iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Sarah Fritz @sarahfritz.bsky.social · 23h

An excellent review from the Financial Times!!!🥳 The UK edition of MADAME COMPOSER comes out Oct. 29 lnk.to/MadameComposer

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 23h

> According to a longitudinal study by the NIH published in 2022… researchers found that frats cause rape. […] > Another study, published in 2007, found that fraternity members are THREE TIMES as likely to rape as other men on college campuses.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 23h

> If your son finds himself in a group that would send a “free pussy” text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom. besskalb.substack.com/p/abolish-fr...

besskalb.substack.com

Abolish frat culture

On “The Good Guy With the Text” fallacy

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Corruption and inaction are the norm in campus policing--even beyond what you think you already know about other police agencies. There is good reason that people are calling for the abolition of campus police departments specifically right now. They maintain an elite lawlessness on campus.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There are unique dynamics in campus police departments that present very specific problems. Including: - Their conflict of interest as university employees hugely guides their judgement. - University police departments often hire the police that other police departments let go.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Kate Manne wrote another brilliant essay about the Cornell case. This time, it's about her own experiences interacting with Cornell's police department.

katemanne.substack.com

Whose Side Are the Cornell University Police On?

Sharing my story of a disturbing encounter with CUPD in 2018

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Which brings me to the other big variable: mandatory reporting policies. If a school has an expansive mandatory reporting policy, then they have more reports made about survivors than by survivors—including multiple reports about the same incident.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

One of the biggest ones is trust in the Title IX system. A school with a really low reporting rate isn’t necessarily a place where violence doesn’t occur, but rather a place where students know they will be mistreated if they come forward.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There are some news articles going around about sexual violence reporting rates at different universities. Let’s talk about why some schools have higher reporting rates than others:

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'm having fun reading this as "twenty-threcond century"

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Wow. I hadn't actually read the NYT story yet when I wrote this. But what actually happened to Jane Doe is the exact kind of thing that I'm talking about in this thread.

nytimes.com

Statement Written by Police in Cornell Assault Case Omitted Her Claim She Was Raped

Documents obtained by The New York Times show that the campus police at Cornell University sent a condensed statement to a prosecutor, who then declined to bring charges.

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

All of this. I also want to add that, in my research, I found that a lot of “inconsistencies” in a victim’s story actually came from gender bias affecting investigators’ record keeping and interview methods.

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liz pelly @lizpelly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Major magazines report this crisis of reading, but the crisis of listening barely registers // new letter from me about understanding AI music generators as amusements, the distracted state of listening, etc plus new music recommendations lizpelly.ghost.io/the-state-of...

lizpelly.ghost.io

The state of listening doesn't make headlines

Major magazines report this crisis of reading, but the crisis of listening barely registers.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Where "AI" means LLMs, none. I keep a list of sources expanding on my ethical and practical issues with the technology here (reillyspitzfaden.com/wiki/reading...), and because of the existence of all of these issues in combination, I strongly oppose the use of large language models in any context.

reillyspitzfaden.com

AI-Critical Writing and Reporting

Reading list of sources critical of AI or reporting on harm caused by its use

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

not fall for Republican plays to pit us against each other. Grrr.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The guest's suggestion was that Dems should support trans rights, but "quietly" -- don't make a big deal out of it. Really? What a low bar. Why not call on Dems to create messaging of solidarity and inclusion, to show that we can and should care about EVERYONE, and >>

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Third, there's a horrible citizens initiative on the ballot in WA state this year that will blow up all of girl's sports in the name of keeping trans girls out. Every single girl will have to prove girlhood through invasive exams or expensive blood tests ... just to play sports. >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

...and they have odd/even harmonics: www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/pipes.html Since strings also have odd + even harmonics, there is a real acoustic fact to support saxes being closer to strings! I'm sure you could find other reasons to call them more/less similar though.

phys.unsw.edu.au

Pipes and harmonics: cylindrical and conical bores

What are the harmonics of different bores? Why do closed conical bores have the same set of resonances as open cylindrical bores of the same length, whereas closed cylindrical bores of the same length...

