iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Topher Brennan (he/they)

This isn't a case of abusing some loophole or misusing discretionary authority. The law is unambiguous and he's breaking it, simple as that. If Congress isn't going to do anything about breaking the law that already exists, passing another law to make it double-illegal accomplishes nothing.

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PenguinGuy @penguinguy.bsky.social · 19h

He recently defended his vote on the Lanken Riley Act! Senate brain!

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 19h

Having a hard time getting excited about Ossoff for POTUS just because he's in the Senate and being in the Senate seems to rot people's brains. If he'd been talking about Republicans in February '25 the way he talks about Mike Collins now I might feel differently but feels a bit late now.

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Lava monster @lavamonster.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

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James Goodwin @jamesgoodwin.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

The Senate functions as a political "subsidy" for the conservative extremism of the Republican Party. It enables the production of more conservative extremism than a properly functioning political marketplace would otherwise produce.

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James Goodwin @jamesgoodwin.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Eliminating the filibuster is necessary for correcting this dynamic, but likely not sufficient. Nothing short of abolition of the Senate can fix the problem. What a pisser.

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Reposted by Topher Brennan (he/they)

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 23h

Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Lord, I've seen what you've done for others... bsky.app/profile/aphc...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 09/10/2026

sincerity is important here - when I see Gavin Newsom talk about how much Republicans suck, I don't think he actually believes it, I think he's playing a game will Ossoff do everything that needs to be done to impose consequences on these people? I don't know but I do believe he hates them

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

God I swear some people on this site would hear a negative comment about pulling wings off flies and go "oh so you care about flies more than humans?"

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is a ‘good strategy’ in game theory terms if you assume Trump will punish you for not rolling over and showing deference and democrats won’t. Democrats should think about altering those incentives.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

You NEED to understand that this is happening in America. It’s the intentional plan of a vile white supremacist in the White House, who sees this as an opportunity to finally torture and expel all the nonwhite people he hates.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

When they do get seized, there’s frequently no help coming, no matter how worthy their claim. People are released here in Minnesota after being illegally detained five, six, seven months. They walk out in a daze, with nothing. They’re the innocent victims of a racial terror campaign.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

ya i mean i do genuinely think that one of hegseth's goals is to drive people appalled by barbarity out of the military, because the long term plan is to make the military shoot at us, and the same guys who object to this won't do that either.

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Kent Lind @camasonian.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If people think that they are naive as hell. This isn't like health care where there is some grand bargain to get the ACA. It is a bazillion local and state bigots pecking away and still butthurt because they think they "lost" gay marriage. But sports is by far the weakest arena for trans rights.

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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“The United States” is not its officers. The United States is its *laws*. A republic is “an empire of laws, not men” (John Adams); “in America, the law is king” (Thomas Paine). ICE is an assemblage at war with our fundamental laws; they are at war with the United States. bsky.app/profile/samh...

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Covie @covie93.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Maybe hegseth watched ICE agents carry out public executions all year and thought people have become numb to it.

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

all knowledge is like this and if you do not feel this way about it you have not gone deep enough

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 08/10/2026

okay I am ten minutes in to episode one and this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my LIFE “We have doors slamming, taps turning on, a fishbowl in the kitchen spontaneously smashed,” home inspector walks in: “okay so first off, I see they have a cat”

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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 08/10/2026

this is good and everyone should stop being weird about it

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Calling someone a self-hating <member of oppressed group> is always fraught but seems pretty hard to avoid the conclusion Yarvin does in fact hate himself for being Jewish. bsky.app/profile/came...

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The Spaceshipper 🚀 @thespaceshipper.com · 07/10/2026

According to MIT News, Margaret Hamilton died at the age of 90. "A profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program". This famous photo 🔽 inspired the For All Mankind character Margo Madison.

Margaret Hamilton, but the famous 1969 photo that inspired the For All Mankind character Margo Madison is in the quoted post.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If care about free markets, you not only get more from center-left Dems than the party of Trump, you get more *from professed democratic socialists* like Mamdani than you do from the party of Trump. Those who deny this only think of it as an anti-left cultural totem and not a real policy agenda.

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Wanna see someone put forward the hot take that silicon can't be conscious but clearly water can be conscious because human brains are mostly slightly salty water. bsky.app/profile/soft...

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Reposted by Topher Brennan (he/they)

Cheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I cannot stress enough that ICE is acting the way cops have acted for years. These are just "starlight tours" for Indigenous teens applied to the rest of the population.

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Louis @louisevans.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

okay i've taken this too seriously on its own terms. when a billionaire says "dictatorship is efficient" what he means is that it's easy to bribe.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/10/2026

interesting that conservatives were militantly “we must reward hustle” when the target was affirmative action at elite universities and now, when faced with the success of south asians and other groups, it is “i think we are too meritocratic”

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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Right now society at large is paying most of the bill for people who drive giant pick-up trucks and SUVs, my humble proposal is that we should stop doing that and ask them to pay it themselves.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Downside: The US now has government goon squads, and deploys them to try to intimidate voters into voting the way the president wants. Upside: They don’t have nearly enough goons. Not even close. They’re hoping fear will make up for that big shortfall, but it won’t.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

one of the ways the media shows which side they prefer, is which politicians they quote uncharitably out-of-context and which they clean up for even when what they actually say and do is offensive (the Biden story ran on the front page less than a week before the 24 election)

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David Waldman @kagrox.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Vote no and take the dough.

