iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 29/08/2025

Any thoughts or predictions about what the next generation of AI-assisted product manager + full-stack engineer + prototype builder + data analyst role will be called? A full-stack generalist? The last employed person? It's both exciting and kinda dark to contemplate.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 29/08/2025

Does anyone want to join me in the monthly challenge on 750words.com? It starts on Monday. Here's a one month free coupon so it's free for a month, even after the free trial: MONTHLYCHALLENGE If you haven't used the site in a while (or ever) I'd love your feedback!

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 18/08/2025

I'm hosting a small salon this weekend on the topic of the nature of reality, and built a fun quiz to help people identify their belief system / understanding of the nature of reality. If you want to help test it out and let me know if it works for you or not, try it here: cosmology-quiz.vercel.app

Shows the results page for my own cosmology: Buddhist Mind-Only. A couple charts and lists.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 01/08/2025

Scientists always talk about the singularity around a black hole where space bends enough that “even light cannot escape”. At my best I could run a mile in about 5 minutes. Can they start talking about the effective singularity where I wouldn’t be able to escape? That seems like an important detail.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 20/07/2025

I reached the first milestone of basically re-writing the entire frontend of 750words.com via vibe coding, upgrading the frameworks and adding a few big features. It ultimately led to 86k lines of code that I chatted into existence.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 23/06/2025

I’m running a new experimental prisoner’s dilemma tournament, pitting ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini against a team of humans. If you’re interested in game theory and/or curious to see how well we can do against these AIs, I think this will be a lot of fun to watch.

open.substack.com

Wanna play an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and humans?

How will we do against the LLMs in this classic game of cooperation and betrayal?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 02/06/2025

I attempted to use AI to migrate 750words.com to the latest versions or Nuxt+Vue back in February, and struggled for 2 weeks before giving up on what was likely a 1-2 month task. Yesterday I tried again (from scratch) with the latest Claude 4 and Cursor, and caught up to where I was in ~3 hours!

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 17/04/2025

In your own mental simulation of the present and future, would the arrival of AGI increase or decrease our chances of mitigating the worst case climate crisis scenarios?

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christin @christin.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

dear @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social and nerdfighters my friend @wysr.xyz and i yapped about everything is tuberculosis on youtube we aspire to you and @hankgreen.bsky.social 's awesomeness! p.s. fellow chaplain here of the buddhist variety youtu.be/I2l2RlbUGow

youtu.be

Neuroscientist breaks down John Green's new book

YouTube video by OK Banger

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 01/04/2025

As a trapped Tesla owner myself, I reserved a Rivian R2 recently and was thinking they should include a bumper sticker for us saying as much.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 19/03/2025

Quick question! At first glance, can you read this latest version of the #quirkyclock: busterbenson.com/clock If not, can you let me know which aspect is challenging to wrap your head around? (Note: it's meant to be disorienting, so don't feel bad if it makes no sense or hurts your head.)

A clock showing the sun, moon, and planets.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 18/03/2025

If I shared three links, one that pointed to Medium, one that pointed to Substack, and one that pointed to my self-hosted blog, which one would you click on and why? a) Medium b) Substack c) self-hosted blog c) none of the above

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 12/03/2025

Do you use a journaling app (other than 750words.com--I know about that one!) that integrates with AI in any way? What do you think of it? I wanna round up of all the different ways this is being done and review them and share thoughts back. Hellppp!

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Matt Bors @mattbors.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

From a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, where after a hundred poems showcasing gentle observations on nature and animals, she hits you with this

OF THE EMPIRE
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 10/03/2025

They really need to make a better drool emoji

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/03/2025

I didn't expect it to be so delightful to boycott Amazon. They pioneered frictionless online shopping so well that now almost everyone can do it (and it's fun finding new businesses), and in the cases that I do have to visit a place in person... also not the worst thing in the world! 🌈 ✨

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/03/2025

After using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for a week, I think it's safe to say that the days of googling error messages and strange bugs is not long for the world. I guess the question is... what will happen when people stop posting these questions (and answers) to the web? Will LLMs train themselves?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 01/03/2025

Deleted Amazon off my phone, and cancelled all my Subscribe and Saves. And won’t use them on the web anymore either. I need to spend less anyway, and seems easier to do now than it has in the past. Not sure about AWS though…

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kottke.org @kottke.org · 27/02/2025

Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.” (via @charliejane.bsky.social) [capitalfm.com]

capitalfm.com

Pedro Pascal calls out “vile and pathetic” transphobic trolls after defending trans rights

Pedro Pascal, whose sister Lux is a trans woman, is a prominent trans ally and he has no time for transphobia.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 16/02/2025

Remember the "life in weeks" thing I built a while ago? busterbenson.com/life-in-weeks @ginatrapani.org has gone and leveled it up and made her code available as well! weeks.ginatrapani.org More people should do the exercise of identifying the formative events of their lives. Now's your chance!

busterbenson.com

Life in Weeks

My life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box, inspired by this post by Tim Urban. When meaningful things happen (for both better and worse) I make a note of it so I can remember how much o...

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 06/02/2025

I'm gonna spend a week or so tinkering with XCode and Swift and see how far I can get towards building a bare bones app for 750words.com. I've watched a couple tutorial videos and am kind of 🤯 by how much simpler app dev has gotten since Objective-C. Has anyone built their first Swift app recently?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 04/02/2025

I decided to stop doom-scrolling and read lots of fiction instead. So far I've read books 2-5 of the Stormlight Archive and am on book 3 of the Fourth Wing/Empyrean series, and also just started Blood Over Bright Haven. If those titles are familiar to you, recommend me more!

