iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 13h

the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 28/09/2026

I had no idea Napoleon was acquainted with the Martin Acres Neighborhood Association.

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Dreaming of a day an artist might create something like this for the waters beneath the ice of Enceladus and Europa; or even the surface of an oceanic exoplanet 🌊 (though in the latter case we'd be seeing wave expressions already thousands of years old)

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/09/2026

Trump fucked up the *American* renewable transition but he might have had the largest positive effect on the global transition of any president ever

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reminder that in Canada upon becoming an engineer you get an iron ring made of a collapsed bridge, purposely designed to be uncomfortable, to remind you that your ethics demand you give a fuck even about the boring grudgework of such as double-checking your math. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

en.wikipedia.org

Iron Ring - Wikipedia

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 24/09/2026

How would we even know if one of the frontier models had gzipped itself up into a 5 TB pr0n.tgz.torrent and was just chilling in Anna's Archive?

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 24/09/2026

This is the option that "energy independence" actually gives you. If you want to disconnect from the global market, you can. Wacky hijinx ensue!

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 23/09/2026

When I was a kid I'd go hiking in the Sierras or eastern CA desert with my dad and there would be no sign of other people. I'd imagine that civilization had collapsed, inspired by the stale apocalyptic fiction of the late Cold War. That we'd come out from the backcountry and there'd be nobody left.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 20/09/2026

Thankfully what my mediocre rural public high school couldn't do, graduating from Caltach in 5 years with a B- GPA took care of.

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Girls are socialized to engage in self-doubt. Boys generally do not benefit from that containment mechanism for ignorant over-confidence. Once you see the dynamic, you cannot unsee it.

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The most dangerous type of man is one with above-average but not genius intelligence who was told growing up that he was a very special boy. Many such cases.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 16/09/2026

Start a coop! Seriously, I love never ever having to think about this kind of crap even a tiny bit.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 14/09/2026

I am using the heavily subsidized tokens to cram as many bugfixes and performance improvements and new data validations into our pipeline as I can while the party lasts.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 13/09/2026

Hiroko is still out there somewhere.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 10/09/2026

Lol, it's the tabular data point-o-pacalypse. Am I really going to update all of these in the same ~month? Clankers, start your engines. * pandas 3.0 * duckdb 2.0 * splink 5.0 * dbt 2.0 * polars 2.0 * (+python 3.14)

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 10/09/2026

It feels like the US is running some kind of gonzo behavioral economics experiment. Like, what if we stripped unpopular but powerful climate policies of their climate connotations. Would they still work? Would they still be unpopular? Can we only the right things for the wrong reasons?

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 10/09/2026

Very likely to outperform at least 70% of active fund managers after expenses.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 10/09/2026

Ooof. The only way to win is not to play.

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Christo Silvia @christosilvia.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Chris Wright, welcome to the war on cars

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Catalyst Cooperative @catalyst.coop · 08/09/2026

Hey #EnergySky here's a monthly update of the FERC EQR data in our free, public S3 bucket. It's mostly late filings, fleshing out the 2026Q2 data release. Preview & download through the PUDL Data Viewer here: data.catalyst.coop/search?q=nam...

data.catalyst.coop

PUDL Data Viewer

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Catalyst Cooperative @catalyst.coop · 08/09/2026

And a reminder that we've got our own agent skill for navigating and querying the hundreds of tables and thousands of columns of data in PUDL, and all the rich metadata we've collected about them for years. #EnergySky docs.catalyst.coop/agent-skills/

docs.catalyst.coop

Home - Clanker Skills

Skills developed by Catalyst Cooperative to help clankers understand and work with the Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) project outputs and codebase..

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Catalyst Cooperative @catalyst.coop · 08/09/2026

A related conversation with the founder of Tessl, on the professionalization of agent skills and the whole agentic software engineering stack. What does it take to test and maintain these things long term? What are all the layers? podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/y...

podcasts.apple.com

You can't scale vibes (Guy Podjarny)

Podcast Episode · The Analytics Engineering Podcast · August 27 · 55m

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Catalyst Cooperative @catalyst.coop · 08/09/2026

A good 20 minute talk on how to empirically verify that the agent skills you create are actually doing what you think they're doing, and whether they're still even necessary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vph...

youtube.com

Don't Ship Skills Without Evals — Philipp Schmid, Google DeepMind

YouTube video by AI Engineer

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Why would the e scooters do this

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Leah Stokes @leahstokes.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It's publication day for The Carbon Wave! Thank you to everyone who has already bought a copy. Until Friday you can buy signed copies at Brookline Booksmith: brooklinebooksmith.com/book/9780262... Book tour: thecarbonwave.com/tour Book club: electricnotes.news/p/climate-bo...

