iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Robert C. Engen

Sebastian Bae @sebastianbae.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Don't forget you can still order your pre-order copy of my forthcoming "Littoral Commander: Australia!" It is the first expansion featuring new national forces and a collaboration with the Australian Army Battle Lab! 🦘 💥 🎲 dietzfoundation.org/product/litt...

dietzfoundation.org

Littoral Commander: Australia

Designed by Robert Engen and Scott Jenkinson, Littoral Commander: Australia is an expansion to Sebastian Bae's critically acclaimed Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific. LITTORAL COMMANDER: AUSTRALIA i...

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Radosław Sikorski @radek-sikorski.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.

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Jill Sargent Russell, PhD @jsargentr.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

The more you make the back end unreliable, the more the front end is eschewed. Nobody is buying your kit if you signal you will brick it on a whim.

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Dr Keith Wilson 💭 @keithwilson.eu · 01/02/2025

“Al seems to have more godparents than even Sleeping Beauty. And, regrettably, more than one significant prick.” 😂

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Alan Allport @alanallport.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

AI Anne Frank bothsidesing the Holocaust in today’s dystopian nightmare.

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Look, I’ve no doubt Trump wants to play hardball with Canada in trade negotiations and that we’re in for hurt. But the annexation talk is a negotiating tactic, same as him insisting that we have nothing the US needs. It is meant to rattle Canadian leadership, which is in flux right now.

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Australians low-key anxious today that Trump wants to annex Canada and not them.

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nacho likes airplanes @nachochip.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

“Bluesky is an echo chamber” Yes of course it is, I tailored it to my taste, interests, opinions, and community. I’m here to have a good time, not argue with strangers lmao

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I have been taking my time deciding whether to restart a social media presence here and had just started crafting content again. But I’m not going to if community protection isn’t taken seriously here. This sort of thing has killed friends of mine. @safety.bsky.app

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Sebastian Bae @sebastianbae.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

The Australian Army's Battle Lab led the development of the Australian expansion for my "Littoral Commander" #wargame series. Roughly 100+ copies will be delivered to various Australian units. A commercial variant will be released later in 2025. #wargaming 🎲

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Accidentally closed the app after an hour of composing my first long-form thread and lost it all, so fuck this, I’m going to bed. Taking recommendations for a different piece of software to draft skeets with before posting to here.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 30/11/2024

superb point: if we take Sam Altman at his word about the relative risk of the tech he's gleefully building, we should all be hunting him for sport

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

For the last two years my daughter and I have done a personal art piece for my department’s Secret Santa before Christmas. This year I did one for our Centre’s program coordinator. Lately she’s been wanting the Untitled Goose Game goose instead of dragons. 🪿

Pastel on canvas piece featuring the goose from Untitled Goose Game standing atop a mountain of papers and paperwork. Caption says “Save Us, Bel.”

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

I can run my mouth for hours in front of an auditorium with hundreds of military officers but have completely forgotten how to social media.

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Altmetric @altmetric.com · 18/11/2024

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

docs.bsky.app

Action Intent Links | Bluesky

Authors, websites, and apps can use action intent links to implement "Share on Bluesky" buttons, or similar in-app actions. Logged-in users will be directed to the corresponding action view in the Blu...

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Reposted by Robert C. Engen

Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 04/04/2024

Basically: autistic people have less neural pruning of synaptic connections as babies and toddlers, but this thick density of connections on the small scale within a region, ends up decreasing connectivity *between* regions. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Autism as a neural systems disorder: A theory of frontal-posterior underconnectivity

The underconnectivity theory of autism attributes the disorder to lower anatomical and functional systems connectivity between frontal and more posterior cortical processing. Here we review evidence f...

