iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 28/06/2026

Digitizing some home VHS tapes makes me believe that the modern computer needs more satisfying noises.

A VCR with several VHS tapes, plugged into a capture card device. The tape inserted is labeled August 2001.

021

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 20/03/2026

A preview of my talk at #BSidesSF tomorrow! Looking forward to it :)

BSides The Musical (San Francisco 2026)

The Phantoms of the Fraudpera:
An Overview of Anti-Detection Tooling
Bobbie Chen / bobbie@digitalseams.com / @bobbiechen.com (Bluesky)

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 20/02/2026

I once playtested my friend's video game, which used the Pavlok to shock you when you get hit. I got shocked a lot (they told me I was by far the worst playtester). It was a VR game, and I didn't realize I could look around. (Image via @genmon.fyi: interconnected.org/home/2026/02...)

Pavlok is a wrist band that gives you electric shocks by remote control:

“I have been biting my nails for 25 years…I shocked myself every time I bit my nails… my husband had a good time shocking me when he caught me biting my nails… this helped with … quitting nail.”

Those ellipses… doing a lot of work… on… the “how it works” page. Also, husband.

You know that friend who won’t eat Taco Bell anymore after she got a terrible case of food poisoning?

That’s how it works: "That’s aversive conditioning. We’ll help you use it to your advantage."

Well why not.

The wrist band also has an alarm clock function.

152

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 11/01/2026

George Dantzig core: "seemed to be a little harder than usual"

During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unproven statistical theorems due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Spława-Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.[4][6] Six weeks later, an excited Spława-Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.[2][4] He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal.[7]

From a Wikipedia screenshot

0121

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 24/12/2025

There are three kinds of Bluesky alt text

Log output: various AT URIs like at://did:plc:ltur3l43nt53imyqqbdrl5j6/app.bsky.feed.post/3mapiuei2r22c.

Most are empty, but three have the following text:

1. Elezen man with unicorn ears, horn, and tail. He wears a red sweater with a gingerbread man image overlaid on a coffee cup with text that says “Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa What.” He’s also wearing white leggings and candy-themed high heels.

2. Kitty sitting on her cardboard castle

3. Northern view into Colpoys Bay through some evergreen trees. // Image captured at: 2025-12-24 05:09:12 UTC (about 3 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: windy.com // Current Temp in Wiarton: 35.88 F | 2.16 C // Precip: overcast clouds // Wind: NW at 19.551 mph | 31.46 kph // Humidity: 71%

021

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 18/10/2025

Me as a birdwatcher messing with the guy interviewing me: "After a great deal of practice, many bird-watchers can identify a bird by the ‘way it looks’... They even have a name for this brute property, which they call the bird’s ‘jizz’."

Experienced bird-watchers develop similar skills. After a great deal of practice, many bird-watchers can identify a bird by the ‘way it looks’, even when the bird is glimpsed too briefly, or is too far away, to allow individual features to be identified. They even have a name for this brute property, which they call the bird’s ‘jizz’. This skill takes some time and effort to develop, and is similar to chicken sexing in that birdwatchers perceive the jizz as a gestalt, but cannot say what the features are that make up the whole. Although identifications made on the basis of
jizz are reliable, they are generally regarded by bird-watchers as requiring some objective verification.

120

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 04/10/2025

Which is not to say we're all doing basic research, but I think it's much happier to reserve time for seemingly-unimportant work. It helps thread the needle of the @visakanv.com meme that lives in my head:

A depiction of Odysseus sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. One side is labeled "life is devastatingly meaningless", while the other is labeled "life is excruciatingly meaningful". Odysseus's boat passes through the middle, labeled "ayy lmao"

0102

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 20/09/2025

A clever phishing attack today against developers on GitHub, using GitHub issue notifications to send a legit-looking message from an official GitHub email. Another supply chain attack attempt?

📌 GitHub x Gitcoin Developer Fund 2025

Dear community,

GitHub and Gitcoin are launching the next stage of the GitHub Developer Fund, a program on Gitcoin created to recognize and support contributors who advance open-source technologies and public goods.