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Clarinets behave as if the end is closed and have a (roughly) cylindrical bore; this combo produces only odd harmonics (and is why they overblow at the 12th). Saxes are also closed, but the (roughly) cylindrical bore makes them behave more like an open tube (e.g., flute)... >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm watching that for the first time, along with my spouse who's rewatching, and we're currently getting to where Spike appears more regularly on the show. He's such an entertaining character.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

He was Dutch and from what this says I'm inferring that when it is not short for anything and is a Dutch name it usually comes from Abraham: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_(g...

en.wikipedia.org

Bram (given name) - Wikipedia

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Naturally, being who I am, the first Bram I thought of was Bram Moolenaar (creator of the Vim text editor). Wikipedia doesn't show it as short for anything in his case, but I imagine it probably still derives from Abraham.

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Noah Kahrs @nkahrs.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Thrilled to see my article on unison openings in (digital) print! mtosmt.org/issues/mto.2... I started keeping this list back in my composer days (circa 2018?), and once you know it's there, there's a lot of contemporary music to find these sorts of openings in.

mtosmt.org

MTO 32.3: Kahrs, Unison Opening in Post-1945 Compositions

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Oh that's awesome — I love the look of those laptops!

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"Cuneiform": having the shape of New York City's public university system

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Idk if I'll get too many floppy releases, but I did come across someone who goes by "Anna Belle" and plays with old computers and has some releases you can optionally get on a floppy. They're available as digital downloads as well though, so not nearly as obscure.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Probably the most obscure item in my library though is "Synth Shock" by one2tres. It's an electronic tune someone posted on SheezyArt (back when that was a thing). It wasn't officially available for download, but I did the thing where you download it from the "page info" popup in Firefox.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I also have "Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior" by Yasuyuki Uesugi, a short noise composition on floppy disc that's one of a run of 5. This one still feels a bit "basic" though; if you're looking to get into floppy releases, this is the one a Wired article reviewed.

A floppy disc inside a stapled paper sleeve.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

...and for "Motor Cross" b/w "Burning the Bread," the B-side is 33 RPM instead of 45, and the only review I could find described everything as "chipmunked," so it sounds like the reviewer didn't pick up on that fact!

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Most of the *super* obscure stuff I have isn't necessarily my favorite music, but I do have some rare ones: Enon's "Long Play" and "Onhold" albums are both self-released on CD-R, and "Onhold" comes in a 5.25" floppy disc case with hand-glued art. I also have some vinyl-only releases from them...

A black 5.25" floppy disc case with hand-glued art of a portable turntable and typewriter text reading "ONHOLD ENON"

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm pretty sure the first time I heard of it was this article: www.its-her-factory.com/2026/08/slop...

its-her-factory.com

Slop-doom-ism: a new era for pop music & criticism

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

All this to say that *even if* we put aside all the ethical issues of LLMs (and that's a big if!), I think we should treat any developer anecdotes about how LLMs are beneficial to them with extreme suspicion.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

...and thus often assign abilities to the model that it does not have. The METR study backs this up with experimental data (and again, the effect of turning users into unreliable narrators is not fixed by models' outputting more desirable results since then!) >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

...(or at least I have seen no quantitative studies proving it has changed) is the poor ability of users to objectively evaluate the models' outputs. Bender et al. note that humans are not used to seeing what appears to be fluent language production from something that doesn't "think"... >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Developer Baldur Bjarnasson compares LLMs to the mentalist's con: softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme... METR ran a study where devs significantly overestimated the productivity gains: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089 While the output quality has improves since these were written, what has not changed... >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I've seen a number of arguments supporting the self-delusion you mention. First of course is the often-misunderstood "stochastic parrot" framing of specifically LLMs - Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.... - Followup discussion: - medium.com/@emilymenonb... - medium.com/@margarmitch...

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I've also been able to use Anna's Archive to get various coding books, and I found that actually coding myself is a lot less intimidating than I thought.

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

While I recognize this does still take *some* time, with these kinds of things, I like to plug "automate the boring stuff" automatetheboringstuff.com, which you can read for free online.

automatetheboringstuff.com

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python - Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

A Page in : Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There seems to be a coordinated talking point among the EA folks that the "standard" approach to "AI" on "the Left" is "AI is just stochastic parrots so no need to worry about it". (Sorry for all the scare quotes, but y'know) >>

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

... and much, much more from MANY voices. When the EA claim "no one has been warning you about this stuff" they are doing a double erasure: 1) Of the people doing the warning 2) Of the actual harms they are warning about bsky.app/profile/emil... >>

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I did not know Katie Mack is bi — very cool!

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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them) @reillypascal.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I would love an @ifbookspod.bsky.social episode on "the gift of fear"! That was one of my mom's favorite books when I was growing up.

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