iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who spent the last 13 hours working on their dissertation and has eight new pages to show for it.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Someone in my running group tonight, after I finished first: "You were fast tonight." Me: "Yeah, gotta outrun my demons, you know." Them: 😐😐😐😐

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I've never made a poster for anything. Come and see how I did! Poster also available here: tomeinhorn.github.io/files/TADA-N... #TADA2026

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The Lea Michelle can't read conspiracy theory will just never not be funny to me.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A group of undergrads just told me the library table I'd been at for two hours was "their space" and I needed to leave. And I... just left. Even apologized to them and everything. Really thought I'd age out of having to deal with playground bullies by my 30s but here we are.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is really cool. A small, custom, local text classifier, runs in RAM, costs about $10 to train, and returns reproducible probabilities. This approach could have a ton of research applications.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Jonathan Larson walked so Hallmark movies could run.

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CineCalendar @cinecalendar.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Sep 24th 1967 - After four years apart, Jack visited Ennis. 📽️📅 Brokeback Mountain (2005)

3 Screenshots from the movie "Brokeback Mountain" (2005): First, a man in a plaid shirt stands in a modest kitchen reading a postcard while a woman in a faded dress works at the stove behind him. Second, a close-up of the postcard reveals handwriting addressed to Mr. Ennis Del Mar in Riverton, Wyoming, signed by Jack, with a postmark dated September 1967 from Childress, Texas. Third, two men in western shirts and cowboy hats embrace tightly outdoors, one smiling broadly with visible relief and joy.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

For similar reasons, I'm excited about decision models for research. They could make what are now cutting-edge NLI techniques in the social sciences more accessible and streamlined.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/09/2026

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

Free-text evaluation of answers to character modeling and constrained generation questions. This is just one of several scores Chronologic-EN can produce; we focus on it here because it's both the hardest test and the one most relevant to simulation of the past. Frontier models reach 72%; Talkie-1930 is stronger than several larger competitors, but not at the frontier by this measure. Note that this score has improved ~45% in the last two years, but still falls perceptibly short of ground truth.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There have always been humans who thought: 1) The world will end soon 2) It will happen in a cool, exciting way 3) It’ll happen to me personally 4) I’ll be a martyred prophet, or a warlord, or otherwise special 5) People who don’t see this are lesser “Sexy apocalypse” is a great phrase for that

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I spent the morning reading John Levi Martin's absolutely brutal takedown of the Vanderbilt report's assessment of politicization in sociology. I recommend it and hope it gets as much attention as the initial (crap) Vanderbilt report. A Reader’s Guide to the Rubin Report osf.io/preprints/so...

osf.io

OSF

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

New preprint! A review article on Generative AI and Society, with the fantastic @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Danny Karell (smartly not online!) osf.io/preprints/so... The lit on genAI is sprawling and mostly not in sociology. Our goal is to synthesize core themes relevant to sociologists. +

GENERATIVE AI AND SOCIETY
Laura K. Nelson,
Daniel Karell,
and Thomas Davidson

ABSTRACT
For sociologists, generative AI inherits the legacy of earlier computational technologies: it is an advancement of machine learning already adopted as a methodology, and it intervenes in a society already shaped by algorithmic systems. Yet it also has a dimension that distinguishes it from previous computational methods, and one that makes it inherently sociological: its interactivity. In this review, we conceptualize the interactivity of generative AI and introduce a framework for understanding how it operates across individual, organizational, and institutional life. Specifically, the framework specifies how generative AI expands users, functions as a proxy for society, and expresses power,
both in sociological practice and in society. We conclude by suggesting three dynamics driven by generative AI that sociology will face in the near future: the transformation of scientific practice, the reorganization of social interaction, and the acceleration of algorithmic governance.

Keywords: generative AI, interaction, computational sociology, methods, algorithms, algorithmic governance

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

שיפה ושונה, כפי שנאמר. שנה טובה.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Recurring YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT AI DID NOW stories I feel often neglect to mention that it did what we asked it to do. This doesn't make AI capabilities less concerning, but it does mean that "AI spontaneously did this terrifying thing" is a slightly misleading way to describe what happened.

