iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Padmini RM

Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New Post: Why I Love AI Next month it'll be twenty years since I went to university, learned to program, and studied AI. I wrote about why I loved it, why I still love it, and why, unfortunately, it no longer exists. www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/i...

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

In this example, at least two of the books are available through the Internet Archive... www.instagram.com/p/DdaiTJ9jp6...

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

3. What is the point of scanning content that is often out of date as well as semantically archaic to teach machines? (I do have an understanding of why this might be, but it strikes me as a particularly odd use of resources) Internet, do your thing pls: get this to reach booksellers & librarians.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

1. A lot of these books are out of print, and public domain - many are on the internet archive - why bother buying physical versions of books you can scan online for free? 2. Why *these* particular titles over others? Can bookshops that have been approached share the titles that have been ordered?

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

As an erstwhile book historian and current digital humanist I need the Bluesky community to help me solve a mystery: we've all read the spine chilling (pun intended) reports of anthropic and others chopping up books to scan, but I have some questions:

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Reading this I've just realised what AI hype discourse reminds me of: a proud indulgent parent whose precious offspring can do no wrong; the tone in almost all reportage is breathless gushing, and never "yeah, so what?"

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Showing your workings is a profoundly feminist act. youtube.com/shorts/R9VQn...

youtube.com

AI does the math

YouTube video by Oxford Mathematics

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

As the hype cycle around recent declarations around the eschatonic potential of AI escalate, I want to bring people's attn: to this doc by one of the so-called "fathers" of AI, John McCarthy: www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/slides/d... That first sentence sums up almost everything abt these narratives.

www-formal.stanford.edu

dartmouth-sli

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Bellingcat @bellingcat.com · 21/07/2026

Bellingcat has been monitoring student protests in India. Police initially denied reports protesters were met with violence at a July 20 march, although later acknowledged injuries to protesters and officers. Social media videos showed tear gas deployed and batons used by police against protestors.

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Asher Wolf @asherwolf.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Millions of people in China have lost access to their AI partners after the government moved to impose harsh rules on emotional relationships between humans and machines ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

ia.acs.org.au

China bans AI relationships with humans

Users lose digital partners as Beijing tackles declining birthrates.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

What's with the tumbleweed here #indiasky?

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

This quality is important to valorise as this moves us away from the "brain in the jar" thinking that makes hyperbolic claims about AGI possible.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

also feel vindicated re: my personal bugbear "responsible AI" :D. What I'd like to see as part of their argument is the role embodiment plays in human creativity: the cognitive ability (or lack thereof) is persuasive but in the same way that LLMs can't make connections, neither can it "sense" -

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

This had me wondering about what the motivation for AI would be to be creative, unprompted - I loved how Narayanan demonstrates that it is inevitably destined by its very defining characteristics to be forever incapable of making creative leaps that humans make due to their own limitations.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Just finished reading @randomwalker.bsky.social 's brilliant & sensible talk (here: www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...) where he talks about human creativity as evidence of superintelligence that can be possibly enhanced by AI, but poorly emulated by it.

cs.princeton.edu

What will be left for us to work on?

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

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Digital Civics @digitalcivics.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

If you're trying to understand how some of the major players (people & companies) fit together in what is unfolding in tech & politics right now, this is a really useful resource from FES Future of Work. #EduSky #AIEthics #TechEthics #DataPrivacy #Politics #TechPolitics www.authoritarian-stack.info

authoritarian-stack.info

The Authoritarian Stack

How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Would be great to be in conversation as this is what I'm currently working on: bsky.app/profile/padm...

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

AI is misinformation and information pollution.

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Sam Jackson @sjacks26.myatproto.social · 08/07/2026

Yesssssssssssss

A screenshot from the preprint (next post in OP's thread). The highlighted sentence reads "The term artificial intelligence does not refer to a coherent set of technologies and it never has."

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Gary R. Bunt @garyrbunt.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I'm re-re-posting this significant article: "The open-source archive now contains more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and might otherwise have been lost forever."

wired.com

How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

Distributed backups, cyber resilience, and a half-million records are preserving Palestinian history beyond any single building or border.

