iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

On my most cynical days I see it as SA prevention because the last thing I want is baby trans people blooming into "oh shit I can ACTUALLY BE HORNY" while surrounded by people who have taught them that they don't *really* know what they want unless told à l'impératif

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 5h

Oh I have no doubt and I don't blame you, I'm just that annoying pedant who's always asking "so, is that science accurate or just racist, like most science has historically been" 😅

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 5h

Mostly I'd question what individualism even means in States with inequality problems and multiple, vastly different cultures inside them, plus AI (non-)excitement is not even vaguely homogenous in its distribution. Hell, over here it's the extra-selfish individualistic rich pricks who love it most

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 5h

Brian, with all due respect, as a French-Swede: HAHAHAHA I FUCKING WISH, it's mostly varnish and marketing (and white supremacy). I don't think individualism vs collectivism is it, that feels too simple

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The Sick Times @thesicktimes.org · 14/10/2026

This week at The Sick Times: @khaoticaa.bsky.social interviewed 16 transgender people with Long COVID and surveyed dozens more, finding how neglect within healthcare and the queer community both contribute to the medical and social erasure of trans people. thesicktimes.org/2026/10/13/t...

A person in a high quality mask holds a sign at a protest that reads, "Silence=Death" with a trans flag in an equilateral triangle. The person stands in the streets of Los Angeles outside of Children's Hospital Los Angeles during a 2025 protest. The text reads, “The Sick Times. Trans people with Long COVID navigate a new “dark age” in trans health. By Khalil (Kae) Dennis. Reporting.”

Key points you should know:

Both Long COVID disability and anti-trans policies limit access to gender-affirming care through varying mechanisms, including increased medical stigma, upcoming Medicaid work requirements, and symptom pathologization.

Unreliable electronic health records, funding constraints, and cisgender-centered research all contribute to the lack of research into trans people with Long COVID.

Trans people with Long COVID face similar medical, financial, and social barriers as people with HIV during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, necessitating a closer look at patient-first care models.

Solidarity from queer community members and trans health advocates is needed to bolster documentation, and subsequent social services, for this growing, vulnerable group.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 8h

Sure love that we can now add "makes godawful racist posts about AI" to the list of first steps in The Classic Shitstorm: - Trans woman has very bad take; - Quote dunk posts ensue; - Degendering ("this person") and dogpiles follow; - Harassment gets taken as proof that the take wasn't that bad

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 13h

Also, if you're writing a real-world setting and it has young people that aren't upper class, their French will be heavily Arabic-inflected these days (and not in the definitely racist "how do you do fellow kids" way cops keep trying to use as a false flag and that spawned a new meme last week)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 13h

A teacher is typically expecting to get "vous" from students and it's generally more respectful for them to use "vous" towards students past a certain (variable) age. They might use "tu" with no harm too, though, unless they are *dropping* to "tu" for a single student while angry (very bad)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

E.g. I am Northern French and by default the lower classes use "vous" a lot more rarely than average. Except a number of people of color in service jobs who will "vous" white people for obvious reasons. Except when even they go for "tu" out of habit.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

"Tu" and "vous" are in fact MAJOR components of a believable French-speaking character voice and to get it right you need to pay attention to age, race, gender, hierarchies and occupations, regional quirks, political affinities, and that's just to *contextualize*, not actually a flowchart

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

The example I used is that if the same character uses "tu" and high register question grammar, that's gonna be WEIRD in the vast majority of cases. Ditto "vous" and low register grammar, unless you're writing something like a working-class character talking to someone with authority above them

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

I was explaining just today that when you're translating *to* French you're going to need to pick a way your character uses registers if you want them to sound like a person. The machine can't pick a voice for you, that's a tricky writing decision within a range that can be quite broad!

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

Two of my favorites are the Italian Easter Lamb Cakes, and the French Tooth Mouse

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

You tell them they belong. You listen. You gently guide them towards separating what they genuinely do and don't want from what people around them (typically, family) tell them not to want. And you watch them bloom, and it's beautiful

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

Especially memorable to me is someone who came in asking for advice about how to repress because well surely he's not really trans. If we'd just told him what to do, I think he'd have fled. Instead we uncorked THE MOST by-the-book gay trans man who's known it all along

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

That second part is important because you'll be dealing with extremely vulnerable people. If you tell them what to do instead of helping them come to their own desires on their own terms as much as possible, you are opening them up to bad actors something *fierce*

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14h

At this point when I see people peddling that "you don't need to [medically] transition to be trans" is identical to anti-trans rhetoric I am just gonna block on sight. Stop posting and go run support groups *while actively avoiding becoming someone who tells people what to do*, then come back

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15h

Yeah, you're making me think of the part of the recent La Redoute retrospective exhibit (a blatant promo job but hey cool archives) that featured a whole section about the way they fostered creative textile hobbies to sell more yarn

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15h

Textile automation did not barge into hand-making social spaces. And those spaces were structured very differently from your average online community - making was not a *hobby* but an extra income source. The history of textile hobbies specifically should be an interesting topic to learn about...