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

AfD voters are highly motivated by hatred of foreign immigrants, but most AfD voters live in areas where there are very few foreign immigrants.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I completely forgot that Back to the Future had a stealing plutonium from Lybian nationalists subplot.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

מתחביבי הוא להוסיף את המילה picturesque לשם של כל מקום שמדברים עליו. למשל, קולגה נסע לכנס וכשחזר שאלתי אותו איך היה ב-picturesque town of Calgary. כולם חושבים שזה קטע שלי מבלי לדעת שאני מצטט את דמותה של טטיאנה הופמן בארץ נהדרת מלפני משהו כמו עשרים שנה.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

ביקום מקביל שרה נתניהו היא גיי אייקון.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I feel like Trump's Lake Ontario stunt is a gift to anyone teaching political sociology this term. He hit Canada hard with tariffs. Not only did Canada not submit, it retaliated. In comes politics as performance. When material levers alone fail to generate power, actors intensify symbolic work.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

לפני שנה בערך קולגה ואני היינו במונטריאול. היא, שנולדה וגדלה כאן, לא מדברת מילה בצרפתית, ואני התרברבתי בכמה משפטים שאני יודע בצרפתית. נכנסנו לבית קפה. בצעד בוטח ניגשתי לדלפק וביקשתי פה או שוקולה. המוכרת הסתכלה עלי במבט אטום ובסוף החזירה באנגלית: "אתה מתכוון שוקולטין?"

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Halfway through Young Mungo, I put the book down two weeks ago because I reached a really dark part, and I haven’t been able to pick it back up since. I keep thinking about it almost daily, though.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Every UI designer in 2026: what if we made corners rounder

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Every year late August is just me reckoning with the consequences of having said “I’ll get so much done this summer” back in May.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Paper rejected today. The reviews were unusually kind, praising the writing, empirical work, and conceptual clarity. Even got a “this is a very important paper”. Basically a great date followed by “I think we should just be friends”. Onward.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I'll never get over them booking Julie Andrews for Shrek 2.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Everything about the Arday story is so awful.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I guess I should’ve expected a hotel right on Times Square to be noisy.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I'm only marginally aware of the controversy around this (I try to stay off the internet these days) but honestly, it is so stupid.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

This is a good take, I feel, about why data centres have becomes the focal point for mobilization.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I'll admit I am not familiar with Pamela Paul's body of work, but God do I wish that damn WSJ article had, IDK, a point or something. I kept reading hoping she would say something of substance, and then it just ended.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

השבוע נבחרו בעשרים המקומות הראשונים ברשימת הדמוקרטים לכנסת חמישה פעילי מחאה: עמרי רונן, משה רדמן אבוטבול, סומיה בשיר, מורן זר קצנשטיין ונאווה רוזוליו. מחשבות על הממשק בין תנועות חברתיות למפלגות פוליטיות.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

באחת השנים שלימדתי פה, הסטודנטים התפדחו לשאול מאיפה אני אז הם ניהלו טבלת הימורים כל הסמסטר ואחרי כל שיעור היו מעדכנים את ההימורים על בסיס דברים שהם חשבו שהם קלטו במבטא שלי. בסוף הסמסטר אחד האמיצים שאל. אף אחד לא ניחש ישראל, אז כולם הפסידו. ההימור המוביל היה צרפת או שוויץ.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

At a campus café, I'm eavesdropping on a prof trying to recruit a grad student as a research assistant. To make sure she can write without using AI, he has her write one page on a topic while he looks over her shoulder. I wouldn't have been able to think with someone standing over me like that.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

IDE developers are in an insane arms race to integrate coding agents. RStudio and VS Code have both had more updates in the last six months than in all of 2025, and most updates seem to be about integrating coding agents. I can't keep up with the release notes anymore.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Vancouver local politics > your city's local politics

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I keep a folder in my password manager specifically dedicated to the growing number of accounts I have to create for various journals.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I love when a Netflix production rolls through town and uses UBC as a stand in for some other university.

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

I chose neutral for most of the AI questions because I thought the premise of the questions was wrong. :(

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Contributed to this new Contexts piece on Indigenous cultural practices and COVID vaccination. We found that participation in some Indigenous cultural activities was associated with higher vaccine uptake, suggesting that cultural participation may shape health behaviour.

journals.sagepub.com

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Decided to write my dissertation in LaTeX. Thought it'd be fun to learn something new. Now, some days, what gets me to sit down and write is wanting to try a new formatting trick I found. "I should write another paragraph so I can test this" turns out to be a surprisingly effective motivator.

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

1. Static word embeddings might model culture. But they're fixed. Boo. 2. Dynamic embeddings are contextual! 3. But encoding is computationally expensive. Boo. 4. Decoder only models are efficient! 5. But they seem to collapse all perspectives. Boo. What, then, ought the sociology of culture do? 👇

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

New essay with @lauraknelson.bsky.social on AI and cultural sociology. Revisiting what made word embeddings so useful for cultural sociology, we argue that contemporary LLMs risk collapsing perspectival differences and discuss provisional solutions that might help recover cultural variation.

rohanalexander.github.io

16 Quantifying Culture from Embeddings to Generation – Notes on the Future of Quantitative Social Science

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Tom Einhorn @tomeinhorn.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I get that Mia is estranged from her paternal relations. Fine. But how could the media have no clue that the heir to the Genovian throne is a teenager living in San Francisco? That makes no sense.

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