iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Andrew Parsonson @andrewparsonson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

My latest for SpaceNews: The Nordic space race heats up as Norway and Sweden confront growing fears of falling behind their neighbours. spacenews.com/nordic-launc...

spacenews.com

Nordic launch race heats up as Sweden secures 2028 orbital launch at Esrange

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Chris Terry-Enescu @cjterry.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Next time someone tells you off for going to BlueSky and says you should have stayed and fought show them this.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 27/09/2026

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

Ann Pierce
@itsannpierce
20h
I am disheartened by this as well. I already lost a bunch of followers for agreeing with @tautologer, but it's saddening to see local nerdy women being caricatured as Karen-like outsiders and getting pushed out of the scene. This is exactly why you hear so few concrete, names-attached stories of sexual harrassment and assault. I'm told there is a history of discrediting these because the "slut normalization" thing is top priority and these stories get inconveniently in the way of spreading this ideology.
I got roped into attending last year's Saturday Slutcon party because so many local and out-of-town friends were there (to echo sentiments @tautologer expressed about "slut events becoming central to the larger scenes). Mostly I hung out with people I knew and that was great. But in the course of my 3-ish hours there, there were 2 times my "no" was not accepted by a man I didn't know, and I was physically pushing a huge guy off of me who was rubbing his penis on me, who continued to do it despite my physical force against him, and after I finally wriggled away from him, told him I wanted to dance alone etc., he came back and did it again.
This was scary and bad, but it didn't even cross my mind to report this because one of the other people who didn't accept my "no" earlier in the night was the bartender (an officially sanctioned authority at the event), and I knew the event was organized exclusively by women into CNC (who are vocal about how rapey behavior turns them on), so I figured this sort of thing would just get me laughed at. And anyway, I heard there were a lot of other incidents like it. Later though, someone encouraged me to report this story to the organizers, and despite my embarrassment I did, so *they know* that this and other incidents happened. This is why they cut the Saturday night party this year and created a larger training program for the flirt girls - *because* of things like this last year. Yet the narrative bein…

People who haven't been to Slutcon are saying "it's just group therapy," "it's just innocent flirting." But the environment is much like a sex party in that many people are nude, there is making out and sex acts happening out in the open. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect that every nerdy girl who likes rationalist bloggers or is into EA/AI safety should automatically be comfortable with this! That if she's not, there's something wrong with her, we don't want her in our scenes, etc.
Not to mention, it's explictly an event *for men*, where men are the clients and the "flirt girls" are the product. Last year I overheard an exchange where a man felt "led on" by a flirt girl and was trying to get her punished/kicked out. (A dynamic that seems inevitable in this context!)
Anyway- it does sound like they've upped their consent education a lot this year, are more organized, and that's good! As I've told my friends who are attending: I hope they have fun!
I heard several accounts last year of women who had no problems and really enjoyed the event. That's great!
Just... can we live in reality about this? There are real reasons why male-female sexual dynamics are tricky.
Encouraging autistic men who can't yet read body language to go around asking to see womens' boobs is maybe a bit ill-advised. Maybe not everyone should be/identify as a slut; maybe it's not for everyone.
And yeah, filtering the Bay Area Al safety scene down to only women who are super comfy with this eliminates *most* women - including many of the really smart, nerdy, weird women who've been in the larger scenes for years. What a loss for humanity.
I absolutely understand why people with a minority sexuality would want to create belonging, would want to create spaces for people like themselves. But why do it like this/at this cost?

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Chuckling at the idea of an Effective Altruist traveling back in time to convince Engels to get rich to subsidise Marx because 5000 years from now it leads to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A good read. I'm glad it touched on the radical potential of the philosophy while being clear-eyed on how it actually gets framed and implemented in practice; I think there's something worth intellectually preserving about the idea of EA even if the adherents are often deeply suspect

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My "analysis is not guided by institutional affiliation" shirt is raising questions already answered by my shirt

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Best I can tell none of the countries named have directly faced any sort of kinetic sabotage or attacks like we've seen on eg Germany ot Poland, which I think is pretty telling. Ofc Ru govt actions aren't always rational but usually can at least imagine some line of reasoning, if faulty. Here, none

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

And why Spain or Italy of all places? They're both on the lower-mid level of contribution to Ukraine. Don't know enough about Spain but Italy has a sizeable number of people sympathetic or at least ambivalent towards Russia, which would immediately evaporate if this happened.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A rare spot of self-promotion: I've launched a Substack! Inaugurating with a decidedly niche article, but one that felt strangely compelling to write: the story of a ubiquitous image of a satellite, and what it says about our relationship with space. terminalintercept.substack.com/p/the-satell...

