iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Victoria Strauss @victoriastrauss.com · 20h

Canada is refusing to issue ISBNs to books primarily generated with AI. This illustrates both the urgency of the problem of the growing flood of slop books, and also the toothlessness of addressing it on the honor system without there also being consequences for lying

Use of artificial intelligence
By registering with ISBN Canada, you declare that your book was created by a human author. You may use AI tools only for limited support tasks, such as brainstorming ideas, checking grammar, or formatting your book. You must not use AI to generate the text, create the artwork, or translate the book. ISBN Canada does not issue ISBNs for works whose content is primarily generated by AI. LAC is currently reviewing its policy regarding the use of AI content creation and our guidance is subject to change.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You're welcome. And absolutely!

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"What are we doing by ceding our ability to take intellectual pleasure to a machine?" 👇

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is all so well articulated. I'm going to share an extract in my first-year Essay Writing workshop tomorrow. AI unfortunately takes up a lot of bandwith, but the ferocity with which the PR-flavoured coolaid is poured out and amplified does need push-back.

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Micha Pajocel @michapajocel.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026

If you want to view your Bluesky profile as a customizable contact sheet, try 'planche-contact' : skyprint.click/contactsheet Made with love in Brussels. Any idea to improve the tool is welcome ! #photography

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Joanne Harris @joannechocolat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Book festivals, please, PLEASE don’t use AI to write author bios and book descriptions. Currently, I am being advertised as attending a festival next month for a talk about a book that doesn’t exist…

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Please do share or point to the evidence (and tell me it includes not only AI use, but also model training). I'm puzzled how business as usual re: electric use is good environmental politics.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The question is whether introducing a new technology is environmentally harmful, not just whether it is less harmful than others. Any technology will be less harmful than global shipping, responsible for the biggest portion of energy use. Also, AI's energy use is just one in a long string of harms.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Given the backlash against Net Zero, I'm not hopeful that some future offsetting of AI energy use is something we can hold out for. Also we need to consider where we've been blindsided by other energy uses: we think about flying, sometimes about driving, but not streaming or arguing on social media.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A lot of responses here are 'I don't use it myself but I see why others might'. The this is 'just a tool' argument always bypasses environmental and other forms of harm. Compare fast fashion: very convenient, but the harms are conveniently invisible.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Basilica of the Dominican Order of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #photographersofbluesky #travelphotography #photodaily #church #interior #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #Lumenira #NoAI New portfolio: lumenira.com/user/wvmierlo

Looking down the nave of the church towards the west entrance. The church is decorated with real trees. The atmosphere is deliberately dark.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Basilica of the Dominican Order of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #photodaily #church #interior #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #Lumenira #NoAI New portfolio: lumenira.com/user/wvmierlo

Interior of the church with two angels and a set of candles in front of a spiral staircase. The photo is deliberately shadowy contrasting with strong sunlight on the left.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That's going to be a big chart next to the letter! :)

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Basilica of the Dominican Order of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #church #interior #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #Lumenira #NoAI New portfolio: lumenira.com/user/wvmierlo

Looking down the nave towards the high altar. The church is decorated with real trees.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yesterday I received a letter from DWP informing me of the date I can officially retire. I might frame this and hang it on my office wall.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Basilica of the Dominican Order of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #photographyersofbluesky #church #interior #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #Lumenira #NoAI New portfolio: lumenira.com/user/wvmierlo

Interior of the church: the sunlit tiled floor contrasts with the heavy shadows around it.

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

University of Nottingham UCU branch @uonucu.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Our strike action began today. The management at our university has seemingly shackled itself to course closures and compulsory redundancies, despite neither being financially necessary. So we fight for our members, our students, and our community until they change their minds.

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A. Feder Cooper @afedercooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Our large-scale study of memorization of books in open-weight LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen) will appear at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling as an oral. We made a website for exploring our results on 200 books and 14 models: books-memorization.github.io

books-memorization.github.io

How much do open-weight LLMs memorize specific books?

Open-weight LLMs memorize books far more than previously believed. Memorization varies by model family, model size, and book. In extreme cases, entire books are memorized, and we can generate them eff...

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Where's the Ladybird 'Story of Pens' when you need it? 😂

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Basilica of the Dominican Order of St. Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr, Lublin | May 2026 #photographersofbluesky #photography #travelphotography #church #interior #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

Interior of a church: two religious statues are basking in strong light, while the rest is in shadows. Interestingly, the church is decorated with real trees and foliage.

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Good Law Project @goodlawproject.org · 27/09/2026

Over 85,000 people have asked their local NHS Trust to say no to Palantir. Time is running out, so every email counts. Will you email your local trust and ask them to stand against Palantir? notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/ema…

notopalantir.goodlawproject.org

Say no to Palantir in the NHS

NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir - fight back

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Mick Houghton @mickh5.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There's something photogenic about an old window that I don't often resist. Over the years I will have taken many images of a wide variety of windows and today was no exeption. This is the Ship Inn at Sandside; it's been closed for a good while now and is very unlikely to reopen as a pub.

