iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jason Lengstorf @jason.energy · 27/09/2026

the hard parts of building a business are - solving a real problem for real people - ignoring shiny ideas that are fun but distracting - prioritizing boring stuff that moves the needle - connecting with customers if anything, AI makes it *harder* to build a successful business

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omg spees @spees.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

my toxic engineer trait is that I'm basically allergic to code all code is bad. the less code the better. why are you writing new code stahp *sprays devs with squirt bottle*

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Temporal @temporal.io · 16/10/2025

Temporal Ruby is GA ♦️ Build durable Ruby Workflows with native APIs, a Rust core, and a deterministic fiber scheduler. Read the post: temporal.io/blog/temporal-ruby-cras…

temporal.io

Ruby SDK is General Available!

Did you know? A typical tardigrade is about 0.5 mm (0.02 inch) long, and even the largest ones are less than 2 mm (0.07 inch) in length.

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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 27/09/2025

A reminder that you can always check out eight years worth of video from XOXO Festival, steadfastly and defiantly held in the war-torn city of Portland, Oregon. xoxofest.com/videos/

xoxofest.com

Video Archive · XOXO

XOXO was an experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 28/08/2025

I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 classic “Computer Power and Human Reason.” This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:

JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM
COMPUTER POWER AND HUMAN REASON
FROM JUDGMENT TO CALCULATION

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

We need to know what humans do before we argue that machines can do it just the same. There can’t be AI literacy without a literacy in being human: how we make meaning in work and life, distinguishing the artificial from the imaginary from the true. mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

Human Literacy

Something I Can Tell Students Now That I Am Not Teaching You and I probably both keep hearing that students should be working toward AI literacy. They should know what to type into prompt windows, ...

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Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

As we mark the 80th anniversary of WWII's end, I’ve come to believe that in losing that Greatest Generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat. We are losing the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

doomsdayscenario.co

What We Lost When We Lost the Greatest Generation

It's no coincidence that democracy is backsliding in the US exactly eighty years after the end of World War II.

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Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

In my gloomier moments, I suspect we don't want to think about systems because we would have to acknowledge connections we would rather ignore.

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Thomas “Scary” Fuchs 🎃👻💀 @thomasfuchs.at · 25/06/2025

As Weizenbaum lays it out here, the whole idea that “intelligence” is measurable and quantifiable is bullshit

“The trouble with I.Q. testing is not that it is entirely spurious, but that it is incomplete. It measures certain intellectual abilities that large, politically dominant segments of western European societies have elevated to the very stuff of human worth and hence to the sine qua non of success. It is incomplete in two ways: first, in that it fails to take into account that human creativity depends not only on intellect but also crucially on an interplay between intellect and other modalities of thought, such as intuition and wisdom; second, in that it characterizes intelligence as a linearly measurable phenomenon that exists independent of any frame of reference.”
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 08/06/2025

Basing your moral understanding of resisting authoritarianism on a Star Wars is the same picture as tech billionaires basing their ideas of a techno-utopia on an Asimov story

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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 08/06/2025

Nobody likes talking about the real issue here, being that trying to structure your understanding of reality on fictional plots (or rhetorical quotes) is not an effective way to make sense of reality or of how we ought to participate in a society

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 20/05/2025

I operate from the belief that the White House is largely run by people who are not the president and that’s one reason I spend a lot of time more concerned about what they are up to and who gets to choose them

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Craig T @igobycraig.uk · 09/05/2025

Great post by Andy here. Designing in the browser forces you to consider state. Recently I've seen things like cart buttons with no design for what happens when you click it. Does it open a modal? Navigate away? Prototypes in the browser bring this to the fore. piccalil.li/blog/the-tim...

piccalil.li

The time for designers to learn to code is now

With design tools further commoditising and sanitising expected creative output, the time for designers to be able to stand out is very much here. I think for some, learning to code is a good route fo...

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 08/05/2025

… never been efficiency: it’s been the dismantling of US Govt infrastructure and expertise, as well as as data mining, to better control opposition etc. Think of it as ‘doing a Twitter’ to the US Govt: Musk bought Twitter to destroy it as a tool for opposition. It worked!

