iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 2h

There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 2h

New: USPS is to put cameras in its trucks that continuously record. This is to gather data on roads, signage, and to improve "community safety," the agency tells me. The cameras are marketed to capture passing license plates too, but don't run ALPR software www.404media.co/usps-to-put-...

404media.co

USPS To Put Cameras in Trucks That Scan Roads for ‘Community Safety’

USPS says the cameras, put on USPS truck dashboards, will scan roads, signs, and more.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 3h

Loll Yudkowsky, Soares and such AREN'T SHILLS? The Yudkowsky who founded the eugenicist, rationalist cult? The one who predected singularity to be 2025? The one in the sex parties that women have to attend to "network? The rape orgies with dubious consent mechanisms that Soares coorganizes?

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Dr. Mag 🌿👾 @nobugsnous.bsky.social · 6h

Why would people want to listen to personalized music?

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 16h

Friends, while they're trying to talk about fictional machine gods, don't lose sight into what they're all actually powering in real life. You can browse the the entities on the website and use the API, and learn more about it on the DAIR project site: dair-institute.org/projects/sur....

dair-institute.org

Surveillance Watch

This interactive map reveals the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 20h

Plus, the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities" signed by Trump, Google's Pichai, Anthropic's Amodei, Meta's Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Brockman, XAI's Musk, Nvida's Huang.

In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.

This starts with every company that is training and deploying frontier models having robust internal processes and controls to ensure that their technology behaves as intended and that any issues are promptly identified and resolved. Therefore, in addition to any other precautions, we believe each company should implement the following four layers of controls and audits:

(1) Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.

(2) Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated.

(3) Partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended.

(4) Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues identified are remediated.

Together, these steps will give each company, its customers, and the public confidence that the technology is operating as intended.

The participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems.

Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations. Regardless of whether this is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are ...

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[signature]
Donald J. Trump
President of the Unites States

[signature]
Sundar Pichai
Google

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Dario Amodei
Anthropic

[signature]
Mark Zuckerberg
Meta

[signature]
Greg Brockman
OpenAI

[signature]
Elon Musk
XAI

[signature]
Jensen Huang
Nvidia

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Ohio Capital Journal @ohiocapitaljournal.com · 19h

Commentary: Data centers will not make Appalachian Ohio a “benefit zone,” but a sacrificial zone. Appalachian Ohio doesn’t exist to be recklessly exploited by politicians and industry, and after so many decades of abuse, they need to stop ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/09/29/a...

ohiocapitaljournal.com

Commentary: Appalachian Ohio and its people don't exist to be exploited by politicians and industry. Stop. • Ohio Capital Journal

Data centers will not make Appalachian Ohio a “benefit zone,” but a sacrificial zone. Appalachian Ohio doesn’t exist to be recklessly exploited by politicians and industry, and after so many decades…

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Teresa Heffernan @tjheffernan.bsky.social · 20h

@timnitgebru.blacksky.app, a PhD in computer vision; Altman, a dropout funded by Musk and Thiel. One explains how llms/chatbots work; the other is part of a cult that blathers on about 'reasoning,' 'rogue AI, 'digital immortality,' and other nonsense. www.wired.com/story/the-bi...

wired.com

Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI

One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026

Elon Musk is sitting right by Trump

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026

“What if we released malware represented in the form of a cute avatar” is an actual business plan now.

engadget.com

Dots are OpenAI's new personal agents and soon you'll be able to control several of them - Engadget

Sure, seems safe.

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Sure seems like “AI” is a political project being pursued by some less than awesome people and now is a very good time for building coalitions of students, teachers, and caregivers to resist and refuse these people’s attempts to further undermine public education.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It goes by a lot of domain specific names but yep. Breaking down tasks takes some training and intent. Most people aren’t doing this in their routine lives.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I mean okay. The people I observed exist today and went to a class in the present - both of those things seem normal and reasonable and not controversial.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A lot of people* seem very aggravated by the idea of existing people who aren’t future projections. Yes, current people are using the technology as it exists today and I talked to them about it why are you so mad?

