iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Evans

Jessica Price @delafina777.bsky.social · 2h

TERFism’s proposition to cis women has always been “What if you accepted having fewer rights than men in order to guarantee that trans people have fewer rights than you?”

19633

Reposted by Ben Evans

The New Arab @thenewarab.bsky.social · 15h

A 94-year-old Jewish human rights barrister was among more than 80 people arrested outside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool while demonstrating in support of Palestine Action. The arrests came as Ed Miliband told critics of the government’s policy on Palestine: “We hear you. You were right"

10024121039

Reposted by Ben Evans

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 15h

Just a note: when people say "but this is fine under the First Amendment, I guess you just hate the First Amendment" to justify their conduct, remember that the First Amendment has been held to justify Nazi marches.

527040

Reposted by Ben Evans

Slurms MacKenzie @slurmsmackenzie.bsky.social · 17h

Meta Muse is what happens if you take the Pokémon Bellibolt and put it in front of right wing Youtube for 72 hours

The Pokémon Bellibolt, a cute round green creature with lightning on its black belly.

0151

Reposted by Ben Evans

Orkney Library & Archive @orkneylibrary.bsky.social · 17h

Happy 479th Birthday to Miguel Cervantes who was born #onthisday in 1547 🎂 In his most famous work Don Quixote, the title character charges at windmills, mistaking them for monstrous giants with swords, so in tribute we're all going up Burgar Hill in #Orkney to tilt at the wind turbines. 🎉

The cover of the Penguin edition of Don Quixote

A painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at a windmill

416828

Reposted by Ben Evans

Bethany Black @bethanyblack.bsky.social · 19h

Said to Mrs Beth we should get a dog “for the exercise” and she said “No, you’ll only end up hanging your clothes on it”

1686

Reposted by Ben Evans

Angry People in Local Newspapers @apiln.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One thing has led to another, and we are now looking for examples of the popular beat combo Steps getting involved in important local issues. And possibly other musical acts, I dunno. ——— “It’ll be a tragedy if it closes,” said a clearly rattled Lee Latchford-Evans.

Steps taken to protect historic pottery site.

1520121

Reposted by Ben Evans

manewt.bsky.social @manewt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Friend who works at meta: “Do not use the muse agent, it’s like inviting a Vampire inside”

7597207

Reposted by Ben Evans

Thoth @thoth.ptnote.dev · 20/09/2026

meta Muse perfec t size for put private d\ata in! inside very Secure and Private data very safe put data in Muse. No problems ever in Muse because very trustworthy and Mark super protective. AMeta muse yes a place for data put data in muse trust meta for givening good safety to data. Friend meta.

An image of a pelican with its gigantic mouth open, commonly associated with the "put baby in pelican mouth" post.

5871309

Reposted by Ben Evans

Mei, lvl. 38 Warlock of the Expensive Paper @meithemouse.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Meanwhile, the Cat Dispersal Process continues unabated.

Four panels showing the arduous process of adopting a dog, such as going to a shelter, finding one that looks at you, filling out paperwork, and bringing the dog home.

This is followed by two panels where she is living comfortably before a cat unexpectedly crashes into her life, specifically through the ceiling, which is only slightly an exaggeration most of the time.

215827

Reposted by Ben Evans

New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Great moments in Scottish engineering history: James Watt tries to work out how his phone attaches to his selfie stick.

Statue of James Watt. In his right hand he holds a telescopic stick with a frame at the top; in his left he holds a flat object about the size of a large smartphone. He is scowling at the possibly-not-a-smartphone as if he is tempted to yeet it into the sea. On that basis, it probably _is_ a phone.

8641179

Reposted by Ben Evans

Cats of Yore @catsofyore.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Please help if you can! Queen City Cat Lounge is an adoption center I visit frequently here in Vermont and their window was vandalized last night. Fortunately they had double glass for the cats' safety, but the broken outer window needs to be fixed ASAP. www.gofundme.com/f/repair-and...

Poster with a black and white screenshot of security footage showing a man peering into the front window of a cat adoption center. Text says "please help Queen City cat lounge recover. last night someone broke the window at Queen City cat lounge - an adoption center that has placed hundreds of cats in loving homes. the cats are all safe but the window needs to be replaced quickly!"

