iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Sherrod Brown @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.

Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 29/09/2026

THIS 👇🏼 💯 absolutely THIS I dunno if I've been this every time I could've or should have (cause I'm so fucking blind to my own privilege so fucking often). But THIS IS THE WAY. And it's certainly who I'm trying to raise my son to be

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Loukas Christodoulou @loukas.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I think one major way you can miss seeing this as a man is all the work women around you are doing to navigate misogyny is invisible to you. There's a minefield that you only see when it blows up, and you wonder, how did that get there. "How did Bob turn into that."

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

another way to think about Zuckerberg at this point is as an digital slumlord, ruling over an e-favela, which is structurally ungovernable but also still managed by cyborg BOPE raids that keep the rabble in line

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 26/09/2026

Agreed. Hands down the best thing on television in this century

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 25/09/2026

A goodharting problem 💀

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geoffrey @parsnip.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

genuinely think online replies to news pieces may have been a mistake. jingus in oklahoma saying “wow, virtue signaling much?” in response to a country announcing the change of its name to reflect its actual pronunciation rather than what occupiers found easy to say is not serving me as a reader

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Sanho Tree @sanho.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Mandatory morning wood inspections are the kind of thing that can lead to rebellions and dangerous miscalculations (see above).

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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Why do so many care about inheritance tax when fewer than 5% of estates pay it? Because that statistic counts the dead. Our new model counts living pensioner households instead. 20% have enough assets to face the tax. Over 50% in parts of London. Thread:

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 19/09/2026

Could you explain why this happens? What's the mechanism behind the drop off?

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The GOP has collapsed so far into far right authoritarianism that it has lost <checks notes> Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, George Will, & Bill Kristol, & yet somehow our National Conversation™️ remains focused disproportionately on whether Democrats are veering too far left into socialism 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

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Joel Morris @gralefrit.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It’s a failure of imagination and wider reading on the part of tech guys to invent Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment about a vengeful god that will punish you for not cooperating, while their tech enrages Mother Nature, a vengeful god we’ve had available in our pantheon for millennia.

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 16/09/2026

I do think anyone who wants us to take Elizer Yudkowsky seriously as an authority on AI armageddon should be forced to testify on video that they have read the entirety of his 660,000 word rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction – written aged 30–34 – and still thinks the world needs his take.

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 16/09/2026

Ah, well except in this particular case the analogy is more like when I take my car in, I discover that the place is staffed by 12 yr olds who have just discovered the twin thrills of power tools and Uzing Big Wurds... They are *not* the experts

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Christopher J Stevens @metaphysiology.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Re rise of AI, reading this historic event through the lens of Theuth & F451 gives us a concrete warning: identify *now* what cognitive skills AI risks atrophying, and ask if and how it is even possible to educate to maintain those skills in the AI-flooded environment we're creating. Caveat promptor

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Gregk Foley @gregk.co.uk · 16/09/2026

Fair play to the wife of a Caribbean man and mother of mixed race children being informed by the BBC reporter that she’s in the minority in her community regarding immigration and responding with, “Yes, I’m surrounded by bigots.”

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 16/09/2026

I would watch this, esp the episode where Farage and Boris wind up trying to grandstand in the same pub, and both wind up vomiting on Braverman's table...

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 16/09/2026

Amen (and obviously, for all things, not just 'AI')

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 16/09/2026

When they write the history books of our time, SpaceX will be regarded as shorthand for collective madness in exactly the same way we laugh in assumed superiority about the primitives falling for the Tulip Mania...