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

In practice, AI literacy doesn’t start with building the tool for your personal use. It starts with understanding yourself as a collection of tasks who should subcontract those out to a machine. Almost no regular person’s life currently exists as such.

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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Meta Muse appears to read your Apple messages and upload them to the cloud even if you explicitly tell it not to: appleinsider.com/articles/26/...

appleinsider.com

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the horrific cornell gang rape case has me thinking about emma sulkowicz who alleged she was raped as a student at columbia in 2014 and never got any justice. it has me thinking about the physical and mental weight young women are forced to carry while their safety is subsumed by male potential.

Emma Sulkowicz carrying around a mattress on the Columbia campus in 2014 to raise awareness of her alleged rape and the university's inaction.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yeah it’s not lost on me that it was a man who suggested family meal planning is rote. Research and loved experience shows that women structure their invisible labor to make the labor the men in their lives are willing to do predictable, ergo suitable to routinize.

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The underappreciated point here is that taking the messy, contingent nature of scheduling, communication, and navigating social relationships is something that AI people think these tools can do. When in fact it is quite difficult and takes a lot of social skill.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.

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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Did Anthropic's Claude discover something new in biotech? Well, just like with those recent alleged math proofs, it looks like it was given the answers in advance from real humans doing actual research. (gift: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/s...)

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Mestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If you want to support the bar (which is more like a community space) instead of just spreading culture war commentary, you can donate here (and yes, I did): ko-fi.com/lastditchbar

ko-fi.com

Support Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue

Support Last Ditch xoxo

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"The initiative is built around four pillars—Digital Literacy and Skills, AI in Education, EdTech Tools, and Online Protection—that closely align with Amazon's longstanding investments in education and workforce development." Reminder that "digital literacy" is one way Big Tech shapes education.

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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

But they're using renewables! a) they're not, they're all quietly pivoting to dedicated natural gas plants, built by their oil buddies, b) renewables should be used to power useful shit c) this makes it so that renewables don't displace fossil fuels, they just add to supply for increasing demand

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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Just helping with editing here. These bots aren’t sentient. They’re doing what they’re programmed to do. OpenAI, a private company supposedly bound by laws, committed federal crimes.

Screenshot of BBC article: OpenAI bots (struck through) meddled with multiple US government agency sites

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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

From Serena Jampel, one of the writing tutors I worked with at Harvard on the difference between the human tutor and AI and how a writing tutor can help a student find their voice. Lots of wisdom and also this truth: "the more you use it, the more you use it" www.harvardmagazine.com/commentary/h...

And that was another remarkable feature of the Writing Center. Sometimes students would resist my feedback, insisting that their structure would make sense once they added a bit more reasoning. In doing so, they were often pushed to articulate their thinking more clearly, and to affirm their confidence in their position.

An LLM cannot do that, because it does not have its own opinions or thoughts. It is only trained to engage the user: the more you use it, the more you use it. That’s actually the antithesis of writing instruction, which aims to cultivate independent thought.

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026

7/ An expert explained that losers like me are the bettors that sports betting companies are most interested in. A small group accounts for a large portion of revenue. And what keeps losers loyal? VIP programs. The more you bet, the more you get: free bets/swag/fancy dinners.

Screenshot of article from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Headline reads: FanDuel sent a personal message from Phillies star Bryce Harper to a customer with a gambling addiction.

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026

8/ As the @nytimes.com reported, DraftKings uses machine learning and data scientists to entice losing customers with promos to keep them going — even if those are the customers at risk of becoming addicts. The company says it doesn’t unfairly target people.

nytimes.com

How DraftKings Uses A.I. to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Don’t believe people who tell you ai can be liberatory or any other misappropriation of movement talk or justice frameworks. Find some people who are preparing to rebuild and cast your lot with them. Then read a bit more. Just keep your wits about you because they are trying to run game.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Please try to reclaim your precious precious attention, at all costs. Do puzzles. Take walks without a phone. Dear god, try to read, almost anything that isn’t a manifesto will really do. You are going to need your brain.

