iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 5h

The DNC is going to make this man President.

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Reposted by Michael Scott Balch, PhD

David Kaib @davidkaib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Everyone should get to be as educated as they want. Education is a public good.

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Otterly EA @ohmalarkey.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The fun thing about reading Novum Organum, as a "classic," is that Francis Bacon is the biggest STEM-bro that ever STEM-bro'd. The first half of that book could've come off a Reddit forum, and that's the good half. I love it. I hate it. It's whatever.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What if class enemy, but good? Because BLUE!

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Dr Eleanor Janega @goingmedieval.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I didn't even have time to get to the whole Robinhood thing. Like what is going on here? And what will it take for people to realise social history exists?

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Every coward seems courageous,🎶 in the safety of a crowd!🎶 Bravery can be contagious,🎶 when the band is playing loud!🎶 [guy who definitely understands theater etiquette, watching a live performance of Hadestown]: Hey, fuck you, you capitalist fuck! Let's see how tough you are without your thugs!

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"At least he's not a CIA agent," I say, as I pull pull the lever for an elderly car salesman with AI psychosis. That is the situation here in VA-08.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's wild that I'm an associate editor at a civil engineering journal, but they do have some juicy UQ problems.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We must put the American populace back into a center-right mass media echo chamber that implicitly treats poor people, migrants, and people in other countries as grist for the mill. That will fix our fascism problem, for sure. F O R S U R E

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David Kaib @davidkaib.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Historically a lot of tech adoption was about being perceived as ahead of the curve, but so much of ‘AI’ talk is baselessly insisting we are all at the end of the curve.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Honestly, corporate backing for right-wing conspiracy theories isn't even new. America's long-term relationship with fascism is like a small child's juice cup teetering at the edge of the table. When it falls, it feels like a big change. But unless you are that child, it shouldn't be a surprise.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I have checked my pickled veggies. They appear to be free of vermin. 2026, baby!

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Two last Will Stancil thoughts: (1) Most of the specifically Leftist conspiracy theories from 50 years ago ended up just being true. The gov't has come clean about basically all of it except JFK.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I know I'm raging out about yesterday's little bout of engineer-sneer discourse, but I do want to send some love to all the public-facing humanities people and political agitators who make it possible for guys like me to learn humanities stuff outside of a college environment.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

MFer literally has a degree in American History. Was he unfamiliar with what the American food system looked like prior to heavy technocratic regulation? Because I, a grubby STEM-lord with my lowly AP US History credits, knew what it looked like.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(1) This all happened a century ago with radio and pamphlets. (2) The people who own and control the formerly gatekept "legacy media" are literally the exact same people who funded Trump 2. (3) You're using dime-store red-scare Russophobia to explain our society's ills, you cheap BlueMAGA shill.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

OH SHIT, IS THAT WILL STANCIL'S MUSIC????

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If you cannot clock Will Stancil's jingoistic propaganda for the absolute drivel that it is, then your precious humanities degree is not worth the paper it was printed on. It's like a degreed engineer not knowing how negative numbers work, a thing that unfortunately also happens.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ah, yes, conspiracy theories, the unique ancestral talent of those wily Communist Russians, a thing that held no purchase in American culture prior to the internet.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Engineers aren't so tough. I learned calculus by reading Newton and Leibniz." Okay, so first of all, that is a psychotic way to learn calculus. Don't do that. Secondly, what you learned from Newton and Leibniz is what I learned in high school to *qualify* for engineering.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

All the professions need each other. Everybody needs to stop acting like their type of knowledge is the only type of knowledge that *really* matters. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Let's also be clear about another thing: A lot of credentialed engineers suck, as engineers, much in the same way that there are humanities graduates who write risible capitalist apologia for The Atlantic.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I'm going to defend this guy, a little. The only way aerospace engineering works as a four-year degree is if you test out of half of freshman year. Y'all don't know what you don't know about an engineering degree. We are literate in the physical universe, and it takes a lot of work to get there.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It struck me just now that DOE is only one letter away from DOGE. That's acronym magic, baby!

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My least favorite thing in Civ 6 is when a computer player builds Great Zimbabwe as a pure spoiler, deriving no trade benefit from it whatsoever.

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Jason O. Gilbert @gilbertjasono.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

AI EXECUTIVE (bragging about his product): Using this every day has made me incredibly stupid

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The AI bubble will pop and/or may have started popping a couple days ago with the New Mexico data center announcement. What will remain is distilled models that can run on your desktop and whatever the DOE is doing with LLMs.

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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Even more recently it still blows my mind that anyone is falling for it after they just did this with crypto. It’s like they ran a show for a season, cancelled it because nobody watched, and then just released it again with a different title. It’s the same cast! The same tactics!

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Losing faith in political institutions and traditional leaders is not "giving into despair". I can see what ordinary people are doing to resist those institutions, and I am very excited about it.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

JJ Abrams' absolute disdain for his chosen profession

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Carly Goodman @carlygoodman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It’s almost beyond comprehension how every person who leads an institution in this country is profoundly unfit for it

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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Fuck ChatGPT flyers. The future is broadsheets.

A crowded broadsheet with way too many fonts. It says:
Forget ChatGPT Flyers
Say it with
Broadsheets
Unlimited fonts
Stretch them
Or cram a really long sentence into one line for no good reason
No whitespace
Mix capital and lowercase
Pointing hands
(They're called manicules!)
Don't be left behind
Broadsheets are the future

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

An annoying side effect of casual Bayesianism in public discourse is the idea that no event has a probability of zero. I'm especially thinking of LLMs going Terminator. Lots of events have zero probability, including LLMs as AGI. Your ignorance does not breathe life into a physical impossibility.

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Michael Scott Balch, PhD @uqprofessional.bsky.social · 25/09/2026