iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

It’s downstream. The psychologism debates come out of Hume and Kant trying to solve skeptical problems by developing a science of man.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I can only imagine that this same thing happened for conservative Germans in 1946. We can't make the same mistake again.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Yeah, I expect that's true of larger corporations and especially office work. I have never worked at a place with more than a hundred employees total, so I've never seen anything like that. Mostly the bad managers I knew are just lazy, which is probably why it took me so long to see the cause.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The only good managers I've ever had were those that also did the work. And I didn't even really think about the cause until I started reading about automation.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

One thing that has been largely neglected in discourse concerning automation-led deskilling is that the management class has been deskilling themselves for centuries. The machines they employ to do their work just happened to have mostly been living persons.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

There are many positive ways to spin this, too, which is nice.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

You can just say that you travelled. It’s a thing people do and that you actually did.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The bitterness and saltiness definitely put olives on a different plane, for me, but the main part seems to me to be the olive-ness, which somehow isn’t shared by olive oil.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I strongly dislike every olive variety I have tried (meaning about three, I think), but I also love olive oil and use it for nearly everything. There must be something I’m missing from the olives we get here. But then again, I dislike most fruits, so it may just be that I need to acquire a taste.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I just realised that it's now online, so it can be shared: ruor.uottawa.ca/server/api/c...

ruor.uottawa.ca

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

(Nevertheless, I want to make fairly substantive revisions myself to publish it as a book.)

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I changed my plan a bit, so I ended up mostly just comparing Plato and Socrates, arguing that the former, by adopting literary production, presents implicit criticism of the latter. I can email it to you if you would like. I defended it in June and passed without revision.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

(This post is occasioned by reading about the value-neutrality of technology. Please carry on.)

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I still have no idea how anyone who reads actual scholarship can have imposter syndrome. There is so much good work being done, but there is also so much more trash being produced by some of the academy's biggest names. It's truly amazing.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

But also, Quranic studies have increasingly recognised that much of the Quran predates Mohammed and reflects Arabic political discourse from the Syrian desert to Petra to Yemen.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The Hijaz was fully entangled in Roman imperialism, so that makes sense.

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Parkrose Permaculture @parkroseperma.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I absolutely loved this article. What a fantastic takedown of the bullshittery that is the AI industry. AI does not scale. The returns are diminishing. Line only goes up if it runs on hype and grift. Bc it's a grift run by the amoral sociopathic incel Nerd Reich.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The plot of the show was about human players (on Canadian teams, naturally, because hockey chauvinism) playing against the robots to show that they were still better. And that's a dumb premise because that's not what hockey is about, so the show never took off. I can't even find an image from it.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

There was a CBC animated series from when I was a kid that imagined robot hockey players in the NHL, and it feels very much like this. www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hocke...

theglobeandmail.com

Hockey Night project is even more animated than Cherry

The Globe and Mail offers the most authoritative news in Canada, featuring national and international news

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

One problem with the way the economy is currently structured that isn't as obvious as it should be is that there is enormous reward for making bold promises like this and little cost for failing to follow through. A rational economy would punish this kind of thing, but that's not this economy.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I respect Machiavelli a bit more about this, because he mostly emphasises that they were moderate and willing to placate/serve the population. And that's better than measuring their military successes, at least.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I suppose the other complaint I have, and this is mostly with Gibbon, is that imperial expansion is not always a marker of political power and health. And so I begrudgingly admit that Hadrian is better because he tried to reign in expansionist tendencies. But still.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I don’t know as much about the particulars of the first four as I do about Marcus Aurelius, of course. But most of the groundwork for their success is established before them, and they slowly dissolved what their predecessors built.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Yes. But fewer. I think the main thing is that they were all image-makers more than astute governors, which is in some sense Machiavelli’s point. Gibbon of course conflates image-making with good governance, and that’s a mistake.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I did a geography challenge in high school that was really just competitively interpreting directions from random people. It was really fun, actually.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

One frustration I have with historians (in the informal sense) is that they remember Marcus Aurelius as a good emperor, but 1) he is only remembered so because he became a famous thinker for his Meditations and 2) living at the pinnacle of Rome's power does imply some responsibility for the decline.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Oh yeah, and my dissertation was nominated for a prize. Not sure what prize, but a prize. I will report back when I learn.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

I have finally officially defended my dissertation and passed without revisions.

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UltimaRed @ultimared.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

"Why won't you love genocide" I say, stamping on the public's face.

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Liberal democracy update

Lizzie Dearden @lizziedearden • 6h
Large demos in favour of Palestine Action were not anticipated by the govt or police when Yvette Cooper decided to ban the group
A document obtained by the i shows that counter-terror police instead predicted that the move would be a "significant deterrent"
against support

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

They code everything with llms here, so it's only natural that it takes longer than a single guy in a basement.

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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Posts like this are way more likely to result in one of your followers killing themselves than in one of your followers shooting a Nazi. Don’t buy guns!

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

This is mostly what I think about when I try to decide whether to teach him in Environmental Ethics.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Hans Jonas is a really curious philosopher: "Heidegger's philosophy is so degenerate that it's no wonder he supported Hitler. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have my own genocide to attend to."

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Caro Flores @floresophize.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Thrilled to say I just found a way to include a screenshot of this in a conference talk

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

(The word comes from the French for a fart.)

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Being Francophone, I had a completely different association with that phrase. 🤡

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Just had Canvas stop working as I was typing comments on a student paper. I now can’t access anyone’s work or grades. Strangely, this never happened back when I used a grade book and had students email me their papers, a system no shareholders extracted money from.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I had a very similar thought as a child. Mostly, it was why we should think that we move on the earth rather than the earth moving beneath us, like a treadmill, since our perspective never moves. Then, years later, I learned about Brentano and Husserl and so on, and decided that I was confused.

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William Gillis 🏴 @rechelon.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Cars as a whole are deeply antisocial and should be abolished. Go out with a sledgehammer and depave neighborhood roads. Pedestrians have a divine right to empty clips at cars that get too close. This, however? Pure fucking fascism. You liberal chumps would endorse ICE doing nanny state arrests.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

My examiners have finally finished examining my dissertation! I can schedule my defense!

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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

"So that’s what I’m trying to achieve, to let 1,000 Zohrans bloom.” Hasan Piker to Prem Thakker for Prem's big Zeteo profile of Piker. zeteo.com/p/hasan-pike...

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Sorry to be overly sincere for a second, but here's why we decided to persevere through all of the bullshit and take over InfoWars. There's just gotta be a line somewhere. Thank you @pablo.show for letting me talk so openly about this.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I’m doing meaningless training, but I’ve at least discovered what the cast of Corner Gas was doing before making that show: bad instructional videos.

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Sunken-eyed Platonist @oldaristocles.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

😬😬😬 Damn, that is a spicy take. Too spicy for me.

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