iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Amanita Design 🔧 @amanita-design.net · 08/10/2026

Seventeen years later… The time has come for Machinarium 2 🦾🔧 Wishlist NOW on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/1619280/...

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

AI makes it even more important to try (and try again) to get clients to see code bases as intellectual investments, not machines. And agents have been fantastic for my own theory building, for understanding behavior and data, for tutoring me, and for forcing me to verbalize my concepts.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’m interested to see what comes of this, and hopeful it could loosen Facebook’s grasp on some communities I care about. But few things I imagine building for my communities would be well served by the panopticon style of social network, designed to support rapid growth and advertising.

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AltTaxPro @alttaxpro.altgov.info · 06/10/2026

FORCED overtime. On-call standby. Staffing shortages. Mismanagement of the state ferry system. 0% pay increase for certain employee categories. Worst take possible from both @ferries.wsdot.wa.gov & @governorferguson.bsky.social to point fingers at MEBA instead of fixing the system.

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mattie lubchansky @mattielubchansky.com · 29/09/2026

awoke this morning with a Vision

that diagram showing the SUV blind spot in the front but it's lowly worm driving his little applemobile

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Hi from someone who regularly walks Aurora between Raye St and the E line.

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Nature’s Edge @edge-nature.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There’s still a few around. White-lined Sphinx moth in the garden.

A moth colored with tans, brown and white stripes, the hind wings have pink bands.

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Andrew Turley @aturls.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

KEEP HONKING THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES (I am talking to a goose) (He is beautiful and violent) (We are enemies) (And will remain so)

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Puget Sound Whale Sightings @pugetsoundwhales.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

🩶💚🖤 Sun, Sep 20 Yesterday began w/Jack, who of late has dispersed from his family. This solo traveling for this long is new for Jack & possibly life from here on out for him. This morning he & others reported off Tacoma. 📷 T137A Jack traveling solo in Port Susan. By Michael Brazeal 9/19. #psws

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

“I brought some firecrackers back from Chinatown, / And there’s a dead [whale] on the beach.” Another epic singing at Cape Meares

Singers inspect a dead whale on the beach at Cape Mears, Oregon.

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This is the plot of Iran-Contra

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

People, we can be excited for fall without putting up halloween decorations. please.

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Computational Cosmetologist @dferrer.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Dug into the Claude dir in my home folder and found some Opus 5 session had created a memory that “the concept of the privy sparks joy for the user”. I never said anything like this. I feel like I’ve been pranked by an AI. Now I have to search every machine.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

If you use Harvest for time tracking and, like me, are unimpressed by the official macOS app, take a look at this app I cooked up over the weekend. I appreciate any feedback. It disables idle nags on video calls!

github.com

GitHub - rainhead/sheaves: A native SwiftUI menu bar client for Harvest time tracking

A native SwiftUI menu bar client for Harvest time tracking - rainhead/sheaves

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Clearing out my dad’s junk drawer is bringing me back.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I have seen my first double decker cat stroller and I have seen too much.

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John Michael McGrath @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

"we should rename Mar-a-Lago something funny, make Google display that" My brother in Christ, the Ontario legislature can declare Google's workers in Ontario to be unionized and assign their collective labour rights to whichever union will be most militant, think bigger

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Greg Ichneumon Brown @gibrown.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The next Dem president should obviously rescind the executive order, but also amend it that Apple and Google have to keep it as a monument to their corruption.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Butlerian jihad is the destruction of Flock cameras as much as it is blocking datacenter construction.

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Steve "Whistling Joe" Everett @whistlingjoe.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Not something you'll see very often - Hedychrum rutilans, one of the Jewel Wasps. Extinct in the UK up to a handful of years ago, now popping up in the southeast. A specialist cuckoo on the Beewolf - this one spotted by Mrs WJ just off #DiggerAlley @rspbminsmere.bsky.social @rspb.bsky.social

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

What on earth is a Staff Software Engineer (Contact)?

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I read "we build delightful experiences" in a JD as "we think vague, positive thoughts about our users, but design has no authority in our organization."

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

So many problems ameliorated by turning mutable state into events.

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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Here's an earlier photo, May 29, 2024. Same podium, though a slightly different moment in time. This image tells a very different story. The 2025 photo has been altered to masculinize the image of the trans athlete through lighting changes and width distortion. This is how visual propaganda works.

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Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Yeah so NYT asked me ~2 yrs ago to write an op-ed about how the Colorado is running dry, & what we should do to keep this exact thing from happening. I said "There's only one real answer. Bill farmers by how much water they use. Duh." NYT editorial staff freaked tf out & cancelled the piece.

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GoldenViz @goldenviz.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

📣 GoldenVizR v0.1.0 is now available on GitHub. An R package providing rule-based quality checks for ggplot2 visualizations, based on the 25 Golden Rules of Data Visualization. to try : 🔽 github.com/WajdiBenSaad... #RStats #DataViz #ggplot2 #TidyTuesday

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 07/07/2026

there is a cohort of men who resent the responsibilities and obligations of adulthood — of the fact that you owe things to other people. it is a fundamentally childish impulse that they have reconfigured as the height of masculinity, and i think it informs the parasocial attraction to platner.

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Vale @vale.rocks · 06/07/2026

Okay folks. People are interested in this idea – it has legs and I want to make it happen. If you're a digital professional and interested in being part of such a freelancer collective, send me a message. Nothing set in stone yet, but I've got concepts of a plan and would like to establish this.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Sometimes, it’s enough to go into the mountains and listen to hermit thrushes.