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Jeff Lindsay @progrium.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

What if you took the core abstractions of Plan 9 from Bell Labs and put them in a WebAssembly module? progrium.xyz/blog/2025/sp...

progrium.xyz

The Spirit of Plan 9 on the Web

Homepage and blog of hacker/builder Jeff Lindsay, aka progrium

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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

There's a strong case that Eric Schmidt is the most dangerous actor in the AI world. He sells a zero sum, Sinophobia-infused vision of an AI arms race and preaches relentless data center expansion—and is happily received in the halls of power. @parismarx.com and I break it all down in this ep:

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Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik.com · 01/05/2025

In short: I think Rails fell from dominance in no small part because of DHH’s disdain for JavaScript. This directly led to key failures on both sociological and technical grounds. Hating technology blinds you to the good parts of tech you don’t personally care for.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 30/04/2025

I think we downplay the role of social media algorithms and targeted disinformation campaigns in drawing voters to Trump and away from Democrats at our own risk — it’s frankly a refusal to reckon with reality. Social media has created a matrix-like info control environment.

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

I cannot emphasize enough how much I miss street dining and am furious so many outdoor spaces that reduced the risk of Covid-19 were taken away for PARKING SPACES

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Do not let James Lindsay (or Richard Hanania) into our tent. They are not new allies, they haven't changed their ways, they are committed Nazis who see the tide turning and want to take the uniform off so they can hide among the winners.

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My Password is Louvre @bmceuen.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

This tracks with the proliferation of eugenics in the early-20th century, where many eugenicists advocated for sterilization precisely because public health measures allowed the “unfit” to survive longer and consequently have a greater chance of having their own kids

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Tobias Harris @tobiasharris.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I think Brian points to something important: pop culture representations of Nazism showed it as something existing outside of history and politics, which did a massive disservice to understanding it as a political force that could emerge in other polities.

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Sarah Drasner @sarahedo.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

A piece of collateral damage in this new age is lack of understanding of the value of infrastructure. Quality infrastructure takes creativity, it’s fascinating, it’s crucial. We’ve lost the plot, relegating it to being described as a cost center. Infrastructure is muscle, infrastructure is bone.

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Gemma Arrowsmith @mmaarrow.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Haha! Love this letter from Douglas Adams to his US editor about not Americanising the text of Hitchhiker's Guide. 🐋🌸

Date: Monday, January 13, 1992, 5:26 pm
To: Byron Preiss
Dear Byron,
Thanks for the script of the novel. I don't know what happened to the
first one. It may have been a victim of the office move (see above).
I'll respond as quickly and briefly as possible.
One general point. A thing I have had said to me over and over again
whenever I've done public appearances and readings and so on in the
States is this: Please don't let anyone Americanise it! We like it the
way it is!
There are some changes in the script that simply don't make sense.
Arthur Dent is English, the setting is England, and has been in every
single manifestation of HHGG ever. The 'Horse and Groom' pub that
Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the 'pounds' they pay with

are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five- inflation) So
why suddenly 'Newark' instead of 'Rickmansworth'? And
'Bloomingdales' instead of 'Marks & Spencer'? The fact that
Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn't
mean that it doesn't exist! American audiences do not need to feel
disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that
people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction. You
wouldn't, presumably, replace Ursa Minor Beta with 'Des Moines'.
There is no Bloomingdales in England, and Bloomingdales is not a
generic term for large department stores. If you feel that referring to
"Marks & Spencer' might seriously freak out Americans because they
haven't heard of it (or because Marks and Spencer owns Brooks
Brothers) we could either put warning stickers on the cover ("The text
of this book contains references to places and institutions outside the
continental United States and may cause offence to people who haven't
heard of them") or you could, I suppose, put 'Harrods', which most
people will have heard of. Or we could even take the appalling risk of
just recklessly mentioning things that people won't have heard of and
see if they survive the experience. They probably will - when people
are born they haven't heard of anything or anywhere, but seem to get
through the first few years of their lives without ill-effects.