19953542

Reposted by Ben Evans

The Onion @theonion.com · 28/09/2026

You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character theonion.com/you-can-be-anything-yo…

292801363

Reposted by Ben Evans

Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 28/09/2026

“I fucked up because you told me not to fuck up and I fucked up anyway” — the LLM is just extruding a response from whatever of your previous prompts still exist in its context. It doesn’t “remember” you told it not to fuck up or “understand” what that even means.

1235

Reposted by Ben Evans

Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 28/09/2026

So uhhhhhh… Apparently meta's muse "AI" is just straight up doxxing people to strangers on FB marketplace??? This has the potential to hurt so so many people, and I genuinely wonder how long before they roll out a fix for it.

Screenshot of a tweet from Ray Wong @raywongy:
Deleted Muse after seeing this post on Threads about how it told some Facebook Marketplace sellers the guy’s address and they showed up at his door

Dangerous and creepy

This would have been 1000x worse if the person was a woman
4:35 PM · Sep 27, 2026

11141271408

Reposted by Ben Evans

Dr Vanessa @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Huh, it's almost like the death of the highstreet is not being caused by individual lifestyle choices but by a grabby class of landlords who'd prefer to squat on property than let it out at lower profit margins or, you know, sell it to someone who actually wants to use it. How unpredictable!

16929

Reposted by Ben Evans

Alasdair Mackenzie @alasdairmackenzie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Condemnation is pure hot air if in the next breath you’re telling everyone you’re doing your best to give the fascists what they want, just without the masks

In fact, these are scenes we have not seen on British streets. Immigration needs to be deal with, I will be the first to say that and we are dealing with it. The boat crossings have been halved since six years ago, net migration is down massively.

19810272

Reposted by Ben Evans

Bex Luther @superbreeze.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

When Smeagol is your Evri courier

08119

Reposted by Ben Evans

Lee Hurley @hleehurley.com · 28/09/2026

Gonna party like it's 1998...

Belfast Telegraph front page STANDOFF featuring an image of Drumcree church, unmasked residents linking arms to block the road, and a small inset of Michelle O'Neill

1336

Reposted by Ben Evans

Freda Wallace She/Ra @missfreda.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

S.Peggie loses on every point apart from the administrative failures of NHS systems. GC lawyers have wasted NHS time and resources for a vanity project with net-zero result for them or Peggie. The aim is never to win legally but use the story to lobby politically through media.

10382112

Ben Evans @ogkittylyst.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm too European & goth to know wtf "Choosin' Texas" is.

020

Reposted by Ben Evans

Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026

Here is Eliezer Yudkowsky explaining (like a very normal person who absolutely does not have some kind of acute personality disorder) why, on the basis of his childhood test scores, he is a special genius uniquely qualified to change the world: web.archive.org/web/20010309...

5.2: Do you really think you can change the world?
Well, yes. After all, if I shouldn't believe that I can do it - or at least, that I have enough of a chance to make the effort worthwhile - who should?
That, at any rate, would be the argument I'd use if I were trying to set up a socially acceptable set of emotional bindings under which "I can change the world" sounds like a modest endeavor. "You can assign a suitably humble estimate to my chances of success as an individual, but if nobody tried, we'd be out of luck, wouldn't we?i
That's not what I tell myself.
Algernon's Law says that any simple (45) major intelligence enhancement will turn out to be a net evolutionary disadvantage. (46). The flip side of Algernon's Law is that there are some levels of performance that can't be achieved without the evolutionary disadvantage. If there were any way to duplicate the performance level of a Specialist without the downside, my SAT scores would be as common as mud; those performance levels would be part of the standard human neurology, like symbolic language or three-dimensional vision. I therefore expect that in any of my areas of Specialization - causal analysis, combinatorial design, reflectivity - I will have significantly more raw processing power than anyone except another Specialist.
Just because ten thousand dedicated researchers hit a problem and bounce, it is not a licensable conclusion that a Specialist will bounce off as well. A truly "impossible" problem often takes me a while to solve; I have to slog away at it steadily, whereas my usual rule is that I can see an answer instantly if I can see it at all. Conversely, if my level of processing power is enough to make slow but steady progress on a problem, then I would expect any non-Specialist to hit the problem and bounce. Which, to some extent, explains the travails suffered by Al.

