iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Sean Jones KC @seanjones.org · 29/09/2026

The rush to speculate that asylum seekers are responsible for every crime in the news is a sort of opportunistic informational terrorism. Until it’s disproved it stokes fear and hatred. When it is disproved there are no adverse consequences and they know that they only have to be lucky once.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 25/06/2026

Meanwhile memory chips are increasing in price so fast that by the time Neuromancer comes out this fall you will *actually* be able to get killed in Chiba City for 3 MB of hot RAM.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Brain slugs. At the rate things are currently downhill, 2027 will be the year we welcome our brain slug overlords with open arms and tears of joy because they have finally come to relieve us of the burden of cognition, so we are no longer troubled by how badly we've fucked up as a species.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/08/2026

Hardly a day goes by without my getting email from someone looking for ways to do good with tech. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods. 1/

The giant head of the Statue of Liberty. Around it are many medieval machines, tended by little medieval rude mechanicals. In the background is a crosshatched architectural drawing of some classical arches and such.

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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I especially love this diagram.

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Oisin Mac Aodha @oisinmacaodha.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Job opening for Lecturer/Associate Professor of AI for Biodiversity Science at University College London (UCL). www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

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Deblina @deblinaml.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

🎓 Announcing the 1st Bath Summer School in Machine Learning 📅 5–7 August 2026 | 📍 University of Bath Topics: ODEs/SDEs, Bayesian methods, Self-Supervised Learning, World Models Open to PhDs, postdocs & staff at EU/UK universities www.bathmlsummerschool.org

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 13/04/2026

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend *$1.4T* on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race. 1/

A line of Nazis at the Nuremburg rally, throwing Nazi salutes. Their backs are to us. Facing them is a hand-tinted group of child laborers from the early 20th century, squinting suspiciously at them.

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Ellipsus @ellipsus.com · 11/12/2025

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you. Defend the em dash.

A rainbow-colored shield against a white background, emblazoned with an em dash on its center. A ribbon runs along the bottom reading "Defend the Em Dash".

A rainbow-colored shield against a rainbow background, emblazoned with an em dash on its center. A ribbon runs along the bottom reading "Defend the Em Dash".

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Looking for a machine learning post-doc involving reinforcement learning and probabilistic models with real world use cases and the lovely city of Bath on your doorstep? Try here: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

bath.ac.uk

SS13519 Research Associate in Machine Learning - Jobs at Bath

Research Associate

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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

This is so, so well-articulated.

People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

There's a "is anyone even reading this" sort of honesty you get in the software update release notes from a project that's been around for a long time.

The screenshot of the release notes reads:

A new version of TeX Live Utility is available!
TeX Live Utility 1.55 is now available-you have 1.54. Would you like to download it now?
Release Notes:
Changes Since 1.54
• Fix bug 137, homepage link in Help Book.
• First release in a long time, since I don't use TeX anymore and resent the very idea of paying Apple annually for the privilege of giving away free and open-source software. Also, I'm really lazy. Please accept my apologies for all the annoying issues you've encountered in this mission-critical software.
• Updated mirror list, which was three years out of date.
• Added missing legacy mirrors, which was even more out of date.
• Added an alert on startup when user tries Homebrew's lobotomized MacTex, because those lunatics left timgr but removed its database.
Thanks for nothing, guys. Bug 142 and 144.
• Use a custom user-agent to work around the Anubis bot trap on texlive.info. Can't wait to see what else breaks because of this, thanks to the profusion of degenerate Artificial Insemination fetishists scraping websites to feed their models.
• Lists of countries in Repository/Continent are now sorted. No idea how you people let me get away with that one for the last fifteen years.

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Catherynne M. Valente @catvalente.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Unburying the lede from my essay on why we all feel like numb frozen crap these days… catvalente.substack.com/p/this-is-wh...

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Private Eye Magazine @privateeyenews.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Following the controversy over the edited Trump speech, the BBC has been lambasted for its negative and biased portrayal of the leader of a prominent right-wing government… An Evening with Private Eye 2025, out now on YouTube.