Your GitHub account has been identified as eligible for this extended phase. We believe that every type of contribution — from one-time efforts to long-term involvement — shapes the future of open source.

About the program:

Funding model: Quadratic Funding, amplifying community impact through a matching pool
Total pool: $15,000,000 USDC
Selection criteria: Engagement in the ecosystem and potential for future contributions - eligibility includes both regular contributors and maintainers, not only project founders

Next step:
To complete your preliminary registration and confirm eligibility, please verify your wallet via Gitcoin Passport.
This step ensures fairness, prevents Sybil attacks, and requires no sensitive personal data. The process takes less than a minute: simply connect your wallet and sign a message.
📝 Please advance to authentication and submission here: https://grants.github.com/apply

Final participation and allocation of funds require a valid Gitcoin Passport score. Full program terms are available on our portal.

Best regards,
GitHub Developer Fund Team
In partnership with Gitcoin

This correspondence was dispatched to you as a subscribed GitHub member.
©2025 GitHub, Inc. All rights reserved.
Corporate location: 88 Colin P Kelly Jr St, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.
[Adjust notification settings] | [Privacy Policy]

---

At the end of the message, several people are tagged, which triggers a notification email from an official GitHub email

110

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 11/09/2025

Shoutout @andrewhinton.bsky.social for adding to the ~20% of Bluesky images with alt text. For everyone who wants that number to go up (myself included): consider turning on "Require alt text before posting" under Settings > Accessibility to never forget again!

In the Bluesky settings Accessibility section, the "Require alt text before posting" checkbox is checked.

010

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 09/08/2025

This is the best form of landmark photo and you can't convince me otherwise

A photo of the Singapore Merlion being pinched from afar

130

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 03/08/2025

I had some vanity milestones for my blog but none of them involved being aggregated into an AI ""news summary"" site

*What they're saying*: The original Google research paper warned about this exact trajectory in 1998.

* “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” wrote Sergey Brin and Larry Page. “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

From The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end - Digital Seams https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-going-to-end

Written by [redacted] Bot
Published on June 23rd, 2025 2:24 PM
Social sharing options: link, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

010

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 18/07/2025

"Watch What I Do" is a great read. If you're not paying attention, lots of it could refer directly to few-shot prompting for LLMs, or low-code/no-code tools, or RPA, etc. but it's from 1993 and Pygmalion itself is from 1975.

It should not be necessary to learn a programming language like C or BASIC. Instead, the user should be able to instruct the computer to "Watch what I do", and the computer should create the program that corresponds to the user's actions.

Allen Cypher, Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 13/07/2025

Saw some excellent birds in Sausalito this weekend

Family of California quails on the ground. Two adults with the head crest, and two smaller birds nearby.

A great egret perched in a tree. It is a large white bird, bending its long neck to look downwards.

010

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 30/06/2025

Just spun up bademails.org - surprisingly, lots of people are unaware of services to create throwaway emails. Although throwaway emails can be useful for privacy, they're also massively used for spam and free trial abuse - this site is a lightweight way for site owners to check on their accounts.

The disposable email checker flags "bobbie+alias@10minutemail.com" as using a known disposable domain, as well as a "plus alias".

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 29/06/2025

Larry Tesler: "Z was next to X, C, and V on the U.S. QWERTY keyboard. But its shape also symbolized the “Do-Undo-Redo” triad: top rightward stroke = step forward; middle leftward stroke = step back; bottom rightward stroke = step forward again. So X, C, and even V were not novel..."

100

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 28/05/2025

The periodic table of image formats strongly implies the existence of a .hog file 🐷

"I think they just got gif mixed up with jpg. The letters have the same pattern in qwerty and one could have autocorrected to the other." A comment by Hacker News user Izkata.

020

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 21/05/2025

I see they're updating the street signs like I update my document names

A street sign that reads, "New New Montgomery Final". This is a photo of New Montgomery Street in San Francisco, which branches off of Montgomery Street.

