iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

www.maptap.gg September 21 97🔥 96🔥 95🏅 100🎯 73🫢 Final score: 902

Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Hallucinations in the sense of new, made-up information only happen in models that randomly generate their output. Most chatbots are an example of this. Models that don't rely on random generation don't hallucinate, but they can still get things wrong. A typical spam filter, for example.

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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 · 05/09/2026

That the product sucks (no craft, low quality) is the point.

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

Seems like he could learn a lot from his students!

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

And we had no problem churning out lots of low-quality software before AI.

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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 · 28/07/2026

Pip installs packages of reusable code other people have shared. Pip is fairly difficult to use, to the extent that Python people have created lots of alternatives.

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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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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

I really like Asus. My current and previous laptop are both Zenbooks. The previous one is 11 years old and still works great--I only upgraded because I wanted more RAM. They also work great with Linux if your student ever decides to make the jump.

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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

R Basics introduces everything you need to get started. It covers both base R and a few Tidyverse functions for carrying out some common data analysis tasks. It also includes a variety of case studies that use open data (often from California Open Data).

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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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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

You're not! Human languages are really imprecise.

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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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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

+1, Mint is the distro that usually just works without a lot of extra config.

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

The Peng You x Farmer Mai event RSVP ended Feb 14 🫠

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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Little Morocco Cafe is delicious and only 2 blocks away.

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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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But Andrew Hickey Died Ten Years Ago This Very Night @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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Nick Ulle @ulletide.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

New Delhi in San Rafael. And +1 for Sol Food. Also Emporio Rulli in Larkspur for lunch dates.

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Rav BOO!dram 🎃👻 @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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