iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 08/10/2026

it's good to see this laid out clearly, but i'm once again going to point to Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"

The present discussion is a contribution to the understanding of what programming is. It suggests that programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 07/10/2026

I took some photos with my new film camera.

Dark hallway with people and light in the middle.

Little library and tilted pole, wrapped in police tape

Traffic light with bright green and red color

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Tony Tran @tonytranrpg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Stock art maintenance - if you've worked with me; I'm a big fan of @kinopio.club; I'm currently working out a way to catalogue my stock art - starting with #Morktober 2026. So this will be a white board experience with what each card/day would release with as I cut em up.

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Molleindustria FUTURE? NO THANKS! OUT NOW @molleindustria.org · 04/09/2026

Future? No Thanks! IS OUT NOW ON STEAM An open-world comedy adventure about workable utopias, the twilight of patriarchy, revolution, and the horrifying possibility that the younger generations might be right. 💀 Windows + Mac 💀 6+ hours of gameplay 💀 20% off at launch futurenothanks.com

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 04/10/2026

LLM-generated output posing as “writing” is like that junk mail you get that looks important and personal, with a handwritten message. Then you realize it is a fake and immediately toss it in the trash because you know it’s worthless and trying to sell you something.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 29/09/2026

Every AI-based solution is a bandaid for a symptom and only worsens the entire system. Oh, I need to orchestrate agents to filter out all the noise among the chats and Jira tickets and emails I get. The problem is organizational. But use ai, and you lose sight of that and never fix it.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 28/09/2026

It's akin to plagiarism because there is no author. That has been obscured/washed by the machine. But the part of presenting someone else's work and expertise as your own, that's still there in spades.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 28/09/2026

Another consequence of LLM output having no author is that the output lacks authority. There is no expertise, knowledge, experience of an author to pin this on. If someone takes that output and "reviews" it, they are then participating in something akin to plagiarism.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 26/09/2026

What would Jesus vibe-code?

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 24/09/2026

it's just personalized, customizable plagiarism

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 23/09/2026

surely i'm missing out on a sponsorship or other opportunity to monetize the fact that my surname has the letters "ai"

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 23/09/2026

This meeting could have been an email could have been a podcast

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026

as a hater let me acknowledge something ai is good at: producing irritating discourse at scale this is usually because, like "ai" itself, people are talking about different things like they are one thing so let me disentangle, with statements numbered for easy disagreement

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Tamara Kneese @tamigraph.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

So excited for this timely event on community responses to data centers in Pennsylvania! Congrats to Cella and the other organizers on pulling so many stakeholders and threads together

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

When I say I've been working on this debunking for *years* that includes academic publications. Here's a quick thread:

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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 15/09/2026

a lot of my frustration with the LLM onslaught has in fact been disappointment at realizing how many people do just want to pretend (at work, creatively, interpersonally)

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I wrote down my thoughts about the last several weeks of AI hell. aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

aiguide.substack.com

Misleading Metaphors, Real Risks

What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 25/08/2026

Sweet. Do you have a place that you share photos? I’ve been trying to take more shots on my X100T and would consider putting them up if there were an okay platform.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 25/08/2026

That is heartening. I look forward to hearing how it goes!

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nn @nicknoble.works · 23/08/2026

I know I’ve been posting a lot but I’m thinking of reviving The Organic Software Directory as a webring. ("Organic Software" was coined by @pketh.org in this fantastic post, which you should read: pketh.org/organic-soft... )

pketh.org

In Search of Organic Software

So over the last couple weeks, I’ve been talking to VCs and founders who have and haven’t taken VC to learn whether it makes sense for Kinopio. I don’t think it does.

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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Who defined the problem? Who controls the system? Who benefits and bears the errors? Who can contest the decision? Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu propose four questions every consequential AI audit should answer, adding a "power test" alongside the fairness test.

techpolicy.press

AI Audits Need a Power Test, Not Just a Fairness Score

As audits enter AI regulation, ask who sets the goals, controls the tools, gains, and can contest results, write Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 17/08/2026

Hi Matt! I’m trying to open a .bike file in iCloud in PaperTrail but it is greyed out. What am I doing wrong?

