iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I am usually someone who spoils his consumption of media w reviews, so when I learned this week that True Detective: Night Country, (which I watched long after it came out having read nothing about), has a lot of dedicated haters, I was really taken aback. To me it might be the best season?

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I am trying to do less generic political posting, but recent SCOTUS-sanctioned events in Tennessee remind me to unequivocally state in any available venue that the death penalty is unacceptable under any circumstances

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Karen Benjamin Guzzo @karenguzzo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hey, demographers! If you've ever used @prbdata.bsky.social's World Data Sheet, consider making a donation so they can continue producing this valuable resource! Visit www.prb.org/donate/!

When the funding that made the World Population Data Sheet possible was abruptly cut last year, something meaningful happened: stories poured in from around the world—from teachers, researchers, and policymakers sharing what this resource meant to their work. Those stories became the foundation of a fundraising effort that secured this 2026 edition.
If the Data Sheet has ever mattered to your work, here's a way to show it—and to help keep it alive. Donors who give $200 or more to PRB will receive a printed copy. Those who give at least $500 will also receive a copy of the inaugural 1962 edition.
🔗 Visit prb.org/donate to learn more!*
*Under IRS guidelines, the estimated value of the printed 2026 and 1962 World Population Data Sheets is not substantial; therefore, the full amount of your contribution is deductible as a charitable contribution.

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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

bluesky does not seem to really be talking about this but today Stevie Wonder unleased 4 songs that didn't make "Songs in the Key of Life." music.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

music.youtube.com

Songs In The Key Of Life - The EP

EP • Stevie Wonder

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Alice Reid @amrcampop.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Interested in a PhD in historical demography/population studies at @camunicampop.bsky.social, @camunigeography.bsky.social, Cambridge University? We have 3 suggested topics (see thread): contact me to discuss, or to suggest your own idea. Apply by early December for funded places.

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

On the one hand it’s an architecturally interesting neighborhood, so I get it; on the other hand, “your garage door can’t have panels, and your back doors that only guests will ever see should comply with architectural standards, and you can’t cut diseased trees without permission” is… ridiculous

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Agree. I am reasonably good at Computer and I absolutely do not have time/energy to get any of this stuff cooking for the kinds of tasks for which it would be most useful, especially anything outside work

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Wind up Bird Chronicler Moby Dicker Lover in the Time of Cholera

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Rarely has a job ad so aggressively said “this is not for you, specifically”

Bullet point starting “strong executive functioning…”

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Since the iced coffee interview discourse is still going, two things are true: 1) if you as a hiring manager care about this sort of thing, (outside of a few buttoned-up fields), you are very bad at hiring. Like, terrible at it. 2) as a candidate in a weak job market you gotta pick your battles

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Terms *and* conditions? In this economy?

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keep your electric eye on me @ubisurv.net · 23/09/2026

Sad news that I had heard was coming: #MicrosoftResearch is basically being brought to heel by #Microsoft. #AI all the time, and no more independent social research...

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I reiterate that if the frontier AI companies really want to slow the pace of development, all we really need is clear legal liability for some combination of the AI companies and whoever wrote the prompt that did the illegal thing Note that this is never their proposal

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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

We can simulate fish schools or ants in ways that solve complex problems (gradient detection, bridge building, nest selection) but no one would create this weird soul/no-soul dichotomy to argue they these that multi-agent swarms of extremely simple rules are “thinking”.

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 16/04/2026

are you there claude? it's me, margaret

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

One interesting demographic skew of this website is the enormous overrepresentation of people who were against invading not only Iraq but Afghanistan Not sure I knew a single person who was against the Afghanistan invasion. Iraq? Sure, myself included. Afghanistan? Not until it started dragging on

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Having recently moved from a neighborhood with a weak HOA to one with a more restrictive HOA, I am once again reminded that HOAs shouldn’t exist or should at most have extremely limited powers

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Jacob Bacharach @jacobbacharach.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I wrote a sonnet about self-improving superintelligence.

