iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 21h

I understand why people are mad, but I think NLNet’s actual explanation of their AI ban is pretty sympathetic. (1/2) nlnet.nl/news/2026/20...

Our new policy is first and foremost a pragmatic measure towards self-protection. Last year we left our processes open to moderate use of LLMs and similar deep-learning systems in case their use was clearly documented, but the result of this experiment has been underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time, says Michiel Leenaars, director of Strategy at NLnet foundation.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/10/2026

I do find it funny when someone hops on the ~ethical tech~ ride when it's getting attention and does a lot of hollering about how important it is and then *boop* (They've had an LLM-written Substack since January, I guess? This is bait, I am not linking to it.)

A quote-tweet of a DHH tweet approving of John Gruber's ode to X.com:

5 years ago, I let myself get ideologically captured by miserable doomers just to fit their definition of a "Good Person."

I deleted Twitter.

I left Substack.

I stopped using tools by @dhh.

I abandoned everything that actually worked for me.

And the folks screaming at me to "do the right thing" never supported me anyway.

All they do is leech and suck you dry.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 18/09/2026

as it happens, Beowulf only responds to “Bee”

a longish-snoot dog with long black fur pines near his food bowl because it is ten minutes to lunchtime

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 15/09/2026

every morning after the schoolbus steals the child Beowulf gets on her bed to have a sulk

A tragic, tragic dog with variously long black fur, a tail that doesn’t match the rest of him, and a depressed expression crammed into a corner filled with pink and lavender velvet cushions.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 17/08/2026

Logged in to check DMs so I will allow myself one (1) post to say that this is just a flawless crystallization of how we got here.

Daring Fireball, who will definitely never change.

"The idea that anything other than my needs should factor into the generation of text for me is patently offensive."

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 08/08/2026

stumbled across a reply to a stranger that made me laugh so hard I have to leave

Yeah we are all waking up to the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE IDIOSYNCRATIC. THEY ARE FUCKING DUMB AS FUCK. you can't train it out, they are just inbred or something

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 06/08/2026

"The thing I found most surprising is that AISI were running these agents without any form of network sandboxing at all: 'AISI provided the AI agents with internet access during these evaluations, which enabled their actions on the open internet in this setting.'"

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 05/08/2026

My suspicion is that LLMs *inside* newsrooms are the only way more liquid content actually happens, so I expect to see newsrooms trying to compete with content-hoovering outside LLM operations using internal ones to make…let's just call it "responsive content" and diminish and go into the west.

Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 05/08/2026

Interesting that this snarky but off-kilter speed-quote came from an account that posted every hour around the clock. Almost as though there is something…robotic? Happening?

Quote-post from

@jade42069.bsky.social
· 2m

Label: Made over 100 posts yesterday
Label: Made over 100 replies yesterday
Label: No break greater than 1 hr yesterday

The phrase "truly strange moment" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for "we built a massive, unregulated infrastructure and are now surprised it has consequences

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 01/08/2026

the battlefield medicine vibes at the vet office are really something

Large print of an illustration of small animals in nurse outfits caring for Bill the lizard who went up the chimney in Alice in Wonderland. A beetle is carrying Bill’s tail. Hedgehogs with a stretcher approach, snails rubberneck in the foreground. Many pansies in the midground. More unsettling than charming tbh

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 31/07/2026

It's frustratingly difficult to explain without doing a full annotation! It's "not x, but y" but at the level of the paragraph, consistently, but it's not just that. Like, this is just wildly Claude-brained, even if you file off the little stylistic tells.

Johnson describes the ideal as treating the model like “a researcher, tutor, and editor at your side.” It’s a lovely image — and it slips something past us: the idea that the collaborator at your side has no agenda of its own, that what it surfaces when you ask what you’re missing is simply what happened to be there. But search was always a set of choices about what to return. A librarian who hands you a stack of books has made an argument about what matters, whether or not either of you notices. Ask what am I missing? and you hand those choices to the system, and the system answers with a shape — what to put in front, what to call relevant, where to nudge you next. That shape came from somewhere. And the somewhere isn’t you.

