iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The political winds may be shifting further toward Democrats in the race for Congress. Both trackers below have moved noticeably in that direction over the past few days. Cost-of-living concerns, Democratic enthusiasm, and gains among Latinos and independents may be contributing.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It can be hard to live as an autistic person in a neurotypical society. Many of us try to outmaneuver ableism, but we cannot always escape its consequences. This study offers one measure of how deadly an “empire of normality,” to borrow Robert Chapman’s phrase, can be for autistic people.

gizmodo.com

Autism Cuts 13.8 Years Off Life Expectancy—and the Causes Are Depressingly Preventable

People with autism are more likely to die early from various health conditions, including influenza, drowning, and malnutrition.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Today I learned that *The American Yawp* has a new second edition. I’m looking forward to reading the revised chapters of this free U.S. history textbook. The updated bibliography is especially useful for the database I’m building. Unfortunately, bot traffic has made the site somewhat unstable.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

More than three decades after the AHA last published its guide to historical literature, I decided to build my own: a few thousand major books in American history, each paired with a Deep Research review. It’s become a useful database for tracing currents across U.S. historiographical subfields.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This fall’s freshmen are the first cohort to have had genAI throughout high school. They’re less likely to major in CS. Where will they gravitate instead: social sciences, humanities, business, elsewhere? What shapes those choices, and how effectively are history departments making their case?

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

I know Americans have long argued about history. What surprises me is how often those arguments now reach courtrooms. In a nation that values free expression, public institutions’ ability to present evidence-based accounts of the past should not be taken for granted. This ruling is encouraging.

travelpulse.com

National Parks Get Their Plaques Back: Judge Orders Trump-Era Revisions to be Reversed

In a major win for scientists and historians, a judge ordered an injunction to return controversial plaques back on display after the Trump Administration took them down.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Reading a classic historian can create the illusion that they're still among us. I'll be thinking about how to extend or challenge an argument by C. Vann Woodward and momentarily forget he's no longer here to join the conversation. Perhaps historians never fully die while they're being read.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Today I attended an African American genealogy workshop preceding the NGS conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was inspired to learn about efforts to recover family histories and reconnect families separated by slavery, many of whom faced barriers to reunification after emancipation.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I flew from Arizona to Indiana yesterday, finishing one book and making a good start on another. Looking around the plane, I noticed screens seemed more common than books. Curious, I found that airport bookstores also appear to be declining. I wonder how travel and reading habits have changed.

120

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

For a long time, I assumed this was simply a personal learning preference: engaging visual and auditory channels to improve retention. I recently learned that reading while listening to a text is termed “immersive reading,” and some neurodivergent readers report finding it helpful.

npr.org

Having trouble focusing on your book? Try immersive reading

Reading text of a book while listening to the audiobook is gaining steam among online book communities.

020

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

My recent reading has moved between Bailyn’s Ideological Origins, Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, and Holton’s Forced Founders and Unruly Americans. Same founding era, very different questions, assumptions, and emphases. I didn’t expect historiography to feel like generational whiplash.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I’m skeptical that one word “broke” Google Search. A historical view suggests a slower shift: keyword search became so effective that users began treating it like semantic search that understood intent. The result for “disregard definition” is a useful reminder that search literacy matters.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

This headline feels surprisingly human to me. My own brain still runs on knowledge, habits, and assumptions I picked up in school during the 1990s. Big Tech might imagine the future replacing the past, but historians know better. The past is still running in the background, shaping what comes next.

pcworld.com

Windows 11 still runs on code from the 1990s, Microsoft admits

Microsoft's Win32 API dates back to Windows 95, and a senior exec says nobody expected it to still be essential in 2026.

020

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

As I learn more about autistic masking, I’m noticing how differently unmasking is experienced depending on race, class, gender, and other forms of privilege. Some can treat masking as something to calibrate in the pursuit of goals. Others face real danger or exclusion when they let the mask drop.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

As Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month closes, I wanted to share a new paper. It introduces the concept of "visibility logic" and describes masking as a "double bind" for autistics. Masking can lead to burnout, and unmasking causes autistics to be seen as incapable: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Thanks to @historians.org for distributing today a call for members in the "Neurodivergence and the Historical Profession" CARE Group, which I help facilitate. Click here for more info: www.historians.org/community-ca... If this sounds interesting, please reach out for more information and join us.

