iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

like social rejection is the worst sin of all?

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One affordance I've noticed is which reply post gets shown. Oftentimes the pile-on will get more likes, which means the "victim" cannot converse on an equal footing, even in reply to another post of theirs. I've seen this happen with a 2 part post where I don't think anyone saw the 2nd part.

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Jon Seidel @jonseidel.bsky.social · 20h

For safety, can you provide an alternative link to the OCR'd text? Or screenshots?

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Reposted by Kate Sills

The "Broadview Six" are in with an "ICYMI" for Judge April Perry, making sure she's aware of ex-AUSA Sheri Mecklenburg's "widely published" retirement letter:

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS EASTERN DIVISION
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Plaintiff, )
v. ) ) MICHAEL RABBITT, ) KATHERINEMARIEABUGHAZALEH, ) ANDRE MARTIN, BRIAN STRAW, ) and CATHERINE SHARP )
Defendants. )
No. 25 CR 693
Judge April M. Perry
DEFENDANTS’ NOTICE OF SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION
Defendants, by and through their respective counsel, respectfully seek to supplement the record with the attached resignation letter from the proposed intervenor, Sheri Mecklenburg, which has been widely published in the local and national news media (attached as Exhibit A).
Included in Ms. Mecklenburg’s resignation letter are additional facts that directly and materially implicate issues in the pending motions before the Court (Dkt. 225, 226, and 227). Specifically, the following factual disclosures made by Ms. Mecklenburg in her letter are of particular note:
• The Front Office threatened to discipline and/or terminate Ms. Mecklenburg, thereby resulting in a loss of healthcare benefits, if she attempted to file anything with the Court to provide her recollection of events. (Ex. A, AUSA Mecklenburg’s Forced

Resignation Letter, at 1; id. at 2 (“you [U.S. Attorney Boutros] have threatened to terminate me if I attempt to rebut the false allegations and bring additional matters to the Court’s attention.”).
• Ms. Mecklenburg “repeatedly sought guidance from, kept informed, and followed the directions of the Front Office — including [U.S. Attorney Boutros] — at every consequential stage” of this failed prosecution. Id. at 2.
• U.S. Attorney Boutros “personally directed” a felony prosecution of the Defendants be pursued over Ms. Mecklenburg’s objection. Id.
• In May 2026, U.S. Attorney Boutros “placed [Ms. Mecklenburg] on leave and cut off [her] devices and credentials without any notice.” Id.
• Ms. Mecklenburg expresses her severe disappointment in the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s handling of the post-dismissal briefing to the Court because she expected that “the leaders who directed or approved the prosecution would accept responsibility for their own roles and decisions rather than assigning the consequences to me alone.” Id. at 3.
In response to Ms. Mecklenburg’s resignation letter which was published in the media, the Department of Justice in Washington D.C. (not the local U.S.

Attorney’s Office) disputed one of Ms. Mecklenburg’s factual assertions about the involvement of U.S. Attorney Boutros (and perhaps other higher-ups in the DOJ) in the prosecutorial decisions and conduct here as flat-out “false,” based on what it claims is contained in Ms. Mecklenburg’s written recommendation on this case:
The claim that AUSA Mecklenburg proposed a misdemeanor and was told instead to file a felony charge is false. Mecklenburg’s recommendation in writing to the supervisory chain of the U.S. Attorney’s Office included the section 372 felony as the strongest charge.
Jason Meisner, ‘Broadview Six’ prosecutor pens fiery resignation letter saying US attorney pushed for felony charges, CHI. TRIBUNE, Sept. 25, 2026, available at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/09/25/broadview-six-prosecutor-resignation- letter-us-attorney/ (last visited Sept. 29, 2026).
The Defendants will be prepared to further discuss the materiality of the information contained in Ms. Mecklenburg’s “Forced Resignation letter,” which reinforces Defendants’ position that there are ripe factual disputes concerning positions taken by the U.S. Attorney’s Office before the Court at Thursday’s hearing or as directed by the Court in writing.
Respectfully submitted,

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Reposted by Kate Sills

Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 20h

We're awaiting the full decision pending redactions by the parties, but it looks like ROSS lost their appeal of their case against Thomson Reuters. We and many others supported ROSS as amicus and are disappointed at this outcome: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

storage.courtlistener.com

Judgment Entered – #211, Att. #1 in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc (3rd Cir., 25-2153) – CourtListener.com

JUDGMENT, Affirmed. Costs taxed against Appellant. (SB) [Entered: 09/29/2026 01:17 PM]

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Hmm, what's an example of a political constraint that would make it impossible to tyrant-proof? I think I'm also not understanding what social media has to do with it.

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and in this example, we've also moved to private governance, which can do a lot of bad things, but mostly not kill and imprison you, so I'm not sure what tyrant-proofing means there. The corporate governance questions are usually about preventing embezzlement and running the company into the ground

I'm trying to follow along here, but I think I disagree with the premises. The point of liberalism is that my personal feelings as to the merits of certain views are immaterial. I wouldn't support a law that says you can't get fired for non-work activity.

Had to delete and repost because of a typo and it broke the thread: bsky.app/profile/kate...

