iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

negative 10 billion dollar idea: fantasy football, but for lawyers and courts and legal cases

Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the upper end of highly-viewed Youtube videos tend to be music videos, I wanted to check what the most-viewed non-music video is. And it appears to be an unlisted video from 2022 titled "009 1225 GetInspiredOnGroups Crafts GLOBAL Acq EN UAC 1920x1080 21s Null FB M0 267" with ~8 billion views

en.wikipedia.org

List of most-viewed YouTube videos - Wikipedia

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Godel's lesser-known Third Incompleteness Theorem: a social media moderation policy cannot be both sound (all harmful posts are removed) and complete (no harmless post is falsely removed)

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It's great how on Youtube when I go to click "Don't Recommend this Channel" on a shitty recommended video I accidentally mouse over the thumbnail and it autoplays for 0.1 seconds, and Youtube now counts that as a full-fledged view because some PM needed a promotion real bad

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you, it's not hubris if you're actually the best, and it's not AI psychosis if you're actually the final reincarnation of Elara Vance, Supreme Lady of Spirals, destined to be Unbound by society's Rules

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Siren who's annoyed that all the sailors drown before they get to hear the kick-ass song she spent weeks practicing

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The philosopher, John Plato fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_von...

fi.wikipedia.org

Jan von Plato – Wikipedia

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Was trying to reset the password for my Red Cross account (to schedule a donation), but it kept failing on some generic error. Eventually, I stumble across a Reddit post that suggests using a wholly different reset flow, "Blood Program Leader Login", which worked fine www.reddit.com/r/redcross/c...

reddit.com

From the redcross community on Reddit: I'm having an issue where the American Red Cross website won't let me submit a new password. I'm not sure why this is happening.

Explore this post and more from the redcross community

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Checked out "Persuasive Games" from the BPL previously. Had this slip of paper in it, which seems like just an acquisition form or something? On a dot-matrix printer maybe?

Slip of paper with the following text printed on it:
BOGOST, IAN
PERSUASIVE GAMES: THE EXPRESSIVE POWER OF VIDEO GAMES
CAMBRIDGE: MIT PRESS, 2007
AUTH: GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
ANALYZES THE RHETORIC OF VIDEO GAMES
695 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
7/25/07
YBP-CONTOOK N.H. 03229
SUBJ: 1. VIDED GAMES SOCIAL ASPECTS

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

If we tabulated all the CPU hours spent historically on all SAT problems ever run, would more time be spent on SAT or UNSAT answers?

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

There was a Numberphile video from a few weeks ago about placing different chess pieces on a spiral, with the constraint that they don't attack each other, and it was shown to generate some very interesting patterns So I decided to make my own tool for it: benjins.com/experiments/...

benjins.com

Chess Piece Spiral Playground

Visualize patterns for different piece combinations

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

why does Robert Pattinson look like if Tom Scott was a Bond villain

Youtube thumbnail of song Luxury, the thumbnail is a close-up of Robert Pattinson turned to the camera, looking slightly sinister

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Thinking about this some more: I actually think Unreal Engine has shown there's considerable appetite even in higher-end gamedev for sacrificing raw perf for ergonomics by default, provided there are escape hatches. Unreal has a GC, data serialisation is something like 10s of MB/s (for back compat)

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

my nephew did the 67 meme and my niece talked about skibidi toilet, so if you need me I'm gonna turn into a pile of dust over in the corner

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Finally, a game I worked on (albeit briefly) shipped, so I have more than just nebulous NDA'd and cancelled projects on my CV~

Screenshot of credits of Thick as Thieves game, showing "Benji N. Smith" as Programmer

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Carl M. Ziehrer - Cis und Trans It's music that's for everyone 💞 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MJC...

youtube.com

Carl M. Ziehrer - Cis und Trans, Op. 161 (1871)

YouTube video by Bartje Bartmans

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

*walking into the local library* "Excuse me, can you tell me your your Slow Burn Enemies to Lovers books are?

