iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 54m

It would be a real shame if people here let the folks at Patreon know that Michael Tracey led the charge to help doxx Jane Doe from Cornell. A damn shame. Please don't.

static.klipy.com

Willy Wonka: Stop. Don't. Come Back.

Alt: Willy Wonka: Stop. Don't. Come Back.

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Heather @alainnfocail.bsky.social · 3h

Important:

Bradish, Basallo, and Alonso holding kittens.

Pete Alonso looking down at a kitten giving it a kissy face

Pete Alonso holding a kitten looking at the camera

Pete Alonso and Samuel Basallo holding kittens. Sammy is having the best time.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

I've lived in this place so long that when my browser informed me it was in the middle of a "TLS handshake", my immediate thought was "oh no—is that legal in this state‽!!"

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 11h

So wild to me that the entire economy is propped up by companies who think living your best life is being a middle manager to a collection of bots.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 11h

"We don't 'engineer prompts' any longer; we 'orchestrate agents'. 'Engineering' was at least two breathless hype cycles ago!"

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 13h

This whole thread is full of great ideas. (Yes, even for those of us without kids of our own, but who care deeply about our niblings and neighbors.)

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 26/09/2026

Microsoft's data center subcontractor in New Jersey illegally runs a bunch of gas "backup" generators on site, figuring they won't get caught or will just eat the wrist-slap fines if they do. Regulatory enforcement is so bad that a third party had to take drone images to get the state to act.

theguardian.com

New Jersey datacenter fined $1.1m after visual investigation showed dozens of unpermitted generators

State regulator’s record fine for DataOne facility in Vineland follows Floodlight investigation with the Guardian

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Library Futures @libraryfutures.bsky.social · 13h

Looking to fight misinformation and improve your community? Look no further! Our libraries and local news series kicks off tomorrow and there's still time to register! nyu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 13h

"Learning the terminology of a knowledge domain"? Let's call that "unnatural language processing". Maybe people who know stuff can even extol its virtues as a complex set of skills one has to slowly install in your own language using apparatus.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social · 16h

This Day in Labor History: September 29, 1917. The Army intervenes in the strikes of the Northwest forests and sends in the military to get out the wood for airplanes. It both busted the IWW and also massively improved conditions on the ground for workers. Let's talk about this unusual moment!

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 23h

nosferatYou™ will let you become more. Forever.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 29/09/2026

No matter how much acclaim Buffy & Veronica Mars receive, they'll still be underrated in terms of helping young men be better equipped to understand & actively anticipate intervening in the various sexual assault scenarios that other men repeatedly create. Bring back "feminist riot nrrrd" media.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 29/09/2026

Claims like this are ones where you need to repeatedly read the phrase aloud, changing emphasis with each iteration. "THEY won't publish hacked FBI data" vs "they won't PUBLISH hacked FBI data" vs "they won't publish hacked FBI DATA", etc.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 28/09/2026

going offline to start a neighborhood "moka pot gamelan" project

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 28/09/2026

Inside which of the new Company Town environments do you want your devices to opaquely restrict access to and/or synthesize representations of information today? Will they accept what little remaining company scrip you have access to from yesterday's choice?

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Lori Emerson @loriemerson.net · 28/09/2026

still recruiting for our MA and PhD programs! and for the record, prospective international students are very much welcome to apply---

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 28/09/2026

The City of Lost Gatsbies Gatsby of Montreal A Gatsby of Their Own Gatsby IV: The Voyage Home Koyaanisgatsby

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 27/09/2026

_The Agony and the Ecstasy: an Autobiographical Novel of Selecting What to Read Next_

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wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Meanwhile, while we're all simultaneously horrified by Faine's must-read threads on abuse permission structures within the "AI Safety" world/sportsball scores/fascist capture of democracy/etc., Jonny's still cookin' on the surveillance capitalism disaster that is Meta Muse.

