iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

"Insight is an emergent property of doing the work," is such a great way to put this.

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

AI is an unsettling litmus test for whether we value the craft or the product more.

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Bryan Culbertson 🥄 @bryanculbertson.com · 29/08/2026

Expanding 80 instead of running a frequent train between Sacramento and Reno is a crime against the climate

Road equipment for expanding the highway along 80

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tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

FRONTIER LABS: We turned up the sycophancy because it produces addictive behaviour, and had to turn it down because of all the lawsuits. We promise to find a good midpoint between revenue and psychosis PROGRAMMER: Thank god technology is neutral FRONTIER LABS: We're building a god, actually

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Kohler trolling Anthropic? 🙃

An advertisement for Kohler's new "Claude smart toilet".

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Schrödinger's Mitch McConnell

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

And universities are still telling students AI literacy looks good on their resume.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/06/2026

I am often saying this

What matters is not the eggs
It is the Goose itself
True value = The power to keep laying eggs

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I'm not sure whether to share this with my data science friends or my gamer friends 😆

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Elaine Burke @elaineburke.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Anthropic Institute, the research arm of Anthropic, published a report speculating on what it sees as potential future trends in AI development, and media literacy took an absolute beating from it. A thread: (1/22)

Anthropic

When AI builds itself
Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

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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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Ky @ky.fyi · 02/04/2026

a colleague asked if my resignation had anything to do with where the design profession is going with AI and this is what I told her

Oof, that's a big question! I will say candidly that Al has been a significant contributor to my own feelings of burnout and alienation within tech, and I'm not sure what comes next, but boy am I tired of it already.
I do worry about design and software development becoming more "niche" or
"bespoke" as more and more of the industry turns toward LLM-driven automation. Weirdly, as someone in a role that is poised to take advantage of this shift, I feel more negatively toward Al than many others... maybe that's because I can validate what it's doing and I'm often unimpressed?

Part of this is my own defensiveness/ reaction to a stable landscape changing too rapidly for comfort; part is ethical concerns I have over how this technology is being created (through the ingestion of others' unpaid labor, at severe environmental cost), deployed (often without consent), and used (polluting our knowledge ecosystems and supercharging the spread of disinformation). It's also funneling more and more money and power into an ever smaller set of hands.

The core belief I'm coalescing around is that the process is the most important thing, and there are no shortcuts. "Ideas" are a dime a dozen, and LLMs can, by nature, only produce statistically-average results. I think it's the act of putting pen to paper, experimenting, and really thinking through a problem that you end up with something-a product, a work of art, a piece of writing-that's worth sharing with others. No matter how technology changes, that will remain constant, and I think that any designer or engineer who really engages going deep with the process will continue to find work. At least, that's my hope!

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NorCal Resist @norcalresist.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Do you love looking at cats? Do you support immigrants? Be part of our 2026 NorCal Resist Cat Tour! In Sacramento tinyurl.com/NCRCatTour

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Michele Tobias, PhD @micheletobias.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I'm so excited that we can finally share this! I'm chairing this year's conference with Nick Santos. It's gonna be amazing! Also, we're looking for volunteers to help with planning. Let me know if you have questions or want the sign up sheet! #gischat

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Your regular reminder that librarians and statisticians are natural allies in the medical research ecosystem.

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

We recently updated R Basics, our introductory workshop about research computing in R! 🎉 The reader (a mini-textbook) is here: ucdavisdatalab.github.io/workshop_r_b...

ucdavisdatalab.github.io

R Basics

Reader for UC Davis DataLab’s R Basics workshop series.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

It is *fascinating* to me how quickly some people have gone completely from “we all must work in the office! human collaboration is vital and only happens in person!” to “I can replace all these pesky people with chatbots!” Definitely some commentary there about our society and who gets to choose.

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

AI is fundamentally a labor issue - and if after reading these testimonials from educators that @bcmerchant.bsky.social has collected you're not convinced it's time for a Luddite praxis in K-12 and higher education, then shit, I'm not sure what else to tell you.

bloodinthemachine.com

"If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?" Education workers reveal a growing crisis on campus and off

AI Killed My Job: Educators.

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Cameron Patrick @cameronpat.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

note that if you're quitting ChatGPT, you should also quit Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI, Grok, etc! none of these firms are your friends.

