iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This might be my favorite wordle result ever Wordle 1,935 3/6* ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

When I was a PhD student, a mentor taught me to be generous with credit. I’ve followed her example, but I’ve also become painfully aware how rare it is If I see you using someone else’s work without appropriate credit, I *will* judge you and it *will* make me less likely to collaborate

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2. Pediatricians are truly the best of us. It takes a special person to go into a low paying specialty where you are dealing with uncooperative and crying patients all day. They care about kids and want the best for them. Paxton is a despicable human being. May he have the life he deserves.

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Texas Pediatricians Face Paxton Investigations for Vaccinating Children

This pisses me off 1. Vaccines are life saving interventions. Vaccinating your kids is one of the easiest and most effective things you can do to protect their health. And Paxton absolutely knows this, because he’s a crook but he’s not an idiot. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/h...

nytimes.com

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate, has alleged a sprawling profit-driven conspiracy. Pediatricians say the accusations are an attempt at intimidation.

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shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

i especially love all the dopes saying “when the internet first went mainstream everyone hated it too” like it happened in the pioneer days so no one can dispute it, like mf’ers we were THERE

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Part of why I don't like the AI-or-bust economy is the constant flopsweat of people on the news who say this HAS to work. Quit making everyone so anxious. Goddamn. If this is the next Google then why are you acting like this? I don't remember being told to buy an iPhone at gunpoint.

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

My now 11 y/o also used that line a lot at that age. It also introduced “porcine” to her vocabulary

“I think” 😂😂😂

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There is plenty of tech that I use despite having ethical qualms about the product or company, because it is *useful* (eg, my smartphone, instagram). Gen AI is just not useful in my day to day, and often creates more work for me.

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I am also at a university where students and many faculty use AI a lot, and I’ve been on the receiving end of enough AI-generated crap to never want to see it again. It actively makes my job harder.

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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

And then there are those of us who try to use it and remain unimpressed. For the things I need, gen AI is mostly mediocre to okay, which isn’t enough to sell me on it outside a few specific use cases. YMMV ML is a different story

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I see some folks asking: what motivates RFK Jr to tell such horrific, dangerous, repulsive lies about the HPV vaccine? Well, he has made $856,559 from suing the HPV vaccine maker (his vaccine adviser, Dr Kulldorff, also got rich the same way) Always follow the 🤑! www.npr.org/sections/sho...

npr.org

RFK Jr. plans to keep a financial stake in lawsuits against the drugmaker Merck

RFK Jr. plans to keep collecting referral fees in lawsuits against the drug company Merck even if confirmed as HHS secretary, according to new filings with the Office of Government Ethics.

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I should say that by “AI” I mean gen AI and not ML, which can be implemented more rigorously and has a number of good use cases

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Have you been to a garment factory? If you think garment workers just push a button, I don’t know what to tell you. The point of AI for many people seems to be that you do not need to produce a highly detailed blueprint (because then you might as well do it yourself)

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You know this is my third or fourth go around with this kind of technological innovation for consumers and citizens. And a lot of it is the same. Same pattern of exaggerated benefits, underestimated challenges. What’s new this time is the sector isn’t even pretending to care about the consumer.

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For no reason at all, sharing this insight from my 4 y/o son “If someone says no, it means you have to stop” DAMN STRAIGHT

In your example, a human (at a minimum) designs, specs, and plans the items and operates the machine. The use of, eg, a sewing machine to produce clothing is analogous to the use of a word processor to write, imo. It is not analogous to AI.

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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 29/09/2026

This internet stranger is proud of you!

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617 days into his 2nd term, Trump's Department of Transportation has *still* not approved a single new transit project for full funding. The problems I highlighted in March—how this lack of funding only makes projects cost more & delays completion—have only worsened www.urban.org/urban-wire/r...

There have been no approvals for new transit projects in the entire 2nd Trump Administration. This graph, produced in March 2026, remains accurate now, in September 2026.

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This guy has it exactly right. AI doesn’t save time. It offloads labor onto someone else (ime, often a woman)

CEO Scott Stevenson was sick of sifting through multipage memos, riddled with AI tics, that never seemed to actually land on a point. It may have been faster for his employees to write this way, but it was taking him forever to read. “It just made us get backlogged,” Stevenson says.

Worse, he worried some people were shipping long, glossy strategy documents as a way of masking their underbaked ideas. “A lot of junior people think good writing is, ‘How do I make something that’s polished and structured and long?’” he says. “I think good writing is, ‘How can you pack the most meaning into the fewest amount of words?’”

Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I was a bio major, but I remember my English major friends figuring out which science classes to take to fulfill the requirements. The earth science dep’t was popular with non-STEM majors, iirc.

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It’s been a while, but my recollection is that Maryland supplies a return envelope with their absentee ballots, with the oath on the envelope. Did not realize that wasn’t standard.

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

He is the absolute worst

Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Apparently a faculty member at our school did this last year, students easily figured it out, and the instructor received the lowest course evaluations of all the classes offered at our school (rightly so!)

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I find AI writing unreadable, and it is everywhere. I’m sure there is some that I’m missing, but most of it is so obvious, and so painful to read. Everything is in the same $&@!? voice. It’s as if everything was now written by the same mediocre author.

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Meal @mealmel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This one seems more accurate. I’ve been testing it on my own writing as well as student assignments pre- and post-AI. So far no false positives. Others have been running larger scale validations (I have no affiliation with them - I’m just tired of AI writing)

For us, this has meant staying at our local public ES/MS. We went in commited to trying it but ready to move (to another public school, private is not on the table) if it wasn’t working. We’ve stayed, and our oldest decided to stay for MS YMMV

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Our approach has basically been: 1. Prioritize diversity and academics 2. Test scores don’t necessarily = good academics. ime, a strong principal is essential (and will attract good teachers) 3. Keep a very, very close eye on schoolwork and on standardized assessments 4. Give kids a say

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We had to make the same choices (White mom, Black dad, high poverty urban school district). While I agree that it’s not easy, it is inconceivable to me that they were not more on top of their kid’s learning and more responsive to their kid’s concerns.

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We allowed our daughter to choose her middle school, since Baltimore has a middle school choice program, and she chose to stay at the same school (it’s K-8)

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Our kids go to a Baltimore city school (our neighborhood school). We’ve had a mostly great experience with fantastic teachers, but we also keep close tabs on how they’re doing - not just their grades but their actual work. If we’d had issues like the ones NHJ describes, we would have moved them ASAP

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I think a lot of people (including me) feel a moral obligation to send our kids to public school. But that does not mean abdicating responsibility for their education or sending them to a school where they cannot get a good education.

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*the part of the article, to be clear

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This is the part I can’t understand. We live in Baltimore and our kids go to our neighborhood school, which we love. But we review everything - not necessarily to correct it, but so we can assess their learning and address any areas of weakness. It may help that we’re both PhDs.

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