iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben

This Week in Videogames @thisweekinvideogames.com · 23/09/2026

Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams says he has no need for GenAI, because his artists are bursting with cool, weird ideas like meat biomes and sphincter doors. "[Tolkien] didn’t have a sphincter door. I mean, I don’t think he did… Who knows what’s going on in, like, Minas Morgul though."

thisweekinvideogames.com

27 Chaotic Minutes with Dwarf Fortress Creator Tarn Adams

Tarn Adams talks about Dwarf Fortress, his favourite bugs of the last 20 years, and why it's incredibly important to have a "meat biome"

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Reposted by Ben

Gavaroc @gavaroc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

My brain just flashed the words "Its About Ethics in Games Vampirism"

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

After installing more multi gigabyte tools, i wanted something lighter for my local llm setup, in both editor and CLI. Inspired by @antirez, dwarfstar, and the text editor lite, I built boggart: a self editing agent and code platform. Built in C, with a #lua sandbox for clever stuff.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Overhead today: I fucking love fortran. (he's a pilot 😂, aerodynamisist, he and all round wonderful human )

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

With AI to actually finish projects the OSS game engine renaissance is here. They're mostly lightweight, modular and all around modern. Mine is a dangerously large pile of C17 netcode surrounding an over-engineering column execution engine that I built into a database😅 It's @spacetimedb backwards

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The codex/chatgpt app is 583mb to download??? Why???

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Reposted by Ben

Paula Beakes 🔜 TAGS Festival @paulabeakes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Between freelancing, I'm also prepping for my first Mini Exhibition in Edinburgh this November. Come and join me as I paint, prep and print for my first show! ✨️

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Reposted by Ben

Michael Greshko @michaelgreshko.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

BREAKING: The world's most sensitive dark matter detector has announced it has spotted something it can't easily explain: a single event that's tantalizingly consistent with a type of theorized dark matter particle. Very early days yet, but pretty wild. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

World’s biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

It’s far too early to declare a discovery, physicists with the LZ detector say

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Reposted by Ben

Tanya X. Short @tanyaxshort.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

god, you guys, just buy the indie game that looks kinda cool. don't play the demo, don't agonize over the reviews or wishlist, JUST BUY THE INDIE GAME!! if you didn't like it, oh well, whatever, maybe next time, meanwhile you supported an artist, thanks for coming to the gig, want a t-shirt?

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Every time I got to cancel my @cursor_ai sub, I end up using composer 2.5 to make trhe most of my remaining credits and wonder why I'm not using it more 😅 It's just great at spikes...

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Hearing that slow horses has been renewed for a 6th season just as I finish binge watching the first 5 seasons is some of the better news I've had this summer 😁

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Main reason I'm working on a new API plane is that agents are better with more data and fresher data. So the question is now to get more of both? Without changing the current pipelines.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Part two of open sourcing some of my libraries is BoltAPI: A #Cpp Web framework with very few dependacies. It came out of wanting http3 support and needing it to build on windows. Is it general perpose? Sort of... Is fast? Oh yes 😁 github.com/Ugbot/BoltAPI

github.com

GitHub - Ugbot/BoltAPI

Contribute to Ugbot/BoltAPI development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Time to open source a few of the libs I've been working on. Very much built with AI rather than by AI. Inspired by the cool stuff in @QuestDb & @TigerBeetleDB This is bolt, the data piece left over from my lock down game engine experiments github.com/Ugbot/bolt And yes it's in #cpp 😜

github.com

GitHub - Ugbot/bolt

Contribute to Ugbot/bolt development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The new MCP spec is definitely better! Stateful connections vs default stateless ones is definite statement of intent when it comes to making this an RPC first. Also respecting the http nature of the actual transport protocol. Nothing goes away but more things are possible.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Apache Fluss made it to a top level project! It's been amazing to be a tiny part of the journey, cheering it along 😁 fluss.apache.org/blog/apache-... Here's a few examples to get you started! github.com/Ugbot/fluss-...

fluss.apache.org

Apache Fluss · Streaming Storage for the Real-Time Lakehouse

Open-source columnar streaming storage with sub-second freshness, primary-key tables, Flink integration, and native tiering to Iceberg and Paimon.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Why on earth is Gmail now using the outbox like it's Outlook in the 90s?? Had a bunch of emails get stuck there which have caused a bunch of embarrassing moments

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Reposted by Ben

Steve Bowler @gameism.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Hey, devs? I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you're making a single player game? Start/Esc should ALWAYS, and IMMEDIATELY pause the game. I don't gaf how "epic" you think your camera is I just spilled something. My cat just puked. The dog got out. My kid fell. Fuck you, PAUSE THE GAME

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Reposted by Ben

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 03/08/2026

Bluesky oldheads will remember that brief period of time when the conservative trolls tried to storm the place and were flummoxed by the idea they would have to organically grow an audience and that someone who didn't want to talk to them could nuke every interaction they ever had from orbit

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

It's been a hot minute since I've used kotlin... Getting back to it is proving harder than I thought, and the AI has strange opinions about coding it... Need to get back to hand rolling this to feta better mental model.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Had the shitty experience of claude code going postall: it tried to RM home... This has happened before, but not in a while. I think this being a new machine means that I didn't have quite enough safety rails but also a low blast radius. Still... It's another reminder that agents can just suck

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Finally got a Strix Halo! Learnings so far : Windows works GREAT! zero driver issues, llama Cpp runs smoothly. GPT OSS & qwen coder are loaded and running nicely. Perf ranges between 70-200t/s. Working on a fork of collabri to get the complete glm5.2 model working 😁 it should be *slow*

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

In a move that suprised me, KX put out some benchmarks for KBDX (kdb in a box) and of course they won vs polars & duckdb. After playing around with the code, it turns out that turning on lazy evaluation made polars *BREEZE* past KBDX on perf.... It's all back to lies, damned lies, & Benchmarks...