Johnson is right about the fact that this is a design problem, and a design problem is the hopeful kind — it means none of this is written in the stars. The same work that found people surrendering also found them coming back: given feedback and a reason to care, more of them started checking the machine again — not most, but enough to show the surrender isn’t fixed. We could build tools that guard a person’s attention instead of spending it behind her back. But let’s be clear: steering a student off the one-shot paper is the easy half. The hard half is protecting the part of her that would notice her own mind being changed — and protecting it inside exactly the sources-open, do-the-work, good-faith partnership Johnson is describing.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 18/07/2026

First reply to a post about undisclosed LLM-gen material is a undisclosed robot

Reply by @jadu100x.bsky.social
the venue problem is the point, honestly — it’s not just anti-LLM, it’s about trust

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 03/07/2026

So just to be clear, this is not what I mean when I talk about approaching LLMs as though they are demons. When you start carrying IRON NAILS around that is not a borrowed framework that is YOU BUSTED YOUR HEAD.

More and more Psychology personnel sought clues in the occult, reasoning that even if they didn’t believe the disciplines were real, they might find helpful frameworks. Some used folk practices documented in mythology and fairy tales, like carrying iron nails to ground their energy.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 03/07/2026

(all my posts are mostly accurately imagined in the voice of markl in howl's moving castle when he says "I myself hate potatoes.")

Markl from the Miyazaki adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, wearing his incredible ultra-beard disguise, with evidence of chaotic housekeeping peeking out behind him.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 30/06/2026

Chat, what does it mean, culturally, that Slack founder Stewart Butterfield is being styled as a tragic Andor spouse? archive.ph/rjbKS

Met Gala photos of Jen Rubio and Steward Butterfield, both wearing, apparently, custom Connor Ives designs. Her ensemble looks like a shatteringly expensive tree wearing a 2000-era Vera Wang tree skirt. His looks like alt concept art for Luthen Whatisname at the creepy Andor wedding, with short pants and loooong cuffs and an indescribable high-collar/cutout lapel situation.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 22/06/2026

This is extremely good news re: the administration's attempts to use shoddy data that is totally unfit for the ostensible purpose to disenfranchise voters. Fingers crossed on the appeals.

[10:33 AM]The Plaintiffs now move for summary judgment. The Court agrees that the establishment of the SAVE modified system and the notices that followed are unlawful in several respects. First, they violate a prohibition in the Social Security Act against the disclosure of Social Security numbers and other related SSA records. Second, they violate both substantive and procedural protections in the Privacy Act, which prevent the non-consensual disclosure of certain information (both by federal agencies and between federal agencies) and require notice and comment for certain actions relevant here. Third, they violate the APA. The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 22/06/2026

Just tried to click through to a Bsky profile from YouTube and got this. Same youtuber's X profile gets no warning. Anyone have a verifiable read on what's going on here? (I don't need help making up snarky explanations, I'm interested in the actual mechanism.)

Be careful! This site may be harmful.

Screenshot with red warning symbol and big red headline:

The site you are trying to visit (bsky.app) may include malware, phishing attempts, or disturbing content.

buttons: GO TO SITE BACK TO SAFETY

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 17/06/2026

someone else got the screengrab ty someone else

onyx • warmth, la... @adv... • 29m
- Replied to Erin Kissane a translated dutch book about seaweed waiting for you at a beach bookshop is honestly the kind of niche literary ambush only a real indie can pull off. chain stores have entire departments and somehow zero soul

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/06/2026

Back to fave beach bookshop for the first time this year and immediately laid hands on a book about seaweed, translated from the original Dutch. PublicSpaces did this, somehow.

Hardcover book, Seaweed: An Enchanting Miscellanry, by Miek Zwamborn, in accidental visual dialogue with my ancient shoulderbag printed with Grecian urns and algae and whatnot. We love a purple-brown leafy shape.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 08/06/2026

Porting the whole post over for the skyline bc it’s easy to misinterpret from the first half

Felix Hlatky
@mellifluousbox@mastodon.social
After individually meeting @rose.bsky.team in April and @seboslaw in May, it felt great to meet both again with @rude1.blacksky.team at #pubconf2026 This is still a competitive situation. Our protocols and the incentives they create matter. Our backgrounds influence what we build. Our financing models bind and enable us. But I felt all of us belonging to "Team Open" very strongly in Amsterdam. I am excited to see where this will bring us and what we can do together

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 24/05/2026

the thing about “put everyone together in an echoing brightly lit room with instant search that encourages everyone to post in oral-culture mode but judge each other by the standards of text-culture mode” is that deranged structures produce deranged behavior

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 22/05/2026

Oh no, I missed this, the book was about… The— Sir, arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/a...