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Cethan Leahy @cethanleahy.com · 15/09/2026

Pretty funny that Ed Sheeran seemingly only hired Irish people and yet didn't see this coming.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026

The U.S. AI industry is being run by a batshit rationalist sex cult, and no, I am not being hyperbolic - they’re genuinely Like That:

Erin Redwing
@realizingerin
I went to an rationalist/EA Al doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that Al will kill everyone.
Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.
My experience was the exact opposite.
The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that Al literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.
Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.
I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.
At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of Al doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.
I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent Al inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.
That does not mean Al safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing Al systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.
But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 15/09/2026

And I played a Cavalier, which was a paladin that didn't have to be lawful good... It wasn't even *in* the books, it was an article in Dragon magazine... I still own a photocopy of it, which saw heavy use

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 15/09/2026

Ah, that's not how I recall it (playing AD&D 45 years ago)... We inhaled those books and knew them by heart - it is true that the things at the edges drove some mad. See also 'falling damage' as the canonical example

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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein @deepcuts.blog · 15/09/2026

When, in ten or twenty or fifty years time, we look back on the Trump era of politics, I do not think many of us will be proud of the stances we did and did not take, the actions we did and did not take. The sins committed by inaction, by centrism, by choosing a middle road between bigotry & sanity.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 15/09/2026

*slaps Cybertruck* this bad boy can hold so many Ls

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

hey Whitaker what does the "NA" in "NATO" stand for

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 14/09/2026

Strausbourg is lovely. If you've not been, Haut Koenigsburg is definitely worth a day trip at some point, fwiw Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg - Wikipedia share.google/MeQdBnp3N3rH...

share.google

Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg - Wikipedia

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 12/09/2026

It's very, very good indeed

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Colin Murray @colinmurray.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

A campaign for *MSF* to be banned as a terrorist group (on the paper thin basis of claims about 2 past employees) is the product of the UK Govt being willing to divorce any meaningful conception of societal threat from its use of proscription powers. Govt needs to wake up to the madness of this:

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 11/09/2026

One WEEK after 9/11, my middle class, university educated white, Northeastern US friends, people I'd known for years, were saying they'd get off a plane if any brown people were on it, and demand they be arrested. The US went insane, and ppl who say otherwise, generally, still are.

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 11/09/2026

Ah, DFW... So many layers of heartbreak in this piece...

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Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The balaclava blackshirted thugs are a result of a decade of politicians, tabloids and the broadcast media telling racists they have "legitimate concerns." The normalisation of actual fascism rhetoric and action has led to this and is a far greater "legitimate concern" than any migrant on a boat.

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Simon Pegg @simonpegg.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This. This was the peak of a folding phone. Nothing you do now will compete.

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 10/09/2026

An image of one of those phone scamming banks w 100s of SIMs in it just popped into my head... Crikey

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 10/09/2026

Yeah, in all seriousness, we're poking around with Stripe's agent-to-agent payment stuff, because... Well, you know, because... Sigh

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 10/09/2026

If using Concur were the Turing test, I would have been filtered out 35 years ago #np

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 10/09/2026

They have to submit expense requests in Concur...

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Mark Masterson @mastermark.me · 10/09/2026

I'm thinking about perf for agents and... 😬

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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

*Oh come on, I'm 72 and find that stuff quite entertaining *Also the von Neumann "singularity" notion dates way back to 1958, when your dad was seven years old

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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Invoking 9/11 in connection with an unnecessary, illegal war in the Middle East over bogus WMD claims.

static.klipy.com

Back To The Future Marty Mcfly

ALT: Back To The Future Marty Mcfly

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Eric Champnella @echamp.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

NEVER FORGET: On 9/11, Donald Trump bragged his building was now the tallest in NYC. Listen for yourself...

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Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 06/09/2026

people really need to disambiguate between "the code for X was coauthored with a language model" and "peoples' inputs into this app are fed into the language model as a subprocessor" because these are completely different concepts!

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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 04/09/2026

The people who get caught for this, whether politics or criminality, is because they can't resist playing the Big Man to someone they perceived as important/helpful. As ever, real Gs move in silence, like lasagne.

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Shane Chowen @ukshane.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Good morning from Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham where earlier today this delegate had his sword confiscated

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