iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 1h

I'm already a couple chapters into Barbara Foley's _Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941_. It's fascinating both for her various arguments and how she knowingly engages in & critiques various postmodern ways of thinking. #BookSky (my 2026 📖🧵)

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 1h

On 20th October I'll be participating in an online panel hosted by Indiana University Bloomington titled 'The Cost of Openness: AI, Extraction, and Scholarly Governance'

events.iu.edu

The Cost of Openness: AI, Extraction, and Scholarly Governance

Generative AI has intensified a long-standing governance gap in scholarly communication.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

Which patterns do you see repeating? i.e., Is it basically people taking their mostly-established orientations to new topics of discussion, or is is that a topic of discussion starts out with Field A, spreads to Field B, then into Field C?

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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 3h

it's almost as if poststructuralists were on to something

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 4h

In 2024, I was diagnosed with HPV again and had to have LEEP surgery for an 8% chance of cervical cancer. I did general instead of localized anaesthesia and it cost me $1600+ with insurance, plus $40 per appointment with my OB-GYN. And the Gardasil vaccine has been approved for adults up to age 45!

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 8h

Put differently, it feels like some people mostly see tasks, while other people have a robust mental model of "mental models". These orientations almost certainly complement each other in practice, but the prospect of AI misuse undermining a strongly-shared mental model feels dangerous & palpable.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 8h

I'm in a new position, and it's been fascinating to see who approaches the team's very nicely-architected documentation in terms of information architecture & who asks an LLM to summarize it to explain a given task or acronym.

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Ryan Randall @www.ryanpatrickrandall.com · 8h

who called them "puns" when "sem(e/)antics" was right there?

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Lauren Necochea @laurennecochea.bsky.social · 18h

We should all be livid. And it's still happening every day.

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 17h

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 · 20h

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 · 20h

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 · 29/09/2026

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 · 29/09/2026

"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 · 29/09/2026

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 · 29/09/2026

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 · 29/09/2026

"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 · 29/09/2026

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 · 29/09/2026

nosferatYou™ will let you become more. Forever.

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

That's impressive! Huge (&& strange) congrats!

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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

Do you happen to have any opinions or experiences with Proton's services?

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

Precisely. And also leaves room for, e.g. "We didn't publish the hacked employee data! We published the already-public information that just happens to correlate to the exact people we found on this hacked list of employees!"

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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

Some of the biggest adopters I know or work with are ADHD (as am I)—but my immediate reaction to these tools has instead always been "why would I want to be gaslit at scales beyond my ability to verify what's actually happening?" The tools feel to me like maintenance debt, never accessibility aids.

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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

Oh, sorry—I was going to link to an example, then got distracted while trying to find something that 100% wouldn't be a spoiler. This isn't necessarily the most interesting entry, but it'll avoid potential spoilers! memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder

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

Spouse & I absolutely binge-watched DS9 a few years ago (the beginning of my Star Trek love), and when we saw stuff referenced on Lower Decks, we definitely had to run to the Memory Alpha site. There's a lot of story to remember!

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

Thanks! I was planning to share that site's "Intro to … Powershell" but had only seen the title of this OpenRefine one. I'll pass it along as maybe promising.

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

I've got 3 or 5 guides I've already started putting in an email to help her "triangulate" toward what she wants to do, but I feel like I've seen almost her precise scenario addressed in a tutorial somewhere in the last couple years.

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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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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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