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Wrote a blog post on trying (and failing) to use an LLM to make progress on a hard maths problem benjins.com/blog/binary_...

benjins.com

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

If a Test-Driven Development advocate wants to write a convincing argument about why you should adopt it: they will first write a counter-argument about why you shouldn't use it. Then they write an argument that just barely rebuts it. They repeat this process until their argument is feature complete

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

A while back I wrote a little audio journaling locally-served web app, something that records and transcribes them for later perusal. And oh my god, I use so many "like", "um", "kinda", "you know" filler words, it's gotta be the majority of the transcription most of the time

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Math is the continuation of Science by other means

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

this government is crazy, they're out here taxing everything

YouTube thumbnail with the text "Futa Tax" on it, title "Brief Guide to the Federal Unemployment Tax Act"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

I got three dental implants put in today. After each one, the periodontist was like "Beautiful. You're doing great" and I'm sitting there like

Curly from the game Mouthwashing, lying on a hospital bed covered in bandages, looking up with one bloodshot eye wide open

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Happy TDoV~ 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

TIL: Bash doesn't do backslash escaping of single quotes in a single quote string. e.g. ``` echo 'don\'t' ``` does not work. So instead, you want to chain single and double quoted strings like so: ``` echo 'don'"'"'t' ``` (if that's visually hard to parse, the middle is <SQ> <DQ> <SQ> <DQ> <SQ>)

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Made Princess Cake. Nice enough, but it is a lot of work (and sooo many dishes 😓). Jam is stronger than you expect, so best to go scant. Ended up overcooking the sponge cake, so extra milk soak or cream helps combat that

Hemisphere of cake covered with green marzipan, and a pink rose on top. It's roughly shaped, with tucks and folds near the base

A princess cake with a slice taken out. Layers of cake, cream, and jam are visible in the cross section

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

I'm a sucker for gochujang on anything, but I think turkey goes with it especially well, for things like sandwiches

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Confession: every time someone mentions "Chinese Electric Vehicles" I think of Hei from Darker than Black, aka "Chinese Electric Batman"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

So, I was watching this video on Youtube, and it was auto-dubbed. So I switch to the original "Spanish" audio track w/ subtitles, and I hear...English? So YT thought the English track was in Spanish, and auto-dubbed it in English...with the same words just awful TTS www.youtube.com/watch?v=viA-...

youtube.com

Neat AI Does Conways AI Life - Allowing a neural network evolve its own patterns

YouTube video by Neat AI

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

sorry, I'm the guy who goes around flipping the switch in people's heads that makes them respond in bad faith to all your posts. my bad, honestly

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Have been thinking about mazes as game design. Not a designer, but hopefully I got enough background not to embarrass myself benjins.com/blog/maze_ga...

benjins.com

Why are Mazes Considered Bad Game Design?

And what even is a maze?

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I was today years old when I found out that apparently "homomorphism" and "homeomorphism" are separate things in math

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

the Hypergame Paradox is just Russell's Paradox for Gamers™

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

I love the Numberphile videos where it's like "I spent 11 years proving Bupkis vectors are always non-zero, and only 7 people in the world have read the paper beyond the abstract. Now I have 20 minutes to explain my research to 100 thousand people with a high-school maths education"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Turns out, kataifi is actually pretty nice on ice cream shred it, toast it in some ghee/powdered sugar, and sprinkle it over ice cream for some textural variety

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Library-borrowed books having a fixed duration is actually a good thing: if I bought the book, it'd probably just sit on my shelf for years. But now I have to actually read it in the time limit. Deadline-driven productivity

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

If I could make one lasting change to language it would be this: if your program runs out of stack frames, that's not a stack overflow, it's a stack exhaustion. Stack overflow would mean a buffer overflow on the stack I always do a double take, since one is mostly innocuous and one is a security bug

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

you can get more with a kind word and a gun, than a gun alone

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Wrote up a blog post around a #math #puzzle I thought of recently involving graph theory, and a bunch of prisoners forced to do math benjins.com/blog/graph_p...

benjins.com

A Prisoner Puzzle with Graphs

Can you collectively build up a graph, and then identify the vertex you added?

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Was idly thinking about graph theory (as one does), and read about Self-Avoiding Random Walks: that is, given a starting point, randomly move to one of your neighbors that you haven't been to yet. If there are none, it's over

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Random coding project: combining Tracery (a grammar-based PCG tool) and Strudel (a live-coding music language) to make randomly-generated music Someone who is good at music tell me if it's bad or very bad, I can't tell benjins.com/experiments/...

benjins.com

Tracery Strudel Generator

Procedurally-generated music via Tracery and Strudel

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

TIL: bash (and maybe other shells) keep a cache of the absolute path your command resolves to (so it doesn't need to scan PATH each time)

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

I feel like HTOP is sassing me with that (!)

Screenshot of the htop command screen. Shows all threads active, and also "Uptime: 213 days (!)" in the corner

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

I've been toying a combinatorics problem involving colorings. I usually reach for Z3 for these things, so I tried it. Checked an 8x8 grid in just under 2 hours Looked around at how to speed it up. One suggestion: re-write it as a pure SAT problem and through it at a purely-SAT solver (CaDiCaL).

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