iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 27/09/2026

Exactly 2^10 #Jev requests 🤓

A screenshot of the TypeSafe AI console's usage page, showing I've made exactly 1024 Jev requests.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 20/08/2026

tfw your reranking evaluation doesn't know the difference between trademark and copyright 💀

Screenshot of an eager and willing evaluation harness. It presents the query "When does a revised edition of a book count as a new creative work rather than the same work for trademark registration purposes?", and then shows an excerpt from a Copyright Office publication.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 09/08/2026

Hi @sfgov.sf.gov! How about I will do whatever I want with these free and uncopyrightable edicts of government, and you will remove these very silly and incorrect copyright claims?Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020).

A screenshot of San Francisco's Housing Code. There is a cool city seal, immediately below which is proclaimed confidently, yet wrongly, "Copyright © 2026 by THE CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO". Below that, there is a box with text which also proclaims, again wrongly, "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed by any means or stored in a database or retrieval system without prior written permission of the City and County of San Francisco." EDICTS OF GOVERNMENT!!!

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 05/07/2026

Legal research... like a pirate!

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 13/06/2026

Well, that doesn't look right at all

A code diff. Instead of a California flag, there's a string that says "CA Courts" with a bear emoji.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 13/06/2026

Messing around with Hermes. It's going ok, but it missed something very important: adding the California flag to a button.

Cool amber-hued Hermes Agent interface. My prompt is:

So far so good. You missed the part about the California flag in the comment on the issue. Do that! The bear is very important!

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 29/05/2026

I may have to stop here. Not sure how to top this.

Screenshot of a git commit.
The title is: "Add pixelated footer grass with monolith (issue #256)"
The body is: "Full-width canvas below footer text renders procedural violet pixel-art grass (750→950 palette, smooth hills) with a black 3×6 monolith near the right edge, evoking planet Ur from Lore Mode. JS extracted to static/js/footer-grass.js; canvas redraws on window resize."

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 27/05/2026

AGENTIC!!!1 (actually, this is pretty cool) 1: issue filed autonomously when a site is detected as being down 2: manually-invoked skill analyzes the failure, then adds a comment to the issue with its findings and next step 3: issue closed autonomously when the site goes back up

Screenshot of a GitHub issue showing that a publication called "Federal Court Forms" failed to crawl.

Screenshot of a comment on the issue, saying the site has been returning a 503 error for 5 consecutive days, but that it's a remote error, not a code problem. At the end, it says "Next action: upstream".

The final comment on the issue, which says:

uscourts.gov is back up (HTTP 200) and the scraper successfully returned a version hash. No code changes needed — the page structure is intact.
NEXT ACTION: CLOSE

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/05/2026

**PROGRAMMING INTENSIFIES**

Claude Code screenshot. My maximally-erudite prompt is "need to rebuild a docker thingy". Claude responds "Lollygagging".

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/05/2026

Is this a lot for a side project? It seems like a lot for a side project.

Screenshot of a count of lines of code, summing up to 32053 lines, which seems like a lot.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 24/04/2026

There is so much going on in just this signature block.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 23/04/2026

I spent half an hour tonight whipping up a pre-filing citation checker. I ran it on the Sullivan & Cromwell brief from this story, and it works. Time to raise the bar, folks.

Screenshot of an ugly program called "Pre-filing Brief Checker". There's a button that says "Select File" and that's about it.

Output from the aforementioned program, showing a mismatch between a name as cited in a brief, and the name of the actual case with that citation. The citation is "821 F.3d 161".

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/04/2026

This Ukrainian soldier said it well about the Russian army

Ukrainian soldier prone at the edge of a trench, looking at the camera. The caption says “We are lucky that they are so fucking stupid.”

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 01/04/2026

Behold: the Nomolith. Red background = stopped; yellow = starting or there's a problem; green = running. It's all of 22 pixels square.

A tiny icon of the Nomolith, an inscrutable black slab that reflects no light, backlit in red. Ominous!

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 01/04/2026

More very serious programming.

Commit messages:
- Make indicator icon more ominous (1 minute ago)
- start command launches indicator first (5 minutes ago)

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 24/03/2026

I am a very serious programmer.