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If the strict 24hr rule was in place all the time, that'd be far too burdensome. But the ability to shut things down entirely could be useful in the moment of a robbery to stop the theft.

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Anyways, I'm interested in the question of how you allow a Mamdani to execute on his ideas, while still constraining an Eric Adams or even a Mamdani gone bad. There are definitely areas of study for this (like I said, corporate governance) but seems like too few people thinking about it.

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An analogy might be a bank vault. Normally maybe it just takes two employees and two keys to open, but we could imagine that when the bank is robbed, there's a button under the desk that prevents anyone at all from opening it for 24 hours. (This probably isn't how banks work at all!)

But it's possible to design constraints such they're selectively burdensome, and not burdensome at all in normal circumstances. This is the asymmetric design. A veto might be an example of this. By default there is no friction at all.

relatedly, I think a lot of people see only a dichotomy: burdensome red tape or unconstrained executive power. If it seems like gov is ineffective and bogged down, then fascism seems like the obvious solution.

That we need to design systems such that the very worst is made impossible (tyrant-proofing) AND we need to elect unusually virtuous people as a backstop because rules and incentives can only do so much-- What do you call this? Who is studying this? Is this just classical liberalism? We need it

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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 22h

The right completely throws this out. They want to allow the worst person to do the worst, because that's their fascist conception of power. The populist left often rejects this too: "just elect good people!" and "let the (inherently good) masses decide!"

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It feels like the "if men were angels" aspect of institutional design isn't popular now, and actually, I'm not sure how many people ever really understood and were on-board. Probably the closest thing currently is study of corporate decisionmaking in law and economics? Anyone working on this?

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Reposted by Kate Sills

Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 23h

#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, #SCOTUS grants a stay in the third-country removals case; clears way for Trump admin. to continue removing non-citizens without a full chance to litigate the conditions in those countries (while also taking up the full merits appeal).

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Yes, but our institutional design assumptions failed us because we didn't account for congress's lack of desire to preserve their own power.

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I vehemently disagree with this. Which is surprising because Bennett explores tyranny so well in his novels. But tyrant-proofing (Nozick's min-max) seems to me to be *the* main problem to solve and also very solvable.

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In institutional design, you can set it up such that someone has immense power, until and unless X happens, and then that power is taken away. That doesn't make the position weak in normal circumstances.

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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"what if trump ran it" is still a really important question, because it's a structural question. If Trump ran the city water, he would be fired immediately. Being able to fire someone is a structural design choice. Sometimes we can't do that! I think people assume power is always symmetric.

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Reposted by Kate Sills

NOW: DC Circuit en banc aguments over Judge Boasberg’s contempt proceedings have now begun at the DC Circuit. Brett Shumate is now arguing for DOJ. www.youtube.com/live/4A1BwFh...

youtube.com

YouTube

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Reposted by Kate Sills

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A political social network has latched on to a handful of politically active academics whose views are the vast minority in their field, who keep making wrong predictions and denying verifiable facts, but retain a large following. Bluesky recognizes this pattern with climate denial, but not with AI

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Reposted by Kate Sills

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

LISTEN👏TO👏EXPERTS👏 (I only know of one expert because they're the one who agrees with me.)

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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 29/09/2026

I read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Forde my 8th grade summer and loved it! Bridget Jones's Diary is also hilarious but might be a little too mature

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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 29/09/2026

Neither Conor nor Chris Rufo have anything to do with rationalists or post-rats as far as I know, but this is a pretty good example of the type of dynamic I'm talking about. Rationalist circles are full of Conor types who I genuinely believe are fundamentally incapable of keeping track of bad people

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Btw, I'm really sincerely impressed by how decent and open you're being. Thank you for this discussion. I'm learning a lot from your example.

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The study you linked says exactly what I said. If you don't do your homework, you will not learn from your homework.

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Anthony Sanders @ijsanders.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I think the causation is the opposite direction. I think it's people who are bad at everyday reasoning trying to turn that into a virtue. I don't think they have to work hard at "high decoupling," I think that's just how they are.

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Reposted by Kate Sills

Today @ij.org put forward a new pillar, Rule of Law. For @theihs.org I wrote about how we at IJ are focusing more on that essential idea these days. We are framing it by what happens before, during, and after ordinary people interact with the government. www.liberalism.org/p/the-rule-o...

liberalism.org

The Rule of Law: Before, During, and After

The rule of law is a vast concept. Individuals depend on it before, during, and after government action.

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You're jumping to new topics w/o replying to what I said. There's nothing inherently deskilling about AI, any more than having an intelligent friend. If you have your friend do your homework for you, you're not going to learn much. If you talk things through with your friend, you might learn a lot

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I think I disagree with nearly all of this. Most people have access to a reasoning model for free, and you can get access to a good one for $20/month, and it will only get cheaper. It doesn't take any special prompts or even a human in the loop.

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Erinn, the vulnerabilities are reported by the company with the vulnerability, not in a press release by an AI company. They are real, and this isn't in dispute.

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If you were a curious and intellectual person, you would try this out and easily disprove everything you just said. It's very frustrating that you are unwilling to do basic experiments that easily prove or disprove what you're saying. This isn't a hypothetical. Claude did research for me today.

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