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Civil Eats @civileats.com · 03/03/2026

“We have so many beautiful stories that have been handed down from generation to generation. I come from a really strong family of women, and I feel like it’s my duty to continue to pass along that wisdom" Read the full Q&A with chef Crystal Wahpepah. ⬇️

civileats.com

Kickapoo Chef Crystal Wahpepah Showcases Oakland’s Native American Side

In her new book, the Kickapoo chef and self-proclaimed ‘Indigenous food warrior’ presents the healing properties of intertribal cuisine.

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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology

She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

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Bryan Culbertson 🥄 @bryanculbertson.com · 05/02/2026

Instead of wasting a half a trillion a year on datacenters, I vote we build hundreds of high speed rail lines all across the US

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Andrew Hickey @andrewhickey.500songs.com · 28/01/2026

I'd actually go further and say that the "STEM"/"humanities" split is a meaningless and fake one. Mathematics and programming have as mucv in common with music and writing as with biochemistry or paleontology.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

The largest Trump superPAC donor so far this cycle is the president of OpenAI

CONTRIBUTOR
GREG BROCKMAN
AMOUNT
ELECTION TO DAT
$25,000,000 $25,000,000

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key-lime pie @keymonster.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Stand up, fight back.

An illustration of an opossum holding a sign that says abolish ICE.

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Rav @rvbdrm.com · 09/01/2026

BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!

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Technology Connections @techconnectify.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Look, I was a little kid when we went through this last and I just wanted it to live in my mind as a horrible thing some evil reactionary adults did when I was growing up. I was fine with that simple understanding! I did NOT ask to experience a re-enactment as an adult.

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Distribute Aid @distributeaid.org · 03/01/2026

🚨 Thread collecting actionable steps to help civilians in Venezuela, Venezuelan refugees fleeing to neighboring countries, and Venezuelan immigrants in the US. 🚨 ✅️ Please post ideas / links, especially to local frontline groups. ❌️ Please avoid non-actions, and be cautious regarding sanctions. 👇

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Micah @rincewind.run · 31/12/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Guards! Guards!

It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it anymore you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Time to start looking for a new web browser, I guess.

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HK @hkesvani.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Really liked reading this from @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com, who asks, isn't it exhausting to just feel like you're going insane every time you go on the computer youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

youngvulgarian.substack.com

aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?

Behold! I have had a thought.

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Tech Won’t Save Us @techwontsave.us · 15/12/2025

🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨 Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025! Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday. 🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/worst-person...

Bracket showing the 32 names in the Worst Person in Tech 2025

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I haven't been watching much TV lately, but season 3 of Dark Winds is the show I'm most excited to watch next.

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Curtis @soccurt.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Lots of insights in this Cory Doctorow essay. Reverse centaur and vocational awe ("workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs [such as] nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists") are useful concepts. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

If universities would prioritize smaller classes and fewer bells and whistles like third-party technology contracts, a significantly bigger number of PhDs would find a position in higher education.

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Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Unrelated to mim itself, but this is also the first preprint I've prepared in @typst.app rather than LaTeX. It was soooo much nicer. Folks; what are we doing? Why don't our journals accept manuscript sources in Typst!

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David Buchanan @retr0.id · 24/11/2025

"writing code to solve a problem" used to have "understanding the problem" as a prerequisite. but vibecoding allows solution-shaped objects to be produced without any of the hard-won understanding. beware of solution-shaped objects.

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soleil ho @soleilho.com · 05/11/2025

went into a fugue state and helped write this re: mamdani’s victory and how we don’t have to be pragmatic after all!! www.coyotemedia.org/zohran-mamda...

coyotemedia.org

Zohran Mamdani’s Win Is Proof We Don’t Have to Settle for Newsom 2028

The Bushwick bisexuals have it! We can ask for so much more, and at COYOTE we plan to.

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鋼のStephen Meyerink @sjmtaelus.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

the entire tech industry

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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 28/10/2025

You may be aware that UC Berkeley disclosed personal information to the federal government on specious grounds regarding individual faculty members' supposed political activities and positions. The likelihood that other campuses did likewise is high. This is a public statement demanding more.

senate.universityofcalifornia.edu

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Python Software Foundation @python.org · 27/10/2025

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

python.org

The official home of the Python Programming Language

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