iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Chinese readers when I translate the meaning of my Christian name into Chinese characters: "hmm, a bit macho, a bit too 'red'" Chinese readers when they see the characters for 'soup nanny': oh that's Tom Cruise! so handsome!

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We Will Soon Speak of Microtraumas

I wrote about blaming your parents for your woes and the days of wacky 19th C shrinks: open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss... #trauma

open.substack.com

Little cuts will also make the jump from the body to the mind

I don't know if any western apps do this, but on WeChat short vids there is a heart button (visible to your followers) and a like button (only visible to you). In the early days, we wanted everyone to see our likes. Now we want the option.

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I like this Yiddish expression you say after something good so you don't jinx it. It's like when we were kids and we said we wanted to sit in the front seat: "called it, locked it, no black magic"

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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine | CNN Business

"noting that in the 1980s and 90s, computer adoption gave the world all kinds of tools that reshaped the labor market. But labor productivity grew just 2% to 3%." I'm shocked that the introduction of e-mail and spreadsheets only had a single-digit effect. edition.cnn.com/2025/05/30/b...

edition.cnn.com

If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it’s going to ruin the global economy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached...

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

He also remarked on the logistical feat of designing a study protocol deemed acceptable by its feline participants. “I really commend this group of scientists for being successful in engaging 30 cats in doing this stuff,” “Most cats want nothing to do with your research.” They herded cats! NYT

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Got this creepy ad from twitch to try and entice me back. It's a totally fabricated conversation where all my friends are wondering where I am during non-descript 'fire' moment. Twitch themselves should know from my real chat logs that I have no friends there.

Obsolete Sony @obsoletesony.com · 27/05/2025

Reposted by Kit Noussis

This much cool should be illegal

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

What asymptote are we approaching for verifications and captchas online? Eventually, I think we will spend 50% of our time posting and 50% of our time logging in.

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Video games are weird. To be in the Steam top 100 is a huge accomplishment, and yet many of those games I've never played and never even heard of. It takes hundreds of thousands of players to make a game a hit, but you can write a best seller book on a few thousand sales.

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

People getting murked by early railway accidents (and later getting quasi-hysterical 'railway spine' injuries) are where we get our modern definition of the 'accident' to begin with. There have always been misfortunes and calamities, but after trains we had a new kind that needed a language.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

One problem with self-help and advice columns, and I'm only paraphrasing (I think) @oliverburkeman.com here, is that you have to use the wisdom you already have to discern between the stars in the galaxy of new media. Self-persuasion and rationalization have a lot of room to do the curating.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Oh, Lenovo has updated their privacy policy? You know what, I'm going to opt out of this round. Let me just throw my laptop in the trash.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

I wrote about the NYT op-ed that informatively begs the bosses not to replace all their entry-level jobs with AI: kitnoussis.substack.com/p/ceos-can-b...

kitnoussis.substack.com

CEOs can be automated, too; they barely do any work.

Crying and begging the capitalists to stop eating their seed corn has never worked before

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Reposted by Kit Noussis

Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

similarly, in the US there are *far* more people working in museums than in coal mining. there are some industries that have salience as 'working people' and 'hearts of the community' (often after decades of intentional managed decline) and some that do not.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

How come Reddit can't keep bots of their platform, but me, a real person, can't even post or comment because my 'karma' is not good enough, and my secret trust score is too low because I use a VPN? We need better captchas. I'm thinking piss sensors like they had in Vietnam.

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

"...took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the [like button]" Everything good about facebook is from employees, everything bad is Zuck's. From the AP book review of "Like"

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Vox article about dry texting has some good anecdotes. Will be interested to see what novels the young zoomers write about IM culture. It's not categorically different than a meatspace mailbox, but it's still weird for your lover and your landlord to come through the same portal, with the same hat.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

First off, bring back album covers. I never see them anymore. Secondly, when was the last time a band was one Big Guy and five Lil Guys?