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Google has England at 52% to win... Not sure what that's from, but it's definitely more than I thought 😅

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

As I'm out of fable credits and I don't fancy burning £180 on another max sub, I'm going to give my free codex a go. Currently loving the UX of moving over 🤣 they know they are playing catchup!

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Current most "AI" used words I'm seeing are Honest : I think it's a pushback against hallucinations and happy path thinking. Sharp : against the vague platitudes they used to spout.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

At an @openai event in London and the host is giving us pro for the month live via codex! Live demos at it's finest!!

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

So fable is back? Just in time as gpt5.6 is banned? Honestly sonnet 5 is far more exciting for me.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

On the subject of good docS: When neither me nor my llm can understand your product you've got a problem. Firstly you're losing the best SEO juice I know of, and secondly users are going bounce off

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

The issues I'm seeing in agentic systems are: Determinism:makes audit & and explainability hard, along with the unconstrained outcomes. Cost: if they are good, tokens are often £££ Intergration: it's harder than it looks to get context & access. And each workload needs something different 🤣

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I got accepted as an ambassador for @aaif.io ! Super interested in pushing adoption of the open agent communication standards like #mcp & #a2a Thank you to @techgirl1908 for getting this all together! #linuxfoundation

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

The main thing AI coding is giving me, is the bandwidth to actually vendor libraries and to shape them how to use I want, or to simply rebuild them at will. #ApacheArrow is great, but in C++ it's 250gb + to build from on windows and that's just obscene...

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Today I'm using @grok for some blog/fiction writing. In the past I was very impressed with the first coder model they produced (it being free on @cursor_ai helped 🤣), but I've not used it much since. It's definitely got a far better "style" than claude, and it's almost as good as gemini for search.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Last weekend I had a fun time with the AG-UI and protocol + @CopilotKit at a hackathon. The stuff you can now do with these is frankly amazing.... Being able to hook up data feeds, search and realtime graphics, by chatting to it It's definitely starting to feel like a bigger change is coming :)

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Fun fact : Chrome spell check doesn't know the word trillionare! While I'm in the process of setting up a new blog, I'm publishing on LinkedIn for the moment : What Else Is New In AI? www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-e...

linkedin.com

LinkedIn Pulse

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

One of the cooler things about AI + zig is that I don't have to settle for the FFI library problem anymore. I litterly rebuild C/C++ libs in @ziglang and have it run deterministically next to original until the output is btye for btye correct. Then fork it out for perf upgrades and more 😁

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Working with the agentic UI has shown that there's really no moat that can't be breached with enough focus and AI tokens. Literally saw people able to build a version of lovable.dev from zero in 2 days... Distributed correctenss seems to one, but it's less needed than you'd think.

lovable.dev

AI App Builder | Vibe Code Apps & Websites with AI, Fast

Build apps, websites, and digital products faster using Lovable's AI-powered platform, no deep coding skills required.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Working with a2a yesterday at the hackathon left me with many thoughts. Similar to MCP we've been given a cross system protocol modelled on REST, which is at once incomplete but fairly extensible. It's still got ALL THE SAME ISSUES! why didn't we at least start with jsonRPC?? Or JSON-LD?

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Most of my personal Dev involves GameDev on windows, and my professional stuff is performance based but on macs, so I built up some tools and skills to improve it a bit. github.com/Ugbot/ai-grind It wraps tools, has skills and has a project tracker to stop plans getting out of hand and lost.

github.com

GitHub - Ugbot/ai-grind

Contribute to Ugbot/ai-grind development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Claude fable is good. Very good in fact. It's not magic, it seems to have finally hit the less stupid errors gap. The token use is wierdly efficient, as it's both slower and less stupid. But it's not magic. It's frankly ludicrous at "one shotting" lazy stuff. But the equation really hasn't changed

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Voice to text is really useful as a somewhat blind programmer. However, polars is not the same as perl5. 🤣🤣🤣 I'm starting to see a whole new class of bugs....

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I'm writing a database in Cpp because it's what I know best.... I'm regretting not using @ziglang every time I end up with a constepxr mess or template magic rather than just having comp time functions...

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

The BT tower always reminds me of luke's new lightsabre from return of the jedi.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I'll be honest, as much as this is could be a useful a feature, it's more than a little distopian not to disconnect. I'm not sure this is the message we need.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I'm spending a day consolidating my tools. Everything from pulling all my project spesific skills out into one repo, to condifying cross platform tooling. What are you all finding useful or missing? I've got some of my stack in the open but I I could do with improving it and sharing.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Unlike many software folks, windows in my daily driver. But using claude code et Al here is a complete pain because it insists on the git bash rather than actual windows tools. Will be fixing this over the next week or two.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

For some reason, Claude 4.8 on max decided that it was time for an honest to god "goto" statement in C++.... It's definitely not what I expected, but it cements my opinion of it being an overkeen PhD student.

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

It's also the end of the month so I'm burning through any remaining tokens on max so 😅

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Ben @bengamble7.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Claude 4.8 feels like a return to form. 4.7 spent too much time agreeing with me. Nice for the ego but not useful when designing systems. 4.8 finally sees the pattern. I don't need to spell out every architectural step anymore. Once it understands the shape of a system, it usually follows along.

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