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Adam @adamshap.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Things happened this year

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I feel like I’m going to throw up

Screen shot of an Instagram post that says the academy of natural sciences is closing its museum after nearly two centuries

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Is there a trick to make Chrome stop eating so much memory? At home I simply don’t use it, but at work it is one of two approved browsers and the other one is Edge

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I’m obviously not going to defend Google, but as a geographer, it is mildly depressing that no one knows even fairly basic stuff about how the mapping technology they depend upon works

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I say this as someone who is sympathetic to the subject matter, to the point that I published a (pretty bad) paper on trees and equity in grad school: Any mechanism by which change in canopy matters but absolute canopy does not is not primarily capturing an effect of the canopy

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I wish human geography/critical cartography could be in the news over something less dumb

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Louis @louisevans.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

First the muppets take manhattan . . . then they take Berlin

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Fun little Easter egg in this Cookie Monster parody of the Wizard of Oz

Cookie Monster is standing in a doorway looking into a room with red curtains and a black and white tiled floor that looks like the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

He took us to a Coptic Orthodox Church because the liturgy is in four languages including a dead one Also a Thai Buddhist temple to hear Thai and Pali (With permission from the congregations, of course) Cool guy

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Every so often, somebody mentions Big Fish and I remember that it’s one of my favorite movies, and then I somehow forget about it again for years

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Good Work Dept. @goodworkdept.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Before interviewing for an analytics-nested “Data Scientist” role, ask whether the first 90-day deliverable is a model, an experiment, or a recurring report. Those are three different jobs hiding under one title.

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I just want to say what a relief it is that I have seen zero Reggie Watts hot takes in my feed here

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sam delgado @samdelgado.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The tree of heaven, an invasive species, is a nuisance to D.C.'s native ecosystem. They're also incredibly hard to get rid of — but this part of year is actually the most effective time to try. Here's how some residents in D.C. are trying to tackle these troublesome trees. 51st.news/removing-tre...

51st.news

Mount Pleasant residents say "hell no" to trees of heaven

This invasive species is spreading through the District. Some residents are taking matters into their own hands.

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

nature.com

Exclusive: NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

The US science-funding agency is withholding $1 billion of its budget so that the money can go to a special White House project.

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Important Excel PSA I only learned about in the past year Also Excel has regex functions now

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 18/08/2026

"You were riding in the morning, or at night, or on a quiet road, or a main road. The only time and place to ride a bike is a time beyond time and a place beyond place, where the space-time continuum is bent so strangely that you are both everywhere and nowhere." buff.ly/bSa1Wm5

mcsweeneys.net

You’re a Cyclist Who Was Just Struck by a Car Driver. Here’s Why It Was Your Fault

You were riding during rush hour Why were you riding then? There are way too many cars on the road. If you were commuting, you should have contacted your bos...

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I am just saying that I *will* judge any parent who lets their kids have these

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Missing Missing Reasons. Seriously hard to overstate how visionary that work is (I am in contact with ~all of my family members, so I can’t speak from direct experience, but I know a number of people who aren’t, and that’s by far the best single comprehensible piece of writing on it imo)

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Ah good, one of the largest accounts on this site is doing baldness shaming today, love that for all of us

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Mike Caulfield @mikecaulfield.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

When we talk about cooking your brain online, this is the mechanism, a steady flow of stories "too good to check" fed to you to boost your ego day after day until your fictional universe has the texture of reality.

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

You don’t want to know what the raw data usually looks like. Pretty much anywhere

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I gotta go do anything but be on here. Be kind to yourselves and those around you.

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Ah, hell I can withhold my opinion on anything else and just say that on a human level this is awful

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Steven Ruggles @stevenruggles.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Curious about the invention of microdata? Our new paper in Demography reveals the story. doi.org/10.1215/0070...

Graph of involvement of PAA presidents with the Census Bureau, 1930-2019. Peak involvement was 1950-1969.

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

"It is urgently important in American education today that the age-old distinction between education for living and education for making a living be discarded." No one is allowed to use this quote in any public writing except for me for the next 18 months kthx

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Nate Frey @natefrey.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

My current conspiracy theory is that nothing is working on computer because there are a thousand undisclosed or undiscovered Huggingface-type attacks going on every moment

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Karen Benjamin Guzzo @karenguzzo.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

"The proposed rule, under consideration by the Department of Commerce, attempts two things: to exclude broad categories of noncitizens from the count in the 2030 Census, and to eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time since 1790."

talkingpointsmemo.com

READ: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census...

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/08/2026

Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.

aiddata.org

Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned

Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.

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