iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 14h

I have recently been reminded that the slippery slope can be hard to recognize. When facing abnormal conditions, it is easy to adapt in ways that only seem to preserve normal practice. This? This is the @apapsychiatric.bsky.social actively changing practice, using a shovel to dig the slope steeper.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It is so rare to find a TV show that I just really like. North of North is one. It makes me think of how Norman Lear used tightly written and well-acted comedy to make social points, except it does a lot more showing and a lot less telling. And it’s set in an Arctic Inuit town, not one household.

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 19/09/2026

I mean, I think I'm just "'AI' Exasperated."

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 15/09/2026

This is partly an LLM problem and partly an organizational problem. The LLM makes life much, much easier for everyone who wants to just pretend, and much, much harder for everyone who doesn’t.

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Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 16/09/2026

As a rule here: blame systems, not people.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Do you ever realize that when you bought something, you put in enough effort to find a tidy enough place to keep it that you have no idea where it is and might just need to buy another one?

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tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.

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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 06/09/2026

Look, if AI and data centers wanted people to be 100% rational in their arguments, they should stop acting like a religion that has to proselytize the entire world into worshipping them.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I let my Intro Soc students bring a page of notes into their exams. They keep thinking they’ll need to turn them in. Does anyone collect notes pages with exams? If so, why? (PSA: The exams are primarily about understanding. When I piloted this a few years ago, the grade distribution didn’t change.)

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Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The idea that we need “intellectual diversity” in academia conflicts with the idea that the goal of some fields should be to learn actual truths. We don’t need to hire young earth creationists in geology departments, because the field has taught us young earth creationism is false.

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Dr. Ruth Marshall is still kicking against the pricks @wtfis2bdone.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Have a look at some statements of institutional purpose. You’ll find that beyond the commitment to science and inquiry they are endorsements of liberalism and democratic forms of life. They are strictly incompatible with the endorsement of fascism or authoritarian ideas. For ie.:

University of Toronto’s statement of institutional purpose

PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSITY
The University of Toronto is dedicated to fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice.

Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.

It is this human right to radical, critical teaching and research with which the University has a duty above all to be concerned; for there is no one else, no other institution and no other office, in our modern liberal democracy, which is the custodian of this most precious and vulnerable right of the liberated human spirit.

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Senthorun S. Raj @senthorun.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Minoritised academics face organised harassment for writing about racism, transphobia, genocide, etc. They/we are subject to forms of hostile exposure (whether in media or politics), which proves the point for why such scholarship is necessary in the first place. They/we all deserve so much better.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

“The contract allows Aquila to use subcontractors for sewing, repairs and supplies, and the award notice directs interested local businesses to contact Aquila. That leaves a possible route for the Sewing Box to continue working on the uniforms, but only as a subcontractor.”

military.com

Navy Cuts 43-Year Business Partner, Inks $1.69M Deal with New Blue Angels Uniform Vendor

The Navy ended the Sewing Box’s four-plus decade deal and awarded a $1.69 million contract to a Virginia defense contractor.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Today, with the very smoky skies in BC, I realized that as far as my brain is concerned, the pandemic had a very distinct smell, the smell of 3M Aura N95 masks.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

This whole thread is very useful. I’ll add that I recently chose not to go to a restaurant because its website now has an online “concierge” chatbot instead of a reservation form. I tried it out of curiosity. Using it to “explore” the menu is even more annoying.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 01/08/2026

Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now." 22/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 01/08/2026

Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/

hermit-tech.com

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 01/08/2026

Also, of course, this, still bsky.app/profile/scal...

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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

This is very much the case in our field (climate) - lots of good productive uses of machine learning, but very little using LLMs. You even have ppl who have done real things with ML, then spoiling it entirely when they use AI slop in their presentation about it.

