iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 11h

This line of robot cars (and one unfortunate human driver) actually goes around the corner and down the street. All stuck because the bots are too stupid to understand it’ll take forever untill they can turn left here.

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 11h

For some reason there’s this assumption that the AI must be so smart we just can’t understand. The simpler and therefore far more likely explanation is that “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted” is just complete bullshit.

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 11h

> @techcrunch.com techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/p...

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Sam Wang @samwang.bsky.social · 13h

Neuroscientist here. I have studied the brain for 40 years. I make serious use of machine learning and AI in my research. Sam Altman is full of shit. These machines are not conscious, any more than a movie of a train coming out of the screen is a train. AI does remarkable things but isn’t real.

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The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 28/09/2026

“Don’t you dare go inside the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts! It’s much too dangerous,” petridishes.bsky.social writes. “If people can understand one another just by scratching a bow across taut strings—perhaps this is a form of witchcraft.”

bit.ly

The Kennedy Center Is the Most Terrifying Building in America

This place is much too dangerous.

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"I immediately thought of Viktor Orban as soon as I saw this last ad because they were the same type of thing he did before finally losing his last election earlier this year. He spent 235 million euros of Hungarian taxpayer money on propaganda campaign material." open.substack.com/pub/heatherd...

open.substack.com

Donald Trump’s latest impeachable offense

Just before noon today, the President of the United States was standing just inches away from the trophy at the Medinah Country Club outside Chicago, wearing an extra-large suit that bulged along his ...

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Look at the lengths to which they have to go to find somebody to prosecute for illegal voting. As if these people conspired to commit crimes in order to very slightly increase someone’s chance to win a local school-board election.

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Greg Wester @gwestr.me · 27/09/2026

We are living in hell

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A constitutional crisis used to be kind of a big deal but now it’s just Thursday

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Other defendants include “Hermes Far Eastern Shining, Infinity - Forms of Yellow Remember, and Fellowship of the Esoteric School of Higher Learning.”

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MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 24/09/2026

Yeah, what psychopath would want his name on a building associated with an assassinated President

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

They also made him sleep on the floor of a holding cell. With the bullet in his back. And no pain medication. They also failed to provide medical care after they shot him. People need to go to prison for this.

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 23/09/2026

federal immigration agents beat up a US citizen in Evanston on Sunday morning and left him lying in the street or as Kavanaugh would put it, he experienced as "brief investigative stop" ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

ballsandstrikes.org

Brett Kavanaugh’s Imaginary Immigration Stops Opinion Gets More Embarrassing Every Day

The fact that ICE officers do not allow wrongfully detained people to “promptly go free” is a surprise to only one man in America.

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Adam Kinzinger @adamkinzinger.substack.com · 23/09/2026

I don't say this lightly, but Pete Hegseth deserves to be impeached. I understand just how serious a vote to impeach is from experience, and I still believe impeaching him is the right thing to do. The Iran war. The purge of senior ranks. The boat strikes. The case is overwhelming. (Link below)

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MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 23/09/2026

JUST IN: In a deeply embarrassing and un-American court filing, the Trump regime is now arguing that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico can be stripped of White House access in the name of “national security.” 1/

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Ok, Grandpa. We’ll do that. How about a nice glass of milk?

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Scott Nover @scottnover.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

BREAKING: TV pool will not be providing coverage of presidential events until further notice b/c of CNN's ban, pool chair and FOX News Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton said. It's effectively a boycott by the fellow members — ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

FT asking the big questions here - could Anthropic maintain its growth trajectory if AI destroys humanity? www.ft.com/content/96d0...

Investors are questioning whether
Anthropic can sustain its extraordinary growth as competition, price-sensitive customers and the potential for Al to destroy humanity cloud its blockbuster IPO.

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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The Trump administration's lawless killing spree at sea continues with a lethal strike on four more supposed "narco-terrorists" in the Caribbean. Very real killing in a make-believe war. Outside of war the general term for premeditated killing is murder.

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👻Skulliam🎃Boo-tler🍂Yikes🕷️ @yeets.biz · 19/09/2026

i need to know what happened

sign in a restaurant "due to recent events Bigfoot discussions are no longer permitted on the patio"

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Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @nothoodlum.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Mark Carney: “I would now like to inform you that the teleprompter has ceased to function. Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy.”

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

“I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” Patel said, although they can’t legally do it and he absolutely does know that.

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

But one day they will bowl a perfect doosra and humanity will then be truly obsolete

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

But, a quick summary: Mr. Chan has filed a very batshit complaint against Wizards of the Coast. The complaint alleges that Wizards of the Coast stole - in direct contravention, as we shall see, of the laws of causality - his Wereshark creation. Nuts, right? If you are WOTC, what do you do?

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I guess the Trump FBI *does* care about diversity.

