iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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onion person @junlper.beer · 09/10/2026

its feels like a mass psychosis where tech leaders continue to insist you can be cruel, mean, and hurt the feelings of lines of code

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is an inexplicable vote by Regina Doherty, Nina Carberry, Seán Kelly Barry Andrews, Barry Cowen, Billy Kelleher Ciaran Mullooly

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Jack Kennedy @jackkennedy.ie · 08/10/2026

Would like to see a journalist ask the 7 of Ireland's 14 MEPs (3 FG, 3 FF, 1 II) who just voted to: -endorse burqa bans -call "hatred of Israel" a sign of "Islamist influence" -identify European Muslim communities as potential tools of "malign foreign actors" to justify themselves

Believes that the practice of concealing the face in public spaces and premises open to the public poses an unacceptable challenge to public security, identification and effective law enforcement; supports, therefore, all national measures aimed at prohibiting full-face coverings (niqab or burqa) in public spaces and premises open to the public as a necessary step to ensure social cohesion, public safety and the protection of the rights and freedoms of others, in particular women

whereas separatist narratives, systematic victimhood, antisemitism, anti-Christian hatred, hatred of Israel, conspiracy narratives, challenges to secularism, the use of religion as a tool of social control or the contestation of equality between women and men may constitute markers of ideological radicalisation or Islamist influence;

whereas the ongoing investigations into suspected electoral fraud in Borlänge and Järva, Sweden, illustrate the particular vulnerability of diaspora communities to organised attempts at electoral influence; whereas such vulnerabilities may be exploited by malign foreign actors or transnational ideological networks pursuing covert agendas

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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 08/10/2026

And while it didn’t start then, it doesn’t help that the 20th century so-called “western occult tradition” was largely incepted by people who mastered the practice of getting people to believe in bullshit, which directly led into everything from New Ageism to Nazism to technoccultism.

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Tyler Britten @tyler.britten.us · 07/10/2026

Its been bananas watching schools go from “tech changes so fast we’re focusing on the theory and fundamentals and you can learn specific languages/tech on your own” to “we need to offer a bachelors and masters in a thing thats existed for 6 months” what are we doing here

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Peter Jeffe @pjeffe.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

“This land was bountiful,” Juba said. “Today, it is a desert.” This could describe so many parts of Palestine. The myth that the Zionists "made the desert bloom" is built on their theft of land and water from Palestinians, and their continual destruction of Palestinian communities.

middleeasteye.net

Ein al-Auja: How settler attacks and water diversion erased a Palestinian community

The spring that once sustained life here has run dry, as Bedouin families flee Israeli violence and resource theft

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InfoWars @realinfowars.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We've read 246 books this year with Z. This is revolutionary!

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dearbhla @dearbhlala.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

it is literally making people less skilled

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is why, every year, the whole of Ireland is required to celebrate the Puck Fair. We can’t just say that hauling a goat into the air for days on end is something just for Kerry. We are a united country, which is why we have airborne goats everywhere.

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Harmonious Bosch @ljon.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One to add to the pile alongside the Minister for Foreign Affairs treating a Meta lobbyist as if he's an ambassador or visiting head of state.

A screenshot of a post by Helen McEntee, Minister for Foreign Affairs, posing for a photo with Dualta O Broin of Meta. The text in the post reads "Great to meet with Meta yesterday to discuss priorities for Ireland's upcoming EU Presidency. Our discussion focused on the importance of strengthening European competitiveness, reducing unnecessary regulatory complexity, and creating the conditions for innovation to thrive. As Europe faces increasing global competition, it is vital that we support businesses to scale, attract investment and drive digital transformation across the Union."

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Johnny Ryan @johnnyryan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Google event in Brussels this evening “to celebrate Ireland’s Presidency” of the EU Council. “Google is delighted to bring together Irish policymakers…” rsvp.withgoogle.com/events/irish... (they have wisely now removed some of this text)

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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Going to work now feels like doing homework after the teacher quit and told the class that education is fake. Everyone just coasting on inertia and hoping there's still a point to all this

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 27/09/2026

Google finally updated some of its satellite images of Gaza and my god, it's horrific. The entirety of Rafah has been demolished. The majority of Khan Younis is in ruins. Entire towns completely leveled and erased of the map.

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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/char...

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Luke LeBrun @lukelebrun.ca · 26/09/2026

Tech companies suddenly decide they can, in fact, moderate content on their platforms after all

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Oh, this is a useful set of statistics. You can use it to assess just what sort of numbers of JOBS the Government means when it says we need the data centres in Ireland for the JOBS. You’d create more employment running a small chain of centras.