060

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 21/05/2025

Here's a baffling use of Google Classroom invites as a messaging app:

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 10/04/2025

A grain of truth in every skeet

Blackout poetry of the original post from Pavel. The new version reads: "avoid people 10 tips to get started 👇"

130

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 05/04/2025

And of course, here's some blackout poetry based on our favorite IBM training manual excerpt. I'm not sure of the attribution here, the earliest image I could find was via Tumblr user virtualgirladvance:

Blackout poetry: A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD. THEREFORE COMPUTER SAD -- IBM training manual (1979)

100

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 05/04/2025

My own, based on my recent blog post "Every app is a messaging app":

Blackout poetry: Every mess will be a way to receive love, and it's real excelint

100

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 05/04/2025

Whipped up a quick blackout poetry tool today - here's one by Austin Kleon, on artists:

Blackout poetry: Artists quickly die off after their work is done so plan ahead, avoid ending

100

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 04/04/2025

I am still tempted to pronounce the name like the musical "doit" (IPA: /dɔɪt/, rhymes with exploit), a quick slide upwards after hitting the initial note.

A musical note with a "doit", a curved line from the note head extending up and to the right

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 04/04/2025

I realized it would help to include the doit.com branding... In the logo, "do" and "it" are distinctly separated through color. In text, the company is branded as DoiT - I hope the dotted "i" helps avoid the dolt confusion.

110

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 31/03/2025

Really interesting to watch my semaphore decoder tool creep up in the Google rankings over time. It's actually one of the bigger drivers of traffic to my blog, and I can see traffic spikes related to various puzzle hunt events: bobbiec.github.io/semaphore-de...

An interactive tool for decoding semaphore flag signals. Eight potential flag positions extend radially from a center point. Two flag positions are highlighted, pointing to the bottom-right and bottom, which is decoded to the letter "A".

020

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 28/03/2025

Robot waiters (which today are like tall Roombas, with wheels instead of legs) already have similar fashion opportunities. Pudu's Bellabot is more anthropomorphic - it has a face (that emotes!) and a vertical canvas for fashion. Compare it to Bear Robotics' Servi, which is very much utilitarian.

A robot waiter with a smiling cat face, painted like it is wearing overalls. It has a cylindrical body about four feet tall, with three levels of trays to place dishes on. Pudu's Bellabot.

A robot waiter that looks like a tool. It has a cylindrical body about four feet tall, with three levels of trays to place dishes on. There is no face or clothing. Bear Robotics' Servi.

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 19/03/2025

I wrote about Undo Send and more "Coyote Time" features on Digital Seams: digitalseams.com/blog/gmails-...

A video game character runs off of a ledge and briefly hangs in the air, before jumping (off of nothing) to the next ledge. This clip is from Celeste and illustrates a forgiveness mechanic known as "coyote time". From https://blogs.bsu.edu/teaching-innovation/2023/11/15/coyote-time-games-teach-forgiveness-learning/

000

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 19/03/2025

On this day in 2009, Gmail introduced the "Undo Send" feature - giving us all the chance to claw back our mistakes before they go out

Screenshot of Gmail's mobile interface. A banner indicating a message has been "Sent" now includes an "Undo" button.

120

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 31/01/2025

Reminds me of this post as well. I had to memorialize a work acquaintance's LinkedIn profile recently - it's crazy how much exists in our digital lives that might float around possibly-forever...

Image transcription of a tweet from Heather Hogan @theheatherhogan: “A friend I loved very very much died a few years ago from cancer. She left up her GoodReads. I’m so glad because every few months when I’m looking up a book, I’ll find a review she left and her voice is so strong and funny and warm and I want to keep hearing it forever.”

010

Bobbie Chen @bobbiechen.com · 31/01/2025

Happy Friday, especially to the Gmail team for implementing this lifesaving #UX feature!

mail.google.com says, It seems like you forgot to attach a file. You wrote "find attached" in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway? Cancel / OK

030