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Matthew Ford @warmatters.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

The obvious way to kill military AI in decision support. Accelerate the production of synthetic data. Rubbish in. Rubbish out. Bring on model collapse and force the adversary to fall back on static data. Back to bombs and bullets before you can say boo to a goose.

media.tenor.com

a man in a suit is running down a street in front of a building that says imgflip.com on the bottom

ALT: a man in a suit is running down a street in front of a building that says imgflip.com on the bottom

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Kevin Veale 😷 (Toitū Te Tiriti) @krveale.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I love the nuclear block and respect the work folks at Bsky are doing in T&S spaces, BUT. The underlying design of the site regarding things like blocks being visible to API are profoundly dangerous, cursed foundations that could turn the nuclear block into a Maginot Line.🧵

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Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social · 06/06/2024

These folks did a great job of breaking, well, *all* the leading LLMs by asking the models an incredibly simple question. These models should not be relied upon to assist anyone with reasoning. Check out the appendix with examples of truly wild confabulations and errors arxiv.org/html/2406.02...

arxiv.org

Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 04/06/2024

Hot off the press and pulling no punches: Allan English’s “The 2024 Defence Policy Update and its Predecessors: Why the CAF is in a ‘Death Spiral’.” The CAF is in serious trouble, but is it interested in change or perception management? Yes, that’s rhetorical. scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcont...

scholars.wlu.ca

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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 20/05/2024

For the record: you call the police non-emergency line and ask whether they have an officer who coordinates tracking people who are at elevated SWAT risk (and if so, ask to be transfered to them). If not, ask to speak to the captain of the SWAT unit.

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Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 13/05/2024

Though politicians have compared Hamas to al-Qaeda since Oct. 7, the groups have different aims and fighting Hamas requires different tactics, writes NDU’s Kim Cragin in this week’s Foreign Policy Essay.

lawfaremedia.org

Hamas Cannot Be Fought Like al-Qaeda

Grouping the two terrorist organizations together obscures some important distinctions.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 06/05/2024

In the Spring of 1864 Twain, while working as a beat reporter for the SF Morning Call, Twain witnessed the murder of a Chinese laborer by a mob that included cops. It radicalized him. He wrote it up, one of the first things he ever authored which he thought deserved to be called “literature”… 2/

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artphobos @artphobos.bsky.social · 21/04/2024

Via Vincent Proce on Twitter (@vproceart) some hope vs the Ai glut (repost to add alt text)

Text: Artists Against Generative Al.

Posting this on behalf of a member who would like to remain anonymous:

I'm an art director and supervisor for a large studio. The studio heads had the bright idea before I started to hire prompters. Several bros were brought onto the film project. I absolutely hated myself for not quitting on the spot but stuck with it because it's mercenary out there. Have a family to feed etc. I decided to use this time wisely. Treat them as I would any artist I had hired. First round of pictures of a sweeping Ariel forest landscape comes through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and one or two of the 40 are ok. Nearly on brief. So first round feedback goes through and I tell them about the perspective mistakes, colour changes I want, layers that any matte painting would be split into. Within a day I get 5 variants. Not changes to the ones I wanted but variations. Again. Benefit of the doubt I give them another round of

Text: the doubt I give them another round of feedback making it clear. Next day it's worse. I sit there and patiently paint over, even explaining the steps I would take as a painter. They don't do it, anomalies start appearing when I say I want to keep the exact image but with changes. They can't. They simply don't have the eye to see the basic mistakes so the Ai starts to over compensate. We get people starting to appear in the images. These are obviously holiday snaps.

"Remove the people"

"What would you like them changed to?" "... grass. I just don't want them there" They can't do it. The one that can actually use photoshop hasn't developed the eye to see his mistakes, ends up getting angry at me for not understanding he can't make specific changes. The girl whose background was a little photography has given me 40 progressively worse images with wilder mistakes every time. This is 4 days into the project.

Text: I'm both pissed about the waste, but elated seeing ai fall at the first hurdle. It's not even that the images are unusable, the people making them have no eye for what's wrong, no thicker skin for constructive criticism and feedback, no basic artistic training in perspective and functionality in what they're making.

Yes the hype is going to pump more money into this. They won't go anywhere for a while. But this has been such a glowing perfect moment of watching the fundamental part fail in the face of the most simple tasks. All were fired and the company no longer accepts Ai prompters as applicants. Your training as an artist will always be the most important part of this process and it is invaluable. I hope this post gives you a boost in a dark time.

