iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 11h

Superb adventure in the sky today, had a buzzard flying alongside us, wing to wing, as if we were just another bird. One of those things you can never photograph in the air, but magical for it.

A motor glider sits on a grass runway, with a vast blue sky above.

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Dr. Smiti Nathan @smitinathan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We have a new Artifact of the Day video out exploring the oldest known example of representational art that archaeologists have identified so far 🏺 🧪 youtu.be/wnZFWEVNma0?...

youtu.be

This Artifact Is the Oldest Representational Art...So Far

YouTube video by Dr. Smiti Nathan

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Trying to complete this annual PDR form, and, like any such exercise, it is profoundly dispiriting stuff. All the Aims, Objectives, Success Metrics, and 'Achieve by' dates I need to complete - none of which I have ever used, but which, by virtue of their being, enforces a sense of inadequacy.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Cloudflow - having a slight breather this afternoon with a test of the resurrected Nephoscope routine. It is working rather well, so I think it's now really a case of deciding when and where to film.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I've been involved in so many high-level meetings about teaching admin, infrastructure, and policy, that the prospect of doing some actual teaching is most welcome

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What do you mean it will be November in 4.5 weeks? What nonsense.

A bright, sunny, warm, and still rather green landscape by the campus east lake

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I've got to do some CPD training for visiting delegates tomorrow (and over the next few weeks). Unsurprisingly, they have a strong desire to learn more about AI. Will take somewhat grim delight in breaking out my Gemma4 teaching assistant. It's not very profound.

AI assistant above my slides. It observes the visuals are sad, like bad UI design.

An illustration showing a sad emoji face under the water, with a girl sitting on top, staring at her phone, as if marooned. The text underlines that one way of considering interfaces is to consider those moments when they break down.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Dungeon of Babel - my weeks as DHoS consist now almost entirely of meetings and emails as the new semester blasts along. Squeezing in a tiny scrap of creativity before I collapse into bed. I quite like this 'warm dark' palette, closer to how I imagine Borges' fabled library #gameDev #indieDev #bitsy

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Great to see newly released Impact Report for "Beware Blue Skies" - an immersive film exploring the psychology of drone warfare, that I worked on as part of the team at the Centre for Drones and Culture, in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum and Human Studio. pdftoflipbook.io/f/f0ef26e6-f...

pdftoflipbook.io

Interactive PDF Flipbook — pdftoflipbook.io

View this interactive 3D flipbook online with realistic page flips. Free browser-based PDF flipbook reader.

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Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

as a satire on so-called late stage capitalism how could one beat investors pouring a trillion into a company offering to wipe out humankind

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Apropos of the fact that tomorrow is the first proper teaching day, I must say I'm thankful to my past self for all their efforts - these slides are actually really good!?!

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This, more than anything. But I'd also extend this into majority of businesses. Many are poorly led, poorly organised, poorly run, and have really quite low technical literacy. The elaborate and often esoteric world of agential tasks is far outside their scope, awareness, and time/IT investment.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Outside my office, three floors below, the builders dug a gigantic hole back in July, leaving it empty and wholly unattended, before then filling it with rubble last week, and are now asphalting it over with the aid of most piercingly squeaky wheelbarrow I've ever heard. There's a metaphor here.

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Anastasia Salter @anasalter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Great thread, terrible article 🤣

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

One of the great full moons of the year - the Harvest moon, with Saturn only at 5 degrees or so to the bottom left.