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Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

This is the saddest day of my professional life.
Today is not only the final recording of the latest series of The Infinite Monkey Cage, it is my last ever Monkey Cage.
I never thought that I would have to leave the show. I always imagined going on until | dropped dead under the studio lights due to a brain aneurysm caused by my final attempt to understand notions of quantum gravity or the shock of being told about fly maggot infestations in the sacks of macaque monkeys.
I resigned in September, after sixteen years of dedication to the show,
A show that I named and helped develop over all those years.
Unfortunately, my opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for sometime, whether it has been voicing support for the trans community, criticism of Donald Trump, numerous other outlandish opinions, including once gently criticising Stephen Fry.
These things were considered to conflict with being a freelance BBC science presenter

In a recent meeting where BBC Studio executives again voiced problems with me, I realised my choices.
Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or 'Resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices'.
•
I chose the latter.
It broke my heart.
I love this show and I love the audience, and it is because of the audience in particular, that this decision was so difficult to make.
I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer.
I felt I couldn't pamper myself with the luxury of silence.
One of my many privileges is that I am able to resign and I can speak out even if it is to the detriment of my career.

I have thought a lot about my heroes, Sinead O Connor, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and so many more.
I think of Sinead's words, "the job of an artist is to be themselves at any cost".
James Baldwin said prejudice was really just a word for cowardice.
Audre Lorde, viewing her life, wrote that her only regrets were her silences.
I think of my father as I resign, he brought me up to believe in fairness , justice and kindness.
Though my heart is broken, it is also full of fire.
I apologise to our incredible listeners for my departure, your love of the show means a great deal.
I am so sorry to let you down.
I hope that you can understand my reasoning.
I have to accept that I am not what the current
BBC expects of their freelance presenters.

Despite this I should add that I have always worked far more than my contracted hours to try and ensure the show was always the best it could be, as well as making myself accessible and responsive to the audience wherever and whenever I met them. Every night, we have recorded, I have been filled with determination to make the best show possible. This was not
"just a job"
I hope that with my departure I can be a better ally to the LGBTQ community, to the neurodivergent community, to activists fighting against those who aim to brutalise society, to those currently in prison on hunger strike, and to all those who fight for a more inclusive world.
From many conversations, I know there are many Monkey Cage listeners who support these communities and activists too.
The strawberry is dead.
Long live the strawberry. B

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andy™ @andylevy.net · 05/12/2025

in the movies this is the screensaver on the computers at the world’s most evil company

the fifa peace prize trophy with zombie-like hands holding up a crumbling earth

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Oisin Mac Aodha @oisinmacaodha.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

We have PhD opportunity (start date Sep 2026) at the University of Edinburgh at the intersection of biodiversity mapping and zoonotic disease prediction. It is part of the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical Innovation based in the School of Informatics: ai4bi-cdt.ed.ac.uk

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Oisin Mac Aodha @oisinmacaodha.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Interested in doing a PhD in machine learning at the University of Edinburgh starting Sept 2026? My group works on topics in vision, machine learning, and AI for climate. For more information and details on how to get in touch, please check out my website: homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/omacaod

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Keith W. Dickinson @keithwdickinson.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

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Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Jane Goodall said she’d like to send off to another planet: Musk, Trump, Putin, Xi & Netanyahu. 🚀

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

We have a Research Systems Developer job, for someone who likes the challenge of building custom systems to support research within a computer science department: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy... Should be a varied role for anyone who likes unusual/weird problems and learning new things!

bath.ac.uk

AP12857 Research Systems Developer - Jobs at Bath

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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website! Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Startling conclusion here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/humanity #smbc

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∙ ᴘᴀᴜʟɪɴᴀ ∙ @iamthepaulina.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Take a listen and seriously consider it. While this is not an uncommon practice, I am glad people are beginning to speak up about it.

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Sandra Wachter @swachter.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Are you interested in the governance of emergent tech? Come & work w/ me @bmittelstadt.bsky.social & @cruss.bsky.social We are looking for 3 Post Docs in Law: tinyurl.com/4rbhcndp Ethics: tinyurl.com/yc2e2km4 Computer Science/AI/ML: tinyurl.com/yr5bvnn5 Application deadline is June 15, 2025.

tinyurl.com

Postdoctoral Researcher (m/f/x) in Technology and Regulation

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Climate Science Breakthrough @climatescibreak.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

US climate scientists need all the help they can get. Including from foul-mouthed comedians! 🤡😱😱 Watch Emmy Award-Winning David Cross team up with Prof Michael Oppenheimer in the US launch of the hit series "Climate Science Translated". #climate #arresteddevelopment #climatescience

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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Congratulations Dr Ziubroniewicz. Too bad it wasn’t a machine vision dissertation, so he could deblur the picture. Congratulations to @ozgursimsek.bsky.social the proud doctor mother too! @tomsfhaines.bsky.social was the internal. My first trip back to Bath since Brexit.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Exciting and practical house designs coming out of Scandinavia

The photo pf the huge container ship run aground in the garden of a small coastal house. I've photoshopped an arrow to the house with 'House to Live in', and another arrow to the ship that says 'a room to keep books in'.

of course writing the alt text has warned me this may be a joke that only I find funny.

