iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It's such a degraded and reductive notion of what consciousness is, what being alive is, what humanity is, tailored to their skillset and toolbox. Serious scholars of consciousness often seem to conclude that consciousness is inherently embodied.

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Anthony Vidal Torres @avtorres4.bsky.social · 17h

NYC is out on our streets tonight to demand ICE out for good. What we fail to repair from our history, we are bound to repeat. The brave of us must free America from white supremacy. @handsoffnyc.bsky.social @getfree-mvmt.bsky.social

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 17h

While the current turn against Turnitin responds to its plan to use student essays for AI training, the underlying extractive model was there all along. Students wrote the work; Turnitin took market advantage from being the obligatory portal for submissions. But now...? wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

wonkhe.com

A supplier shouldn’t be able to rewrite who owns students’ essays

Sam Dickinson looks at Turnitin’s paused plan to put student essays to work on AI – and finds that neither anonymisation nor university regulations answer the copyright question

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 18h

Funny that UK universities are starting to cancel Turnitin contracts over proposed "new terms regarding the processing of student submissions using AI tools", since UK HE was where Turnitin got its first foothold in the sector www.timeshighereducation.com/news/more-un...

timeshighereducation.com

More universities end Turnitin contracts as concerns mount

Newcastle and Westminster join Southampton in decision not to renew deal with plagiarism checker amid questions over how once-ubiquitous service is adapting to AI age

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Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab @bpal.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

We already had free art for people who are broke or bad at designing things, it's called the PUBLIC DOMAIN

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Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz.com · 17h

I chatted with @radiolab.bsky.social about math and AI – hope you enjoy the conversation radiolab.org/podcast/math...

radiolab.org

Math Vs Machine

Machines are answering our hardest problems. Does it matter if we don’t understand how?

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Dan McQuillan @danmcquillan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Announcing our critical philosophy of AI seminars for 2026-2027: ‘Yet Another Machine For Producing Gods’ cpct.uk/2026-2027/ Each week pits a philosophical text and a technical document against each other to interrogate presuppositions and provoke radical reflections.

cpct.uk

2026/2027

‘Yet Another Machine For Producing Gods’ Image: UBahn station in Essen, Germany, artwork by anonymous students at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste, 2026 Time: Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00 p…

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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Art! Crime! This week @artcrimeprof.bsky.social joins me on the pod. We discuss forgery in the 1920s, including an Italian anti-fascist, womanizing art forger who fooled American museums. A man whose unwillingness to carve imperfect noses and breasts, put a pair gay art experts onto his trail...

open.spotify.com

Episode 35: The Anti-Fascist Italian Art Forger that fooled America

The Untitled History Podcast · Episode

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Rob Burgess @robaburg.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Being a sentient person in 2026 means arguing in public for issues you never thought you would have to articulate out loud: "Read to your children yourself instead of outsourcing it to a robot!" "Don't televise executions!" Things like that.

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Madhu Pai, MD, PhD @madhupai.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Measles outbreaks in the United States “The overwhelming majority of people who have contracted measles were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status” apnews.com/article/meas...

apnews.com

Measles is surging in the US. These graphics show how bad it has gotten

The U.S. is enduring its worst year for measles since 1991. Since the beginning of last year, large outbreaks have been reported in several states, including Texas, Utah, South Carolina and, now, Penn...

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Jason Karsh @jkarsh.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

We are watching in slow motion the things that happen before ethnic cleansing happens. People get that, right?

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Status Coup News @statuscoupnews.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

🚨NYPD ARREST protesters who are rallying against ICE in NYC. This is taking place outside the hospital where a man is being guarded by ICE agents after being SHOT by them in his car

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Nnedi Okorafor, PhD @nnedi.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

What kind of society do we become when the state invites us to gather around a screen and watch it kill someone? 🇺🇸

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NYCLU @nyclu.org · 08/10/2026

ICE out of the Bronx. ICE out of New York. ICE out - now.