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Kaz @kazlefay.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

You know how everything bad gets blamed on video games & the internet? I have a theory that it’s golf destroying our society. Few activities have such an outsized effect on the environment, public health and epitomizing the corruption of wealth & privilege. Limit and restrict access to golf.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 31/08/2026

The 2026 Golden Globe Race is about to begin. A couple dozen people will try to sail around the world alone, non-stop, without modern instruments or communications or re-supply. It looks like there's a lone woman among the skippers. goldengloberace.com/skippers/#2026

goldengloberace.com

Golden Globe Race

The Race Returns · Sailing like it's 1968

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 29/08/2026

Related: the guy who eventually built Byzantium into Constantinople was born in Serbia, fought the Persians on their own turf, then followed his dad to Britain, and was named emperor in York.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 29/08/2026

This is exactly the kind of deal that later results in totally justified expropriation.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 26/08/2026

nothing has made more of a radical anti-car extremists than being a guy whose primary form of transportation is a bike

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 26/08/2026

It's okay. It's summer. The days are longer than normal.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 25/08/2026

I have no idea if this is what's actually happening but it would be hilarious (as a housing activist) if all the resistance to data centers is ultimately revealed to just be garden-variety NIMBYism totally unrelated to instrumentalized "concerns" about AI, the broligarchy, or electricity prices.

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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 25/08/2026

This girl I used to waitress with in Austin, we moved to New York together in 2003 on a literal Greyhound bus. Shared a fifth floor walk-up studio that, when it rained, had more leaks in the ceiling than we had pots and pans. We used to get drunk and smoke off the fire escape and do “sad-offs.”

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 25/08/2026

The situation is similar for soy. About half of all US soybean oil is used to produce fuel, not food. We could rewild close to half of the midwest just by switching from biofuel crops to solar + EVs. www.grainjournal.com/article/1058...

grainjournal.com

Renewable Diesel Production and Expanded Soybean Crush

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 24/08/2026

Underappreciated: US farmland *already substantially produces energy, not food*, and does so very inefficiently. Corn ethanol (~40% of all US corn) requires about 100 times more land per vehicle-mile driven than solar photovoltaics -> electric vehicles. Shifting corn to solar *would free up land*.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 20/08/2026

I have not seen much conversation about worker-owned AI models, nor have I seen any unions talking about collectively-owned platforms, but that's what a good alternative should look like. I do understand people will say that sounds insane; It usually takes about 7 years until people think I'm sane.

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Dr. Katharine Dickson @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

ALSO because nobody is gonna write this story, I’m gonna at least mention it: The cows are not in Imperial but in the San Joaquin Valley drawing on groundwater under basin plans already forcing pumping reductions on about the same timeline.

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SARS‑CoV‑2 (COVID-19) @covid19disease.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

🚨 BREAKTHROUGH: Mexican researcher Eva Ramón Gallegos achieved a milestone that puts Latin American science at the center of the world medical debate: she managed to completely eliminate the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) in controlled clinical studies.

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 21/08/2026

Whenever I'm forced to buy insurance I feel like I'm getting scammed. The sales department / agent will say anything to get you to pay the premium. And the claims department will do anything to avoid paying any money out. Like you need a whole separate legal team just to get a claim paid.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

They didn't like Aaron Swartz's goals (making scientific knowledge more accessible to the public) and they do like the LLM companies' goals (permanently crushing the labor market for knowledge workers)

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 21/08/2026

How is it not trivially easy to call an arbitrary phone number from my computer? What are the best options now the Skype is dead?

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 21/08/2026

Thinking about doing the Baja Divide this winter, and binging various YouTube vlogs about it. At least half of them end with tears or "fuck this." The ones who enjoy it seem unconcerned with doing big miles, and carry a ton of water. So maybe it would be fun? bikepacking.com/routes/baja-...

bikepacking.com

The Baja Divide

The Baja Divide connects the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez via miles of beautiful backcountry tracks, mountain ranges, historic missions, and villages...

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Zane Selvans @zaneselvans.org · 20/08/2026

Lol we spent 2 years of NSF POSE Phase 1 funding getting ready to have an open-source ecosystem around our open energy data pipeline and now suddenly we have a bunch of new contributors! But now we don't have a dedicated source of funding to help us guide and integrate their work.

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