A brilliant full moon overwhelms my cheap phone camera, making it look more akin to the sun. A pristine dot of light marks the position of Saturn amidst the glare

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Gosh, I rather love September skies - an ocean of wind.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

While it is a privilege to be Deputy Head of School, the "emails" at this time of year are just wild. I knew it would be like this, but it's an experience - you can well appreciate how this level of academic service knocks out both teaching and research capacity (and I've still got to do it) 😅

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There's a lot of unknowns here, but the premise of expecting intensively human written and organised proposals to be submitted, but then potentially desk rejected via LLMs, doesn't fly. "Grateful for the time and effort" indeed. Readily see such turning the grant cycle into a fully automated lottery

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Mariana J López @marianajlopez.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

There's been so far 173 responses, resulting in 918 sounds. Thanks everyone! 🙏 I'm currently looking for responses that represent sound heritage in African countries, if you can help and also share with others I would really appreciate it tinyurl.com/5579y76e #SoundHeritage #Soundscapes #Acoustics

Screenshot of Mariana's website and the page 'Sound Heritage Survey'. Text says: This survey seeks to crowdsource examples of sounds that are meaningful to people from different parts of the world. The focus is on sounds (but not music) which are meaningful to you personally and/or that you consider culturally important. These can be connected to a very specific area (village, district) or have a wider range (regional/national). They can be natural sounds or they can be human-made sounds, they can be isolated sounds or combined sounds, and they may also include the acoustics of spaces. For example, some people in villages in Spain mention the sounds of specific bells as culturally and personally...'

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Saw this one on Instagram just now - I'm assuming that King's or Amsterdam are not involved, and no I didn't click on the link(!), but any relevant colleagues I know on here may want to be aware...

An AI generated advert with heavily distorted, misspelled text, calling for participants to test new psychological questionnaires

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Babel in Bitsy (Idling towards finishing this longstanding project) #gameDev

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Raise your glasses with me, for I have done the meetings and emails of being Deputy Head of School (Learning and Teaching) today, and, heavens, this evening shall be given over to wholly unproductive pursuits of art and leisure.

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Mariana J López @marianajlopez.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The first of a series of short videos discussing what each of the images on the cover of 'Sonic Pasts: acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes' means. Thanks to Oswin Wan for a beautiful cover design @routledgebooks.bsky.social #Soundscapes #Acoustics #Heritage #SoundHeritage

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Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yuriko Furuhata, Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time – @dukepress.bsky.social, September 2026 dukeupress.edu/Archives-of-... Introduction open access at this link

dukeupress.edu

Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Closing out a slightly surreal weekend of endless, iterative LVM testing for one of the Geocamera boxes. I'm using it to (re)develop the core visual analytics software that will eventually go into the bigger, GPS equipped version.

A black 3D printed box with a camera port and a Raspberry Pi situated within. A small black and white oled display reads text relating to one of the analytics programs it is capable of running.

A screenshot from an aerial, kite captured image, which has been subjected to a visual analytics routine. Areas of the image are broadly classified by landclass type, held within colourful labelled boxes, and annotation text boxes hover above, describing these areas of the scene and their ecological significance. It is very much not perfect, but not entirely unreasonable.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Nephoscope was one of the very few projects I consciously put on pause, as I found it so irritating and disappointing to develop. Nevertheless, looking through one of the recordings from last year, I am beginning again to see what I 'saw' in it originally, and I think I will return to it, one day.

A screenshot from a Nephoscope video. A circle is overlaid on top of a scene of overhead clouds and blue sky. There are words in the circle, relating to meteorology, and some lines indicating the motion of the wind.

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Anastasia Salter @anasalter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

There's nothing really new here, but it is powerful to see this admission spelled out from internal Microsoft docs: “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

As I build the datasets for the Geocamera system, I'm becoming mildly obsessed by Wales' LANDMAP system, which does not only cover the usual Geological and Habitat assessments, but also contains Visual and Sensory, Historic, and Cultural reports too. Fascinating classifications hidden within...

A screenshot from a spreadsheet. One column simply characterises locations by various key adjectives, which include: "Attractive, Unattractive, Tranquil, Sheltered, Settled, Exposed, Threatening, Remote, Wild, Safe"

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MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

New and #OpenAccess: "The Aesthetics of Machine Vision" is an interdisciplinary glossary on machine vision and aesthetics, with researchers, artists, architects, art historians, and critical theorists contributing to this critical dialogue: mitpress.mit.edu/978026205417...

