iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jared Wiener @jaredwiener.com · 05/10/2026

xkcd.com/394/

xkcd.com

Kilobyte

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William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Malcom Edwards…

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Robert Sweetnam @rgsweetnam.zq.ie · 04/10/2026

Lidl Connect is available tomorrow. Unlimited 5G. It's on Eir's network but 1Global handle data. Your traffic will end up going abroad first before coming back to Ireland adding +26ms compared to Eir mobile proper. Goosed has more info in this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Uo...

youtube.com

Lidl's €8.99 SIM runs on Eir. So what's the catch?

YouTube video by Goosed.ie

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Dermot O'Halloran @practicalreason.net · 04/10/2026

The tone of the "yeah" at 1 min 6 seconds says a lot

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Street Art Utopia @streetartutopia.com · 01/10/2026

📱 “Hands” / Photo Tunnel — By Kerry Wilson in Glenrothes, Scotland, UK 🇬🇧 Under Bridges (8 Photos) streetartutopia.com/2026/10/01/stre…

Hands by Kerry Wilson at the Napier Road underpass in Glenrothes, Scotland: two painted hands frame the real tunnel and path beyond like a phone screen.

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National Library of Ireland @nlireland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

☕ For #InternationalCoffeeDay, we’re sharing one of our most popular photos of all time on #Flickr! This bustling scene shows the Tea and Coffee Van at Ballybricken Fair, Waterford City, on 4 May 1910. flic.kr/p/bT52Ak

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

All the next day Toad sang songs to his seeds.

Toad, literally singing in the rain, serenades his seeds.

From "The Garden"
In *Frog and Toad Together*

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SK @sk-76.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Doddington Grove, Kennington, London (1976) Photo: Nick Birch / Indiana Univ.

Three girls huddled together against the corner of a brick wall as a straggler stands a few feet behind. Parked cars, bricks buildings, and blocks of flats are in the background.

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Sheila O’Flanagan @sheilawriter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Libraries are a sanctuary where nobody tries to sell you anything, you're not followed by an algorithm and you can take home books for free!

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I wonder how much it cost Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to license this William Eggleston photo for a full-color, double-page spread, mentioning The Row only in microscopic type on the back corner, in today's Times

A photo of a flat field, a row of tiny trees in various species, big puffy clouds filling most of the frame

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Laurent Peraldi @tintamarre.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

William Eggleston

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Nicholas Allen @dedalusdenaries.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Incredible photo by Rich Fury in the Irish Times of U2 on Grafton Street this evening

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G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 25/09/2026

Every day we get closer to this:

Cartoon by the human artist Twonks, showing George Jetson vacuuming the floor while Rosie the robot paints a picture

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Donna Rainey @donnarainey4.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Moonrise 🩵

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Nate Chinen @natechinen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Ralph J. Gleason, who got to know John Coltrane on the way up, wrote the liner notes for ‘Coltrane’s Sound’ on Atlantic Records. A memorable first few paragraphs here.

Ralph J. Gleason’s liner notes for ‘Coltrane’s Sound’ on Atlantic Records.

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Titania @titaniasrealm.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Wishing you a magical autumn equinox! 🍂 🎨 Abby Jacobs

Painting depicting an autumnal scene. There are trees with orange, red and yellow foliage, and a cottage with smoke coming out of the chimney.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 21/09/2026

"In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental right to data protection" noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...

noyb.eu

AI: EU Member States plan “digital expropriation” of Europeans in the interest of AI companies

In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of AI companies to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental rights of Europeans.

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The Spaceshipper 🚀 @thespaceshipper.com · 17/09/2026

Forbidden Planet (1956) "For the very first time, Forbidden Planet is presented in its original Cinemascope aspect ratio of 2.55:1 with its theatrical "Perspecta" stereo soundtrack in an eye-popping brand new 4K restoration that is out of this world!"

youtu.be

Forbidden Planet | Official Trailer | 4K

YouTube video by Arrow Video

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Helpful points from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com here on what AI solving big maths problems might mean for the future of the maths community www.ft.com/content/c947...

Many mathematicians are leaning "bad". few days after the OpenAI Navier-Stokes
announcement, a group of 25 winners of mathematics' prestigious Fields Medal published a letter arguing that the goals of the AI companies and the human
mathematics community are fundamentally misaligned. Their core position is that although solving complex technical problems has historically accompanied expansions in our understanding, the former was only ever a proxy for the latter. A brute-forced solution without the
deliberation and painstaking accumulation of human knowledge along the way is the signal of expanded understanding without the actual expanded understanding.

Another big question is what this all means for the incentives to share progress towards new discoveries. It's not hard to see how the threat of being scooped by AI could exert a chilling effect on the culture of sharing important incremental findings or promising new avenues, which has underpinned scientific progress for centuries. And for the Al labs themselves,
the backlash over the Navier-Stokes case may mean future Al-powered breakthroughs are kept under wraps. If AI is amazingly capable at turning new theories into findings, but stifles the development and sharing of those theories, there may be a bumpy road ahead.

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Morgan Davie @fromthemorgue.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Legendary “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, due to one extremely meta feature: there’s a utopian ending, but no way to reach it

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

“Now seeds,” said Toad, “start growing.” Toad walked up and down a few times. The seeds did not start to grow.

Toads studies his garden, waiting for the seeds to grow.

From "The Garden"
In *Frog and Toad Together*

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Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Cory @doctorow.pluralistic.net has been writing about inflammatory AI predictions for years. Message below is that systems are being deployed & given the ability to do real things on the network, without adequate testing or guardrails. The systems have zero intentions. medium.com/@doctorow/ll...

medium.com

LLMs are real, AI is fake

No, it didn’t “go rogue.”