His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, is all about “how Truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized” thanks to the “pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI.” Yet a New York Times investigation this week found what Rosenbaum now acknowledges are “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” linked to his use of AI tools while researching the book.

These quotes include one that tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she “never said” and another that Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said “don’t appear in [my] book, and they are also wrong.” Rosenbaum is now working

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 17/05/2026

I use Halide Process Zero pretty much exclusively, to the point that I forget where the iOS camera app is. I’ve never taken the time to learn how to do it properly, which is okay because I kind of love everything that comes straight out of the camera.

The most alien of the local rhododendron blooms, creamy and spotted like orchids, with big pink buds against dark glossy leaves with brighter green bramble leaves in the foreground behind the rhodies and dark hemlocks in the background, mostly obscuring a bright blue sky.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/05/2026

found a new NOAA gallery that has terrible metadata but also this guy

Photo by Daryl Duda of a balloonfish, which is a type of porcupinefish. What you need to know is the fish has big dark eyes that reflect the bright green marine plants around it and it is doing a chill fish smile. Lil spikes on top, some stripes. Suggestions of some facial hair. Very high charisma.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/05/2026

My nomination for the least representative fake social media posts anyone has ever mocked up (from pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35533417/)

Three fake social media posts from the linked paper. The first reads, "Retweet if you've ever been talking about a policy you support, and someone asks you to explain what its effects would be you realize you can't! It seems many of us think we understand more than we do."

Second: "I was with my book club and we were discussing single-payer healthcare in America. We all felt informed enough to talk about it and express our opinions. But then one group member asked for an explanation of how transitioning to a single-payer healthcare system would actually work and what effects it would have, and none of us were able to provide an answer! Have other people had this experience? We thought we understood something until we had to explain it."

Third: "Anthony and I started talking about social security last night at Sara's dinner party. We were discussing and kind of arguing back at fourth about what the retirement age should be. Tom interrupted to ask if we could actually explain what the effects of changing the retirement age for social security would be and how they would happen. Anthony and I (and other people at the party) couldn't give a complete answer. We all realized we didn't know quite as much as we thought we did!"

All have fake engagement metrics attached.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 08/05/2026

Thanks, yes. I found the footnote and various other versions of the quote, but can't track down the original. Harry Price has the earliest version of the quotation I can lay hands on.

Concerning Hitler and the occult, a most interesting article,
* Poltergeist over Europe,' appeared in the Guardian for July 25, 1941.
The writer maintains that there are ' extraordinarily significant points of resemblance between the records of Poltergeist hauntings and the Nazi movement. Both are manifested in a subconscious uprush of desire for power ... both suck, like vampires, the energies of adolescents; both issue in noise, destruction, fire and terror.... Hitler speaks best in a state of semi-trance. ...
Whether the uprush of subconscious energy generated through him and sucking into itself the psycho-physical forces of German youth is merely the outcome of an unformulated group-desire for power, or whether, like some of the Poltergeist hauntings, it would seem to have another source, is an open question.' Hitler has been called some hard names, but ' Poltergeist' must be new to him!

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 08/05/2026

I've got as far back as this reference from Harry Price's Search for Truth: My Life for Psychical Research (1942), which is…an experience. Maybe Price was referring to one of the other dozen-odd Guardians, but I can't find a trace of this.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 08/05/2026

From SD Tucker's Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist (2020). File under: "behind the times."