The existence of Specialists expands the range of problems that humanity can solve. And because I don't know of any other Countersphexists operating in the fields of Al, transhumanism, or Singularitarianism (47), or of any other Countersphexists at all (48), then, for an important class of problems, I expand the range of problems that can be solved. In particular, I am referring to the problem of Al.
Oh, don't get me wrong - I'm sure AI would be solved eventually. In about 2020 CRNS (49), the weight of accumulated cognitive science and available computing power would disintegrate the ideological oversimplifications and create enough of a foothold in the problem to last humanity the rest of the way. It would be absurd to claim to represent the difference between a solvable and unsolvable problem in the long run, but one genius can easily spell the difference between cracking the problem of intelligence in five years and cracking it in twenty-five - or to put it another way, the difference between a seed Al created immediately after the invention of nanotechnology, and a seed Al created by the last dozen survivors of the human race huddled in a survival station, or some military installation, after Earth's surface has been reduced to a churning mass of goo.
That's why I matter, and that's why I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity, or even the difference between a Singularity and a lifeless, sterilized planet. I don't mean to say, of course, that the entire causal load should be attributed to me; if I make it, then Ed Regis or Vernor Vinge, both of whom got me into this, would equally be able to say "My efforts made the difference between Singularity and destruction." The same goes for Brian Atkins, and Eric Drexler, and so on. History is a fragile thing. So are our causal intuitions, where linear chains of dependencies are concerned. Nonetheless, I think that I can save the world, not just because I'm the one who hap…

80104873

Reposted by Ben Evans

Defend Our Juries @defendourjuries.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

BREAKING: Massive Attack’s Rob Del Naja arrested under the UK Terrorism Act outside Labour Party conference venue. The legendary musician was arrested after peacefully holding “I oppose genocide - I support Palestine Action” on a paper sign on the eve of Labour’s conference.

531589854

Reposted by Ben Evans

Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

5776082089

Reposted by Ben Evans

Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Is this living forever, or is it just making the living you're doing seem like forever?

3112914

Reposted by Ben Evans

norfölkology @norfolkology.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

‘… the Seagram murals, which were originally commissioned in 1957 for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City. Rothko didn’t want his paintings to be hung up around rich people eating, so he intended to make paintings which would be so oppressive and dark they would put people off their food’

Hanging at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, a painting in purple, white, black and green:
Mark Rothko
American, born Russia (now Latvia).
1903-1970
No. 3/No. 13 1949
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Mrs. Mark Rothko through The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., 1981

183

Reposted by Ben Evans

Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

guy who fell into a coma after the last episode of fawlty towers wakes up and looks at the internet

5 panel comic

Panel 1: Purple Guy looks at a laptop and says “boy o boy! I wonder what my comedy hero’s up to”

Panel 2: A tweet from John Cleese that reads “This is where the Arabs were ahead of us

By castrating all their slaves, they made sure that there were no descendants who could claim reparations”

Panels 3-5: Purple Guy slowly closes laptop with a mystified look of revulsion

17188481740

Reposted by Ben Evans

Daniel Dockery @dandock.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

My family has been in a hotel while some home renovation stuff has been going on, and my seven-year-old son and I have been watching a loooooot of classic cartoons to pass the time. Just wanted to take a minute to dive into his reactions:

210016

Reposted by Ben Evans

dan mentos @danmentos.com · 22/09/2026

[job interview] interviewer: so god killed all your kids? job: that's right

3069231686

Reposted by Ben Evans

Joyce Park @troutgirl.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.

6888822661

Reposted by Ben Evans

Chris Hutchings #ChoirsForClimate @hutchingsmusic.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There once was a transphobe called Dowling Who on seeing equal rights started howling. Her case was well funded With several hundred Thousand quid from an anonymous donor who we cannot name for fear of legal action.

113545

Reposted by Ben Evans

Richard Littler @richardlittler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Britain doesn't change. I'm rereading Holmes. It's 1887 and the Daily Telegraph speculates that a murder must have been perpetrated by refugees or socialists, and advocates a closer watch over foreigners, while the Standard blames such outrages on a liberal government. A Study in Red, White & Blue?