Screenshot of a GitHub commit. The text is:

feat: add CornerArt widget for decorative ASCII art in TUI screens
Adds a reusable CornerArt widget that displays ASCII art files at the
bottom-right corner of any TBScreen. Includes _load_art() helper that
auto-computes width from actual content. Background color matching against focused ListViews is an open problem tracked in plans/ascii_art-in_progress.md and GH #68.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 28/02/2026

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

A talented lucha libre performer stretches his wings as he soars above the ring in Mexico City

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 28/02/2026

Opening new frontiers in engineering erudition thanks to Claude Code

A Claude Code prompt that says:
"Make sure the new XBEL generation code is doing XML character escaping or whatever correctly"

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 18/12/2025

So I'm considering building a cyberdeck, centered around as beat-up a retro-industrial keyboard as I can find. This is a very strong contender. What a magnificent beast! www.surplussales.com/items/165668...

Photo of a gorgeous retro keyboard with an unusual layout. Alphabet keys are light beige, but everything else is dark gray.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 16/12/2025

Real ones are switching to Offpunk offpunk.net

Screenshot of the Offpunk terminal web browser. Among other things, it shows a photo that’s been converted into ASCII art.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 14/12/2025

Important update for @annaleen.bsky.social and @charliejane.bsky.social: I patted chinchillas while listening to this final episode.

Photographic evidence that I patted chinchillas. Leroy is above, sitting atop a wooden house. Droopy is below, his fluffy head protruding from the house's doorway. My right hand is scritching his head.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 10/12/2025

The "Loyalty" principle says: "A user agent must serve its user’s interests over its implementer’s interests and over the interests of any other party."

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 10/12/2025

There's a recently-published W3C Editor's Draft titled "Web User Agents", and it is just full of bangers. But the key idea is that web user agents (browsers and other tools we use to access the web) are for their regular, human users, and owe those users *duties*. w3ctag.github.io/user-agents/

3. Duties of user agents

Each user agent serves its user (The Internet is for End Users), not any of the other constituencies. A user agent owes its user various duties, which should be established through collective discussions and embodied in the various standards that user agents implement.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 21/11/2025

I ran across this W3C Editor's Draft yesterday, and it has some really surprising *bangers* about user agents *owing duties* to their *human* principals. All is not lost! w3ctag.github.io/user-agents/

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 06/10/2025

I decided last week to name my robot Clanker, but there are some other good robo-slurs on this list. Updated photo:

An in-progress robot chassis. The frame is square aluminum tubing. There are two beefy DC motors. Only the front left wheel is attached so far.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 15/09/2025

The New York Times is ON IT. This headline is from today, in the year 2025.

New York Times headline:
“In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump's Mission”
Damn, really? Deep insight there!

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 10/09/2025

Bad news, everyone, Polish is hard

Duo the green owl doing a superhero pose as I unlock a score of 9 in Polish

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 09/09/2025

History is great, isn't it? You can learn so much.

A painting of an executing by guillotine during the French Revolution

Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723 – 1807); Une exécution capitale, place de la Révolution (Place de la Concorde)

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 29/08/2025

I’m a sucker for exotic input devices.

My right hand holding a cool handheld pistol-grip trackball input device. It’s black, and the ball of the trackball is light green. You click with the trigger button! There’s also a scroll wheel and a few other buttons on the top of the device.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 25/08/2025

So what are folks doing about the generative AI slop ouroboros? 3 engineers confirmed this post, and likely the entire site, is bullshit. It won’t be long until it’s scraped and ingested into training new models. From there, to code generators. Not great!

Ouroboros drawing from a late medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript. A red snake is in a circle eating its own tail.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 21/08/2025

There are no other mentions of “Calvinball” in Supreme Court opinions known to CourtListener.

Screenshot of a CourtListener search for “Calvinball” in Supreme Court opinions, showing only today’s dissent.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 19/08/2025

Have some respect! You are talking to Doctor Manhattan!

Doctor Manhattan, a huge blue god guy, standing on the moon, looking out wistfully at the stars. A thought bubble above him reads:
“I AM TIRED OF EARTH. THESE PEOPLE.
I AM TIRED OF BEING CAUGHT IN THE TANGLE OF THEIR LIVES.”

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 16/08/2025

The World of Coca-Cola is weirdly nifty.

Photo taken inside The World of Coca-Cola.

On the right, a white wall with this quotation from the 1915 design brief for the world-famous Coca-Cola bottle:

“A bottle so distinct it could be recognized by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground."

On the left, a red wall, with the white silhouette of the bottle, with shards of glass sitting around its base.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 14/08/2025

Do they not understand that all the chunks come down after the rocket blows up?