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Reposted by Kit Noussis

Prof. Ian Walker @ianwalker.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

A new evidence review asks what speed limits should be if we started with the goal of reducing death and injury. Safe to say that despite being rooted in evidence, there'll be a lot of motivated reasoning trying to make these conclusions go away downloads.roadsafetyfoundation.org/Determining_...

Based on the latest publicly available research, the evidence-based maximum operating
speeds on British roads if most deaths and life-changing injuries are to be avoided are as
follows:
• 10mph where there is a particular prevalence of pedestrians and/or bicyclists and/or
motorcyclists, or where there is a heightened vulnerability of pedestrians to impact
and injury (e.g. around schools, around hospitals, and in the vicinity of major sports or
social/cultural events)
• 20mph in other locations where pedestrians and/or bicyclists and/or motorcyclists mix
with cars
• 20mph where cars and HGVs mix and where:
o head-on collisions are possible (i.e. single carriageways) or
o side impacts are possible (e.g. at T-junctions and crossroads)
• 30mph where head-on collisions and side impacts are possible only between cars
Higher operating speeds may be consistent with a Safe System on roads which have fully
segregated facilities for any pedestrians or bicyclists and a physical median between opposing
directions of flow (including, for example, no T-junctions or crossroads). On these roads (i.e.
some dual carriageways including motorways), the priority is to provide adequate roadside
infrastructure measures to ensure that road users are suitably protected if they run-off the
road at current operating speeds.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

The work of @ianwalker.bsky.social inspired me to write up a little something about my bipedal rage in a quadwheel world: open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss...

open.substack.com

The Kettle Logic of Motonormativity

Convincing Yourself That Death is Not Just Around The Corner

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Reposted by Kit Noussis

Cédric Scherer @cedricscherer.com · 13/05/2025

Our ggplot2 [un]charted course is live! 🎉 Lesson 1, “Why R and ggplot2?”, is free to explore — short, thoughtful & a bit different. Get the early-supporter price! 👉 ggplot2-uncharted.com Follow along as new content drops and learn while running your code in the browser 👩‍💻

Screenshot of the first lesson called"Why R and ggplot2?". The header text reads:

Course
Foundations of ggplot2
Why R and ggplot?
Why R and ggplot2?
This lesson shows why programming is so powerful for data visualization. It covers what sets R and ggplot2 apart, highlighting their strengths, trade-offs, and how they compare to other tools.

Let's get a clear sense of when and why to use ggplot2!

... and the first paragraphs:

🌍 A World of Visualization Tools
Data visualizations are everywhere— on web pages, in reports, and at the heart of dashboards.

What used to be a time-consuming, manual process is now much faster, thanks to powerful tools that turn raw data into clear, engaging graphics. But with so many options out there, choosing the right tool can be tough 😔.

There are 5 main categories of visualization tools. Some are quick-and-easy chart makers, while others are flexible, code-driven libraries.

The right choice depends on factors like data complexity, custom design, and the need for reproducibility. Explore the categories below to find the best fit for your needs!

Another screenshot of the lesson, showing the three main reasons to use coding to work with data and create visualizations:

1. reproducibility
2. Customization
3. Automation

It also shows a gallery of some of data visualizations such as the circular astronauts plot and the stream graph about appearances of the main X-Men characters.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

What YouTube thinks you're into when it has no cookies or history on you: come for the cocomelon, stay for the met gala

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

@ianwalker.bsky.social I was reading a study out of China correlating personality traits and pedestrian behavior. PMCID: PMC5708679 I was interested in the way they extended previous research on anti-social behavior of motorists to anti-social behavior in pedestrians.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

Why ask a friend or a stranger for an answer to a question that can easily searched online? Because there is more to communication than just exchanging information. "Let me google that for you" is something you say to a profile pic, not a to a person you recognize as a fellow soul.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

My mom says she saw this at a thrift store and DIDN't buy it?! It was the 80s, so there was naturally a classical pilar

