iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 02/10/2026

Tldr- AI is a meteor and the web dev education community is a crater. Why pay for courses and content when a chatbot can explain concepts to you? Even if those answers can’t be verified by the learner because they aren’t the expert?

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 01/10/2026

CF gets the benefit of scaled testing of their CA infrastructure. Customers get free TLS and marginally fewer CAs to have to trust, CF probably tips the cost/benefit scales because this is free marketing and easy on ramp to other paid services.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 01/10/2026

It seems like a lot of upside. The downside is their existing MITM as a service. That’s cheaper to operate when they issue their own certs like this. So mass adoption for free certs is going to push other CAs to make money on other offerings like LE has.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 01/10/2026

I think this may help with stewarding TLS in general. Let’s encrypt has earned a lot of market share. Fewer CAs are easier to secure in general. Merkle trees make it really hard for a CA to mint bogus certs, especially if the root gets compromised.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 30/09/2026

I upgraded to Ubuntu 26.04, so far my "Year of the Linux Desktop" is 18 months long and going strong. brentjanderson.com/writing/ubun...

brentjanderson.com

Ubuntu in 2026

The year of the Linux Desktop for me personally

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 25/09/2026

Mamdani's applying "broken windows theory" to political science, and it makes a lot of sense. Worth a listen. Fixing potholes and ensuring taxpayer money goes where it's supposed to go are non-partisan issues.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 24/09/2026

I’m not aware of a GitBook alternative - I would start with NimblePublisher and build from there depending on what you want. That’s what I use for my own website. nimble-publisher.hexdocs.pm/2.1.0/Nimble...

nimble-publisher.hexdocs.pm

NimblePublisher — NimblePublisher v2.1.0

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 24/09/2026

Do you mean ex_doc or are you wanting to build a different sort of documentation site? ex-doc.hexdocs.pm/readme.html

ex-doc.hexdocs.pm

ExDoc — ExDoc v0.40.4

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Prioritizing people and relationships over AI is one angle here. If AI is replacing connections between people, that doesn’t serve to help teams, companies, or societies. It’s further gutting of our social fabric. “Bowling Alone” explores this 25 years ago. I don’t think it’s gotten better since.

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Some of this is the same as scaling a company. The model of what any business does fractures as you add more people. Hierarchy emerges in response, as do silos. This suggests that AI makes teams smaller, which doesn’t help with making what we do legible to others.

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First-order effect: Cool! We can solve customer problems faster! Second-order: We lose touch with our shared understanding. Customers can still tell us what’s good and bad, but the legibility of the model becomes sullied. Progress slows. Third-order: An exercise for the reader.

This means that the better we can articulate that model to other developers, marketing & sales, support, and of course the market, the better off everyone is. AI collapses that understanding into a single output (the code), keyed primarily by whether we keep our wallets open to the agent.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 20/08/2026

Customers are downstream of the running code we write. The code itself is an artifact we make of a model in our heads about the customer and their problems, and how best to solve them (when the customer isn’t the product…).

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Computer assisted learning can help, but if LLMs do your homework at all, you are worse off. Same thing if part of learning is learning how to find the nuggets you haven’t learned yet.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 20/08/2026

There’s some research on all of this recently out of china. The gist is that healthy mental struggle remains a core part of learning. Learning is work rearranging neurons, so anything the LLM does for you is something you will not learn. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

papers.ssrn.com

The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education

Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 16/08/2026

Why be deliberate and measured when someone else will get all the spoils and glory first? At least *we* are the worthy ones to mortgage the future, as only we are equipped to steward what comes next. We couldn’t possibly afford that right to our children.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 19/07/2026

Indeed. He also supported UBI though he framed it as “negative income tax”.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 17/07/2026

Composing GUI apps like CLI apps remains elusive. Apple used to be better at this (you could drag stuff from one app into another and it would just work). Imagine a "Pipes" app that let you connect a pipe from your Bluesky browser tab into an Excel spreadsheet.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 25/06/2026

There's a whole paper on how all we do is "steal" when learning or making anything new, though it dresses it up in a few more words: worrydream.com/refs/Hofstad...

worrydream.com

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 21/05/2026

Sadly not Firefox compatible. Safari handles it alright though!

