iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

congrats! one of my favorite subjects in the world, excited to read your take on it how have we not met IRL yet??

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

everything downhill since we abandoned these

a conventional telephone with a shoulder rest attached to the receiver

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

recently overheard a handful of kids all realize that for every single one of them, one of their earliest memories was hanging out at IKEA's Småland

an image of IKEA's Småland free child care facility

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

maybe a mistake to start both of these at once, as each is rocking my world in a totally different way books have such power, still, and perhaps more than ever in an age of slop, both human and ai-generated

cover: Isabel Allende -- A Long Petal of the Sea

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

So I guess either Bluesky becomes a nonprofit or we all start sharing our Threads handles on here…?

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

truly it is the decade of threads

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

There’s a whole book on this subject. I truly wish everyone understood this, it’s one of the most powerful yet least known forces driving inequality and poor working conditions in America today

Cover of David Weil’s The Fissured Workplace:

Why work became so bad for so many

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I just finished this book. It is such a crazy, brilliant fever dream of a book. If you like science fiction, and specifically the experience of an intellectual round house kick to the head that changes your view of what‘s possible, I cant recommend it enough.

Book cover: There Is No Anti Memetics Division

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

when you're ready to graduate to a floor desk there's just no substitute for making it yourself with plywood; this way you can get it to exactly the right height (this pic is from years ago but I still use this desk almost every day)

a cozy floor desk in an attic office, complete with whiteboard, view out the window, several houseplants, floor chair, laptop on stand, ergonomic mouse, external 2nd monitor, all under a pitched roof in a white room with a warm wooden floor

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

so if you're very rich you can buy this folding TV designed by Bugatti

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Think Tech Is Spending Too Much? There’s Trillions More to Come. * Tech companies spent > $1 trillion on AI in 2025 and 2026 * In 2027 they will spend even more, with a total of: $2.7 trillion in future commitments

chart: Beyond Capex
All that capex spending is just the start. These five tech heavyweights have committed to $2.7 trillion in future leases and purchases

Alphabet - $900 billion
Meta - $700 billion
Microsoft - $550 billion
Oracle - $300 billion
Amazon - $250 billion

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Finally saw the movie everyone can’t stop talking about

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

the Bluesky features that force people who want to argue with you to follow you is both good community management and a hilarious practical joke

Post interaction settings screen on Bluesky, with replies limited to followers and quote posts turned off

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire. SpaceX stock is down 50% from its peak, Tesla is also cratering www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

10 day share price performance of SpaceX, Tesla is down and to the right, with both down nearly 25% in the past week and a half

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I cannot emphasize enough how much oil market analysts who have no special insight into what this administration is planning are Just Making Stuff Up

📣 “We've seen that as soon as Brent hits $100 or above, there are de-escalatory measures taken. We are likely to see de-escalation this time, too.”

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Please enjoy this home security footage of an oddly human-like bear raiding a fridge in Lake Tahoe www.wsj.com/us-news/blac...

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

sometimes when I'm scanning for tech news on X I'm reminded it's a warren of incredibly lonely men who want to blame the world for their problems

It needs to be examined why our country gives the best reproductive opportunities to the men most likely to squander them

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

to be fair, a major reason air taxis are being held back is that we have sober regulations about the safety of helicopters in urban environments (which is what they are) that are a product of horrible crashes like this one, so we *could* speed their debut by dismantling those laws...

crash of a commuter helicopter on a roof in in manhattan

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

life goal: to be an urban sketcher of this caliber www.reddit.com/r/urbansketc...

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

apparently we are headed for "full AI communism" www.reddit.com/r/Artificial...

OpenAI head of strategic futures says open-weight model dominance is AI communism

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

There is a civil war happening in tech over Chinese / free to use / open weights AI? At least on X. I realize no one else cares, but this is my World Cup. tl;dr a former Trump official joined OpenAI, said some stuff about open models he's since walked back, everyone is losing their minds

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Companies are expected to sell $800 billion in stock by the end of this year. They‘ve sold less than half that so far and investors are already getting the willies. Eventually supply outstrips demand - and a bull market ends. www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

