iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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I’m in DC scheduled to give this talk today. But the organizers flagged slides in my deck that mention racism, structural gaslighting, New Jim Code and other themes that are off limits in the Land of the Free.

APA Women’s Leadership Institute event flyer with “keynote speaker” crossed out with a red X

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Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 4h

"There are nearly 26,000 students at Cornell but just 3 full-time investigators...~ 2,860 people are sexually assaulted each year. Even if only 10% of those victims reported, a single investigator would have a caseload of 95/year. For the same body of students, there is 1 full-time victim advocate."

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 8h

[Exit pursued by a bear.]

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

By the way, I explained this AI policy on the first day of class, and AFAICT the students seemed to appreciate my point about the danger of using AI to avoid struggling with written material, such as scientific articles, as a trainee

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Here's the #genAI policy from the syllabus of my grad-level developmental genetics course at UMich. (The course has no exams and is graded on participation in paper discussions, mini-lectures given by students, and questions submitted before class.) Many thanks to @islemcelroy.bsky.social!

Statement on genAI use in CDB 581 (with thanks to Isle McElroy and Lois Weisman)

If you use LLMs to research topics or summarize papers, you are depriving yourself of all of the training value of this course, but I will not police AI usage outside of class. However, no AI-generated content is permitted in materials you submit or present. All material (text, images, etc.) that you submit or present must either be your own work or must cite exclusively human sources. Lack of citation means you are claiming sole, unaided authorship. AI-generated text, images, and "ideas" cannot be cited because the human-created source material is misappropriated and/or untraceable.

You will benefit from this course if you struggle to read and understand the papers (not pre-digested summaries), engage with articles directly, encounter things you don't understand at first, and form your own impressions. This will be difficult and sometimes unpleasant. Struggling with material is what skill-building feels like. If you bypass the struggle, you bypass skill-building.

You can easily use an LLM to generate the questions you must submit before each paper discussion and each Panel. Please understand that the value of those questions is not in the questions themselves. With respect, nobody needs your questions about these papers or your mini-lectures. The "product" is not the point. The value of the questions and presentations is entirely in your struggle to conceive, organize and communicate them.

I won't try to catch you using genAI. If you want me to think you are the type of scientist whose thoughts are indistinguishable from the output of a word-association mimicry device, that is your choice. Good luck.

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Heather Randell @heatherrandell.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I just came across this today when @tressiemcphd.bsky.social posted it on Instagram. I’m sharing it with my statistics students, some of whom clearly used AI on their first homework. My TAs and I will not police AI use, and this is why I’m giving an in-class midterm and final for the first time.

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ceej @ceej.online · 08/10/2026

waymos are driven by the ghosts of people who died in debt

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Katie Tightpussy, Editor-In-Chief @katie.bzky.team · 03/11/2025

FACT: you should be sappier with your friends and loved ones. there is no reason not to be.

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Jason, ex Inferis @benedictsred.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Sending you a song I think you’ll love is a sign of great respect in my culture

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This might the first slop I ever enjoyed reading. Ugh. Brb just going out for cigarettes

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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

god there’s just no one like anne carson

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

“She asked the powers at NASA to let her add a safeguard to prevent that error in a real flight, and they laughed it off as too unlikely… When an astronaut did make that blooper during the Apollo 8 mission, it caused necessary navigational data to vanish, and they called Hamilton in to get it back.”

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David Tan @mangrovepitta.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Today's cool insect sighting is this pretty caddisfly (the iNaturalist computer vision algorithm suggests it's Halesus radiatus), spotted on the office front door.

Caddisfly (probably Halesus sp.) perched on a glass wall.

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 07/10/2026

I once had someone tell me, and I do mean this literally, that LLMs transcend the limits of turing machines and computability because they are not constrained by having to give correct answers

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Matt Binder @mattbinder.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

the tech industry is about to invent books

Andrew Yeung
@andruyeung
X.com
We created gyms because modern day work no
longer required physical activity. Without exercise,
our muscles atrophy.
I predict we'll need gyms for our brains too, once Al
starts doing our knowledge work.
10:53 PM • 10/4/26 • 1.3M Views

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I generally like sweet dummies, but variety is the spice of life

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah! Who are these emotional efficiency experts who need characters in books to make the best possible choice at all times?

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s nothing “unrealistic” about characters in fiction making disastrously stupid life choices. If you find dumb-ass characters implausible or unlikeable, sadly we cannot be friends

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Jennifer Doyle @fromaleftwing.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is so so true. It's all over the Nassar case.

