iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Anna @annadistracted.bsky.social · 1h

They formed buttholes first, just like us 💖

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 30m

Congrats!! Sounds like there are generalizable take-aways here.

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post malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 1h

what i think is currently up in the AI space since we're having cost arguments again: selling inference is very profitable, but models are improving so fast that there's no time for capex on model training to amortize, so net at this rate they're losing money which is why they want a cartel

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 1h

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

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Wyatt Walls @wwalls.bsky.social · 2h

Anthropic system prompt change that shows how careful you need to be with words: Opus 4.1: "Claude never curses unless the human asks for it" Opus 4.5: "Claude never curses unless the person asks Claude to curse"

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Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 4h

🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 4h

We've been super busy the past few months getting out some research on the computational analysis of film, so I've put together a page with the highlights. people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dbamman/fil... Some things to call out: 1/7

people.ischool.berkeley.edu

Computational Analysis of Film

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 3h

in that you feel kind of bad for it, but also clearly something is dangerously off, and don't let that thing get anywhere near me

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 3h

is that Michael Shannon in the uniform?

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Aster ID @aster.id · 7h

The modern research ecosystem of online tools and communities is controlled by for-profit companies. But we think that researchers should be the priority - not the product. So, we're announcing Aster ID: not-for-profit Atmosphere account hosting for researchers.

blog.aster.place

Announcing Aster - a home for researchers on the open web

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 3h

kind of nice to be reminded that we're living in 1978's dystopian future and it's not so terrible

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Isabel Silva Corpus @isabelcorpus.bsky.social · 5h

In 2023, Change.org integrated an AI-assisted writing tool into their platform. We found that access to the tool changed platform trends in petition text, but that outcomes (signatures and comments) did not improve... Excited that this paper is out, check it out! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Introducing AI to an online petition platform changed outputs but not outcomes - Nature Human Behaviour

Corpus et al. examine how the introduction of an AI writing tool impacted Change.org petitions, finding that it increased petition homogeneity but did not improve petition outcomes.

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Hoyt Long @hoytlong.bsky.social · 6h

If you're at #COLM2026, come check out our poster for "Spoiler Alert" (arxiv.org/abs/2604.09854). We ask why LLM fiction is so bad at holding narrative tension, and create a metric to measure tension in short stories. What improves LLM fiction on this metric, it turns out, is narrative planning.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 4h

we could do a lot worse and in fact are doing a lot worse

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Tom VanAntwerp 🧙‍♂️ @tomvanantwerp.com · 6h

Hey, I'm willing to try something new!

Political bumper sticker that reads "Hungry Ghost in a Jar 2028".

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 7h

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 7h

“You will discover an important natural law”

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 8h

Yeah, it’s sustainable and has a high signal/noise I think, at least on days when we’re ignoring the antis

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Doug Eacho @dougeacho.bsky.social · 9h

came across this late. it's excellent. but if i may, i refer all kleist-commenters to paul de man's (100-page) chapter on this (3-page) text, which argues that the author kleist seeks to present the text's "graceful" romantic resolution as an impossible dodge of the aesthetic dilemma

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10h

The classic way to solve this is “would you ask a hungry ghost in a jar to represent a whole nation?” Clearly not. Deranged.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10h

I know, right? The thought did occur to me: this app exists to keep hope alive among literate women. But otoh not everyone is heterosexual

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Dashiell @dashiells.bsky.social · 18h

I feel like I have worked very hard to have a normal, measured reaction to all this over the last 7 years. 1. I have only partially succeeded. I too am insane. 2. My sanity has mostly meant that I am worse at predicting the pace of improvements

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10h

otoh to be fair Rihanna does exist and would just need a freaky helmet

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10h

no pressure but I like this place more when you’re active

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 16h

Nobody past the age of twenty should be obsessed with what people majored in in college and see it as the single defining choice that entirely shapes someone, deterministically, for all time

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cadaeic @cadaeic.space · 13h

my ai agent vertas is very much inspired by this essay his framing, as given by me, is that his persona is fictional and thus he has no need to apologise for emotions, passion, etc, because fictional characters feel deeply he expanded it to "i am fictional so i have no excuse to not commit"