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Scott MacFarlane @macfarlanenews.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Washington Litigation Group, which sued to halt Trump's shuttering of Kennedy Center: "This constant effort to add Trump's name to the Kennedy Ctr facade is the definition of insanity. This is now the 3rd attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man's ego"

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Yep, that’ll make all the difference

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Andrea Junker @strandjunker.com · 14/09/2026

I find it absurd that the em dash is now widely perceived as an indicator of AI use. I have used it since childhood; it is part of my writing style. Sometimes inserting a brief aside within a sentence, at other times emphasizing the conclusion of a thought.

Screenshot of a post on X by Malte Ubl (@cramforce): “AI slop has fundamentally changed how I experience reading.

I now notice the tells everywhere. The short, punchy sentences. The relentless groups of three. The em dashes—the unnecessary little asides.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The worst part? My brain now flags perfectly innocent human writing as AI slop too. AI hasn’t just made me enjoy bad writing less. It’s made me suspicious of all writing.

That’s a real loss.”

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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 13/09/2026

So they realized they're in the gutter, no revenue in sight, operating at a tremendous loss, and suddenly decided to slow down "to save the humanity."

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

More nonsense about how they need to slow down because their product is just so darn smart and capable. That they are deeply in debt and not profitable I’m sure is just a coincidence.

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The Questionable Authority @questauthority.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

OK - Coming attractions time. I found this wonderful paragraph in a federal court filing (specifically, in a motion to dismiss). It's one of the most amazing string cites (kinda) I've seen. The full case is amazing; I'll do a litigation disaster tourism thread tomorrow.

Hundreds of years before the Common Era, Herodotus wrote of the Neuri, a
tribe northeast of Scythia that would reportedly transform into wolves for several days once a year.
Herodotus, The Histories, 4.105 (circa 440 BCE). Werewolves continued to appear in folklore from
antiquity through modern times, and across a wide range of cultures. See, e.g., Pausanias, Description of
Greece, 8.2 (circa 160-180 CE); Ovid, The Metamorphoses, I 219-239 (circa 8 CE); Pliny the Elder,
Natural History, VIII.34 (circa 77 CE); Augustine, The City of God, XVIII.17 (circa 426 CE); King
Canute, Ecclesiastical Ordinances, c. 26 (circa 1020 CE); Anonymous, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (circa
late 1100s) (Slavic folklore); Marie de France, Bisclavret (circa 1200); Völsungasaga, ch. 8 (circa 1250
CE) (Nordic folklore). Bram Stoker depicted Dracula as a werewolf in Dracula’s Guest. Werewolves

came to the silver screen first in Werewolf of London (1935) and then Lon Chaney’s definitive
performance in The Wolf Man (1941), and have essentially never left it since. And animal
shapeshifting has not been limited to wolves. Greek mythology is replete with humans (or humanshaped gods) who transform into animals or monsters. In Tlingit folklore, Kóoshdaa are wereotters. Celtic mythology includes selkies (were-seals) and kelpies (shape-shifting water-horses that
live in lochs). DC Comics has featured numerous shark-human hybrids since its Silver Age,
including Guppy (a small-time criminal in Nightwing’s rogues’ gallery, first appearance in 2018),
King Shark (the son of a shark god and a human mother, first appearance in 1994), and Karshon (a
mutated shark, first appearance in Green Lantern 24, October 1963). Other examples abound.

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Ben Paddon 🎃 @benpaddon.net · 13/09/2026

An AI flyer is a brown M&M test. If your event or business is cutting corners by using an AI flyer, where else are you cutting corners? What else are you cheating out on? Why should I be bothered to go somewhere you couldn't be bothered to promote with a little of your own personality?

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Anna Hughes 🍁 @annaghughes.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

trying to make new friends as an adult

Amy Adams in Arrival holding the white board that says HUMAN while she's trying to communicate with aliens

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Also important context for this: Trump is always just bullshitting, meaning the saying of words without regard for whether their meaning is true or false. He just says whatever he thinks will help him get what he wants at that particular time.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/09/2026

Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces): peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-...

peoples-things.ghost.io

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

“Oh no, we really want to slow down developing this thing because it’s so smart and capable that it could end the human race, so please buy a trillion dollars worth of our stock in the IPO so we have the funding to slow down its development better”

better.how

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Here’s yet another example: “oh dear, the product we’re working so hard to develop and force everyone to use is so dangerous we should slow down its development, and by the way it’s dangerous because it’s so useful and we need another trillion dollars to develop it faster.”

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/09/2026

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/g...

pluralistic.net

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Cory Doctorow is usually right about things and his take on LLMs and AI is no exception: LLMs are real, AI is fake.

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Lowering the Bar @loweringthebar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

ALERT: Lil Dirk not guilty of trying to kill Quando Rando and actually killing Cousin Rando

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