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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

this is fucked up

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think people should listen to what the administration trying to bring back spectacle lynchings, race riots, and middle passage-esque deportation voyages are trying to tell you about themselves. bsky.app/profile/bren...

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

we have a policy for the use of genAI at the @aial.ie. we reflect on values key to scientific integrity, such as replicability, and err on the side of not using it blogpost: aial.ie/blog/gen-ai-... pdf: zenodo.org/records/2322...

A flowchart that guides reflective thinking around generative AI in the context of research. It highlights key, interconnected values underpinning scientific integrity, alongside practical and wider socio-political considerations when deciding whether to use generative AI for research.

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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 08/10/2026

It is not actually contradictory to accept that computers have rapidly closed the gap in terms of what tasks can be automated in various areas that used to be exclusive to white collar work but also that this doesn’t mean they’re imminently becoming complete substitutes

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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 08/10/2026

been talking in DMs with some folks who are panicking about this and I cannot emphasize enough that this is a “person who got a ‘hard’ degree and expected it to protect them” problem, and as someone with a social science degree who now works in tech I cannot emphasize enough how that’s wrong headed

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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 08/10/2026

Like, I work with AI models at work, my colleagues do, we have all kinds of differing views on whether we like or dislike working with the models, how much we trust them, etc, but we all agree very strongly that we gotta get together as humans and discuss stuff and that isn’t changing

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ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 08/10/2026

Overwhelmingly what you do in a white collar job is mostly the soft stuff, and no, that doesn’t actually reduce to “humans are a liability condom” or whatever. It’s just stuff that is traditionally devalued becuase it’s not flashy/is sometimes hard to articulate, but it’s really important

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick @shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 08/10/2026

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A new Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology has just been published, in which it is claimed that the human species is polytypic: not only is race biologically meaningful but the races are distinct enough to be considered subspecies. Published by Elgar. In 2026.

Chapters in Part III take stock of the current state of evolutionary psychology, by casting wider attention to other social and behavioral sciences and assessing the field's influence on them. In Chapter 11 ('Evolutionary psychology and anthropology'), Heiner Rindermann identifies three major forces that oppose scientific anthropology: Religion, National Socialism ('Nazism'), and woke leftist ideology. Ironically, in this sense, woke left ideologues, who include most anthropologists themselves, geneticists, and other university academics, share much in common with the Nazis in their common opposition to scientific anthropology.
Rindermann's extensive review of the literature leaves no doubt that humans are genetically polytypic and contain different biological races or 'subspecies' At the end of the chapter, Rindermann delivers devastating rebuttals to all potential arguments against the notion of races/subspecies among humans.

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 07/10/2026

"I don’t know what every person in that group saw or knew. But I am raising one of the others. The boy who might someday be in the room. Or holding the phone. The boy who didn’t do it. The boy who could therefore spend the rest of his life explaining that he didn’t do anything." buff.ly/z7yWbR2

buff.ly

An Open Letter to Cornell University from the Mother of a Prospective Male Student

“Seven former Cornell students are accused in a civil lawsuit of sexually assaulting another Cornell student who says she was incapacitated. Messages alleged...

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Phil PlAIt @philplait.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

An absolute giant.

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 08/10/2026

This picture will always be iconic. RIP Margaret Hamilton who wrote the software that successfully guided NASA’s Apollo missions through the moon.

Margaret Hamilton with printed computer code in 1969. Credit: NASA/Alamy

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Dexerto @dexerto.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Amazon users are discovering a bizarre "About You" page that reveals what the company thinks it knows about them One woman found Amazon had determined she "has flat buttocks"

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Soraya Nadia McDonald @soraya.press · 07/10/2026

This is sexual violence as a form of terrorism. It is political violence and it is chilling and horrific, and AOC was absolutely right to be terrified that the goons (now pardoned) laying siege to the capital would rape her if they found her. Small changes won't fix this. FLIP THE TABLE NOW