0210

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I wouldn’t read the book right before seeing the movie—you might focus on what’s missing. But this still got to me. Rocky and Grace’s friendship brought the film to life, even with the science dialed back a bit. The cinematography was breathtaking, at least for humans, and the music almost Eridian.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I’ve been adding salmon to my weekly routine. Today the waitress remembered my order — main, sides, and drink — without a single prompt, and without making it awkward. Small moments like that make me smile. #AutismJoy

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Smart take in Dan Cohen’s newsletter. AI excels at well-defined problems and linking existing knowledge, but is less adept at expressing new ideas or posing innovative questions. As Hannah Fry notes, it’s strong at interpolation—less so at extrapolation beyond current boundaries (see 7:06–9:31).

youtube.com

AI Isn't as Powerful as We Think | Hannah Fry

YouTube video by New Scientist

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Scanning old files, I found my high school interest survey. With hindsight, it’s striking how closely it matched my path—programming, libraries, a history major, and broad interests across the social sciences and humanities.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Shipped 1,000+ books from my library to be scanned. First PDF arrived today. Not the full “wearable memory” future (↓), but soon my shelves will be searchable. In the AI era, the challenge isn’t just access to info, but preserving and strengthening the human role in telling stories about the past.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

AI debates right now feel split across three worlds: • Work: AI won’t replace you—but someone who uses it better might. • AI labs: We can reward correct answers in math. What’s the reward signal for a great novel? • Universities: Guard the essay, explore the research assistant.

100

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Most sincere: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Heaviest: “I have not broken your heart — you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” Most fateful: “Kiss me, and let us both be damned.” Love as ontology, injury, and doom.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

A former Google AI exec argues PhDs are becoming obsolete in the age of AI. His perspective is that college is for credentialing and the soft skills for the workplace can be obtained elsewhere. He might be underestimating how college is an ideal place for teaching critical thinking and creativity.

fortune.com

Ex-Google exec says degrees in law and medicine are a waste of time because they take so long to complete that AI will catch up by graduation | Fortune

“Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete,” the former Google AI leader told Fortune.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Daniela Amodei—a former literature major and now president of Anthropic—argues that as AI excels at STEM, the humanities matter more, not less (see ↓). That hope is worth holding onto, even as AI disrupts work and firms like Anthropic still profit from us. Interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUDG...

101

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

This image in today’s Washington Post feels like a turning point. Libraries and bookstores long mediated how readers encountered knowledge. Digitization began tipping the scales. AI may further reshape how books are accessed and used, including in proprietary systems. That shift is worth noticing.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

This article reminded me of something Ben Vison said in his presidential address to the AHA last week. He called it the "massification of higher education." I'm looking forward to the publication of his speech to explore this concept in more depth and what it might mean for the future of higher ed.

washingtonpost.com

College enrollment hits 10-year high, fueled by community college growth

New data show drops for foreign student enrollment and private colleges. Enrollment for students of color increased while fewer White students enrolled.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Ben Vinson, in #AHA26 presidential address, expresses his hope that academic historians, who specialize in understanding and explaining change over time, are the best positioned individuals to become agents of change in society, impacting their students, institutions, and ultimately the common good.

051

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

It’s been fascinating listening to the many #AHA26 sessions devoted to the upcoming 250th. I like the many ideas for how historians can join the conversation of commemoration. I hope get an overview and assessment at some point of the collective impact of these contributions by historians in 2026.

041

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Same hotel, different scholarly languages. SSHA (Nov, Palmer House): PowerPoint + extemporaneous talk. #AHA26 today at Palmer House: essays read from the lectern. The differences in linguistic registers & discursive strategies has me curious about the construction of scholarly authority and culture.

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

I worry some AI advocates in history are at risk of functional amnesia. They talk about scale and extraction, and gravitate towards AI-friendly questions of fact, effectively operationalizing positivism. Will they recall postmodern ways of reading texts or let AI outputs shape their interpretations?