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Kris Inwood @kris-inwood.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

🧵 the myth of the ‘miniature expert’

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Leslie Root @lesja.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Fascinating how conservatives treat marriage as a market when it suits them and as something else entirely (the sacred duty of women, I guess) when it doesn't

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/07/2026

Just received email spam from an outfit called Academic Humanizer that uses AI to rewrite your AI-written manuscript so people can't tell that it was written using AI. I don't understand why academics don't trust Silicon Valley to solve any problems it inadvertently creates along the way.

An animated bot happily "humanizing" my entirely human-written text.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 23/07/2026

15. I keep coming back to this line. It is willful misrepresentation of our federal funding agencies' mission beyond discovery: developing that R&D workforce (and a pipeline of ideas) that flow into the private sector so beloved to our author. We employ trainEES because trainING is what we do.

Frequent turnover fragments efforts and slows progress. As science funders have noted, no technology company would entrust its core R&D to a workforce composed primarily of temporary trainees, yet this is the standard model in academic research.62 A more balanced approach would expand stable, well-compensated career paths for staff scientists, engineers, and technicians, roles critical to sustained institutional capability.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

One thing that has been happening more and more is people emailing me AI generated content about my area of expertise and asking for free consultation. You spend ten minutes guiding some prompts and want that to be verified by people who’ve spent decades building knowledge.

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I didn’t really have any interest in seeing The Odyssey until I read this. open.substack.com/pub/flintdel...

open.substack.com

Actually, Nolan IS kind of making a point about trans people

And I have the (ancient) receipts

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 16/07/2026

TINA SMITH: Researchers in MN made a breakthrough in childhood cancer in Black kids with a grant. But it seems that according to your proposed rule, this type of research wouldn't allowed bc it's 'DEI.' VOUGHT: We are against DEI policies. We have intended to rid of them whenever we possibly can.

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Coherent literatures don't behave this way. Literatures containing strong evidence contain relatively stable signal. Subgroups of studies may behave differently, but it shouldn’t be the case that *any* number goes or that small disagreements about inclusion/exclusion decisions change everything (15)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We used a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to critically evaluate the 11 studies that reached a “remarkably similar conclusion” about widespread desistance. Spoiler: these claims do not hold up (6)

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Annette Gordon-Reed @agordonreed.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Don’t know who to credit for this. But it is how I feel.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Just yesterday, I heard a professor in Canada argue that DEI training and classroom content about it suppresses freedom. They are very definitely drawing on arguments coming out of the US, so it is nice to see such a clearly worded ruling on this.

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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

BREAKING: Eleventh Circuit, on a 2-1 vote, upholds injunction blocking Florida from enforcing its 2022 Stop WOKE Act in the university context. The majority opinion is from Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Before GRANT, LAGOA, and WILSON, Circuit Judges.
GRANT, Circuit Judge:
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." U.S. Const. amend I. The First Amendment, incorporated against the States in 1868, is this country's written commitment to the idea that freedom of speech is essential to freedom of thought, and that both are essential to maintaining our liberty. The Supreme Court has long been clear that teaching and scholarship are due some measure of protection under the Amendment. But how much? And in what contexts? That Court has not had to say, but this one is now put to the test. The State of Florida legislated a broad set of speech restrictions banning certain viewpoints relating to race, color, sex, and national origin in various settings. The provision at issue here bars Florida's educators from promoting or endorsing those distavored ideas when instructing students. Its prohibition applies not only in primary and secondary education, where states traditionally exercise a great deal of control, but also in public colleges and universities, where the state government's role has been far more limited.
When several groups of professors challenged Florida's new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the

government pays a professor's salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.
That is not a blessed union. Florida's salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State's own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry-classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court's repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.
Nor does this Court's leading academic speech precedent,
Bishop v. Aronov, demand the outcome Florida seeks. 926 F.2d 1066 (11th Cir. 1991). In fact, it counsels the opposite. The restriction in that case was imposed by one university, against one professor, relating to speech about one thing— personal religious views that got in the way of the course's well-understood parameters.