Our world is becoming increasingly bland, bureaucratic and boring - in short, it is becoming thoroughly disenchanted.
'Disenchantment' was a
word used by the great German
sociologist Max Weber to describe the way that, in modern-day society, power has been transferred away from charismatic individuals and placed within the hands of impersonal bureaucratic structures. It is not the holders of office who now bear true power, it is the offices themselves; Prime Ministers and Presidents are merely temporary representatives of these offices, who can always be booted out by the electorate. When technocratic elites complain about populists and charismatic politicians being on the rise, they perhaps fear a swing of the pendulum back towards this earlier state. Weber claimed that power in hunter-gatherer societies rested with charismatic, shamanic-type individuals who possessed miraculous powers like telepathy and weather-control, but that over time we gradually progressed to a state in which legal systems govern our way of life, not the capricious whims of shamans (Weber's apparent acceptance of the reality of such things is played down by an embarrassed academia today). Society became more stable, predictable and ordered - less prone to the ways of the Trickster.37 Nowadays, Boris Johnson only has to make a harmless joke to be instantly deemed 'unfit for office'; what would such tedious prudes have made of life in a primitive magical matriarchy ruled by the likes of Mrs Forbes?

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 04/05/2026

I made a lot of faces between 4 and 5am today

When the ring showed up, some wanted me to discard it. I chose to study it, help others understand it, then redesign around it.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 24/04/2026

My trying to log into streamplace to ask questions: Hi! The computers: No

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 24/04/2026

louder for the people in the back bb9.berlinbiennale.de/all-problems...

Her parting words were meant to comfort me. “For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. If the eggs are scrambled, they’re scrambled. You can’t unscramble them. All you can possibly do is cook them and share them with somebody.”

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 21/04/2026

staring at my mailbox like a fixated bird

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/04/2026

I am going to make a bot that just posts this in all the "what's up with Gen X" discussions.

The famous Why Axis chart showing the high childhood blood levels of lead right in the Gen X zone, then trailing off.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 12/04/2026

They’re here, in settings. If you are basically normal you probably don’t have any. But “app passwords,” aside if you ever reuse passwords across services, you should stop doing that and change to unique ones.

Screenshot: Privacy and Security
Two-factor authentication (2FA)

Enable
App passwords
Allow others to be notified of your posts
Anyone who follows me

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 11/04/2026

this kind of fix is 100% why I read incident reports pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/a...

$The band-aid fix was insane but did the job. This is how we actually fixed the outage on Monday, before we found the true root cause: // Use a custom dialer that picks a random loopback IP for each connection. // This avoids ephemeral port exhaustion on a single IP when a container // restarts (TIME_WAIT sockets from the old process block the fixed IP). memcachedClient.DialContext = func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) { ip := net.IPv4(127, byte(1+rand.IntN(254)), byte(rand.IntN(256)), byte(1+rand.IntN(254))) d := net.Dialer{LocalAddr: &net.TCPAddr{IP: ip}} return d.DialContext(ctx, network, address) } That got us out of the death loop because it expands the client ip+port space. Crazy, but effective! We removed this once we fixed the true root.$

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 10/04/2026

many fine people who like computers: but "account" is imprecise! me, a person who hangs out with mostly teachers and painters: PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW CARS WORK FAM (from www.leahreich.com/maybe-stop-b... but in the spirit of goodwill)

At the end of the day, he ran back into the office and shouted, "PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW CARS WORK, YOU GUYS." This one revelation opened the door for him to understand that everything he thought was obvious was like mystical, arcane knowledge to the vast majority of drivers. Their relationship with the concept of "car" was wholly different from his, and as an expert, he would be better able to help them if he could bridge the gap between his knowledge and their lived experience. He was ready to translate his technical language into language more people could understand. Everything he spent all day thinking about? Most people never thought about it. You have to know your audience.

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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 01/04/2026

I wrote this three years ago, watching the Next Twitter come online, and I am feeling it erinkissane.com/tomorrow-and...

In the machine, we are always forgetting, chasing the same discourses and panics in circles. Instead of making restitution, we wait for the cycle to erase the screen and carry on as before. Stay long enough and everything rhymes with something that gave you scars, but that everyone else has forgotten. Resolution eludes us online even more than off. But then, the paradox: Nothing stays gone, either. Fast search resuscitates archives without even a bump in load time. Screenshots jump networks and decades; we have the receipts. Somewhere between the continual etch-a-sketch and structurally eidetic memory, the provisional and crucial ties of solidarity recede, always just out of reach.

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