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Dudley Colley @thecorpo.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Goodness, as pointed out by the bauld Pip over on the 'gram, the first Corpo record is 25 years today. I like to think the world changed a little that day. Oh wait, that was the next day... thedudleycorporation.bandcamp.com/album/the-lo...

thedudleycorporation.bandcamp.com

The Lonely World Of The Dudley Corporation - 10th Anniversary Remasters, by The Dudley Corporation

15 track album

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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Elle Cordova @ellecordova.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I am the very model of a modern day typographer I know the type tonalities from elegant to jocular I am a master tracker and my kerning is harmonical I know the sacred swatches and can name the hues Pantonical (Full version of Modern Day Typographer now on my YouTube channel)

youtu.be

Modern Day Typographer - Elle Cordova

YouTube video by Elle Cordova

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Dublin UX @dublinux.ie · 03/09/2026

Join us for Dublin UX: Designing What’s Next on 22 September, as we explore AI, agentic workflows, design systems and the changing shape of experience. In partnership with SiriusXM. 🎟️ At capacity, but the waitlist is open: DublinUX.ie/waitlist Learn more at DublinUX.ie

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Buzzbead 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @buzzbead.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Here’s one of my favourites. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

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DIAMONDS NEWSAGENTS BALLYMENA @diamondsnews.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

It’s 6am on Sunday 30th August 2026 and it’s dark and damp here at Diamonds on Broughshane Street Ballymena as I start my last day as a newsagent…… I thank you all for making this daily snapshot of life in Ballymena popular 13c …… 🙏💎

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Brandon Sheffield @brandon.insertcredit.com · 26/08/2026

Men only want three things

I'm holding a blu ray triple feature of the thing (1982), the thing (from another world), and the thing (2011), in front of shelves of other disc based media

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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Nope. It's fake. AI. The title should be a dead giveaway (a dory is a kind of boat, and there are no boats in this image), as should the electric train signs, but in case you're still not convinced: arnoldzwicky.org/2025/02/11/o...

arnoldzwicky.org

On the faux-Hopper watch

… in which I report on a genre of AI art that I hadn’t realized existed. But first, the story of how this genre came to me. I tell this story without any names attached to the people wh…

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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.

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Dermot O'Halloran @practicalreason.net · 23/08/2026

Worth it for the glossary alone

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Frog put the cookies in a box. “There,” he said. “Now we will not eat any more cookies.” “But we can open the box,” said Toad. “That is true,” said Frog.

Frog and Toad hide the cookies in a box.

From "Cookies"
In *Frog and Toad Together*

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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

A professor writes: (Jason Stanley) The problem is that journalists failed to do basic journalism. Not a single reporter seems to have checked’ Jason Arday’s citations. The ‘quantifiable metrics’ of his work. Prof Stanley did: ‘Arday is easily comparable to the leading scholars in the field’

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 17/08/2026

My conclusions from the end of the post

Some observations #
The fact that a 17GB file can do all of this stuff on my home machines is a miracle. Once again, I’m delighted and amazed at how much progress local models have made this year. A year ago this would have been competitive with the best and most expensive of the proprietary models—today it can run on a capable laptop.

The only thing holding this back from being a daily driver is performance. It feels pretty slow on both the M5 Mac and the DGX Spark. That’s the catch with these dense (non-Mixture-of-Experts) models—they require a whole lot of memory bandwidth to perform well, and neither of the machines I have access to are top performers in that regard.

The most important thing about Qwen 3.8 27B is what it demonstrates. We can have an open weights general purpose model with a long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation, and we can fit the whole thing in just a 17GB file.

The models at this size continue to get better at an impressive rate. We don’t need to spend half a million dollars on datacenter-class hardware just to run a competent model.

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

trying to learn about audio equipment and intentionally looking for stores with one star reviews so i know the person at the shop is an enthusiast and not a businessperson

A Google review of an audio store reads: "Worst phone interaction I've ever had in my entire life. I called to ask if they had an electrostatic headphone amp, I was informed that it was a waste of money to own electrostatic headphones. Then I tried to say that I know a lot about headphones and own many and that I am just looking for an amplifier, but then I was interrupted and told that I don't know anything. Wild!"

A Google review of an audio store reads: "I normally have tremendous empathy for the mentally ill but not with this guy. He's abusive, slanderous and bizarrely demanding -- and that's if he likes you. Maybe he can still repair stuff but I wouldn't know; I walked away after the third time he screamed at me for asking a simple question and that's no exaggeration. Actual screaming. Just wild."

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Jan Beta @janbeta.net · 13/08/2026

New video! Troubleshooting and repairing the low volume audio output issue with the C64 from the previous episode. YouTube: youtu.be/Y_l8fl9VtmU PeerTube: makertube.net/w/2pZpJeZr5c... #Commodore #Commodore64 #C64 #Repair #Troubleshooting #SID #MOS6581 #RetroComputing #VintageComputing

youtu.be

C64 Low Audio Level Repair

YouTube video by Jan Beta

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SK @sk-76.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley, and D.J. Fontana (1956) Photo: Jay B. Leviton / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Three members of a band performing on stage.

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Samuel Pepys @samuelpepys.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My wife and I to talk again about getting of a couple of good mayds and to part with Ashwell, which troubles me for her father’s sake, though I shall be glad to have the charge taken away of keeping a woman.

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