iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It’s shameful that doctors, nurses, teachers, are only valued during a crisis. That’s why during normal times you still need to clang pots and pans as loud as possible for as long as possible once they’ve finished a shift! Don’t let them sleep until you have! That way they know you really care!

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Hey man I’m just saying that if you don’t love me at my brief clarifying question then you don’t deserve me at my 8-15k illuminating the fundamental nature of the concept

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Reposted by Melissa

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

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I learned from a podcast that two of the most effective antidotes for hedonic adaptation are (i) cultivating a very good memory because then you never forget how much better things are now than they were before and (ii) just absolutely classic gratitude journaling stuff lol

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ahem *clears throat as if to say something very profound* you can’t spell vibe without IBE

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Joe Stieb @joestieb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Absolutely no one is surprised by this kind of news anymore. The issue is whether a company will ever rise to the occasion by being totally transparent, communicating with the govt through proper channels, thereby earning trust and opening the door to actually fair, safe, regulated, and free use.

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Total death penalty abolition is the only acceptable thing

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Yesterday’s Enterprise might not only be a top five overall TNG but I think it might also have the actual best pre-credit opening!

The nature of my specific mental illness makes it very important that I surround myself with reliable epistemic agents—people who are kinda over-thinkers like me, and who have a commitment to truth and inquiry and such so that I can rely on them to really think things through with me if I need!

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The very fabric of society requires wifeguys being cringe (laudatory) on Main Street. Without wifeguys to balance the fuccbois in the ecosystem a society will inevitably decline into disrepair! Or madness!

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Okay so “Once bitten, twice shy”: Plausibly, overall bites just 2x shyness. 3 bites makes you 6 shy. Or… the second bite doubles your base shyness (2 shy after the first bite). So now you’re 4 shy. Third bite, 8 shy? But that means bitten 6 times is 12 *or* 64 units of shy!!!!!?? What say ye

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AG Holdier (Academic Job Applicant Edition) @agholdier.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

All the girlies on Threads are talking about having a competence kink so I am gonna write the next 50 Shades of Grey. All the sex stuff is all still bdsm but the rest of the time is explaining what everyone’s job is and everyone being really good at it. I am going to make one gajillion dollars btw.

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this just reminded me to renew my APA membership

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I don’t know if this is just passive aggression or if it’s galaxy-brained Buddhistic zen pilled, but if a person lies to me and I know they are lying I will basically never confront them about it. I will simply be silent and act exactly as I would as if I fully believed them while privately knowing

When I was in Bayeux with my fam my mom bought this pillow as a keepsake because “the horsies are smiling”

A pillow embroidered with a scene from the tapestry of horses (smiling) with their soldiers on a ship. Lola napping in the background.

“Is AI useful?” doesn’t generate meaningful disagreement imo. AI is useful to different people in different ways according to their specific position and context—like cars vs. public transportation. I know exactly how to use AI, I know when it is useful for me and why, I know its limits and dangers.

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I think the opening monologue in Patton (1970) might be the swaggiest—and morally best?—expression of American patriotism in existence. What do you mean George C. Scott is showing up with psycho level gravitas and talking about killing Nazis in full military discipline. Come onnnnn bruhhhh

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I’ll add that I’ve done it the insurers website way and insurance company documents are basically always years out of date—they are static documents until they are updated, in which case they are good info to guide action for an indeterminate amount of time

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Okay so if I said e-gal-itarian capit-gal-ism how would you feel about it

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Has anyone put that Mary Kate and Ashley meme—about how the opposite of fire isn’t ice the opposite of fire is no fire—in a philosophy lecture because I think it’d really bang

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If anyone asks me to perceive things I simply link @rosenovick.com's poem to them and smile serenely

(It appears crooked, that half-submerged)
It appears crooked, that half-submerged
stick, but it is not.
How much mischief hides in that appears;
how much more in that
is not. A whole world of confusion –
no, two: the real one
and the apparent alike dwell there,
by their requited
antipathy sustained. Stick, you are
a trickster, wearing
now this face, now that, shrugging off each
as the medium
demands. Now, you resemble a stick,
straight (enough), hung half
in water, half air, tossing off light
in patterns wholly
sensible, under such conditions.
(Do I ask too much
of you, stick? You’re only a stick. Still:
no thoughts but in things.
Maybe better: no things but in thoughts.
It comes to the same.)
My eye, unused to light in water,
denies the water
though it sees it, certain: only air.
Worlds the fruit of this
first disobedience, worlds that split
you, stick, in two: real
and less than real, body and shadow.
Do I ask too much
of you? But I ask only that you
appear as you are,
and this you’d do without my asking.
What is more (I trust,
stick, I am not boring you with all
this babbling), I
have heard a most curious report.
I have heard: no stick.
I have heard: no air, no water, no
light, no things, no thoughts.