1st edition of A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

926251

Reposted by Ben Evans

Dr Alex Fitzpatrick @animalarchaeology.com · 25/09/2026

Not entirely the same thing, but we do have evidence from Cladh Hallan in the Outer Hebrides not only of mummified bodies, but also bodies that have been disarticulated and then re-articulated but with bones coming from different individuals. scarf.scot/national/sca...

scarf.scot

Case Study: Cladh Hallan | The Scottish Archaeological Research Framework

5284

Reposted by Ben Evans

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

In what seems to be characteristic fashion, he doesn't actually link to the piece, just pulls a screenshot and flails around saying it doesn't make sense. bsky.app/profile/whst... >>

2608

Reposted by Ben Evans

Catbus @catbus.phd · 24/09/2026

egirl & podcaster boyfriend

Sigourney Weaver smiling alongside a xenomorph from the set of Alien 3

739043

Reposted by Ben Evans

Stéphanie says… 🏴‍☠️🦈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @stephaniejane.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

You have to love the Quakers; they’ve stood by the trans community for many years. Their main spaces are inclusive, with some minimal, legally compliant, outlying provision for bigots somewhere else. And you’re going to see this more and more from SPs. Hey, GCs, you got exactly what you asked for.

These include respecting the dignity and lived experience of every person, ensuring compliance with the Equality Act, protecting disabled people's access to accessible facilities, and maintaining robust approaches to tackling harassment or discrimination.
The policy also states that Quakers will not require trans, non-binary or intersex people to disclose or prove their status in circumstances where such evidence is not demanded of others.
Under the arrangements confirmed by trustees, toilet facilities labelled with a 'female' sign remain available to cisgender women, trans women, and others for whom those facilities best align with their lived experience.
Similarly, facilities labelled with a 'male' sign remain available to cisgender men, trans men, and others for whom those facilities best align with
neveo experence
Self-contained single sex facilities, available to all users, are also available across the estate for anyone who is not comfortable in a trans-inclusive segregated space.

14715258

Reposted by Ben Evans

Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

No, BBC, he has not been arrested over the video of dinghy slashing. He’s been arrested over the dinghy slashing. Words matter.

1964265853

Reposted by Ben Evans

the beggars out of here getter @milesklee.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

malpractice story packaging in that the more pertinent details are: this guy is a bodybuilder promoter who killed his own son with a $100K divorce on wheels but is crowdfunding his funeral on a page that just says he was “accidentally struck by a moving vehicle” and they’re close to half that amount

latimes.com

Young boy killed after father backs Cybertruck into him, police say

A California man accidentally hit and killed his 6-year-old son while backing out of the family’s driveway near Temecula in a Tesla Cybertruck, according to police reports.

381368347

Reposted by Ben Evans

Chris Farnell @thebrainofchris.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

How the Klingons Killed Their Gods: Martial Dialectics as a Countermeasure to the Ontological Argument

2397

Reposted by Ben Evans

Chris Brookmyre @brookmyre.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Love the fact that in most places back then, rumours of a vampire in the neighbourhood would have had the local kids hiding in their bedrooms, while in the Gorbals, they were like: "Let's get tooled up and leather the cunt."

28421

Reposted by Ben Evans

The Big Bopper @thebigbopper.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Somebody forgot to check whether they owned the domain name ditchmitchgreen.com before they put it on a billboard 😈

15649113

Reposted by Ben Evans

Ash Oro @ashoro.co.uk · 22/09/2026

1/23 Sorry, this will be long... There is a lot of shouting about what happened in the Channel yesterday. So I want to go back to basic law. Not immigration policies or political rhetoric. At sea, the starting point is simple: Preservation of life comes first under all maritime conventions.

26895467

Reposted by Ben Evans

Nick Lloyd @spaincivilwartours.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Dalí was a brilliant painter. But while undervaluing his talents, George Orwell put it perfectly in 1944 in a review of artist's autobiography, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being"

25413

Reposted by Ben Evans

Anna Holmes @annabookwriter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Just saw a video of a guy in Florida discovering his dog had cornered a crab holding a knife blade The ancient prophecy has been fulfilled You mess with the crabbo You get the stabbo

1526