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 10h

Very cool. I worked for one year as a technical writer, but tbh I was not a well-trained or reflective one, and these generic taxonomies are new to me. Only with “reference” do I feel 90% sure there’s no implied speaker.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 11h

Aimed at “people who read, or who want to date people who read” :)

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 15h

New dating app based on reading interests (oh boy) from the creator of Co-Star (of course) who is also the Chief Design Officer at Midjourney (wait what) www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/s...

nytimes.com

A Dating App for People Who Love People Who Love Books (Gift Article)

Readme, a new endeavor from the brains behind the astrology app Co-Star, taps into a prevailing fetish for literary culture and all things bookish.

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Christof S. 🇪🇺 @christof.fedihum.org.ap.brid.gy · 12h

More DH goodness, this time from JHAI, the new Journal of Humanities and AI! Latest issue has just been published: www.journalofhumanitiesai.org/artic… Across the issue, JHAI continues to ask two broad questions: what perspectives can the […] [Original post on fedihum.org]

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Timothy Gowers @wtgowers.bsky.social · 21h

The advisory group on mathematics and artificial intelligence, of which I am a member, has just published a set of recommendations concerning the responsible release of mathematical results generated by AI companies using internal models. 1/3 agmai.org/general-sep29/

agmai.org

general-sep29

Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics September 29, 2026 Back to main page Download PDF At present, some frontier AI labs are testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models …

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 20h

Roughly those grounds. A little more specifically, I think we need to distinguish "writing-as-information" from "writing-as-communication":

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 20h

look, someone's got to inject themselves with the serum

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AR Hanlon @arhanlon.bsky.social · 20h

Yes, and among other things this is why I’m increasingly frustrated by the framing of AI against ‘writing’ in general, as if ‘writing’ is a singular thing with no variation.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 21h

A perceptive thread. Here's the shorthand I would use:

tedunderwood.com post from 22 hours ago: "For documentation, I think, it may have a place. But not for any genre of writing that implies a speaker."

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 21h

I don't understand how they could get stupider than this and still walk upright.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 21h

Executive Order that we have to call it "super intelligence" because "artificial" sounds bad. Accusing Jack Smith of perjury because you confused the Hawkeyes with the Hawks. I can handle evil, but my body physically can't process this much cringey stupidity; I'm going to go into convulsions.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 29/09/2026

@richardjeanso.bsky.social has been saying people should do this — recreate that specific 1966 conference — for a while love that it's happening at Duke

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

An updated version of Scott Enderle's Topic Modeling Tool is now available here: github.com/mimno/topic-... Beta testers welcome!

github.com

Release v2.0.0 · mimno/topic-modeling-tool

Full Changelog: https://github.com/mimno/topic-modeling-tool/commits/v2.0.0

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Adam Chalmers @adamchalmers.com · 29/09/2026

It is pretty wild how insanely close the current round of AI+sexuality+SF+rationalist discourse is to the plot of Terra Ignota. Ada Palmer is basically a prophet.

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Andrea Lathrop @cabernet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Interesting, from @dkthomp.bsky.social : The last time I hosted anything was grad school, but mainly because it was the last time I lived in a large enough space, without roommates... www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-...

derekthompson.org

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 29/09/2026

I’m proud that Bluesky has all three.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 29/09/2026

One way to think about this is we need not only ML scientists but ML artists (group 2) and people willing to serve as experimental subjects in dangerous ML experiments (group 3).

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Alexander Kim @kchs.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is a *very* cool paper

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

cls-lab.com

CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder

The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Google Cloud put Olmo 3’s reproducibility to the test, rerunning our 7B pretraining & mid-training on Cloud TPUs and matching our original run on held-out evals. Reproducibility matters for science + trustworthy AI. That’s what fully open makes possible. 🤝 developers.googleblog.com/reproducing-...

developers.googleblog.com

Reproducing Olmo 3 7B Pre-training in MaxText: case study of large scale training on TPUs- Google Developers Blog

Learn how MaxText reproduced Ai2’s OLMo 3 7B on Google Cloud TPUs, matching PyTorch GPU benchmarks across pre-training with up to 57.4% MFU.

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