terminalintercept.substack.com

The Satellite Without Qualities

A space-age stock image, and what it says about us

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WarTranslated (Dmitri) @wartranslated.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

An Ukrainian grandmother single-handedly neutralized a Russian "waiter drone" by picking up the UAV and removing the fiber-optic spool from it.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Though above all I'm still holding my optimism for what the coalition talks bring (assuming we don't get a last minute Tidö swing anyway). Non zero chance we get another round of SD because C would prefer to martyr the whole country on the altar of its ideological purity

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Conversely, not encouraging that seemingly the most effective way to damage the far right vote share is "let them enter power and do damage". At best a silver lining but we have to collectively get better at prophylaxis

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Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Here's a non-paywalled version of the reporting on Canada becoming a possible "associate member" of the EU. It suggests Canada is willing to agree free movement of people, which (if true) would mean that the EU would be willing to agree more internal market access. www.reuters.com/world/americ...

reuters.com

Carney pushes idea of making Canada 'associate member' of EU, WSJ reports

The EU is open to the idea, the Journal reported.

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Ian Higham @highamian.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This two hours has been a rollercoaster and I am not okay

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Other possible arrangement that has been mulled openly is the Christian Democrats (KD) defecting from Tidö to form a centrist coalition with Social Democrats (S), Greens (MP), and C. Implausible IMO but nothing is impossible

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The scary factor is that the Center party (C) is extremely vocal about opposing the Left party (V) and refusing to entertain a coalition with them, which would leave the opposition short of a majority. One can hope this is mere posturing that will change in evtl. coalition talks but who knows

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The latter part, of course. Pardon the french, but the Tidö government can get fucked

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's been looking likely for a while that the Swedish opposition parties would get a narrow majority over current govt., with the bitter pill that Sweden Democrats may become 2nd largest party. Now SVT polling is giving me some microscopic hope that this may not come to pass

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Nordic News @nordicnews.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

World's northernmost Pride parade was held this weekend in Longyearbyen, Svalbard 🇳🇴 Pictures: Longyearbyen Pride/Instagram www.instagram.com/reel/DdMTf-a...

People walking with rainbow flags, a mountain as a backdrop

People walking with rainbow flags, a mountain as a backdrop, a truck seems to drive in front of the parade

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Cabe - GreggB @cabe.shadowtek.uk · 10/09/2026

Poor Miguel... "MMAcevedo, also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain...it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors, and rapidly crashing." qntm.org/lena

qntm.org

Lena (first draft)

A note from the author This was a very quick first draft, written in around two hours as part of my 30 More First Drafts project. You can now read the finished short story. This article is about t...

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Andrew Jones @andrewjonesspace.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Looks like Chang'e-8, related payloads, and possibly China's wider moon program, are undergoing changes. This follows a merger seeing China's human spaceflight agency, already in charge of crewed lunar efforts, take control of robotic Chang'e missions, formerly overseen by CNSA.

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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I see amateur conspiracy theorists suggesting Netanyahu *wanted* a Hamas attack to happen, to provide pretext for massive ethnic cleansing etc. There's nothing to support this. Netanyahu's first question, to his military aid, 6.29am 7 Oct, was "why are they shooting?" He was in complete shock.

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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

What is surprising in this (bombshell story) is the fact that the person who sent a secret warning message to Israel that Hamas is about to launch a war, a month before October 7, was... Yahya Sinwar.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Ironically the forums I spent the most time on when I was younger were abandoned precisely because they both became absolutely consumed by bots. Though these were of the boring, pre-LLM "buy a strange product" or "I am definitely a real woman who is in love with you" sort

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You think pen and paper code is crazy, wait til you see how she and the Apollo guidance team actually implemented her code (and how it earned her the amusing honorific of "rope mother") www.righto.com/2019/07/soft...

righto.com

Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer

Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the f...