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Rob @robosullivan.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

As Terry Pratchett regularly highlighted, "privilege" means "private law". One rule for me and another for you. O' Callaghan is working hard to exacerbate that inequality and hurt those who effectively live and contribute as second class citizens in Ireland. It's just plain racism #spéirgorm

rte.ie

Citizenship a privilege, says minister ahead of overhaul

Minister for Justice Jim O'Callaghan said "citizenship is a privilege, not a right" ahead of new rules for people seeking Irish citizenship.

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Paul Blinkhorn @paulblinkhorn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

You can't blame Ed Sheeran for caving in to American stadium owners I suppose. I mean, take these guys in the 60s, they refused to play to racially-segregated audiences in stadiums in the southern states of the USA and who remembers them now?

bbc.co.uk

The Beatles banned segregated audiences, contract shows

The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences in the US, a contract for one of the group's concerts shows.

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Philip Hadley @lordblandings.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The analogy to drugs is valid. It’s noteworthy that some dealers started adding fentanyl to their products in order to increase their addictive qualities, even though, in the long run, this practice would gradually kill off their clients. People just don’t think very far into the future.

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I wrote this quickly at a bus stop and didn't realize it would go viral, or else I would have worded it better. But the point is that the media is too credulous about AI killing everyone in 10 years (how?) when climate change is killing people now and will only get worse (we know exactly how).

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Conor @ernekid.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

A reason why it’s imperative to get Fianna Fail and Fine Gael out of office at the next election because they’ve made it very clear that their political project is ‘make everything worse forever’

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Dean Buckley @deanbuckley.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"I want more citizens, I just want fewer and fewer of them to be immigrants" is astounding enough, but then he outright says he's just playing his part in the race to the bottom on immigration law with the rest of the increasingly authoritarian west. just doing his job. just following orders

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Jamie @fctwentebenson.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

You gotta have some fucking taws on you to be talking about Irish values in a country with over 5,500 homeless children

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Jude Sherry @judesherry.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

What are Irish values? Letting childern die in agonising pain? Destroying nearly all our nature? Making sure most kids grow up with no hope of getting their own home unless they emigrate or have rich parents? Handing over resources to corporations & giving them their own courts to sue our democracy

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The Biden White House e.g. joined in pretending to believe the UN aid agency were terrorists, so that the Israelis could replace them with soldiers firing machine guns at hungry people collecting flour. The US put a pontoon bridge on the beach to make it look humanitarian.

The New Yorker Y
@NewYorker
X.com
Top officials from the Biden Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.

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Mic Wright @brokenbottleboy.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Farage’s right-hand man, Dan Jukes, on camera here talking about the importance of “clandestine projects”.

Dan Jukes speaking to an undercover reporter. The subtitle reads:

“those little clandestine projects are so valuable”

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Chris Towers Missed The Playoffs @cptowers.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

i think part of the data center/AI backlash has to be that big tech made an awful lot of promises about how plentiful and abundant the future of technology would be and then have spent the past five years or so clawing it back and adding exceptions.

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Gerard Cunningham @faduda.eurosky.social · 03/09/2026

Perfect example of AI brain rot here from the Collision "think tank" at Progress Ireland. "I don't understand this topic, but it won't stop me pontificating about it. And the mistakes in my reporting are because there were too many words for me and the LLM to understand."

The first thing to say is, it's hard to even find the 2022-2028 Dublin City Development Plan.
Despite being an electronic document, the council has chosen to split it into 24 separate PDFs. Added together, these 24 PDFs sum to 2,447 pages.
Note: I'm leaning on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude a lot for this piece because no sane person could be expected to manually pore over two thousand pages of planning documents. If there are errors, blame the voluminous PDFs - not the LLMs. Nor

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Aidan O’Brien @aidanobrien.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

As a result, Meta has implemented these changes for users in Holland *and Holland only*. Even though the court has ruled that Meta is breaching EU law. The Commission hasn't rushed to enforce this ruling either, raising further questions about how effectively the DSA is being enforced.

What happened after the initial ruling
Three months after the initial ruling, on 6th January 2026, Meta implemented the required interface changes, with a delay of six days with respect to the extended deadline set on 31st December 2025 (this was granted despite the urgency due to the Dutch elections of October 2025). However, around 4% of Facebook and Instagram users were unable to see these updates until at least mid-March 2026, as the company claimed that keeping this portion of users on the previous interface was temporarily necessary to resolve bugs and other technical issues arising from the launch.
The company appealed the first court's decision in January 2026, but eventually decided to contest only procedural aspects — particularly the "urgent nature of the lawsuit" - after withdrawing all the other objections one day before the hearing. The appeal ruling of 10th March 2026 confirmed "the contested ruling in all other respects" apart from the amount of the maximum sanction for non-compliance, which the judges doubled to 10 million euros. This means that the mandated interface changes will remain in place for Instagram and Facebook users in the Netherlands.
On 21st May, Bits of Freedom shared that Meta filed for cassation before the highest court in the Netherlands, the Supreme Court (Hoge Raad), which will verify whether the lower courts applied the law correctly, without reassessing the substance of the case. Despite being procedural in nature, the outcome of this future ruling, if in favour of Bits of Freedom, could set a significant precedent for the application of Art. 27 and 38 DSA across the EU; if favourable to Meta, it may restore the feed to the same version as in the rest of