For those of you who joined Twitter in its earliest days, congrats on 20 years of being A Poster

a still from the movie The Deayh of Robin Hood showing a very grizzled old man

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

feels like "war over energy will make the price of everything skyrocket" and "we need to eradicate inflation" are directly contradictory endeavors

dueling headlines on the homepage of WSJ: "The Battle for Hormuz: Trump Shifts Into Dangerous New Phase in Iran War" and "Warsh Tells Congress the Fed Has ‘No Tolerance’ for High Inflation"

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

seriously how do we bring this energy to local elections in the U.S.

count binface being interviewed by a serious journalist

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Used Threads for a few minutes to remind myself what it's like and it was a weird mix of clickbait and accounts I want to see but which are getting almost no engagement. If that was the only place I hung out on the internet I think I'd believe the Dead Internet Theory

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I mean this sounds like precisely what Bluesky, which is after all still a business, is trying to become

Threads now increasingly resembles the social message board Reddit, as well as X. Users gravitate to specific communities on the platform, rather than a feed of news, to discuss television episodes, game recaps, celebrity gossip and current events. Among the most popular topics are K-pop, the W.N.B.A., dating, dramedy books and television shows like “Heated Rivalry.”

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I'm sorry, but we spent how much on Twinkies? www.wsj.com/business/ret...

Why Smucker’s $5 Billion Bet on the Twinkie Flopped

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

SpaceX stock drops below IPO opening price despite flood of bullish Wall Street ratings "SpaceX's ambitions — and potential impact on humanity — are bigger than any company's we've ever seen" says JPMorgan Chase

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

It blows my mind that e-book sales are actually declining, even though e-book readers are better, more varied, and more capable than ever. But not better than printed books, it seems! I can't think of any other medium where the latest way to consume it hasn't won.

At the same time, sales of e-books have shrunk, even after all but replacing the mass market paperback during the 2010s. Since 2016, e-books dropped from 17 percent to 11 percent of trade publishing revenue, according to data from the A.A.P. that looked at the first 10 months of each year. But revenue from e-books this year was about the same as it was last year.

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

could be sarcasm but it seems the AI industry has lost Katie Miller

Katie Miller on X:

Decided to breastfeed instead of use formula to save water for AI data centers.

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

What happened to Mark Zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

infographic: left, the last time zuckerberg's chain was visible in a social post, when trump's disapproval rating was 49.5%

right? trump's disapproval hits 53.3%, the chain is now hidden

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

these things are 9 feet long and we're only just seeing them in the wild, in case you were wondering if the ocean is still full of rarely-observed wonders / horrors

a goblin shark, which looks like the gnarliest Kaiju ever

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

just a partial list of things I've seen YouTube creators attach their li'l mics to

a guy on subway takes holding a MetroCard with a mic attached

YouTube creator Justin Taylor holding the magazine for a semi-automatic rifle with a microphone attached

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

low key excited for everyone to learn the definition of "crack spread"

Growing Crack Spreads Telling Us US Economy Undersupplied With Fuel

chart: shows the divergence between the price of oil and the price of refined products such as gasoline and diesel; higher -- "The spread approximates the profit margin that an oil refinery can expect to make by "cracking" the long-chain hydrocarbons of crude oil into useful shorter-chain petroleum products." according to wikipedia

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

It's funny because I think in the western mind an abacus is something foreign but here's an etching from 1503 of Europeans using something halfway between an abacus and what's now known as a "counting board." This kind of thing goes back to the Sumerians and almost certainly predates writing!

Use of an abacus, as illustrated in Margarita philosophica (1503)

on the left is a regular accountant using written figures to do the same kind of calculation. an etching.

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

You're not hearing about big wins in renewable energy in the U.S. because people building this infrastructure do not want to attract the attention of the Trump administration. But they're happening. www.semafor.com/newsletter/0...

chart of share of u.s. electricity generation by source, renewables in green and gas in yellow.

In October 2025 gas was 45% of u.s. electricity generation, renewables just 22%

as of April 2026 renewables are beating gas -- 35% is from gas, a little over that is from renewables

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

I have so many questions about this fake review that popped up on Google Maps

Wyoming Man Hunter writes:

I had a really great nap here

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Head of national security commission of Iran's parliament: "The number of American casualties is already far higher than Trump confirms... This time, the war won't be limited to the region."

post on X by @Ebrahimazizi33

We're not afraid of fighting losers.
The number of American casualties is already far higher than Trump confirms, and it will rise.
This time, the war won't be limited to the region.
We'll see what happens!

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

so you're saying we should go back to this

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