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

A series on the witticisms I found in Eagleton's Literary Theory that had me chuckling to myself in the cafe: "'imaginative vision' we now reverently elevate above the merely 'prosaic' discourse of those who can find nothing more dramatic to write about than the Black Death or the Warsaw Ghetto"

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

>“yet another thing I’m supposed to remember to do for my own good.” We have too many of these already, and I try to inflict such advice on people as little as possible. >But in this case it’s unavoidable. It’s a high priority should. www.painscience.com/articles/mic...

painscience.com

Sitting Too Much? Take Microbreaks

Small, regular breaks are a survival strategy for chair-bound office workers, based on the (debatable) idea that sitting too much is Bad For You.

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Reposted by Kit Noussis

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 05/05/2025

The newest and most powerful A.I. technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier.

nytimes.com

A.I. Hallucinations Are Getting Worse, Even as New Systems Become More Powerful

A new wave of “reasoning” systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Help, my mathematical grant was cancelled by the NSF! Does anyone know why my work was flagged as 'DEI'?! #TidyTuesday

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

So the terminated NSF grants were, in part, selected by using an Excel formula flagging the word 'diversity' in the abstracts. BIO-diversity grants were slated for cancellation. Can we expect the guardrails of LLMs to do any better than simple keywords when our leaders can't either? #TidyTuesday

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Though I have misgivings, I cannot resist using ChatGPT to debug emotional challenges. The language of troubleshooting and technical efficiency is embedded in me. Now, both the terms and the techniques for healing the soul are digital. #therapy #LLM

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Loved this pic from Adam Tooze' newsletter. Computers have always been framed in metaphors of the mind. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

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Reposted by Kit Noussis

Cédric Scherer @cedricscherer.com · 02/05/2025

Thanks to everyone who contributed their #DataViz, celebrated others’ work, and shared encouragement — thank you all simply for dedicating your time, in whatever context, to help make the 5th edition of the #30DayChartChallenge such a success 👑

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

@djnavarro.net This album cover from 1975 happened to appear in my algorithms shortly after your abstract pieces. I thought that was a bit of synchronicity. Considering it's from a yacht rock band, I don't know if you'll be flattered 😅, but nevertheless:

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Shakespeare's plays packed the Globe Theatre. I've been told that the refined allusions were for the upper crust on the upper decks and the lewd jokes were for the groundlings. Could it be that the poor people in the audience were actually better listeners than today's elites? Pic IA Richards

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

The operations of the mind can only be described metaphorically, through a physical happening. It sounds trite, but it needs repeating in a time when machines are so hastily likened to minds. From "The Philosophy of Rhetoric" by I.A. Richards

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

I took an oath to never share my account. It's called the terms & conditions, sweaty💅. I bet you don't even read the privacy policy.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

1/ What if you are a spy who needs a way to behave randomly, but no one can know what you are doing? Trying to 'think of a random number (or letter)' is like trying not to think of a white elephant. It goes against nature. But the world is filled with noise sources. #30DayChartChallenge

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Can we go back to the black and green terminals from the 80s? At this rate, we will all need three 4K monitors to browse the web. #UI #UX 1. Tabs 2. Address Bar 3. Cookies bar 4. Special Notice 5. Site Title Bar 6. Site Navigation 7. Site Subnavigation 8. Title of the paper I'm reading ‼️

Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

What happens when you force a job interview into the format of yes/no questions, but make the candidate answer randomly? Such a study is referenced in 'Noise' by Kahneman et al.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Social activities really do seem to be declining, though some people I know want to imagine it isn't. Data from the US BLS. The only thing that went up is caring for pets. Compensating? #30DayChartChallenge Imagine I posted this on an appropriate day for the theme.

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Kit Noussis @kitnoussis.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Terence Tao, one of the world's best mathematicians, has said that he occasionally uses Wikipedia to get an overview of a new niche in math. This is the rare anecdote from the routines of genius that actually makes me feel good about my own ways.🥲