iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The perfect email signoff has been staring us in the face this whole time: simply combine the old standbys "Best" and "Take care": "Best take care" Vaguely intimidating but with plausible deniability.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thinking about how much the sociopathic Patrick Bateman in *American Psycho* maps onto ChatGPT: "there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman," he explains, "some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory...I simply am not there...Myself is fabricated, an aberration."

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

You hear about faculty who are demoralized, exhausted, and ready to quit. All true! But what you don't hear is that for many of us, the time we spend with students is the best part of our day and it's what keeps us going. I for one am uplifted by my students.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

woke up thinking about the time bigfoot came onto the 6 million dollar man and i was confused (still am?) whether bigfoot was a robot or an alien

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is how entropy disguised as bureaucracy works. Following the Board on Geographic Names, which in turn was instructed by Executive Order 14422, the Library of Congress has renamed its "Lake Ontario" subject heading to "Lake America."

authorities.loc.gov

Authorities Search

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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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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The Altman quote here—”some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless some people act quite urgently”—is classic abuser rhetoric, washing one‘s hands of any blame. Not much different from “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/u...

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said last week that “some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless some people act quite urgently.”

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

There's that dialect quiz going around. Really, there are only two questions you need to ask to pin me down: what do you call carbonated soft drinks (pop) and did your parents say "warsh" instead of "wash."

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UFO Sighting Bot @ufoskies.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I saw a UFO land at an undercover CIA airfield in the Arizona desert.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Did some maintenance and updates on my old Sestetle project, which creates 6-line poems that could have been a Wordle board. sestetle.fugitivetexts.net

sestetle.fugitivetexts.net

Sestetle

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Sestetle #2077 BASIC TENET BASIC TENET NEVER ENTER sestetle.fugitivetexts.net

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

samplereality.github.io/sestetle/

Sestetle

brain
basic
begin
begin
basic
brain

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Ridicule as praxis might work when you're ridiculing people you'd never want on your side ever. Like Nazis. But why ridicule people who you hope to bring over to your side?

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I love the term "folk forensics"—and indeed, many cloying tells of AI use—like lists of threes, words deemed statistically likely to be LLM output, and em dashes—are mere superficialities. Not only that, they distract us from the underlying logic of textual production in the 21st century.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Tomorrow is the final day to register your intention of entering this year's @ifcomp.org. Which I think I'm doing?

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

If you have to preface your online comment with "Not to be a dick, but..." you are indeed being a dick and nobody owes it to you to read any further than that.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Typical Microsoft to bleed money into jamming Copilot into every conceivable Office orifice while continuing its multi-year delay of AppleScript integration with Outlook

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

100% guarantee this tech will be used on peaceful protestors or innocent bystanders long before it ever deters active shooters

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

That "perfect album from the 90s" thing that was viral a few days ago? There is only one answer.

The album cover art of The Tragically Hip's "Fully Completely" (1992)

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The 45 album cover of Hall & Oates' "Maneater" goes hard in a post-Heated Rivalry world.

Close-up of two sweaty men staring into each other's eyes. Text above reads "Daryl Hall John Oates." Text below reads "Maneater"

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Perhaps the most profound realization of my adult life was that Dexys Midnight Runners was *not* a one-hit wonder.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Killer summarization of Appiah's report on the state of literary studies by @gabrielh.bsky.social: "Appiah hasn’t done the reading, can’t discern good from bad data analysis, and doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about literary studies and internal field debates over both epistemology and method."

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Has someone written an actual pre-history of AI slop, that is, a pre-history of low-effort, high-volume content? Because the actual pre-history would include things like spam, shovelware, tourist tchotchkes, box scores, horoscopes, Family Circus, etc. & etc.

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Molleindustria FUTURE? NO THANKS! OUT NOW @molleindustria.org · 14/07/2026

The United States is turning into a kind of reverse Omelas: everyone is miserable except for a single child, Donald Trump, who inexplicably must be kept happy.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Seriously, I can't stop admiring the output of this bot. I've been to Granada at least five times, and every time, I vow I'm going to make a bot inspired by the mosaics in the Nasrid palace there. Finally managed it!

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Reading extended family group chats from spring 2020 is...enervating.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Fascinating new post by @jengolbeck.bsky.social about how core MAGA hates Flock just as much as the rest of us. Gives lie to the Flock CEO's characterization of the DeFlock movement as antifa.

magareport.news

AI, data centers, and Flock: MAGAReport 7/11/26

Issues that can unite us?

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

One of those days where I could say something that could get me doxed so I’ll just keep it to myself.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Pretty sure if you ran White Noise through an AI checker, it'd be flagged as AI-generated. DeLillo didn't invent staccato compound noun phrases or liberal use of words like "humming" or "fluorescent" (try John Dos Passos)—but he surely influenced the training data.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

This reminds me that several months ago I filed FOIA requests with my town and several neighboring towns regarding any Flock contracts and Flock data they might have accessed. And in defiance of North Carolina Public Records Law, two of those towns have not replied.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Need a palate cleanser? Check out @alhambot.bsky.social's procedurally-generated tiles (not AI, just Python and math!)

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

guys, i made something new. @alhambot.bsky.social makes procedurally-generated tiles in the Moorish style of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

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Robert Downen @robertdownen.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Have not seen it pointed out enough that the Trump admin's targeting of the Smithsonian is being influenced by David Barton, the debunked amateur historian and Christian nationalist activist who has spent decades peddling claims that church-state separation is a myth.

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

These laws are clear First Amendment violations but will that stop them? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

It's quite possible that consoles are dead. (Again.)

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Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social · 22/10/2024

A Brief History of Nobody Reads Anymore 🧵

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I remember reading this essay in 2014. I also read it in 2005. Back in 1997 I read it as well. Pretty sure there was a copy floating around in 1985. 1977 as well. 1965. 1959. 1942.

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