iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

So many good points here (the background readings for the whole course are super interesting as well).

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A very public 101 lesson on the social construction of crime. Massive breaches of laws in multiple countries that are not framed as crimes nor the responsible actor as criminal. Instead, this is managed through the frameworks of public relations and sales.

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I wonder if there's an academic corollary to that heuristic about knowing people based on how they judge service staff, for treating undergrads as worthy of encouragement and respect. Anyway, what a legend: www.wgtn.ac.nz/news/2026/09...

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Alex @shakingstick.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Idk if duh but it feels important to talk about what we're losing. The basics are also about history and culture, design principles, mindset towards accessibility and presentation/content. The more it gets treated as "rote code", the less care and attention to detail gets applied to the experience.

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Basically "was jesus of Nazareth, (an iron age itinerant Jewish radical preacher) a socialist?" Is a fucking stupid question. It's like asking if Solon was a Rawlsian. The better question re historic figures is "what do we think they'd be saying if they were born 30 years ago?"

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Jaws Slayer 🎃 @jesawyer.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There have been two occasions in my career where I had to go to war with teammates against mistaken understandings of probability. In both cases, it was because people expected large numbers of d6s to occasionally result in maximum damage. But the curves for 3d6 and 15d6 (e.g.) look like this:

Two curves showing the distribution of results across 3d6 and 15d6. At the extreme ends of the first, 3 and 18 are both 0.46% likely. On the second curve, the extremes are 15 and 90 damage, but the probability drops below 0.00% below 29 and above 76.

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Everest Pipkin @everest.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm very please to announce a public release of my drag-and-drop bookmarking, game-making, and wandering tool Scrubjay! Scrubjay is a weird website builder that lets you cobble together web elements, images, links, text fragments, etc into a series of nested rooms...

"SCRUBJAY" sits over a bunch of images of frogs, birds, doors. it's a very 90s look

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There has never been a widely debated public justification for surplus. The entire thing has always been based on vibes, unstated assumptions and implicit values.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oft forgotten how direct the Poesia translation of Marinetti was in its attacks on women. When meddling technocratic billionaires start quoting this while derangedly pumping AI investments, mask is really off. And to think of the modern corporate manifestoes that are descendants of this text.

Screenshot of archival scan of Poesia page with the Declaration of Future, the first English translation in 1909 of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto.

The excerpt shows the text from point 7 (There is no beauty except in struggle) point 8, on eternal speed, point 9, "We will glorify war", point 10, "We will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism etc", and point 11, inviting chaos.

Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If this makes sense to you, I am sorry.

Word art with transparent background. Diagonal drop-shadow Impact text running from top left to bottom right that says "The Wool Price Crash".

At the bottom margin is serif text doubled up in green that says "1987 Sharemarket Crash".

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Pup Fiction @pupfiction.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Reposted by Mark

This is a great insight from a young woman in Canberra on housing and time and multiculturalism www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...

The woman who feels priced out of spare time

Rosie* is in her 30s and lives in Canberra. She captured the point vividly.

"Housing gets covered as deposits, rates, supply. Living it, the real cost is time. You work the hours the housing demands, in the suburb the housing pushed you to, and what gets sacrificed is the ability to sit down with the people around you.

"Multiculturalism worked in this country when people had time to spend with people unlike themselves. Not policy time — ordinary time. Backyards, front steps, sport, the shops, someone's kitchen. That's how a stranger stops being a category and becomes a neighbour.

"We have spent 30 years pricing that time out of people's lives and now we're surprised that cohesion is fraying and asking what went wrong with our values.

"When people are exhausted and stretched and never in the same room, difference stops being interesting and starts being threatening. That's not a failure of tolerance. It's a failure of time. That's what I'd want people in power to understand."

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Robert Yang @radiatoryang.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

if you’ll be here for #NZGDC come roll thru!! I’ll be running an IRL #ManifestoJam and I’m even bringing a door to nail your manifestoes onto

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Tze Ming Mok 莫志明 @tzemingdynasty.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

They lie because they think it doesn't mean anything, it's just a game, it's just a job, it's basically a joke, totally meaningless and everyone knows it haha no need to be serious or sad about a soul rotting away

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Many people getting upset about this 2018 term that was meant to be provocative don't acknowledge a difference between metaphors, models and descriptions. It's hard to have any reasonable discussion of the provocation when that level of understanding and nuance is not admitted.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 27/09/2026

J-Treds was known for his wildly creative wordplay and flows on Funcrusher Plus but he put out a handful of records too, including this one with inspiration/life advice. According to 2000s forum rumors he moved on and became a high school English teacher. Wherever he is now, I hope he's doing well.