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Puget Sound Whale Sightings @pugetsoundwhales.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

07:35 - Report of 6 orcas in the middle of Elliott Bay, off downtown Seattle. No direction included. [WA app] #psws

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Qagggy! @qagggy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Yes, when I say "cities should be built for kids" I mean giant Habitrails in the planting strip.

large play structure in a planting strip in Zaragoza, Spain that looks like a Habitrail hamster enclosure. photo by me

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

It's finally PREORDER DAY for The Psychology of Software Teams!!!!! Which means you are just a few clicks away from your own personal guidebook to being more human in tech 🥰 www.drcathicks.com#book

drcathicks.com

Dr. Cat Hicks

Leading the science of software success

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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 22/06/2026

A security firm published a working exploit on June 18 that permanently breaks the security foundation of a large range of previous gen Apple iPhones, iPads, and Watches. It cannot be fixed with a software update, ever. The code is publicly available. Here’s what I surmise so far about the risk.

ps.tc

Paradigm Shift - Introducing usbliter8

This write-up details a novel iPhone BootROM vulnerability discovered and exploited by our team. It covers the underlying bug, the associated exploitation techniques, and the post-exploitation steps r...

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

At the "huh, sure, I'd go to Denver" stage of drinking in the airport.

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I was like well think of a codebase as a shared narrative with an oral tradition with lots of tacit rules and he was like, yeah yeah I get it, it's the same here

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The world if the #iNaturalist app had built-in photo cropping... *sigh*

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Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

The stories & photos from today’s voting rights marches in Alabama deserve to be seen by people who weren’t able to stand there in person. If this piece moves you, please share it widely & help make sure these voices aren’t lost in the noise of a crowded news cycle. open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

open.substack.com

Selma Rejects Jim Crow 2.0

Half of the population in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is located, was African American in 1965.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Amused to see Amazon slide from one-click purchases to "exit through the gift shop."

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Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 10/05/2026

Thinking about all the moms in detention today, and all the ones left behind

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 08/05/2026

Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/

Understanding Artificial Neural Networks:
Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism
Olivia Guest1,2, Nancy Abigail Nuñez Hernández3, and Mark Blokpoel1,2
1Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University, The Netherlands
2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
Mysterianism is the idea that human cognition, mind, cannot be understood. Taking this
concept and applying it to known mechanism — such that claims are made that we do not
know how engineered systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), work, or that they
constitute black boxes that we can only open with difficulty — is inappropriate at best and
malicious at worst. We do know the mechanistic structure of such models because we designed
and built them. We also do know their functional role (what they are for) as well as the
mathematical function they are asked to approximate (map inputs to target outputs). Because
mysterianist beliefs about known systems, such as ANNs, are often expressed, scientists need
to sit up and take notice. We provide an error theory as to what is going on to help unpick
this metatheoretical blunder. Ultimately, the problem is that ‘understanding’ is not a technical
term in these cases: the word is co-opted for a specific narrative to sell ‘artificial intelligence’
through mystification. All computational systems, from pendulums to databases, will behave
in ways we cannot predict or control — this is not a unique property of ANNs — and experts
do indeed grasp the computational properties of these systems nonetheless.
Keywords: artificial neural networks; mechanism; black box; epistemology; artificial
intelligence; understanding

4 GUEST, NUÑEZ HERNÁNDEZ, & BLOKPOEL≈
ANNs are equiva-
lent to or inspired
by humans.
α
≡
ANNs are a black
box or unknowable,
even if opened.
β
≡
Humans are a black
box or unknowable.
γ
Figure 1
Three co-occurring (latent) assertions in the context of con-
temporary reasoning on AI and cognition. While they may
appear to hang together in “reflective equilibrium” (Elgin 2017),
their metatheoretical examination brings their contradictions to
light. Starting from the top, and moving clockwise: 𝛼) represents
the typical assertion of so-called cognitive, neural, or otherwise
biological plausibility or inspiration presented for ANNs; 𝛽) is
the claim we tackle head on here — both in terms of analysing
the constituent terms and in how it relates to the other two
assumptions; and 𝛾) exemplifies a type of mysterianism, which
while not always explicitly expressed, plays a background role
and importantly comes into conflict with the other two claims
in important ways

MYSTERIANISM ABOUT KNOWN MECHANISM IS MYSTICISM 11World
?Di
Data?Si
ANN
Figure 3
Not all systems, 𝑆𝑖 relate to their relevant data, 𝐷𝑖 and world
phenomena this way, but ANN models (as many inferential
statistical models) do when used without scientific understand-
ing of the data-generating process or without verbal or formal
theory to match (Guest and Martin 2025b, 2021, 2023). As we
move from left to right above, we move from full understanding
of engineered systems, 𝑆𝑖 to less or even possibly none of the
data, 𝐷𝑖 to the world which can be thought of as the set of
phenomena to be understood.

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Peter Abrahamsen @rainhead.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Oh man if they’d had KEXP in the Bay Area back when, I wouldn’t have left.

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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Adulthood is just cycling between "If I don't say yes to every opportunity, no new opportunities will ever be offered to me" and "Oh no, I have said yes to too many things" over and over until you die.

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pvh @pvh.ca · 23/04/2026

Ink & Switch is ten years old this month! We made you a card to celebrate. inkandswitch.com

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Brian T. Rice @briantrice.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

The tar-blackened, gnarled wooden staff that my girlfriend found abandoned in an alleyway with an onion when she lived in London years ago. I absolutely know a drunk, wizened wizard will boom into existence and demand it back some day.

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