit" period of climate change. Wanted to make my thoughts on that concrete, which I do by writing, so here we go... My thinking is that there are three factors that feed into peak bullshit:

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Maybe you're like me, aware of Noam Chomsky hovering near the periphery of things you were interested in, but never directly relevant enough to read. Confused by his reputation as an intellectual giant when a lot of what you heard him say seemed pretty stupid. If so, I recommend this:

strangematters.coop

Chomsky After Epstein - Strange Matters

Noam Chomsky – friend of Epstein, defender of dictatorships – was no model anti-imperialist. Can we do better?

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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

(A short thread about my story:) bsky.app/profile/did:...

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

NYC has two major arches I'm aware of: Washington Square Park and Grand Army Plaza. The context in which those were built, what they recognized, their design elements and scale, the politics behind building them — none of them have anything in common with this monstrosity.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

A striking figure from this analysis: "Oil consumption displaced by EVs in China in the first half of 2026 exceeded the UK’s total oil consumption over a six-month period."

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

(As she acknowledged, she was slightly off—first co-ed class started in '83, graduated in '87) As a Columbia freshman in '85, the striking thing was how quickly this transition took hold. Two years up, and the classes had been admitted as all male. And (at least as a guy) I simply couldn't tell.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I should elaborate on this a bit. It's possible that Scheufele — who had to leave his faculty position because he was having sex with grad students — is still a major figure. I just stopped paying attention.

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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Born in Paterson NJ, grew up one town over. I'm largely without a regional US accent, but the terminology of my youth has stuck with me.

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