That precedent makes clear that universities and even other government entities have crucial authority to shape curricular content, discipline teachers, and take other steps to guide and govern postsecondary education. But the speech ban Florida's political leaders seek to impose here is different in both nature and degree from these ordinary concerns. The rule Florida developed for this case does not withstand scrutiny.
11 Case: 22-13992
Document: 156-1 Date Filed: 07/07/2026 Page:
22-13992
Opinion of the Court
5
The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe
not.
Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves. We affirm the district court's preliminary injunction.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Look if you think it’s fine for Trump to corruptly get a red card revoked (or “suspended”) bc FIFA is already corrupt, maybe you understand the MAGA mindset better than you think. “All politicians are corrupt so it’s ok for Trump to be corrupt” is a very common maga rationalization

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Charlie Angus @charlieangus104.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Everything you need to know about the American owned media in Canada. The senior editor of the National Post whining that we aren't American.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 10/12/2025

imo this is very much because our culture has decided that Humanities is For Girls and Thus Pathetically Easy Bullshit whereas STEM is For Cool Boys With Huge Dicks

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The OhNoIThinkIMovedItToAMoreSensibleLocation Curse.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Why do so many butchers make separate hot Italian and mild Italian sausages, and make both spicy?

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

The report will make the rounds. We should make sure this critique does, too. And do what we can to get on the committees that write the reports, so we don’t have to.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

People, in every field, are watching their careers get burned into ash in favor of a machine that is *allowed* to make vastly bigger mistakes than they would ever be allowed to. The machine can't even get the company's name right, but *you* are hounded over the color of a single pixel, etc.

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amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

“Loitering is not permitted in this area. Please proceed to a designated location. Thank you for your cooperation,” a surveillance machine tells a small cluster of National Guard members as they patrol the fenced off Reflecting Pool in the rain.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I'm not a big FIFA fan, but I have to admit that I'm feeling for Swiss fans. (The Canadian image is with at least a third of the big group already through.)

The pedestrian approach to BC Place, densely filled (and more) with Canadians hyped up for the game. The outdoor walkways of BC Place are very small in the background, but they are also already filled with Canadian fans.

The pedestrian approach to BC Place, mostly empty except for a small group of Swiss fans get hyped for the game. The rally would seem energetic if it weren't for how much more energetic all the others have been.

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I was at the SCOTUS yesterday to hear decisions. When you can predict who wins before the justices announce the outcome just by knowing the identity of the parties & when 6-3 is the default setting,the system is broken.You could palpably feel the diminishment of the Court’s legitimacy & position.

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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 24/06/2026

The vast majority of Americans look at this country right now and think that it's on the wrong track. Change IS the actual moderate position for our current electorate.

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Don't be fooled by the fact that none of today's 5 #SCOTUS rulings were "big" ones. Four of them split the Court along its usual 6-3 ideological lines—one of which guts accountability for human rights abuses; one that makes it harder to enforce Spending Clause statutes; and one that's bad for LPRs.

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

This series of replies is how I learned, in order of clear importance: a) Water scientists are Serious Partiers. (But does ACE or Pipeline have better ragers??) b) Some of them are called limnologists. (Which is cool because it's a fun word) c) a reason for algae in the reflecting pool. (See thread)

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Sarah O @erniebufflo.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I read "More Men Want Children Than Women Do: What's Behind The Divide" aloud to my husband, the father of my children, and he just started laughing. "Hmmm, who has more at stake in this decision??"

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 19/06/2026

Omg there’s gonna be a water treatment conference in DC next week hahaha the universe wrote this comedy so well

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Suzanna Crage @smcrage.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

When you realize it’s a hyperfocus or no-focus day, so you better figure out a way to turn that hyperfocus on. And then you dump your phone into the organics waste bin and hey, there you go!

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Lori Emerson @loriemerson.net · 05/06/2026

"The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that 'sincerely held religious belief' under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse" www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-r...

businessinsider.com

She won an exemption from using AI at her tech job. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals.

Legal experts say employers must take AI-related religious objections seriously, as a 2023 ruling raised the bar for denying such accommodations.

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