iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

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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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I’ve been saying for years that the game developers who will make big bucks are the ones who give the girlies (gender inclusive) what they want! Less stabbing, more dress up!

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Anyway, your problem isn‘t finding the time to take notes. The problem is that taking notes is thinking and thinking has to be done by someone. women have been doing a lot of metacognition that looks like a task when it’s really thinking.

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Jennifer Liang @jenniferliang.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I like paying taxes for schools, roads and feeding the hungry. I don’t like paying taxes to drop bombs on IranIan school girls. Tax is how you pay for society.

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ah yes, that classic fraud of paying full price for a service. Next they’re coming for the Hulu subscription I keep forgetting about. And all those hooligans with auto insurance who haven’t gotten into any accidents!

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Jared Pechaček @vandroidhelsing.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I can’t go to your thing. I have to attend to my agonies

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Writing has been hard of late, owing largely to the horrors, so writing 2200 words today felt good. Crossed the 30k mark on this novel revision, so I’m over a third of the way through!

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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 19/09/2026

The AI industry wants you to say "the AI just did that thing on its own!" Like, United Health's AI that's denying a shitload of claims with a 90% error rate? They wanted you to think it's just the AI.

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Maura Doherty @molowell.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The week in review. Read Bender's whole thread:

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 11/09/2026

If you put ten children in a room with a single large red button that launches all nukes, it would be a genuine threat to humanity. But it doesn't mean children are a human extinction risk. It means the person who puts them near the nuke button is a human extinction risk.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

(They mean they will be treated like poor and brown people. That’s the extinction level event they name but cannot describe…and why they won’t describe it. In case that got lost in the jokes.)

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Every half-ass plan for our extinction that they provide just turns me on. No internet, you say? No online banking?? No 2FA to use the bathroom at my job??? Baby I was a latchkey kid in the 1980s. You’re describing my platonic ideal. Extinct me.

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P. Djéli Clark | The Disgruntled Haradrim @pdjeliclark.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

West Africans practiced smallpox inoculation long before Europeans had ever heard of it, and brought the knowledge with them to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade. Historian Elise Mitchell examines how these stories were “forgotten” amid the hardening of racial ideologies in the 19th century

gavi.org

The world has spent centuries forgetting the African history of immunisation

Historian Dr Elise Mitchell re-examines the early history of smallpox inoculation on both ends of the Atlantic slave trade.

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Star Tribune Going Out @stribgoingout.startribune.com · 03/09/2026

Threading the 2026 MN State Fair 4-H Llama and Alpaca costume contest contestants here because you deserve it 😇

Llama and owner dressed up in a Mamma Mia theme

Llama and owner dressed up in back to school theme

Llama and owner dressed up in curious George theme

Llama and owner dressed up as thing 1 and thing 2

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Rest in peace, Wendell Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

from Openings: Poems (1968)

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Aisha Harris @aishaharris.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I cannot possibly take seriously anyone who reads Dolly Parton's politics as "neutral."

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Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This is set up for laughs, but it’s actually one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how being capable of producing convincing sounding language and understanding meaning are two completely different things. A chatbot does not understand you, it just has automated responses based on your words.

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Alexandra Petri @petridishes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

the year is 2027. gas costs $83 and lettuce is at war with us. however every location on every map now says AMERICA

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Alex Spahn 🌋🌪️☄️ @spahn711.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Your moment of zen with some misty mountains scenes from eastern Kentucky.

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Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I can promise you that living in Washington of California has not begun to give you the chops to even sit at the hate table with the people who live in red states that don't vote Republican, I learnt new swear words that day and my literal day job is knowing words

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Bribed myself to write today with chocolate, and embarrassingly, it worked. My brain really is no different from a treat-motivated cat.

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Let’s go! Cringe as praxis, baby!

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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

carlsonlab.bio

The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab

Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...

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Anna Meier @annameier.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

If you have so much work to do that you feel you need AI in order to get it all done: you don't. You need a union.

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

At the risk of being earnest on social, I so appreciate this. My partner and I are almost 40, have considered parenthood, but the math has never mathed. There has never been a point when we’ve felt we can do it logistically and financially. It’s infuriating how much this country despises mothers.

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Alisha Grauso (She/Her) @alishagrauso.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I'm not the first to say some version of this, but I keep thinking about the Big Tech oligarchs and how really all of it for the past 20 years has boiled down to the simple fact that these men are terrible at being human, so they hate it and want to do all they can to escape their own humanity. 1/x

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

It’s one thing to read it, another to hear it in her incredible voice.

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tante @tante.cc · 17/07/2026

Even if you train an LLM just on fully validated, peer reviewed texts the LLM _will_ still generate fabrications. LLMs are _language_ models, not _knowledge models_.