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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

a little louder for the cheap seats in the back

One of the biggest myths is that men rape by mistake. Like, "Oh, they need consent training." But research is very clear: Sexual violence is not a mistake. It is an intentionally made decision by people who know they don't have consent. They just don't prioritize consent over things like status, power, domination, and sexual gratification.
For my research, I got a certificate of confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health, so my notes couldn't be subpoenaed. One of the reasons I call them perpetrators in my work is because every single person I interviewed confessed in that context. The first question I would ask them was, "When you received that email from Title IX that you were under investigation, did you know what it was about?" Every perpetrator I interviewed said "yes." If sexual assault were a miscommunication, you would be wondering, What have I possibly done wrong? That is not the way that any of them reacted because they knew.

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ThemBOO! @thembo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

good morning

comic panel depicting clark kent handing a handgun to lois lane.
clark: here, lois -- shoot the gun at Jimmy and see what happens!
lois: but why..oh, all right!

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Rick Burin @rickburin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I want to hear more about the second of these writing sessions

Jeffrey Archer, former
Conservative politician and novelist, dies aged 86
Publisher says author died peacefully at home
'between writing sessions'

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Kath Barbadoro @kathbarbadoro.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Viewing this video changed the trajectory of my day earlier

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In 1974, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley began recognizing a pattern in the experiences women shared in her Women and Work course: women were being pushed out of jobs by men’s sexual behavior. Farley coined the term, “sexual harassment.”

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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

An entire generation of faculty and students (rightfully!) fully internalized “the institution cannot love you” and institutional leaders wonder where trust went 🙄

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

You gotta be willing to say "I loved it, it meant a lot to me, I tossed it all out in the trash where it belongs" if you want to avoid eventually finding yourself being loud and weird after the next piece of shit is revealed.

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️👇⤵️

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

The "I never liked his books in the first place" to "how fucking dare you, she was of legal age in the UK!" pipeline is real, and a person falls into it the moment they decide that liking something is proof of innocence.

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Kris Lito @kris-lito.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week - how over the last 15 years we’ve made no progress on the issues of sexual violence and instead how the ethos that perpetuates rape culture now seems to be infused into everything

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

especially at the university where I work

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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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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

genAI is rape culture in multiple ways and I need to start saying that more often IRL

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just a reminder that people don’t always realize they were raped in the immediate aftermath. It can take hours, days, months, and even years to realize you were raped, and it doesn’t make it any less true. There are many kinds of responses, including fawning and trying to appease your rapist

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Claire E. Aubin @ceaubin.com · 01/10/2026

Okay so I don’t think this is true - historically speaking, mass violence consistently comes from an attempted rejection (rather than a *lack*) of empathetic impulses, which exist whether we want them to or not, and desire to distance oneself from an externalized target.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a leading attorney who represents survivors of sexual misconduct on campus, Iliana Konidaris (whose brother is the awesome 🔭 Nick Konidaris). I learned A LOT:

news.chanda.science

How This Lawyer Confronts Sexual Assault on Campus

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash I first met Olympias Iliana Konidaris at her brother’s wedding, where she gave a great toast that affirmed all of my...

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This must be tough for you 🙄

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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is a free PDF to my article about trauma-informed, survivor-centered teaching. It's all about how to talk about sexual violence with the assumption your class is full of survivors who are eager to have that conversation--as long as you can do it without victim-blame or rape myths.

nicolebedera.com

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Jenny with a Green Ribbon Around Her Neck @readingtheend.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

(hey, remember when people's tongues were always fighting for dominance? that was an era of our reading lives. I think it's over now! the tongues came home from war. I hope their dogs still recognized them.)

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“Willfully ignorant” is exactly right. These men understand power dynamics juuuust fine when they’re the vulnerable ones

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 29/09/2026

I'm thinking about this partly because of the Cornell news but also partly because of The Love Hypothesis, which is being pitched as a cute romance but is personally horrifying to read / watch as a woman in STEM. (I know the author is also a woman in STEM and honestly I don't get that at all.)

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Get To Know Nature @gettoknownature.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Common Yellowthroat in the yard, fueling up for migration #birds 🌿

A small yellowish beige bird with a yellow throat and black and white mask around its eyes stands on a thin branch, looking down intently at something out of frame.

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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Jackie Jackson died two days ago. His death did not get the fanfare that the big celebrities get but I assure you he was no less than any of them: a titan astride the earth. In this thread, a few of the songs he played bass on. You know these songs. You know their bass parts. youtu.be/DKVB_CtU8XQ

youtu.be

Pressure Drop

YouTube video by Toots & The Maytals - Topic

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Scott Barolo @sbarolo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Rankings assembled by committee never make a lick of sense

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