(A pic of text reads 'this machine kills Al' above an arrow pointing to a pencil)

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Reposted by Robert C. Engen

besha @besha.bsky.social · 20/04/2024

I saw someone call it mansplaining as a service, not just the unwanted explaining but the high inaccuracy and high confidence, and I do think that explains both who makes it and who is pushing it

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 13/04/2024

When "tech" meant faster computers and smaller phones, it was exciting, you wanted to know what they were going to come up with next. Now it's a bunch of assholes trying to figure out new ways to charge you a subscription to look at the shittiest ads you can imagine

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Nite the Dragon @danandnite.bsky.social · 08/04/2024

Nasa: do not stare directly at the sun in the upcoming solar eclipse The entirety of America:

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 16/02/2024

This is one of the primary goals of "AI" these days: to create an empty chair that takes the blame for corporate misconduct. We didn't discriminate, the AI told us who to hire. We didn't wrongfully reject the health insurance claim, the AI told us to. And on and on.

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Nina Jankowicz @ninajankowicz.com · 07/02/2024

I wrote a piece about how we ended up in a political environment where legitimate research and government action on disinfo has been chilled by a bunch of people crying "censorship!" when they themselves are the ones doing the censoring and intimidation. www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

foreignaffairs.com

The Coming Flood of Disinformation

How Washington gave up on the fight against falsehoods.

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 02/02/2024

1930s South African medical journals. The obituaries are wild: Obit #1: 5-page memorial to beloved Afrikaner doctor; testimonials; complete list of notables at the funeral. Obit #2: “Found dead at the wheel of his car, syringe next to him. Wife is on holiday in Jo’burg. Should someone tell her?”

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 01/02/2024

Today’s kick in the gut. British Indian Medical Journal, 1933: “Case of a seven year old boy with gonorrhoea. Maybe he got it by accident from one of the house servants?” Same Journal: “Boys with gonorrhoea are weird but we see young girls with it all the time, wonder why that is. It is a mystery.”

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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 24/01/2024

I wrote something: “Male Historians Explain Things To Me: masculinity, expertise and the academy”. With a huge debt to Rebecca Solnit, Sara Ahmed, Siri Hustvedt, Professor Lucy Robinson and many other feminists before me. www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

manchesterhive.com

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Ben Werdmuller @werd.io · 30/12/2023

There are some jaw-dropping infringements here, including an image where DALL-E apparently copies the entire Pixar universe from the single two-word prompt, "animated toys".

garymarcus.substack.com

Things are about to get a lot worse for Generative AI

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Someone else already did this in the comments but it’s deeply funny to me how true this is, as literally shown by asking Chat-GPT what the poem is about.

You
What is the Shel Silverstein poem "The
Homework Machine" about?
ChatGPT
"The Homework Machine" is a poem by Shel Silverstein that tells the story of a magical machine that can do homework perfectly. The machine is shared among a group of friends,
and they use it to complete their assignments effortlessly. However, things take an unexpected turn as the teacher becomes suspicious, leading to a humorous twist in the poem. It explores themes of laziness, responsibility, and the consequences of taking shortcuts.

You
What is the Shel Silverstein poem "The
Homework Machine" about?
ChatGPT
I apologize for the confusion, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Shel Silverstein did not write a poem titled "The Homework Machine." If you have a different poem or
topic in mind, please provide more details, and I'll do my best to assist you.

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Ian TB @iantb.bsky.social · 05/12/2023

My #ManeuverWarfare #cardgame #wargame is up for pre-order from @thedietzfoundation.bsky.social! It’s a deck construction game that puts #futurewar in your (cargo) pocket. Designed to be played by the warfighter anytime, anywhere, even your truck’s tailgate! dietzfoundation.org/product/mane...

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Robert C. Engen @robertengen.bsky.social · 27/10/2023

Today’s parenting: “it’s rubbing off with a bit of spit, so it can’t be gangrene.”

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Shaolei Ren @renshaolei.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Our new AI water paper is out! Updates include water withdrawal vs. consumption and scope definition. In 2027, global AI May withdraw 4-6 billion cubic meters of scope 1&2 water, equivalent to to 4-6 Denmark or half of UK! That’s really a lot of water! arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271

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The Glaze Project (UChicago SAND Lab and ETCH) @theglazeproject.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

By now, I'm guessing most have already seen the news on our new project, Nightshade. Lots of artists sharing it, but here's the article from MIT Technology Review (tyvm to the wonderful Melissa Heikkila). This is a thread explaining Nightshade & its goals www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1...

technologyreview.com

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.

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Dr Emma Salisbury @salisbot.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

I write a regular military technology newsletter for the fine folks at Wavell Room - latest issue out today, on Iron Dome. Sign up for free on the WR website!

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