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

A true hall of shame lmao To me, AI design slop always looks like the visual representation of one of these three things: 1. A walking red flag, like you’re about to get harassed by a sexist creep (most of them tbh) 2. Live, laugh, love your way to wellness 3. Colorful, highly-addictive phone game

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Jonathan Edward Durham @thisone0verhere.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Maybe I'm not overthinking, maybe I'm just regular thinking about stuff that’s overhappening

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Lmao, seafood? In the mountains? And not a single biscuits and gravy to be found smh

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Yup. If a god is omnipotent and omniscient and this is the world they create, they are not loving. Sometimes I think if there is a god, maybe god’s a bit of a himbo (all-loving, omnipotent, not omniscient) or else a weary wizard who lost their power (all-loving, omniscient, not omnipotent.

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Rory Blank @roryblank.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I made a new t-shirt that I think has an important message about the future and also about friendship and i think maybe you will like it roryblank.bigcartel.com

A shirt depicting a cute beaver wearing a hardhat and a work vest and holding a hammer, standing in front of a series of pictures of other beavers in work gear variously sawing wood, hammering nails, and carrying planks of wood.

On the pictures it says "working together we can build anything we like."

In big text it says "stop building hell" at the top
and at the bottom it says "we are trapped in the prison of nostalgia, a world built by ghosts, not a world for the living. Nothing new can be built until we escape. Nothing can be fixed if you aren't willing to let things go."

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U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission @cpsc.gov · 29/06/2026

Every year, people are betrayed by their optimism. "Fireworks have exploded in other people's hands, but surely they will not explode in mine. My hands are different."

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Lady Topham Catt @ladytophamcatt.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

1/4 You can have a little Cincinnati Union Terminal. As a treat. 🧵 Architects: Roland Wank for Fellheimer & Wagner, with Paul Philippe Cret as design consultant. Completed in 1933. Cincinnati, Ohio

Color photo of a portion of the Cincinnati Union Station taken from the tiered fountain located in front. The building itself is enormous, so only the center section and its massive stepped half dome is visible in this image.

Color photo looking over the curves of the fountain, beyond playful water elements and back towards one of the gigantic reliefs flanking the terminal's main entrance.

Color photo of one of the stepped, limestone buttresses that flanks either side of the entrance. Both feature a bas relief by Maxfield Keck, and the one shown here celebrates transportation, with a scantily clad Mercury bursting out of the sun and riding on an eagle, lil' winged cap on his head and staff hoisted high above his head so he can flex his muscles. A small frieze in the Art Deco-ist font possible marks 1931 as the date construction started on this building.

Color photo of the enormous chrome, white and red clock that graces the facade against an enormous grid of rectangular windows of different sizes, separated by fluted limestone piers. The clock eschews numbers in favor of evenly spaced wedges, and rocks open geometric pointers as hands. It is attached to the building by chrome brackets with horizontal fluting and is pretty much the coolest thing ever.

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Immigrant Boo👻 @porcupunk.eurosky.social · 23/06/2026

I love and adore Josh... but this hits so close to home in so many ways that instead of smiling or laughing I am teary eyed.

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Dr. Sandra Steingraber 🏳️‍🌈 @ssteingraber1.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Your reminder that fairy tales are full of stepmothers because women once routinely died in childbirth, from postpartum sepsis, or from other infectious diseases and left behind housefuls of motherless children. Stable nuclear families are made possible by vaccines, antibiotics, and safe abortions.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 17/06/2026

You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down *real* cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer. 11/

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The tech companies building AI data centers are following the same playbook the coal industry did in Appalachia. Company towns. Lying to rural communities about job creation. Polluting the local environment, making it unsafe for residents. It’s all right there if you know your history.

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Stephany Daniel @sadanielwrites.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Absolutely love this framing of curiosity and attention.

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Taco Bell Quarterly @tacobellquarterly.org · 08/06/2026

If nobody buys your book who cares? You can write an even more stupid one after that

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Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 08/06/2026

As things stand, these machines are being deployed in policy areas where they affect populations who when they die, noone is expected to do a post mortem and make sure that can never happen again, when they systematically discriminate, it's accepted the algorithms aren't perfect but we "need" them.

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Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog · 08/06/2026

By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.

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Frances: Meh and Loving It @francesmeh.reviews · 07/06/2026

if the people who say "just listen to your body" had to listen to mine for 15 minutes they would lose their goddamned minds

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they/them might be giants ☭ @babadookspinoza.bsky.social · 24/02/2024

I really appreciated this tweet and it reminded me of something in Buddhist philosophy I’m covering with my friend and tutoring student right now. A short thread.

Tweet from @MariamBarghouti:
I see a lot of cheap rich people.
Not just money. Cheap with your heart, cheap with your attention, cheap with your hope and support. Cheap with courage. Cheap with your voice. Cheap with your resources.
Don't be cheap when investing in justice, the future can't afford it.

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 11/04/2026

I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

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