Implications
An official interpretation of art. 27(3)'s requirements - with specific design suggestions on how to implement them - has not yet come from the European Commission, the main enforcer of the DSA against VLOPSEs such as Facebook and Instagram. The fact that the first-of-its-kind legal decision on recommender system design and user control under the DSA emerges from private enforcement instead of the Commission and the national Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs) has been noted by Meta, which stated that "the issue is a matter for the European Commission and regulators at the European levels and not for courts in individual countries".
In fact, private enforcement, together with out-of-court dispute settlement, is one of the mechanisms through which the DSA can be applied outside of the enforcement actions led by the Commission and subject to the providers' appeal at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). While not legally sound, Meta's argument raises the question why the Commission's enforcement and secondary regulation have not substantially touched upon this matter as of the time of this writing.
The Commission has taken a cautious approach to enforcing certain aspects of the DSA in the current geopolitical context, especially considering the "ongoing pressure from the Trump administration to challenge the implementation of European digital regulations". However, given the large fines already imposed on US tech companies such as Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, this explanation alone does not sufficiently clarify the reasons for the lack of regulatory guidance on the implementation of the DSA obligations on recommender systems, which remain vague to a large extent.

These obligations require a sound knowledge base and technical grounding to be implemented, which the regulator is still trying to build. Indeed, the DSA enforcement team of DG Connect opened a call for tender in August 2025 "to develop and deliver comprehensive user models that capture the complex interactions between users and recommender systems on online platforms, specifically VLOPs and VLOSEs". The external expertise sought should support the regulator to understand "how often users interact with options to better control their recommendations, including switching to a non-profiling based recommender system, providing explicit feedback signals [...], or modifying any other recommender system settings available to better fit their own interests and needs"
It should also be noted that art. 25, 27 and 38 DSA are also aimed at countering addictive design, which is at the centre of the Commission's most recent preliminary findings against Meta from July 2026.
According to the Commission, Meta "did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users" as it did not consider how "certain design features of Instagram and Facebook, such as highly personalised recommendations, [.] fuel the user's urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into 'autopilot mode', contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use"
With regard to recommender system design, the Commission might be reactive rather than proactive, as its normative view on how a compliant feed would look could be easily challenged by providers from a technical standpoint. Therefore, the regulator may prefer to wait and see how platforms update their design after being told that they are not compliant with the DSA. The political and commercial relevance of platform design changes cannot be understated: they are inextricable from the prevailing business models built on maximising user engagement.

Concluding remarks
According to the initial court ruling, "autonomy, freedom of choice and control over the way in which information is presented" are the principles grounding the EU legal framework on recommender systems.
While users have been traditionally regarded as the passive stakeholder of the recommendation process, i.e. those consuming the recommended content, the DSA in its recital 70 aims to empower them to
"influence how information is presented to them". The role of transparency and user control for recommender systems is therefore to enable users to influence the socio-technical infrastructure that has been influencing them since the rise of social media platforms.
However, changing the role of users from a passive to an active one is not a straightforward task. The mechanisms through which recommender systems influence users, and through which users can effectively contest such influence are, to a large extent, still obscure due to black-box and proprietary nature of this technology. However, an important question remains open in this regard: if users are indeed given more control over their feeds, as promised by the DSA and championed by Bits of Freedom, will they make use of it?

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Gregk Foley @gregk.co.uk · 03/09/2026

Probably worth remembering that as a journalist employed by the public broadcaster participates in the generalised moral panic about Afghan refugees desperately fleeing the violence of the Taliban after decades of war, our own military is pushing to shield soldiers from prosecution for war crimes.

A BBC journalist waist deep in sea water haranguing people who are very likely victims of British militarism and may even have been allies

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

You cannot placate fascists because they have neither a ceiling nor a floor. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

You’re the sensible centrist government watching this take place.

The far right pulls off votes to independents and fringe parties from you, the very sensible moderates whose managerial capitalism has actually caused the degradation they ascribe to foreigners.

But they’re small enough in number that you dismiss them, and continue with the self-same policies which actually impact their voters’ lives.

Next time, they do well enough that you take notice. It is at this point you enter the spiral that has redrawn the electoral map of the Western world for the past decade.

