iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It's this one: coloring the graph such that no two points of unit-distance are the same color en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadwige...

en.wikipedia.org

Hadwiger–Nelson problem - Wikipedia

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Flash gave you complete creative use-after-freedom

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

my favourite one is watching even other game developers try to guess what the most popular custom game w/in Roblox is. And when they don't know, watching them guess how many times it's been played in total, and not even getting the right number of digits

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

I find it a bit naive that people think they *can* keep up with everything, even the stuff that "everyone's heard of" for all the folks tut-tutting people over not having listened to the song, have they listened to all the Phonk tracks w/ billions of plays? Every song that blows up on tik-tok?

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

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

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

Per: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... (this was only added there recently, so methinks this might be youtube's recent dumb change to count any playback at all as a view)

en.wikipedia.org

List of most-viewed YouTube videos - Wikipedia

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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 · 17/09/2026

(I have actually seen codebases where every local variable is prefixed with "the")

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Wait, this could work if you combine it with Hungarian notation and Rust-like mutability XOR aliasing: anArray // "an" array implies one of many, so constant theArray // "the" array implies it's the only one, so mutable

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

sounds cool until people realise they can exploit it for blasting ads on unrelated viral tweets :/ non-notification option where folks can add an "addendum" rendered alongside instead of pure edits maybe, but I also have only spent like 82 seconds thinking about this

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

"you're under arrest" "no I'm not" "yes you are" "...yes I am" "no you're not- aw dammit"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you wanted to assign coordinates to the entire observable universe with Planck-length precision, it'd take ~78 bytes, or roughly half a tweet (or a quarter skeet): ln((4.40×10^26 / 10^-35)^3*4/3*pi)/ln(2) ~616.4

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It's from a few years ago, but Dan Luu has a good article/talk that goes into more about this: danluu.com/deconstruct-... I was young when I read it, so my main takeaway was "gee, I sure hope I never have to deal with any of this stuff😓"

danluu.com

Files are fraught with peril

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Okay, guess I'm just 14 years too late... www.somethingsimilar.com/2012/05/21/t...

somethingsimilar.com

The Opposite of a Bloom Filter – Something Similar

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Is this not a cache set? Like, a hash set w/o probing? Has certainty w/ yes answers, no answers are probabilistic based on hash collisions

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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 · 23/08/2026

huh, me too. maybe some switch in the algorithm flipped

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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 · 15/08/2026

Gotta keep AllowNegotiate set to 1, communication is important here

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

(yes, I know Jan is pronounced like an English Y)

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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 · 11/08/2026

I had thought it was short for "ohne" in German, but googling around just raises more questions about the history (there were multiple nomenclatures at the time) And apparently, it's still called "AB0" in German? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABO_blo...

en.wikipedia.org

ABO blood group system - Wikipedia

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

"please, Mr. Redacted was my father"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I remember playing it in like 2016, and thinking "wow, that would really suck for the people who had to wait 5 years for the next one in English" and then immediately downloaded SC

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

so if someone makes a ZIP file in a time zone several hours ahead, you download and unzip it, you'll get a file w/ its creation date in the future

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

If you're curious, I think this is probably from unzipping a ZIP file in your downloads folder. ZIP files encode the file's creation time stamp, and ZIP extractors will manually set the unpacked file's creation time based on that value. Those timestamps don't have time zone info (just raw time),

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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 · 23/07/2026

there's an entire book exploring several examples like this from a game design perspective: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204353... Another thing is that people treat 100% and 0% as "special": we tend to round probabilities, but we still gravitate toward guaranteed outcomes even c.f. a 95% chance

mitpress.mit.edu

Achievement Relocked

Getting something makes you feel good, and losing something makes you feel bad. But losing something makes you feel worse than getting the same thing makes y...

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

also probably utility theory (1MM is not quite 20x better than 50K to most people) and loss aversion (people really hate losing stuff, even if it's stuff they were expecting but didn't have yet)

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

maybe it can throw powerpoints at the enemy

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Blaise Pascal would look at these jokers and say "look, be fucking for real"

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

brb, setting up black-market operation smuggling electrons across the border

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

are we sure they just didn't get confused, cause they're both abbreviated CA

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

One studio I was at hired a statistician, who I briefly was supposed to help analyse our historical bug database to try and come up with dev/process improvements. Unfortunately, I was pretty green back then and kinda squandered that opportunity

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Benji Smith @benjins.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I assume those people would work more on the infrastructure, or potentially support things like websites, analytics, CI, performance profiling etc. The folks in the industry working most closely w/ content/data pipelines would probably be tools engineers. But I haven't worked w/ data eng as of late

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

realising now I should probably be more general: most of the *dev work* is in data, not code. Bugs are just what I see often remarked about

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

that most bugs are in code. In actuality, the majority of bugs are in data

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