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 13/08/2026

I vibe with this. I recently got a cheap mp3 player and loaded a few dozen songs. My intent is to use this instead of always getting distracted by having access to all the songs on the internet on my phone.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

For all human history, it was far more difficult to write a document than to read it. Until now. But generating a document doesn't make the work of *producing meaning* disappear. It's just been outsourced from the producers of the document to its consumers.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

Cognitive Pollution: Real knowledge only forms through doing the work

many humans appear to be on auto mode, not on manual mode

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10/08/2026

What's so sad about those who deny this is they must then therefore think humans are formal systems. Which may be true I guess, but we have no evidence for this. So if they truly think this, they can prove it by showing us the formalisms. But I won't be holding my breath for them to write it up. 💀

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 08/08/2026

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Anyway, your problem isn‘t finding the time to take notes. The problem is that taking notes is thinking and thinking has to be done by someone. women have been doing a lot of metacognition that looks like a task when it’s really thinking.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 27/07/2026

I predict that in the future, there will be only two types of people. Those who are right-handed, and those who are not.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 27/07/2026

semicolon is punctuation dark horse

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 27/07/2026

semicolons are underrated

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 24/07/2026

Is Flickr still okay?

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 15/06/2026

After a few months of paying the actual cost of AI via token-based billing, an increasingly-anxious conversation has begun about AI's ROI. Per Cisco's Jeetu Patel, the costs of AI tokens are far higher than the actual value that these tokens are generating at scale. www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

In the middle of April, The Information’s Laura Bratton likely burst the AI bubble with a piece about how Uber had burned through its entire annual token budget in a single quarter.

This kicked off an industry-wide anxiety about the mounting costs of AI, with multiple other companies burning millions of dollars in the space of a few months, including Zillow, which destroyed its annual Cursor budget by the end of May. What really began the downfall was a comment by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald:

"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. "I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features."

He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can't draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.
In a single podcast, Andrew Macdonald gave the entire tech industry permission to say the truth: that nobody was actually able to show any ROI despite its massive costs.

This began an increasingly-anxious conversation around AI’s ROI, made worse by the fact that you can’t measure the cost of a task because of the sheer number of models and harnesses, and can’t cleanly translate “AI spend” into “actual financial outcomes.” Toward the end of May, Axios would publish a story about how a company somehow spent $500 million on Anthropic tokens in a single month after failing to set up cost controls.

A few days later, Sam Altman would make a massive fuckup, saying that customers were “totally happy” with their AI spend at the beginning of the year (before token-based billing), and that spend was now a “huge issue,” likely because the costs vastly increased.

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Cyd Harrell @cydharrell.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

an idea's been rolling around in my head about how what we lose with assuming everyone wants "answers" & not search results is similar to what we lose when "route" is the only kind of map we encounter I won't get the academic terms right, but it's some version of skipping an essential abstraction

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Dr. Velislava Hillman and Dr. Peter G. Kirchschlaeger argue that as AI erodes job markets, it exposes the reality that the crisis facing young people "was never primarily technological, but political." Time to rethink what education is for, they say.

techpolicy.press

AI Lays Bare the Authoritarianism of Modern Work. Time to Rethink Education.

AI now bypasses the original logic of the educational bargain altogether, write Dr. Velislava Hillman and Dr. Peter G. Kirchschlaeger.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 06/07/2026

the language around the red card being suspended is confusing because without it being suspended, the balogun is suspended. two different suspensions being talked about.

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 03/07/2026

I’m interested in an analog/digital combo on the face and leaning into the oversized look

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Ben Tsai @bentsai.org · 02/07/2026

@hiro.report hi there, do you have thoughts on, or a favorite G-shock watch?

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

A phenomenon I've noticed recently is people trying to occupy some untenable middleground wrt to the use of systems sold as "AI" -- this is a position where people try to recognize the harms of this tech but also hold space for "responsible" or "ethical" use. 🧵>>

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