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Discourse is bad when it’s a bunch of strangers on the internet who I don’t agree with but when discourse is me and all my friends? Well in that case discourse is very very good—the very foundation of society, intellectual progress, and innovation even

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Stardew Valley—a perfect game as is—should offer VegPlotter as DLC for people who desperately want a kitchen garden of their own and love learning and being cozy at the same time 😭

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So there I was lovingly and meticulously formulating my all-things-considered judgments and External Stimuli had the motherfucking audacity to eliminate all my work, bypass rationality, and invoke one or maximum two of all the things that needed to be considered smdh

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

there are lots of plausible AI risks, I don't think any of them involve emergent machine gods, and the superintelligence bullshit mostly avoids talking about regulation and handling of the real problems.

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USER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Women supporting women is a beautiful thing

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Ok so my next article is on self love and self care and just a PSA none of y’all need to worry about these topics anymore because I’ve got it all figured out 😉

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This week we celebrated my mom’s bday!!! She is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, and she has never let me forget the importance of resting and having fun. Shoutout to the goat fr 🥰

Young pic of my mom, swagged out immigrant style

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ahhh but you see I would never fake a Star Trek academic paper

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Very Greek tragedy thing about LLMs is that they simulataneously provide clear evidence that writing is extremely important to cognition while they also cause people to stop doing it.

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Contemporary philosophers catch a lot of shit for soul-less or tonally cold writing, especially when the abstract or signposting looks like this: first I will present claims (i), (ii), and (iii), which entail (iv), and so on. But I think that is unfair! It is a genre that’s just optimized, imo,

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Which theory of autonomy or agency do you think best makes sense of the way pop psychologists talk about the importance of self-efficacy i.e. truly believing that you can in fact do something, through self-enforcement if need be. It seems *the belief that you won’t succumb to akrasia* is important

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reposted by Melissa

if you bring coffee to a job interview you should bring enough for everyone, obviously

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Okay ok one last thought as I fall asleep… Panopticon except it’s totally woke bc it’s sex club and the so-called prisoners have an exhibitionist kink and the so-called guard is a voyeur Goodnight :)

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What’s cool about being raised Catholic and then going into philosophy is that my closest friends and family have *always* known me to enjoy whimsically speaking Latin in conversation as if that’s a normal thing to do. Mea maxima culpa? Sure. Ceteris paribus though? Absolvo te 😌

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Borges story where a man distrusts his lover so much that he invents a machine to look into her subconscious, but the images are so fragmented and confusing that he has to invent a second machine to interpret the output of the first machine…

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Me reading one footnote from Infinite Jest

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Saying “that really hurt my feelings” is grown up behavior—hiding when your feelings are hurt is what’s child-like

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Melissa @yournerdyfriend.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I can’t help but wonder about some of these legacy politicians… I find their behavior actually mystifying. Is it a radical lack of empathy? Is it cowardice? Do they enjoy lying? Are they so paralyzed by the prospect of losing power that they’ve lost the ability to take action or make choices?

My diagnosis of the Stancil vs philosophy bsky situation right now is that two disagreements are taking place at the same time in a way that keeps the waters very muddy: disagreement about right conduct for public debate, disagreement about what counts as good evidence for claims X, Y, or Z

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Philosophy Bits @philosophybits.com · 23/09/2026

Ask a person how they talk to themselves when they are getting in the headspace to do a very difficult thing (e.g. hit a weightlifting pr, give a high stakes presentation, send a vulnerable text or email) and you’ll really learn a lot about them You might be shocked at how diff people are from you!

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“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, vol 1 (October 1945)

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Honestly my preferred solution (mind you, my experience is junior faculty in the philosophy dept for three years and absolutely no administrative experience beyond that) is no LLM use in all liberal arts classes in fresh/soph year. I think in liberal arts you need protected time to do things the

I sat in on teaching demos by profs in the education department and their main focus was exactly this. When is cognitive offloading harmful? How do we create a code of conduct for AI integration in the classroom when it’s a question people can reasonably disagree about?

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I’ve always thought that for any political movement choosing your rhetoric, your first round draft pick has gotta be Rationality or Truth, and that’s what frustrated me as an undergrad seeing my peers wanting to translate post structural critical theory stuff into actionable political praxis

Thinking of open-mindedness and creativity as Aristotelian intellectual virtues—openness to conspiracy theories is an instance of the vice of excess and certain forms of localized science denial (e.g. accepts vaccines but denies climate change) is the vice of deficit