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

I’m back in Chicago, for the AHA, after attending SSHA two months ago. I’m walking into a session about AI rewriting the past, after delivering my own paper with a similar title in November. Is this what doubly Déjà vu feels like? In any event, I’m interested to hear what this panel has to say.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I’m getting excited. I’ve lined up recommendation letter writers. I’ve requested transcripts. I’ve drafted personal statements, updated my CV, and dusted off my master’s thesis. I’ve narrowed down possible doctoral programs to half a dozen. Here’s hoping that I land at one of them in Fall 2026.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

This essay proposes using backprop to determine when content contributes to an LLM response and compensating creators accordingly. It reminded me of how many academics want credit & payment when their work is used to power chatbots. There would be challenges, but this sort of mechanism could emerge.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

This is a great academic analysis of the settlement. It mentions the 7.5M title database of LibGen titles compiled by The Atlantic. I’ll add that, according to the settlement, the 7M pirated downloads by Anthropic from LibGen and PiLiMi yielded only 465k titles. Something does not add not add up.

100

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

I have questions (below is NYTimes today). Why did Turvey go to publishers vs research libraries? If Anthropic took 500k pirated books, did they buy millions from publishers? How does this impact Public Interest Corpus? Is $3k per pirated book insulting? What kind of response if 500k list released?

700

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I can understand the accidental framing, given the discourse around LLMs and their hallucinations, but I think the odds are decent for the model encountering and recalling this set of facts from the more than 7,000 Victorian-era documents it was trained on. Perhaps we will see more historical LLMs.

arstechnica.com

College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history

Hobbyist training AI on Victorian texts gets an unexpected history lesson from his own creation.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

The AHA has just reported that it filed yesterday, along with ACLS and MLA, a motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of NEH, in response to the harms done by DOGE. I asked OpenAI’s o3 model to evaluate the motion and the model gives it a 70% chance of success. I hope we prevail in the courts.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

A historian of science ponders the future of the humanities after feeding documents into AI and hearing an impressive podcast and then assigning students to have a conversation with AI on the history of attention and finds that chatbots have perhaps become better than humans at getting attention.

newyorker.com

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

I just received this email that the AHA is exploring possible legal action to protect historical funding from the NEH and other agencies. With some help from ChatGPT, I found that similar advocacy at the federal level to protect the work of historians has been successful before. I hope we prevail.

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I worked with ChatGPT on some estimates. About 60B words published in univ press books since 1969. And > 250T words avail for scraping on the web. That’s a 1 to 4k ratio. How would comp work for LLM training on academic books if they’re a drop in the bucket? What criteria would work for licensing?

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I'm writing a paper for this year's Social Science History Association conference. I decided to read the call for papers against the grain. My working title is "Emergent History: When AI Models Rewrite the Past." If the paper is accepted, I'm hoping I don't get called Foolhardy during my session ;-)

ssha2025.ssha.org

SSHA2025

010

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

It has been 16 years since I've attended an AHA meeting (www.historians.org/perspectives...). Today I dug up an old password, successfully logged into historians.org, and renewed my membership. I'll be in Bozeman next month at an AHA event to learn more about large-scale historical research with AI.

historians.org

The Future of Research in the Age of AI – AHA

This symposium will take place on Thursday, March 27, and Friday, March 28 at the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman, Montana. The event is supported by MSU’s College o...

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I read "Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research" (arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190). This got me wondering about adding social sciences and focusing on history. I prompted o1 Deep Research to reimagine the paper (chatgpt.com/share/67c0e7...) and generate more provocations (see below):

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I gave the new copyright guidance a quick scan and it appears there was little to no discussion of public domain or Creative Commons licensing. Will digital libraries built by AI that summarize and extract insights from primary sources have the option of online open access or become walled gardens?

000

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

This post (resobscura.substack.com/p/the-leadin..., HT @nic221.bsky.social) by @resobscura.bsky.social caught my attention. Perhaps taking a cue from the author, I enlisted the help of the o1 model in a close reading of the text. You can peruse the remaining response at chatgpt.com/share/6791ca....

020

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

This is about research presented at NeurIPS. I agree that LLMs need better coverage of history across time periods and regions. But are multiple-choice tests the best way to measure how LLMs understand history? When will we measure how well they reason when given primary sources & relevant context?

earth.com

AI struggles to understand human history and fails miserably when tested

The study, which is the first of its kind, evaluates the historical knowledge of leading AI models such as ChatGPT-4, Llama, and Gemini.

1102

Sterling Fluharty @sterlingfluharty.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Yesterday, I saw a request for info on a county founder in a Facebook genealogy group. I asked Google Deep Search to generate a bio. It read nearly 40 websites, wrote an essay, and dropped 14 footnotes to cite its sources. I wonder how this capability will improve as more sources are digitized.

000