You say you recognise ‘legitimate concerns’ and take a tougher line on, say, refugees.

You accept the far right’s entirely false premise that immigrants increase crime, that the housing crisis is due to migrants rather than your own bad policies, or that foreigners are swamping the health service, rather than holding it up with their bare hands in the face of your own drastic underfunding of the system.

And you become less popular. You, the sensible moderate, continue to slide in the polls against the very parties whose policies you were trying to steal.

A sizeable number of your own base are appalled, and you have failed to impress a single racist.

Because everywhere, from France to Germany to the Netherlands to the UK, as with Fanta and its supermarket imitators, it turns out people prefer the original to the copy.

You’ve driven away your traditional base, while sanitising the racism of the far right for low information voters, who now consider them more reasonable.

You have moved the sensible middle position toward the far right — where you now stand, boxed in, by the ghouls you’ve just baptised as moderates.

And the slide continues. Because you cannot placate these people. You cannot reach an end.

Round up every refugee in camps and they’ll want the next cruelty.

Their concerns are not about society, the economy or public safety, they’re an ever-moving target of fear and hatred that cannot be sated, it has to be challenged.

And now it’s too late, because you thought that you — and you alone! — would be the first centrist to steal the fascist’s lunch by agreeing with them rather than fighting them with every fibre of your being.

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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 01/09/2026

If buying isn't owning then piracy can't be theft. Any reasonable corporation knows that.

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

the moderate democratic position on Gaza is that if Israel’s opponents do not comport themselves perfectly, if they don’t dance flawlessly through the rhetorical minefields every day, then it’s dead children forever.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 21/08/2026

Man this is right here. Even everything it's compared to (smartphones, calculator, printing press) found its use through immediate, organic adoption. GenAI is way more like SUVs, single-use plastics: it had to be pushed, marketed and forced into unavoidability by companies

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Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The banality of media evil

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 19/08/2026

we were promised flying cars, and we got pervert glasses and generative CSAM

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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 18/08/2026

In case you were wondering what type of speech is acceptable to Facebook these days

from futurism:

"Another comment posted under a news bulletin about the Dearborn hysteria literally says “I hope we kill people” in reply to a comment seething that the “first shot has to be heard somewhere,” neither of which have been taken down after we reported them for calling for violence."

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Gregk Foley @gregk.co.uk · 17/08/2026

I think that we *should* mock and sneer at people who denigrate the humanities and then get their history from media made for literal children

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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

New Gist: Ireland's Biometric Laundromat Ireland quietly passed a law in July potentially undermining every EU citizen's protections against law enforcement use of biometrics. Jim O'Callaghan's Irish 'biometric analysis' wheeze has gone international. www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ire...

thegist.ie

The Gist: Ireland's Biometric Laundromat

Ireland quietly passed a law in July potentially undermining every EU citizen's protections against law enforcement use of biometrics. This is the Gist.

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Annika Brockschmidt @ardenthistorian.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I asked @profgabriele.com how the narrative of „Western civilisation“ has been used over the years - and what has changed. He also explains why the claim of a „Western“ - meaning christian and white - world - against Muslim East - is ahistorical nonsense.

religiondispatches.org

The Innocuous-Sounding Glue That Binds the Global Right

The majority of the homepage is occupied by a pair of buildings. On the left is the 2000-year-old Roman Pantheon, whose famous inscription informs the onlooker that “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius buil...

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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 15/08/2026

This by Annika is so good and so important. The Trumpist right is part of a wider global movement to make a white Christian “civilization” - a move straight out of the 19th c colonialist project. And it’s using history to do it

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Dr. Black's Medieval Remedies @winstonblack.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

My god, what an image. Dead kings in a plastic box, carried off as the world burns.

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Weird watching the right-wing columnist cohort try to collectively pull the handbrake on ethnonationalism. Like the world's biggest hotdog man convention.

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Dean Van Nguyen @deanvannguyen.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The great Jess Kav on the soul-searching (or lack thereof) in the Irish music scene over the last week or so

open.substack.com

Angel At The Table

The thicket of un-grooming and the Irish music industry

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Bruno J. Navarro @brunojnavarro.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

An ABC NEWS Verify investigation has found Facebook's parent company, Meta, is directly paying several controversial content creators including a white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links and a prominent anti-vaxxer.

abc.net.au

Facebook pays controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

An ABC NEWS Verify investigation reveals Facebook is directly funding some controversial Australian content creators including a white nationalist and an anti-vaxxer influencer.

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[Sic] Burns @sicburns2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Teach a man to fish and he’ll get drunk on a boat for one day. Feed a man to a fish and you’ll have a cool story for the rest of your life

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