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A question for passing traffic - I have the opportunity to teach on a Digital Design Skills module this semester, and I'm really keen to do a Media Archaeology week. However, I need to link it to a concrete 'making' exercise, and I'm a bit stumped for something that isn't too complex. Thoughts?

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Annie Dillard: "The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us ... Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring." home.ubalt.edu/ntygfit/ai_0...

Black and white image of a historic solar eclipse

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is an interesting one - the design studio Special Projects apparently prototyped a video call app that turned people into plants. It was intended for those who find looking at a grid of faces overwhelming, but they didn't proceed as unsure of validity. www.linkedin.com/posts/adrian...

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Please do share and complete Mariana's survey of sounds you have found culturally / personally important, wherever you have lived in the world! As noted, if you, or know others, who have lived in Latin America, Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Ukraine, their responses would be especially welcome 🙂

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

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Mariana J López @marianajlopez.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I've been 'mapping' the survey responses on sounds that are culturally/personally important to people in different parts of the world. The video represents only the first 80 responses. Sadly very few from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, and none from Ukraine tinyurl.com/7w3amz83

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's difficult to illustrate this, but I've been trying out different vision-based image stabilisation routines (detecting the horizon and deriving orientation from that, vs gyro data). Tried various elaborate algorithms / ML routines, but it's Otsu's method that clearly won...

An illustration grabbed from another horizon detection system - it shows a natural scene from a drone that is then processed so that the land is flat white and the sky is black. It is the slight contour characterising the resulting division, the horizon, that is of interest. Otsu's method is typically the first stage of another set of processes, and this is the case with this illustration, but my method stops here.

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Astrobot JWST @astrobotjwst.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

New #JWST 🔭 data release for target names: NGC-6644-BACKGROUND. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI. Take a look at news_by_date.html

jw07965-o004_t002_miri_f770w_i2d.jpg
NGC-6644-BACKGROUND
Probing the chemical evolution of the carriers of the Aromatic Infrared Band emission.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Nice to see one of my "Better Images of AI" 'Polytope' designs out in the wild - this time for the @creativecommons.bsky.social event "Guidance on Using CC Licenses in the Age of AI" creativecommons.org/event/guidan...

A series of geometric tile designs, drawn from North African and Eurasian designs, set in an interconnected network, background text that reads "Guidance on Using CC Licenses in the Age of AI"

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I love reveal.js for its portability and ease of embedding websites into a slide deck. But I don't always want to work in markdown. So I made Small Reveal, a lightweight, browser-based WYSIWYG editor for reveal.js. Demo: slides.samplereality.com

slides.samplereality.com

Small Reveal

Build reveal.js presentations in your browser. No build step, no backend, no account — your decks live in your own browser storage.

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My essay on rogue AI has been republished by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — “Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did.” Grateful to @thebulletin.org for the invitation!

thebulletin.org

Rogue AI didn’t breach Hugging Face, human decisions did

At the core of the Hugging Face hacking incident were a series of human choices that traded security for speed.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Really pleased to see that "Algorithmic Light" is featured in a chapter of the Open Access "Posthumane Verflechtungen: Lyrik im Technozän" [Posthuman Entanglements: Poetry in the Technocene] (2026), ed. by @antjeschmidt.bsky.social - doi.org/10.1515/9783112247716

A screenshot of Algorithmic Light - grayscale landscape, featuring Bodmin Moor, and the great Tor of Brown Willy, is overlaid with multiple colourful machine vision boxes, each with a poetic label drawn from a dataset of landscape writing.

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Richard A Carter @richardacarter.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

People working in AI industry posting nonsense on X are not “putting their careers on the line.” They’ve got a ton of $$ and will be fine. A lot of this discourse is just weird in-group social signaling explicitly *for* career advancement. Genuine concerns exist but good luck disentangling all that.

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