This is I think the most consequential thing I found in the muse VM, or at least the thing that would be most worth following up on. there are no other plain string matches I can see for what uses it, I'm looking in the binaries now, but the comment seems to indicate pretty clearly that a) meta uses anthropic's models internally, presumably to develop the thing (the code, comments, and skill text reek of claude), but also b) they use some kind of internal proxy that intercepts and proxies all requests to anthropic's API. the only reason I can think of for doing that would be model distillation.

OH what's this???

/etc/hatch/env

hmm a feature flag labeled as a "killswitch" for proxying requests to anthropic is certainly interesting to seeeeeeeeeeeee in meta's big AI bet.

edit: sorry to be a bit cryptic here, the implication was definitely corporate espionage, more clearly said:

The system prompts are indeed in the hatch binary and are the things that contain all the behavioral guidance. I cannot for the life of me figure out why every AI company decided to make system prompts be a clientside thing rather than something that gets injected serverside. Like maybe some you're supposed to be able to edit, but not things that influence malicious behavior?!?

The entire security posture here, if there is one, is oriented around preventing the LLM from misbehaving, but having the entire context be user-editable and user-visible is a sort of mind-blowing neglect of a misbehaving user. even for the "fully transparent agent" they're trying to do, it makes very little sense to store the full message logs of the subagents including reasoning output. That basically gives me a full map to see what the LLM is consulting when it refuses commands. I would also bet money that the system prompts are strings in the hatch binary even though that makes no sense to have clientside, but haven't looked.

Am working on responsible disclosure so will pause thread, but unrelated to that I do want to say that this experiment in continual, boundariless context window backed up by infinitely refreshing context summary in the form of accumulating markdown documents works terribly compared to environments where you can control the context. Like that is an absolutely fundamental part of using these things and muse demonstrates that the "tree of markdown summaries" really does not work.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 27/09/2026

At this point, though, if someone contends they've never even heard of "earthrise.ninja.2" or Shadow Records OR Ninja Tune, it may pose an excellent opportunity to invite them into the fold. #nowListening

youtu.be

Earthrise.Ninja.2 (compilation album CD 1)

YouTube video by Scotto Moore

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 27/09/2026

In retrospect, my "remain obstinately aghast at the 'Higher Ed & Concussion Ball Exploitation Matrix' for decades" experience probably should have better prepared me for higher ed's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Slopforce™ Platforms" turn. And yet.

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Andi Zeisler @andizeisler.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The connections being drawn between the Cornell 7 and Brock Turner bring up something crucial: The outrage at Turner’s insanely light sentence has ultimately made it impossible for him to blend back into society. Where legal redress failed, community stepped in to make sure no one would forget.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 27/09/2026

Quietly asking DH lazyweb friends: Does anyone happen to have a beginner tutorial for focused web scraping (getting linked info out of lists on a person's own site), **specifically on Windows**? I've done something similar with Beautiful Soup, but not enough to give Tracy helpful suggestions.

tracydurnell.com

Learning scripting by scraping my own website – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

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Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I have been reading @annaleen.bsky.social's book about cities (highly recommend, btw!) and learning about how archeologists use LIDAR to find sites of former cities, so I am charmed that scientists use it to weigh bears!

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 26/09/2026

Today's tech weirdness (of the old-fashioned variety): - digging deep into Harper documentation (mostly to make spellcheck squiggles more visible in my new editor) - discomfort over Harper being an Automattic joint - discovering a useful config template via an *archived, not current* GitHub repo

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Reposted by Ryan Randall

Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 25/09/2026

Riker DuckDuckGoing: > Does the vampire named Lestat appear in the film version of "Interview with an Iced Coffee"?

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 26/09/2026

We don't hear enough about the unnatural and/or antisocial sciences these days.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 25/09/2026

Riker DuckDuckGoing: > Does the vampire named Lestat appear in the film version of "Interview with an Iced Coffee"?