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Mick Houghton @mickh5.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Another from our Morecambe prom wander at weekend!

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Street corner, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #photographersofbluesky #travelphotography #street #shadows #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

In the old town, a street corner captured with strong shadows.

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Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 26/09/2026

Genuinely, half of me thinks the main area of AI experimentation going on right now is in how fully the concept of an "ai agent" can legally indemnify its operators

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Street corner, Lublin | May 2026 #photography #photographersofbluesky #travelphotography #street #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

In the old city, an empty street with a bench, captured with strong shadows.

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Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Week 1 of Austen’s Afterlives today - the module that’s being simultaneously abolished and used as a TEF excellence case study. This is just some of the tat and fan culture we’ll look at alongside her works, adaptations, sequels and retellings. They like The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen but…

A collection of Austen ephemera: a Darcy bobblehead; Austen’s History of England, Pride and Prejudish sponge, a crochet Jane Austen, the Austen board game and card game, Austen soap and an Austen seed tray.

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Five Leaves Bookshop @fiveleavesbooks.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Why we don't stock certain books... An example is this book. The retail price is £22.00 but you can buy a copy in Tesco for £11. We can't blame you for doing that. The price to us from the publisher would be £12.10 as they discriminate against small shops on discount.

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

Laura Cleaver @laurajcleaver.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Marking the 350th anniversary of the oldest English book auction catalogue, this year’s book trade history conference returns to the theme of auctions. 🧑‍⚖️ 📚 London 22-23 November, book now at www.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

sas.ac.uk

47th Annual Conference on Book Trade History | Battling Over Books: Auction Catalogues and Their Contexts, 1676-2026

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Reposted by Wim Van Mierlo

John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking.

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review. Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage. To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.

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Melissa Terras @melissaterras.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

UKRI is using AI for grant reviewing. Alternatively, they could have modernised the grant review process by paying human reviewers for their labour, ensuring a wider pool and speedy turnaround. Using AI here is likely a race to the bottom: uniqueness is at risk of being ironed out. What a world.

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Good Law Project @goodlawproject.org · 24/09/2026

Make sure you get down to your local protest next week and join the international day of action to say NO to Palantir ❌ Not able to make it? Take action with our digital tool instead 👇 goodlaw.social/74abab

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Lublin Cathedral | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #cathedral #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

Interior of Lublin Cathedral, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. A side alter with religious paining in the centre is brightly lit, with the rest of the image, faintly showing pillars and other religious objects, in dark shadows.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Lublin Cathedral | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #cathedral #photomonday #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

Interior of a baroque cathedral looking towards the high altar.

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Art Herstory @artherstory.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Coming up Oct 2, in person & online – In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing before 1920 Women and the Arts Forum Conference 2026 A collaboration of the National Gallery, London; the Women’s Art Collection; & the Univ of St. Andrews Full schedule: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/confe...

A painted extract from Dorothy Wordsworth's diary with cursive text in black) which describes the foxgloves in a painting (not visible here) and expresses the joy that her natural surroundings bring her.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Lublin Cathedral | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #cathedral #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The fire hydrant series may well be my favourite 🔥

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This a wonderful new zine. Take a look. Well worth your while 👇📷 #photography #zine #aofoto

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This is a beauty. As you say, it's so rewarding to slow down and look at these wonderful images. Congratulations one and all!

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Whitney Trettien @whitneytrettien.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In an essay from 1950, Norbert Weiner describes a guy who buys a player piano. It's clear he doesn't care about music, he's only interested in the mechanics of the thing. For Weiner, this is the difference between KNOW-HOW (technical skill) and KNOW-WHAT (how to use tech for human flourishing).

Quote from Norbert Weiner reading: "Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player-piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not correspond to any
particular interest in the music played by the piano but rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism. For this gentleman, the player-piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving
some inventor the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music. This is an estimable attitude in a second-year high-school student. How estimable it is in one of those on whom the whole cultural future of the country depends, I leave to the reader."

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This sounds all-too familiar 👇

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

You are dead right. I've been in this situation for years now. Workload-wise the fragmentation of teaching looks the same as a regular timetable, but having no routine incrementally impacts on well-being.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Lublin | May 2026 #photography #travelphotography #Lublin #Poland #Nikon #NoAI Prints for sale: www.saal-digital.net/profiles/wim...

An art installation with large flying bird hung high above the street between buildings.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Any parallel with Finnegans Wake is also based on a misconception of how meaning and language work in the Wake.

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Wim Van Mierlo @wvmierlo.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Another explanation might that these systems are just spouting randomised text that humans are now looking a pattern for. It also makes me wonder: Could it be that poetry these LLMs have ingested en masse is now poisoning the outputs?

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