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Also studying up on @sociocracyforall.bsky.social as a way to spread power which would hopefully affect capital too.

Good start. Doing things with other people in real life, shopping local (BerkShares are a near local currency concept too), bartering, starting or joining co-ops are all on my radar for this.

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So what do we do to make this more real?

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Adam Smith or Piketty? 😂 Or both. Go figure that much of Smith’s writings are ignored when his aim was not the same as rugged economic individualism and Darwinian self-interest. “The tragedy of the commons” is another fun myth. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel taking that one down.

“It’s a wonderful life” is a good example of this. 👆

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Zaynab Mohamed @zaynabmmohamed.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

When you are more “in relation” with the people you lend to or borrow from, the social costs of default go up for everyone. Scrooge could be tight-fisted because he was invulnerable and thus closed to all, including himself. Credit implies trust. Enclose/commodify that trust and you cut the root.

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Reposted by Brent Anderson

For decades we’ve had school shootings and seen government do nothing. I’m proud that today we passed my bill to ban assault weapons for the first time in MN history. We can never bring back Harper & Fletcher, but today we can say we did all we could to make sure no family endures this ever again.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 19/04/2026

From someone who is decidedly red pilled on AI, Steve Yegge has a few thoughts on how draining AI assisted development can be for human operators. It runs somewhere between thinking at a different level of abstraction and dopamine loops. He calls it a vampire: steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampi...

steve-yegge.medium.com

The AI Vampire

This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 15/04/2026

Have you called your senators? Please let them know this is not for sale.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 14/04/2026

Pro tip tho if you rent cars. Costco car rentals are industry competitive and go towards that annual spend. So if that’s part of any annual budgets, it goes a long way.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 13/04/2026

Sociocracy takes this same approach, in a way that is designed to also scale to larger numbers of participants. www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-deci... The one downside is ensuring you get enough circulation of the idea to ensure people aren't blindsided by changes.

sociocracyforall.org

Consent Decision Making - Sociocracy For All

Check out the full explanation for consent decision making. With a step by step and facilitation worksheet.

Peter DiCampo @peterdicampo.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Reposted by Brent Anderson

The news has moved on, but ICE is still in Minneapolis. My neighbors are still patrolling streets, driving strangers to work, and providing aid. As a photojournalist at @propublica.org, I wanted to know: What do they look like in their daily lives? So I picked up my camera 👇

Four portraits of Minnesota residents inside and outside their homes. From left to right: A woman in a hijab, an older woman wearing a red whistle, an elderly couple in winter coats standing in the snow, and a woman wearing a buttoned-up cardigan and dark blue jeans.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 18/03/2026

Bucket does sound like a singular thing in a single space. Might I suggest “slice” as in a “bucket slice” or a “permissioned space slice?”

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 12/03/2026

Year from now or September / 6 months from now? I’d go for the best 17 you care to get and let it ride then. They last for a long time so amortized the cost/value is in your favor to buy all the features you could want (esp RAM and storage - those are not getting cheaper soon!) and go high mileage.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 12/03/2026

Wait for the 18 or 18 pro. Consider getting on a zero interest plan with Apple Card. Might as well live in the future if you’ve already waited this long. Or, go the other direction and find an ePaper phone. Get less “engagement” in your life. Get a used iPod and DSLR too.

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 03/03/2026

For being a digital scavenger hunt marketing campaign, it actually reminds me a lot of nonchalance.com/jejune.html and some of the other public scavenger hunts like that. I think there's potential for IRL stuff like that.

nonchalance.com

The Jejune Institute

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Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 02/03/2026

Might I suggest giving ARM Ubuntu a spin? It’s quite good. 2025+ has been the year of the Linux desktop for me and I’m finding it works really well.

Brent Anderson @brentjanderson.com · 23/02/2026

REAL ID or driver's license? Not proof for the SAVE act. Birth cert or passports, in-person registration only. Who do you know who loses their right to vote? SAVE excludes valid votes, incl. married women who changed names. It takes just a minute to tell your senators NO: 5calls.org/issue/save-a...