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Anime Feminist @animefeminist.com · 08/07/2026

Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia – Episode 1 – 2 A beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking double premiere about the horror and tragedy of war and invasion… and one girl’s grasp for her own agency in the middle of it all. www.animefeminist.com/jaadugar-a-w...

animefeminist.com

Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia – Episode 1 - 2 - Anime Feminist

A beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking double premiere about the horror and tragedy of war and invasion... and one girl's grasp for her own agency in the middle of it all.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I'm putting together a database of indigenous initiatives that have been using AI for different use cases here: chivalrous-carpet-76a.notion.site/47e033ca4c5a... please do let me know if you have recommendations for initiatives for inclusion!

chivalrous-carpet-76a.notion.site

Indigenous Initiatives Using AI | Notion

This is a database of indigenous initiatives using AI for their own communities: please drop me a note at padmini@designbeku.org if you have suggestions for resources to be included, comments or amend...

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, has long been out of print - used copies sell for hundreds of dollars. It's wild that this is not more widely available given how much his ideas still apply to the world we're in now. 🧵/

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I'm currently working on the idea of untranslatability in the age of AI: looking at machine translation as an act of violence - and I'd love to hear about any models that cluster related concepts from different languages together. Already working on a prototype w/ a friend but tell me more!

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

This is big, and it took the global publicity that was warranted by the BBC to get them to *finally* take cognisance of Meta's continuous flagrant disregard for community guidelines and takedown requests.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

If you’re in Cambridge or within commuting distance, I'm going to be in a conversation with some fab folk moderated by Dr. Maya Indira Ganesh about Dr. Alan Warburton's fascinating film "Image Empire" on different ways of seeing, sign up to join us - details below! www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/...

lcfi.ac.uk

Who Makes the World? Creative Labour, Synthetic Vision, and AI - LCFI

A screening and discussion of Alan Warburton’s short film IMAGE EMPIRE. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) will host a film screening and hour-long fishbowl discussion (rather...

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

AI hype as misinformation; videogames and accessibility for PWD; Epistemological models for reimagining AI; Small language models and indigeneity; Academic collectives and co-ops; Community engagement and the GLAM sector

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Hello! I’m in the UK from the 23rd of April to the 22nd of May. I'll be in Cambridge / Edinburgh / London / Birmingham and Bristol and I’d love to be connected to folk who are interested in/working on:

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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/02/2026

The enshittification guy not just embracing enshittification tech, but defending it through strawman arguments that seek to misdirect his readers is quite the move. Yes, I’m talking about Cory Doctorow (very poorly) defending his use of LLMs, as @tante.cc expertly breaks down here:

tante.cc

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Genuine question: does the #digitalhumanities need gen AI? Or is our work to imagine alternatives (psst, that's what I'm trying to do but I'm open to other ideas)

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Ooooo. As a lapsed academic but a dhumanist at heart i might have things to say.

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Neugin @lostcitymagic.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

A message for you all to carry through the year

Image is a popular astronaut meme. An astronaut is looking at the earth from space saying wait, I am worthy of love? An astronaut is behind him holding up flowers and saying always have been

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

#digitalhumanities folk: could you please recommend significant work on topic modeling and small language models that you might have come across?

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

enshittification intensifies. google now throwing up wrong timezone difference information. what is additionally bizarre is that it links to the correct result in from the linked snippet (worldtimebuddy.com)

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Just used this while facilitating an artist's residency encouraging them to challenge narratives about AI: used the Du Bois anecdote about his very intentional choices re: exhibiting to explain how to imagine the phenomenological relationship to data in space. They're keen to read it now!

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Realising the academy only has itself to blame for the AI driven student plagiarism problem (at least in the humanities and social sciences) still largely entrenched in ossified modes of making knowledge available rewarded by systems like tenure made it easy for formulaic templates easy to emulate.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Sure, but a damaging one after a point, no? As @roopikarisam.bsky.social said upthread, we know this but the ostensible truth claim of it can be damaging to those when applied to contexts for which it is not appropriate.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Yes! Exactly the hope with my current project about indigeneity + small language models :) if communities are sharing knowledge, and we’re thinking of that as “data” - I’m interested in how they are semantically imagining that knowledge; I’m hoping that we’ll find smthg cognate but different.

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Padmini RM @padmini.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Haha, but I’m grateful for you allowing yourself to be briefly distracted, this is so useful tysm. For me there’s *smthng* between the commons and what we call data but I’m guessing I’ll probably find the answer when your book comes out :D

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