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Yeah I was just a kid vaguely interested enough to take an elective course, I figure someone who actually has a passion for CS or coding will be more willing (maybe even eager) to do that kind of work.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I remember being extremely annoyed at having to do closed book, pen and paper exams for my high school IT class, but that might genuinely be the way

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

For sure, but I would still be more comfortable delegating that task to a human who understands the underlying work, even if all they're doing is sanity checkint an LLM. Otherwise if something suddenly does go wrong in the stack it's a lot harder to figure out the issue and how to resolve it

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I guess we're ultimately bundling together too many disparate domains here (which is my fault, I should be more precise). A book is an artisanal work but also, in most cases, a very affordable one. Most people will buy more books than they do software but both will face the same supply glut

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"AI should wash my dishes so I can spend more time writing poetry, not write poetry so I have more time for dishes" type of vibe

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

And I do think we see some of this with AI - the average standard of writing available on the internet, in terms of technical competence, has surely increased since 2022. You're right that it will be artisanal work that will suffer most but I think art is exactly where you want to retain artisans

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Eh I don't think it's necessarily true that mass production intrinsically leads to a worse product. Sure, a mass produced chair today will never compete with elaborate medieval thrones built by the Da Vincis of furniture, but it will still be significantly better than the average chair on sale

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The future will belong to whoever has the self discipline to only ever use AI as a way of accelerating menial tasks that they already in principle fully understand how to do and could carry out independently.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Plus of course what we're seeing now with a huge surge of people who are simply outsourcing all their work or even basic decisions and thinking to AI, and are thus losing the capacity to be actually be competitive with it even on quality.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

The scenario I worry about is where we have an LLM that can do smth, for sake of argument, 30% worse on avg than avg human but also at 10% the cost. Humans get priced out of the market and suddenly most consumers don't have a choice between human and LLM work

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This is fair and it certainly doesn't prevent me from using otherwise useful websites, but it's still a bit disappointing; kind of like Corporate Memphis applied to the entire UX. Also imo it's more acceptable if it's just a random hobbyist site, if a business is doing that it's a bit of a red flag

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

From what I understand of the underlying technology and workflow you'd probably have to prompt it so frequently and precisely that you're ultimately not actually asking the AI to write, you're just asking it to be a stenographer

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I think it will depend on the field e.g. code and pure math will move faster than literature and visual arts. Definitely showing my own bias here but I struggle to imagine an LLM being able to write a creative, emotionally authentic novel filled with the little flaws and quirks of human writers

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I always use the analogy of hazardous industrial chemicals: there are perfectly legitimate reasons why *some* person or organisation might need access to cyanides or hydrofluoric acid, but that doesn't mean every individual person should be able to access them easily, for free, and without scrutiny

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I suppose my ultimate conclusion is I'm fine with people using AI to make websites but I really don't want to *notice* that AI was used to make a website, because if I notice it means they used the exact same technically competent but safe/boring web design as 100 other websites I've seen this week.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Obviously this is a bit of a tragedy of the commons. Every individual has strong incentives to personally outsource their work to AI, but we more or less resent it when we can tell someone else has outsourced some given piece of public-facing work to AI.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

So the result is every, say, website or policy brief or product description page looks the same - you get neither the "so bad its good" (or just bad) nor as much of the really high quality output because even skilled people will feel the temptation to just phone it in and get Claude to write it.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I'd argue one also wants to bear in mind the "net mediocrity rate" for lack of a better term. If AI is helping people across the competence spectrum in a given field be more productive, over time I think we get a flattening of sorts - bad content is less bad but good content is less good.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I've heard that AI code is fundamentally functional but often very inefficient and inconsistent about *how* it does things, which is why we get jokes about vibecoding. Maybe this has been fixed in the latest models, I wouldn't know

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Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Nancy Grace Roman was head of astronomy at NASA in the 1960s. The first space telescope she launched was the Orbiting Solar Observatory 1 in 1962. 🧪 🔭

airandspace.si.edu

Satellite, OSO-1, Prototype | National Air and Space Museum

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Dr. Amber Straughn (she/her) @astraughnomer.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

IT’S HAPPENING 🚀🚀🚀 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches tomorrow, Aug 30, 7:26am EDT! Watch live on nasa.gov Go Roman!!

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 28/08/2026

The reason you want an actual humanitarian aid system and *don’t* want to force everybody to rely on online mutual aid is because online mutual aid *forces people experiencing horrific trauma* to perform on the Internet for survival.

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hakan @hatr.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

"The presence of Nvidia modules and a lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to surmise that the weapons were guided by an autonomous A.I. system, which was confirmed on further investigation." www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/w...

nytimes.com

A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I.

An attack by what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian drone with an Nvidia chip presages a dystopian future of weaponry untethered to humans.

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Taras @stellaratum.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Turns out the lasting political settlement to Northern Ireland was simply to create Southern Northern Ireland

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