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Thomas “Scary” Fuchs 🎃👻💀 @thomasfuchs.at · 15/03/2025

I think scientists who assume that brains work (only) by making deterministic calculations are making a categorical error; maybe similar to scientists who thought physics are purely Newtonian.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 07/02/2025

How different the world might be if Americans learned to think in terms of power structures, to always ask why someone is seeking power, and not to accept answers that are only about ego and not about structural features of society So many people only know "good/evil" as an analytic frame

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Mike Perham @mike.contribsys.com · 28/01/2025

I'm happy to announce a major sponsorship of Hanami and @timriley.info. I want to see more useful frameworks and tools for building Ruby apps and I don't know of a better option today than Hanami. 🌸 www.mikeperham.com/2025/01/17/s...

mikeperham.com

Sponsoring Hanami | Mike Perham

Ruby, OSS and the Internet

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 26/01/2025

One of the best things you can do right now is read books. Buy them. Borrow them from the library. Gift them. Read history. Read fiction. Read science writing. Read anything that shows you the world is bigger than what fascists say it is. Read to remember why your resistance matters. 📚💙

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Demiurge of Doom @euthyphro.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

For anyone wondering how legacy media could be so unhelpful in the face of overt fascism, here’s the NYT covering Hitler for the first time in 1922. This is who they’ve always been. Don’t look to them for help.

But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using antl-semitie propaganda as a bait to catch mesges of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization Is porfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 11/01/2025

part of what motivates conspiracy theories about climate crisis-driven catastrophes is trying to find someone to blame, totally, but also: conspiracy theories can make facts about who is profiting from climate crisis and who is evading responsibility for climate crisis sound like conspiracy theories

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Anthony Iannaccio @mrtonynacho.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Mister Rogers never misses

You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Than any computer could ever be. You know why?

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

You’re a living human being. And a computer is just a machine.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Human beings are far more wonderful than machines.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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Matt Holland Author Dot Com @gallaethamatt.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

So many of the British Invasion bands of the 60s and 70s were only able to exist because half of them were on the dole when they were starting out. Without 60s era social security benefits there'd be no Beatles. How many world-changing bands have we missed out on because of capitalism?

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Thomas “Scary” Fuchs 🎃👻💀 @thomasfuchs.at · 14/12/2024

So when a health insurance company (or any other company or person ftm) says “it’s an AI deciding this” what they really say is “our executive leadership deliberately choose to let an AI decide they fully know is fundamentally flawed”. It always comes back to Weizenbaum’s book from 50 years ago.

en.wikipedia.org

Computer Power and Human Reason - Wikipedia

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Writing is thinking. It’s not a part of the process that can be skipped; it’s the entire point.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 01/12/2024

the artificial intelligence project is a fraud that plays on the trusting instincts of people — Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976

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Russ Olsen @russolsen.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Explainers' paradox: - When building something there is power in abstractions. - When explaining something there is clarity in specifics.

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Ted Pavlic (he/him/his) @tedpavlic.bsky.social · 05/07/2024

Perhaps of interest, from @irisvanrooij.bsky.social. "Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science" by van Rooij et al. (2023–2024, preprint) osf.io/preprints/ps...

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of AI in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of AI, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable. This means that any factual AI systems...

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Gregory Brown [MOVED, SEE BIO] @skillstopractice.com · 16/11/2024

This new "Big Lesson" from Conway is in brief: "Think networks first, actors second" You can find the whole essay here: melconway.com/Home/pdf/Ubi... But see the excerpt below for why you should care.

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Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Why RTO mandates will fail to deliver innovative software, as explained by Michael S. Malone ca. 1985

Excerpt from Malone's The Big Score (1985) explaining the nature of software creation.

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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 30/07/2023

My cartoon for this weekend’s Guardian books. p.s. my latest book cartoons collection is Revenge of the Librarians: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

Caption "As the years went by, Tim's bedside selection of 'to be read' books expanded into a teetering pile, then an imposing wall and finally a vast, elaborate labyrinth from which he never emerged"

Image: A man in his pyjamas is reading a book as he wanders in a maze made of piled up books.

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