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 07/10/2026

you don’t hold "AI" accountable; you hold AI developers, vendors, and corporations that profit off it accountable holding "AI accountable" is like holding a toaster accountable. it's an inanimate object. it doesn't have wishes, feelings, or desires

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Kim Kelly @kimkelly.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m giving a talk at the Mütter Museum tomorrow, October 8, and cannot tell you how excited I am! For the past few years, I’ve been working on a book on the American freak show for @onesignalbks.bsky.social, and this is the first public peek at what I’ve been up to 🎪 muttermuseum.org/events/meet-...

muttermuseum.org

Meet & Geek: Strange Girls

Life, Love, and Disability in the American Freak Show

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Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

AI has talked kids into suicide, fueled paranoid delusional that led to murder, degraded education quality in both k-12 and higher ed, run roughshod over copyright law, increased spam, fueled spam, fueled fraud, degraded the environment, put people out of work, the list goes on and on.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 07/10/2026

Creating an "AI" avatar of your dead loved one w/o their input or consent, & saying that it counts "the same" as the dead loved one— ESPECIALLY as evidence in a MURDER TRIAL— is both a massive misunderstanding of what "AI" is & how it works, & a hugely dehumanizing insult to said dearly departed.

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Dr. Ruth Marshall is still kicking against the pricks @wtfis2bdone.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

On the upside, my most brilliant PhD Religion doctoral grad started a school for the humanities w friends and he reported he’s making a living. Hope that is seen is not hope. ✊ mimbres.org

mimbres.org

About

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

science.org

‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research

Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year

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Shaily Patel @vox-magica.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

did y’all think, perhaps, with religious extremism on the rise globally, hand in hand with authoritarianism, or with religiously-motivated hate crimes increasing everywhere, that y’all might one day need some religionists? or do y’all still think religion is epiphenomenal to culture and politics?

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Grateful to the team at @studiosity.com for inviting me on their podcast with Judyth Sachs to talk about why I think human writing matters. Here's something I said that I think gets at what humans can do that chatbots can't --and why teachers and writing centers matter more than ever.

And this thing is that often what really will sort of light the fire under a student is when you help them figure out not how to do something with what's ont he page, but how to find the thing that's not yet on the page. That's what we're doing.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/10/2026

Far from Larry Ellison's utopia of people on their "best behavior," this will be a world of inauthentic, stunted selves, a society of people who will never know the joy of finding out who we are and being those people. eof/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/10/2026

It's the foundation of Bentham's "panopticon," a prison where prisoners can never tell if they're being watched, which is meant to induce a continuous performance of virtue: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopti...

en.wikipedia.org

Panopticon - Wikipedia

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 06/10/2026

Everybody's loving this clip, for good reason, but it should remind everyone that cities therefore have an obligation to build enough housing that all these marginalized and outcast people can come and afford to live in them on minimum wage *without* becoming homeless. YIMBY!

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026

Holy shit.

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Marguerite Mayhall @mkmayhall.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

All I can think of is this Friedrich painting

Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, depicting a man with his back to the viewer standing on a rocky promontory in front of a foggy rocky landscape with mountains in the distance.

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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is gutting. Sternberg is one of the most important paleontology museums in the country. MUSEUMS SHOULD BE LAST ON THE LIST TO CLOSE, NOT FIRST. What kind of world do we want to live in? Because running the country -- and universities -- like businesses and not a public good is what got us here.

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Ausarchosaur @ausarchosaur.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Petition to save the Sternberg Museum: www.change.org/p/save-the-s...

change.org

Sign the Petition

Save the Sternberg Museum of Natural History from Closure

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I'm again grateful to @theverge.com for publishing my newest long-form essay on the limits of the computational model of the mind, the benefits of understanding both biological and cultural evolution to explain human thinking, and the danger of cognitive hot dogs in education.

theverge.com

Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI

AI is junk food for the mind: easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 05/10/2026

Remember when us phil-tech types said effective altruism was just utilitarianism taken to its worst possible extents? This is what we meant: Real harm for unquantifiable potential benefit. "…'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology….'"

politico.com

Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.

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