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15h

This. And as a textile nerd I keep returning to comparisons... I think the big differences are that the automation of textile manufacturing was not accessible to people who didn't have Build Factories Money AND transport was not a fully solved problem for a long time. So hand-making persisted

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15h

It is really not that difficult to say "The AI bros want slaves" instead of actually drawing comparisons between machines and actual enslaved people. That's inaccurate, ahistorical, a thought-terminating cliché rather than productive, and most importantly racist as all hell

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 17h

Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination -- Arundhati Roy www.equator.org/articles/aru... 🧵

equator.org

Apocalypse Now and Then • EQUATOR

Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Exactly, but over here in Quicksand Country we do it for the love of the game and snicker at the philistines who cannot appreciate the finesse of our craft

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Et aussi notez que lesdits arrêtés mentionnent parfois le fait de *fournir* le matériel de protection. Donc agissez en connaissance de cause quand vous distribuez, communiquez de façon intelligente

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Y'a une vraie amertume dans tout ça parce que clairement les gens comprennent que les masques ça marche, juste pas quand faut en avoir quelque chose à foutre du validisme. (Et pendant ce temps on pétoche sur les arrêtés anti-masques)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

And it's so much code, and it's so complex, and if you handle it right and put the fear of god into people you will be left delightfully alone

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Turns out the quicksand warnings are real, they're just about UI programming

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House House @househouse.com · 15/10/2026

An explanation on why Big Walk isn't available on Xbox. bigwalk.game/xbox

Regarding Xbox

In June 2026 we announced that the release of Big Walk would be limited to computers, Switch 2 and PS5. Since then, we have received many messages and comments, asking about a future Xbox release. We would like to address those questions here:

We have made the decision not to release Big Walk on Xbox, in accordance with the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement’s call to boycott Microsoft, and their designation of Microsoft Games (and Xbox) as a priority boycott target. If you need help understanding our motives, we would recommend reading about why Microsoft is a BDS priority target, the successes this kind of pressure has already had on Microsoft, and especially, watching this great introductory piece by People Make Games.

It has always been our intention for Big Walk to be played by groups of friends, and we know that keeping the game off Xbox runs counter to those intentions. This decision means that some people will miss out on playing Big Walk with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we’re causing. We are disappointed too.

We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets.

We’ve made this decision with the belief that meaningful change can be made in the world, that coordinated collective action can confront even the most powerful interests, and that one day, Palestine will be free.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
House House

(see bigwalk.game/xbox for links)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Hence "AFAIK", maybe something's possible, though I would expect the app packaging to mangle all that beyond recognition for the usual Apple Security Reasons

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

The Photoshop "clone" has, alas, been called that by some

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

(Lest you think this is me defending Adobe: I spent a year working with Illustrator scripting and you can only aspire to one day match the degree of hate I therefore have for them)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

It's as clean room as my living room carpet and I sure don't like vacuuming

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

It really is cosmic horror all the way down. Everyone's just gone fucking insane in the most dull way possible

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

"Clean room" means *no knowledge of proprietary techniques used in the original product*. A LLM fed on everything it could get at, laundering away licenses and provenance, cannot guarantee that lack of knowledge. At the very least it's bending the term to a dishonest degree

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

While I'm getting angry on the internet, if I see one more post calling anything LLM-assisted "clean room" when they are BY DESIGN IP infringement laundering machines, I am going go start biting people

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Methods! Sources! Literally anything that makes this look legit! Because the goddamn website is just an email harvester that promises to send you the full decomp when it's done, which, wat.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind. There are serious sources out there, Addiction By Design being a major one, but everyone's losing their mind over a short video that claims to have fully decompiled a commercial app and seen TYPE NAMES?! Do you just have no idea how a compiled program looks

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

As far as I know you can't just get symbol names out of an iOS app, where the hell do those "rule names" come from, what kind of "decompilation" happened here and why is it used interchangeably with "reverse engineering"? The whole thing seems very weird

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Also in basic due diligence: leaving aside that the manipulation techniques of mobile apps are known because their makers BRAG ABOUT THEM AT CONFERENCES (and also dark patterns are a different specific thing), that account you're reposting is a weird pro-AI Get Rich On The App Store grifter, so, huh