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UKP Lab @ukplab.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Is In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs Memorisation? Emergence? Some Algorithmic Capability? 🤔 📢New work exploring ICL in LLMs: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11004 💡Key Finding: ICL capabilities are linked to token frequency 🤨 Strap in for the unexpected 🤯 A 🧵👇 #NLProc

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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Starmer's anti-immigrant speech today wasn't just a moral and political embarrassment. It was also an intellectual embarrassment. inews.co.uk/opinion/star...

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Led By Donkeys @ledbydonkeys.org · 07/05/2025

TANK vs TESLA "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again" - ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

We're still looking for new machine learning lecturers (+senior lecturers and one reader) to join us at the University of Bath. Big and growing research group with varied interests in a beautiful city:-) www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy... www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

bath.ac.uk

AP12664 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer - Jobs at Bath

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 25/04/2025

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 09/04/2025

The problem with most machine-based random number generators is that they’re not TRULY random, so if you need genuine randomness it is sometimes necessary to link your code to an external random process like a physical noise source or the current rate of US tariffs on a given country.

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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

We have lots of lectureships in #AI / #ML @uniofbath.bsky.social. Friendly colleagues, beautiful city and more areas of expertise than I can keep track of. www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy... (lecturer/senior lecturer) and www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy... (reader).

bath.ac.uk

CH12482 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer - Jobs at Bath

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Nome @nome.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

I have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane. Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.

media.tenor.com

a statue of a hippopotamus with its mouth open and teeth showing .

Alt: A hippo being tossed a watermelon, which it crushes in its massive jaws.

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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Maybe appealing to people trying to get out of the US. lecturer = asst prof sr lecturer = assoc prof reader = assoc prof with better transition probability to full prof than a sr lecturer

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

The Washington Post and LA Times editorial pages have gone full MAGA, MSNBC has purged all of its anti-Trump anchors, and Twitter is owned by a literal Nazi. Here's why liberal media bias is still a problem.

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

bath.ac.uk

CH12482 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer - Jobs at Bath

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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

The great Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, expert on fascism and on Ukraine and Russia

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Dan Kaszeta FRHistS @dankaszeta.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

The Papua New Guinea Courier is in rare form.

Screenshot from "Letter from our correspondent" in "Papua New Guinea Courier"

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Oisin Mac Aodha @oisinmacaodha.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

We have open PhD positions starting Sept 2025 in computer vision and machine learning at the University of Edinburgh. UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Dependable and Deployable AI for Robotics (CDT-D2AIR) www.edinburgh-robotics.org/apply Round one application deadline: Feb 16th

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

The UK government's "pivot to AI" is going to be a disaster for the public finances. They'll spend billions on foreign-owned bullshit, give away all our personal data (Palantir is bidding for NHS England's records—biggest medical data trove in history), but that's not the worst bit. /1

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Tom SF Haines @tomsfhaines.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Looking for a #PostDoc in #MachineLearning, specifically in relation to sequential decision making? #ReinforcementLearning Goal is algorithms that can be used to optimise real manufacturing processes. #Probabilistic #Bayesian Özgür and I have two positions available: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

bath.ac.uk

ED12340 Research Associate in Machine Learning - Jobs at Bath

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Jonathan Edward Durham @thisone0verhere.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

I love how people think those little cheese knives are for serving cheese, like awwww that's cute no those are for *defending* your cheese, trust no one

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Creature of Hobbit 🇺🇦 @creatureofhobbit.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Some cartoons aren't meant to be funny. 💔

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Esther van Hulsen wildlife art @esthervanhulsen.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

40 WAYS TO DIE IN THE PREHISTORIC. Enjoy! These illustrations were made as scale drawing for a book about prehistoric creatures. Thought it would be fun to have a bit more interaction between the animals and human figures

A standing illustration showing 40 scale drawings of different prehistoric creatures with a human figure. The human is stomped on, eaten, ripped to pieces, smacked, stabbed and many other ways to come to an end. The drawings are all black silhouettes, spread over a white background

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