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Google Gemini says that @jevinwest.bsky.social and I aren't to be trusted because in our first lecture, we had a playful example where Jevin presented data the same way that Tim Cook did, and I called bullshit on it. It hallucinates criticism and the only citations are to the lecture itself.

1. The "Explosive Growth" Slide ControversyIronically, the most direct and explicit example of this occurred during their very first "Calling Bullshit" lecture at the University of Washington.The Setup: Jevin West presented a slide to the class showing a graph that purported to show the "explosive, hockey-stick growth" of web traffic to their new Calling Bullshit website. The graph utilized standard marketing axes and compressed timeframes to make the project look like an unmitigated, runaway viral sensation.The "Bullshit": Carl Bergstrom actually had to step in and call "bullshit" on his own co-instructor's slide. When the data was displayed honestly without selective axis truncation or creative smoothing, it showed that while traffic was high initially, it heavily ebbed, flowed, and plateaued over time.The Criticism: While some praised this as a playful, planned pedagogical moment to show that "anyone can fall prey to bad data framing," critics viewed it as a perfect illustration of the double standard: when it serves a personal or professional promotional narrative (like proving your own course is a massive success), the temptation to use flawed, hype-driven metrics is incredibly high.

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I try to avoid ranting about NZ politics and often fail miserably. Every time I post about the school lunches I get A LOT of passionate feedback and engagement. It's a live issue, visceral, and has deeply frustrated and angered a lot of people.

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The Syllabus @the-syllabus.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Destroyed the local community economic loops and healthy school lunches, force feeding kids disgusting Compass Group swill. She is a merchant of slop. RNZ ascribing "non partisan" to the motivations of her new astroturf org is an extraordinary confirmation of everything in the Dirty Work book.

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Between 1971 and 1974, John Cage attempted to reconcile the "irreconcilable" social philosophy of Buckminster Fuller and the politics of Mao Tse-Tung by "listening to both." Our article of the week examines the politics of Cage's philosophy of silence. By Luke Martin buff.ly/e1BJYgE

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SCP @10-5.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It’s actually discouraging how much of the discourse gets diverted to “AI good or AI bad” when the obvious and more pressing issue is “AI *companies* are definitely bad”

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It started with HTML validators in the 2000s. People got more interested in seeing the green light/completion tick than putting a small amount of extra effort into providing accessible and useful information.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Neither Huang nor Klein have a clue what systems thinking is and it makes for an embarrassing cringe-versation.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

NZ media sure does specialise in cursed blunt rotations

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

“We have completely detached our sense of what makes a good solution to a problem” This is a really good post and I greatly appreciate it. I’ve talked a bit before about the lost art of symbolic AI but more recently I’ve drifting towards framing of profligate use of scale in the 64 bit era.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

An opinion I have that doesn’t seem to be shared by certain news editors is that repeatedly lying and making misleading inflammatory statements should be disqualifying of being given a platform to broadcast to thousands of people.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Not talking consistently about ideology, power or the funding networks promoting certain positions is one of the reasons so many people view media orgs as unreliable narrators. Need to talk about this, not handwave it by falling back on the truism that people just want their bias reflected back.

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

The NZ political reporting culture has been so focused for so long on masterful gambits, they are unable to contextualise blatant lying and deception as bad and dangerous qualities in leadership situations.

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Helen Simmons (She/Her) @littlehen.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Doing interesting work in service design? Would you like to share it with researchers, practitioners, educators & students in Newcastle upon Tyne at #ServDes2027 #DesigningInTheShadows? Full Papers due 15 Nov, Other Submissions: 1 Dec #PhDSky #AcademicSky #DesignSky #ServiceDesign

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Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

These Fountain Force 2 units were assembled in New Lynn. Not much is known about them beyond what you will see in the MOTAT collection and occasional reminiscing on NZ/AU forums. 43 bytes data memory is impossibly microscopic from today's view.

Mark @maetl.bsky.social · 20/09/2026