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

If you're gonna rando in and be rude at least *try* to not have pro-genocide garbage in your last two posts. At least cover it up a tiny bit better. C'mon it's just embarrassing at this point

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Ricardo Parreira @ricardoparreira.com · 10/10/2026

« Bismillah c’est les ténèbres » Résumé d'un coup (de la flicaille) raté :

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Yup, plateforme à la noix x)

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

To people organizing against AI: this is a quality example that "vibe coding" is no longer useful as an attack word. Leave it to coders to reclaim derogatory terms in the most pathetic way possible

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Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra.me · 14/10/2026

Simba Kundizeza's statement on his Caine Prize-winning story "The Blue Fighter" is also worth reading—keep in mind, the evidence-free article slandering him was published in The Atlantic to a mass readership and his defense is a tweet to his eight hundred followers

Simba Kundizeza
@S_S_Kundizeza
Statement on The Atlantic article concerning “The Blue Fighter”

I would like to say at the outset that this statement is not in any way a proffer of an explanation or a defense against the allegations levelled against me in the article published by The Atlantic, because I don’t believe the article warrants either. I am however writing because of the level of public interest generated in its aftermath, and out of respect for the people who have supported and championed my writing, as well as my fellow shortlisted writers for the Caine Prize. I want to set the record straight.

For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote "The Blue Fighter." I did not use generative AI to write it. It is entirely my own work.

This story did not appear out of nowhere; it has a concrete, documented history. Its genesis was during my LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency in Ghana. While there‚ I read a poem by vangile gantsho titled “my father's hands․” I was inspired by this poem to write a story about my family's experiences in Zimbabwe‚ including my father leaving his accounting profession and the hardships my family faced as a result․ Other aspects of the story‚ including characters and the setting‚ are drawn from events in my own life․

There is also a clear chronology to the story's development. I sent the completed first draft of the story to vangile for feedback on May 15‚ 2025․ I then submitted the story to The Shallow Tales Review on May 27‚ 2025․ Fiction editor Nzube Nlebedim accepted the story on June 10‚ 2025‚ and it went through the standard editorial process. vangile then provided her feedback to me on June 25‚ 2025․ On the same day Nzube also provided editorial feedback to me․ In an email dated June 27‚ 2025‚ I sent the final draft and requested that the editor preserve the formatting of an epigraph in the story as originally submitted by vangile as a courtesy to her․ The story was published on June 30‚ 2025․

The Atlantic article seems to question the story's authorship by comparing its style to my other writing. As writers we develop recurring interests, but we don’t produce work from a single fixed template. My debut novel, “Freelance”, and the story titled "The Whistleblower" published in Transition Magazine in 2021 which is referenced by Ms. Vara, are thrillers dealing with political intrigue. "The Blue Fighter," however, is a deeply personal story about economic collapse and familial relationships. The voice shifts because the subject matter demands it. To suggest that a writer cannot write in different styles or genres, or improve his writing substantially after five or more years fundamentally misunderstands the craft of writing.

The motive for my supposedly using AI to generate the story is equally difficult to understand. I was under no obligation to write “The Blue Fighter”. I was not commissioned to produce it, nor was I paid a fee for its publication. The decision to submit the piece for consideration for the Caine Prize was made by the editor of The Shallow Tales Review months after its publication. I therefore didn’t write the story with any guarantee that it would be submitted, let alone win anything. The idea that I would have somehow written the story with the express intention of entering and winning the Caine Prize, despite the inherently competitive and uncertain nature of the prize, conjures up a motive that simply did not exist.

"The Blue Fighter" is my work, and I stand by it completely. I'm grateful to vangile for her inspiration, to The Shallow Tales Review for giving the story a home, and to the Caine Prize judges for recognizing the work on its merits. I’m also heartened by the numerous messages of solidarity from fellow writers and readers, and to Adrienne Ingrum and Regina Brooks at Serendipity Literary Agency for their support throughout.
I look forward to continuing to work with the Caine Prize team, and to celebrating this recognition with the people who helped bring this story into the world.

Most importantly, I will continue to write.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The Grace Hopper Conference isn't exactly a shining beacon of revolutionary feminist but it's still concerning when it can't go forward. Same kind of omen as basic Pride stuff disappearing from big name stores and company logos www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

sfgate.com

California's Grace Hopper Celebration canceled just 2 weeks before start date

"Although difficult and painful," organizers said it was the only option.

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Idem en France ! C'est juste une blague US je crois

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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Have you stumbled on people calling it the shongles shit instead of the shingles shot? I don't know WHY it ends up so funny, but it does. Should amuse a langagièr 😁

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