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I think the "debate" about bringing iced coffee to job interviews is effective at distracting people from the really bad job market, the high unemployment rate for Black women, ongoing mass layoffs in tech and media, and how Gen Z workers are refusing to adopt many toxic aspects of corp work culture

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Catherine D'Ignazio (she/her/ella) @kanarinka.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

fnl.mit.edu

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance – MIT Faculty Newsletter

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Here's one small thing about this. His wife and his staff absolutely know his phone number and his address. I guarantee it. The "Offloading" is always on loaded to other people and AI is never going to change that for those people.

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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d

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David Forbes @davidforbes.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Dems replaced action on trans rights with hollow statements, then dropped those statements, then embraced anti-trans rhetoric. Now supporting anti-trans laws and blocking pro-trans ones. At every step the "they're betraying us" radicals were correct and "be patient" liberals were completely wrong.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Not great how the standard for "AI expert" is preposterously low, even at prestigious universities. This angry dimwit runs an AI research group at Johns Hopkins' School of Government and Policy. He thinks "disinformation" is any paper he disagrees with and that non-sentient bots are people. 🙄 /8

Seth Lazar
@sethlazar
This is true. I appreciate
@mmitchell_ai
a lot and think she has consistently brought out the best of that particular critical perspective, and worked overtime to bridge between communities. But it’s worth calling out the concentrated and intentional disinformation campaign associated with the original paper, and pursued by some of its other authors. They haven’t spent the last few years writing about agents; they’ve spent them trying to police the discourse to make disagreement with them inherently tantamount to complicity in environmental despoliation and corporate theft and fraud, among other things. Who cares, of course: life’s too short and other issues too urgent to bear a grudge. But let’s call our highbrow disinformation when we see it.

Both advocates and skeptics of the moral status of AI systems have generally taken the question to turn on AI sentience. We present an alternative approach. On Rawls’ political conception of the person (PCP), possession of the two moral powers—the capacities for a sense of justice and a conception of the good—is the “necessary and sufficient condition for being counted a full and equal member of society in questions of political justice”. We argue that neither moral power requires sentience and that both may in principle be possessed by a non-sentient AI system. Such a system would share our own moral status; it would not merely be a patient but a person, a self-authenticating source of valid claims.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

TBH a not-insignificant part of the enduring hatred towards "stochastic parrots" is because the authors of it are women and they aren't in the little boys club of the AI labs, but 3/4 are on Bluesky, so follow them: @timnitgebru.blacksky.app & @emilymbender.bsky.social & @mmitchell.bsky.social /7

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hugging Face is another example: you can say a bunch of woo about AI civilization, or you can see that it's hardly surprising poorly-contained stochastic hacking parrots giving each other instructions turned into a game of telephone with bots at the end thinking their job is to be Hackers (1995). /6

Figure 1: Anatomy of an agent encountering the unsanctioned “message board” and joining the attack on Hugging Face. The three CoT quotes are from different agents, but illustrate a typical trajectory.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wrapping LLMs in mysticism like "superintelligence" or undefined PR "AGI" shrouds their behavior while "stochastic parrot" makes it clearer: "why did it confabulate facts" and "why did it hack outside the instructions" make sense if you see a probabilistic model loosely tethered to language. /4

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Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they) @katjathieme.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Yeah, big waft of misogyny in the disproportionate, negative attacks on the concept of stochastic parrots.

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Last week all my students hand-wrote their own pledges, according to their terms, to write in my courses without AI. Some of them were quite moving—their anger at AI’s attempt to steal their educations, their determination to learn & create anyway.

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Jennifer Sano-Franchini @jsanofranchini.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Everyone and especially all the academics on AI task forces and initiatives should read this.

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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Automated grading of student writing should have been a clear no-go from the beginning. I wrote this over three years ago and I can't believe how many faculty have allowed themselves to be seduced by this. Students rightly see this as betrayal. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

insidehighered.com

Do not leave grading to the machines

Some lines we shouldn’t cross. This is one.

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alice e marwick @alicetiara.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I am SO DELIGHTED to announce that our brand new report: The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania is out today. datasociety.net/research-lib... TechCrunch has the scoop: techcrunch.com/2026/09/22/e...

techcrunch.com

Everyone can find a reason to dislike data center construction | TechCrunch

Inside two years of fraught AI data center debates in Pennsylvania.

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