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AAUP @aaup.org · 25/09/2026

Join us on Monday, 9/28 to learn why billionaires like Marc Rowan want to destroy academic freedom & how faculty, campus workers, & students can fight back to defend the freedom to teach, learn, research & speak out without government censorship. RSVP 👇 us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

THE BILLIONAIRE ATTACK ON UNIVERSITIES
RSVP TO THE WEBINAR
9/28 @ 3 P.M. ET

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 25/09/2026

People are bringing "iced coffee surveillance" discourse to the "let's critique luxury surveillance" platform?

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🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 25/09/2026

I read the article on which this story is based and I can't believe that journals are still accepting research about predatory publishing based on **Beall's List** www.timeshighereducation.com/news/china-s...

timeshighereducation.com

China ‘spends $7 million’ on research for retracted papers

With country now holding largest share of research retractions globally, scholars hope putting a number on the problem will trigger action

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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 25/09/2026

Not them asking for a little privacy 😭😭😭😭

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 25/09/2026

Using a fancy, fun new code editor is all fun & delight until you realize you haven't enabled spell check in a way that lets you perceive typos as you make changes to your website. (Also, huge THANK YOU to person who reached out about that! The internet can indeed still be kind sometimes!)

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 24/09/2026

Much like planting trees, the best time to build a regional light rail system was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

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Mike Hoerger, PhD, MSCR, MBA @michael-hoerger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The top graph shows our county-level COVlD map using the CDC's Standard Benchmarks. The bottom map shows the downshifted levels under the CDC's new system. This really makes a difference for early warning in the middle categories. I've highlighted 5 areas.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 24/09/2026

Tiniest smol thing I've learned in the last few weeks that keeps blowing my mind: the CommonMark flavor of Markdown lets you indicate a new line with a backslash (\, which is visible) as an alternative to the usual two spaces ( , which is my muscle memory, ergonomic, & often invisible by default).

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Yes, because it helps you avoid being a mark and to place accountability in people making these tools. Hope that helps.

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Roopika Risam @roopikarisam.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Wow: “To be a librarian is to dance along the cracks of the institution, engaged in a thousand small teaching acts.” Good thing this is OA or I’ll soon be in violation of copyright.

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Abigail Goben @hedgielib.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"Can you come and talk to them about AI usage and the risks?" -- it was a request from an *extremely* frustrated faculty colleague. And so I put together this framework. The ACToRS in AI Framework hedgehoglibrarian.com/2026/09/22/t...

hedgehoglibrarian.com

The ACToRS in AI Framework

About a year ago I was invited to give a lecture designed to spark critical thinking in graduate students when considering using generative AI and other tools that had started applying the “a…

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 23/09/2026

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (aka "putting updates on my own site before announcing them on sociable media").

ryanpatrickrandall.com

“Ryan P. Randall’s website”

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Andy Famiglietti @afamiglietti.org · 23/09/2026

Your own personal shadows on the wall of your own individualized cave. Plato's Narcissus.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 23/09/2026

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (aka "putting updates on my own site before announcing them on sociable media").

ryanpatrickrandall.com

“Ryan P. Randall’s website”

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Every person running on the Dem side can say: 1. The GOP controls all branches of government. 2. Are you happy with how things are going? 3. Vote blue. 4. What do you have to lose? [use Trump's own words against him]. The end. lol.

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Will Burrows 🖖🥖🥀 @reforest-kelley.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

In a few months it'll be 32°F (0°C) and I'll be like "this is positively balmy" but at the moment it's a bit chilly

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 23/09/2026

Commodore 🌈 64 (My dad got it to use as a super fancy word processor, and my brother & I used it for Carmen Sandiego, a few other video games & Print Shop.) A computer so good, indie rock bands famously wrote songs about their exploits with it!

youtu.be

C-64

YouTube video by Barcelona - Topic

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 22/09/2026

Setting up a new-to-me work computer & once again realizing that the sheer open source beauty that is Homebrew cannot be overstated. Its maintainers deserve all the love. brew.sh

brew.sh

Homebrew

The Package Manager for Everywhere.

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