Excerpt from the decree, I mean, executive order:

“what regulatory requirements should be inapplicable for a launch or reentry vehicle that possesses a flight termination system or automated flight safety system”

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/06/2025

Here’s a peek at the inside. Still a work in progress. The “brain” of the thing is flopped over on the left. It’s an @adafruit.com QT PY RP2040. Bonus points if you can figure out what’s going on at the top left corner inside the enclosure.

Inside the enclosure! We can see a battery holder for a pair of AAA batteries laying atop a square of mostly unpopulated perfboard. There’s a QT PY RP2040 microcontroller. It’s so small and cute! Above that, we see the aforementioned RFM69 radio module. And one more mystery board…

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/06/2025

I’ve been working on the remote control for the robot. Robo-Magellan rules require a remote dead-man’s switch: if you take your finger off a button, the robot must stop. That’s the red button here. The switch above that toggles between manual driving and autonomous modes. Power switch to the right.

Photo of a DIY remote-control unit. The enclosure is a semi-translucent plastic box that cost $1 at Target. On the top face, there’s a red button, a small metallic toggle switch, and an on–off switch. On the right, a small antenna is sticking out and pointing upward.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 15/05/2025

Boom! It’s at the top of the RECAP category! 😎 free.law/store

Screenshot of the Free Law Project merch store, showing the awesome brat green RECAP hat

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 30/04/2025

Aw yeah. I got the final parts for the drive assembly and put one of them together! A motor will drive the sprocket in the center there. It's nice to see things coming together. #robotics #DIY

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 29/04/2025

Yeah good point. I’m not great with the taxonomy of power saws. What I have most readily available is this guy, which I think (?) is more like a chop saw. What do you think?

Screenshot of the Ryobi website’s product page for their line green 7-1/4 inch compound sliding miter saw, with a cool photo of its circular blade coming down to cut the heck out of a piece of wood.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/04/2025

Eugenicists building disease registries? Fuck off with that. Now’s a great time for software engineers to have a look at the ACM Code of Ethics. Let it be a tool if you ever need to tell your boss to also fuck off with building something like this. #software #ethics www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

Screenshot of section 1.1 of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct:

1.1 Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.
This principle, which concerns the quality of life of all people, affirms an obligation of computing professionals, both individually and collectively, to use their skills for the benefit of society, its members, and the environment surrounding them. This obligation includes promoting fundamental human rights and protecting each individual's right to autonomy. An essential aim of computing professionals is to minimize negative consequences of computing, including threats to health, safety, personal security, and privacy.
When the interests of multiple groups conflict, the needs of those less advantaged should be given increased attention and priority.

Screenshot of section 3.7 of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct:

3.7 Recognize and take special care of systems that become integrated into the infrastructure of society.
Even the simplest computer systems have the potential to impact all aspects of society when integrated with everyday activities such as commerce, travel, government, healthcare, and education. When organizations and groups develop systems that become an important part of the infrastructure of society, their leaders have an added responsibility to be good stewards of these systems. Part of that stewardship requires establishing policies for fair system access, including for those who may have been excluded.
That stewardship also requires that computing professionals monitor the level of integration of their systems into the infrastructure of society. As the level of adoption changes, the ethical responsibilities of the organization or group are likely to change as well. Continual monitoring of how society is using a system will allow the organization or group to remain consistent with their ethical obligations outlined in the Code.
When appropriate standards of care do not exist, computing professionals have a duty to ensure they are developed.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 22/04/2025

Over the weekend, I also attached a few of the tubes together to see what one of the corners would be like. The brackets are kinda questionable, so I’m going to reinforce them with flat ones on the top/bottom sides. Hope that’s enough; we’ll see!

Close up photo of square aluminum tubes joined on 3 axes with angle bracket things

Photo from a few feet away, showing the length of each of the tubes that are joined. They are 24 inches long, 12 inches wide, and 6 inches tall.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 19/04/2025

I cut the aluminum tubing down to the right sizes! Well, approximately. I got the hang of it right around the last cut. 🙃

Photo of some freshly cut square aluminum tubing. Ahh, so fresh! A few of the pieces are laid out in a 1-foot by 2-foot rectangle, with 6-inch pieces sticking up from the four corners. The remaining pieces for the top are laying to the right.

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Ansel Halliburton @anseljh.com · 18/04/2025

I landed on switching to #25 chain because there is also a British equivalent standard (04C) that is denominated in metric. This means I could find sprockets in both metric *and* Imperial units, for which it’s easier to get all the other parts. 📏 See www.usarollerchain.com/04C-Roller-C...

A screenshot from the linked page at USA Roller Chain, describing how metric ISO standard 04C chain is equivalent to Imperial ANSI #25 chain.

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