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 05/10/2026

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the autonomous vehicle developers who most vocally argued that society must accept a certain number of deaths to enjoy the technology's safety benefits (Tesla & Uber ATG) were the only ones who killed people and never actually delivered on their promises

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Robert Rose @robear.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A good fresh Star Trek take on those fake isekai title jokes

A tumblr screenshot showing a post and two reblog responses, reading:
1. "star trek would be the ideal fictional universe to get trapped in because you'd explain your situation and they'd be like yeah makes sense. no further questions. fortunately we can use the mysterious warp signature emitting from this system's icy moon to counterface with the solar radiation and slingshot you back home"
2. "I'm from a universe where your world is all a work of fiction." Benjamin Sisko, nodding. "That happened to me once."
3. "I Got Isekaid Into The Star Trek Universe And They Quickly Understood What Was Happening"

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Topher Brennan (he/they) @topherbrennan.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The only people who believe this are people with zero ability to physically defend themselves, because if you actually study martial arts you know that no matter how badass you are, being outnumbered = you're probably fucked. bsky.app/profile/polp...

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horse shoe crab programmer @myrrlyn.net · 01/10/2026

turns out when you have a thorough american cultural dictionary, the phrase “i care about documentation, reliability, and user experience” compresses pretty well to “she”. i don’t have a pithy sentence for it but force femming the robot also backed off the sycophancy dial. make of this what you will

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hikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

real answer: so you understand the formal model at a deep and intuitive level granting you the ability to compose the right formal concepts into clear descriptions that LLM agents can productively act on

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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

the sequences explicitly present you with a dichotomy between empiricist science and rationalist bayesianism, and tell you to choose the bayesian option

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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.

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JoGo @mywitsend.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Eight years ago today the Saudi government murdered WaPo columnist Jamaal Khashoggi. Today they own 49.5% of the biggest media/news company in America.

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"Police said the bicyclist was not wearing a helmet." Who cares? A bicycle helmet isn't designed to protect cyclists against cars. "At this time, speed, drugs or alcohol do not appear to be contributing factors in the collision, police said." Speed is absolutely a factor, to the 2nd power.

staradvertiser.com

Bicyclist, 40, dies in collision on Sand Island Access Road | Honolulu Star-Advertiser

A bicyclist died this morning after being struck by a vehicle on Sand Island Access Road near the Keehi Marina Boat Harbor in Kalihi, according to the Honolulu Police Department.

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Reposted by Topher Brennan (he/they)

Daniel Suitor @danielsuitor.com · 02/10/2026

Will is 100% right. Has happened to multiple clients of mine. One judge (not my case) has said that this isn't really release and ordered the person *actually* released. But it's forcing us habeas attorneys to win our cases twice (or more)

On September 9, 2026, Respondents permitted Pablo F. to exit the building where
he was detained, but he was immediately swarmed by four ICE officers and handcuffed as
soon as he stepped outside. (Doc. No. 25-3 at 4:48:45–4:49:26.)3
The officers drove him
to the back of the Whipple building and returned him to a holding cell. (Doc. No. 21 ¶¶ 8–
9; Doc. No. 25 ¶ 5.) During this encounter, officers dislocated Pablo F.’s shoulder. (Doc.
No. 21 ¶ 7.)4
Pablo F. now bringsthis Motion seeking to enforce the Court’s Order granting
the Petition.

Again, Respondents make no attempt whatsoever to support their assertion that
Pablo F. was released. Absent any such argument, the Court cannot agree that a reasonable
person would have felt free to leave when exiting the detention facility and immediately
being stopped by ICE officers. Likewise, absent some argument, the Court necessarily
concludes that Pablo F. was subject to restraints not shared by the public generally when
he took one step outside of the detention facility and was immediately stopped by ICE
officers who forcibly returned him to a detention cell. Because Respondents do not make
any legal argument that Pablo F. was ever meaningfully released from custody, the Court
grants the motion and orders Pablo F.’s release.6
6 To be clear, Pablo F. is not arguing, and the Court is not concluding, that an order of
release in a habeas matter renders unlawful any future arrests. Rather, the Court reaches
the narrow conclusion that because Respondents advance no legal argument in this case to
support their assertion that Pablo F. was released from custody, and because the
uncontested facts show that ICE officers immediately swarmed Pablo F. as soon as he
stepped out of the building, Pablo F. was not released from custody.

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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 01/10/2026

the constitutional convention was one of the most epic examples of “we’ll fix it in post” in human history

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you need to send a fundraising email with the header “We know you’re not an ATM” maybe it’s a sign you ought to reign in the grifter consulting firms that are alienating supporters with a constant stream of panhandling spam to raise money that mostly gets poured back into their own coffers?

Dem fundraising email headed “We know you’re not an ATM”

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aly @aly.codes · 02/10/2026

do people not know Mets used to be the baddies bc of what their human reviewers were experiencing

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aly @aly.codes · 02/10/2026

One of the reasons AI began to be used in moderation everywhere is because in the 2010s there were atrocious articles describing the absolute hell human reviewers were going through and how they all had PTSD

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James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Somehow not everyone is aware of fact alluded to below. So one more time: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett were all on GWBush 2000 'Florida Recount' team. (Which made GWB first prez in 112 yrs to 'win' after losing popular vote. Now they 'impartially' rule on our future.)

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Double the judges, double the fun

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