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 03/02/2025

If you have really bad decisions to make, apparently this is the time to do it. Maybe it'll get lost in the mix with all the other really bad decisions.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 31/01/2025

I was excited to see a mention of “Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement” from @adamgrant.bsky.social today. Unfortunately it turns out that unproductive disagreement is still quite prevalent in this world…

Screenshot of Instagram post by Adam Grant that mentions my book

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 31/01/2025

I’m about halfway through my 9-month experiment to make 750words.com sustainable. It has required some cuts in spending and Louie (8) has noticed this. Tonight he decided to get proactive and asked me how old I was and then asked Alexa what kind of jobs a 48-year old could get. It was very sweet.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 24/01/2025

Does this make sense to anyone? Continuing to try to create a nature-based calendar that organizes around lunar cycles (moonths) instead of months in a way that invites curiosity without breaking brains. Lots of planets in the night sky right now! Have you seen Venus???

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 24/01/2025

Finished book 5 of the Stormlight Archive! That was so good! I was kinda hoping this would last me a bit longer but I guess I have the Mistborn series to read now.

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talia jane @taliajane.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

the threat of fascism hits different when you are firmly in community. find your people and build something resilient and beautiful. there is strength in solidarity.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 21/01/2025

Flow is worth watching. I also need to talk about the end with someone so tell me if you’ve seen it!

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 20/01/2025

My plan is to give all my attention and energy to people and communities and projects I love, and none of it to people and publishers that just want to suck up all the attention in the world in the hopes of finding a glimmer of self-worth. Best of luck to them.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 20/01/2025

I’m ready to be surprised by what happens these next 4 years. So far, no surprises.

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Amy Widdowson @amynw.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

"The world has enough critics. What it needs are builders who can see problems clearly without being paralyzed by them, people who can maintain hope without succumbing to naïveté..." I am so damned grateful to have Joan Westenberg's writing as both comfort and galvanizer (friend link)

medium.com

We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or…

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 12/01/2025

Sarah and I started the 17-mile SF cross town trail! Here’s a live share link. Cheer us on! www.alltrails.com/live-share/c...

alltrails.com

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/01/2025

In quantum field theory, light isn’t a particle moving through space, it’s a wave moving across a field. A photon is the expression of a blip in this field rippling at that speed. If space and time are linked, does that mean all movement is expressed as waves on fields? Nothing really moves?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 07/01/2025

I haven’t read any news or sought any political commentary since the election and I think this may be the best thing I’ve done for my mental health since unfollowing VCs and tech reporters 10 years ago. So many more interesting people and topics of conversation to pursue.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 31/12/2024

Why do we assume that something came from nothing? What if both something and nothing came from the even less defined “field of maybe-something-maybe-nothing”? I call this field / state kyzykshmursh and exist in it for an indeterminate amount of time every morning before I drink coffee.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 20/12/2024

I asked Google’s Notebook LLM to roast my book and identify all the weakest points and challenge me to address them or be publicly shamed… and it wouldn’t do it. Very disappointing.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 16/12/2024

This is kinda crazy! 15 years ago today I launched 750words.com And I still like it! Of the dozens of sites I've built, this is the only one that kept being used by people even when it barely changed for years at a time. Here's my launch post from Dec 16, 2009: busterbenson.com/2009/12/16/7...

busterbenson.com

750 words a day, or a defense of private, unfiltered, unplanned writing

Over the last couple days I thought of, and built, a site that I think serves a single simple purpose: to encourage a kind of writing that is in danger of being neglected in this age of public, edited...

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 10/12/2024

I read The Way of Kings from the Stormlight Archive to Niko when she was 7, and we both loved it, but we didn’t continue at the time (they’re long books). Niko reread the book this year, age 13-14, and just started book 5. I’m catching up on book 3. We’re both obsessed. Who else has read the series?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/12/2024

This has been a fun little project. 750words.com now has two "competing" word-of-the-day groups, where people get a word every day from either Merriam Webster or Wordnik and are encouraged to use the word in their journaling. The number below is how many people have used the word so far.

Screenshot of a box from 750words.com that shows two different words of the day and how many people have written about each of them.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/12/2024

Here's how month 2 of my 9-month experiment to make 750words.com sustainable went, including specific growth, churn, and retention numbers (tldr: good progress that came short of targets, but momentum is at least going in the right direction): community.750words.com/c/blog/novem...

community.750words.com

November update! | 750 Words

It’s now been 2 months since I set out to work full-time on 750 Words for 9 months and try to make it something that could sustain permanent full-time work. October’s report is here. The goal remains...

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 09/12/2024

Using ChatGPT and Github Copilot is giving me insight into the connection between intelligence and metacognition. Is having separate, iterative cognitive processes for "coming up with a list of possibilities" and then "reviewing the list against criteria", what makes both humans and LLMs smarter?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 06/12/2024

In the Bay Area the earliest sunsets happen between Dec 1st and 10th. Our sunset happens at 4:50pm for this 10-day stretch. And then the sunsets start getting later again! Even before winter solstice! Living on a sphere is weird. But, excited that things will start getting lighter again.

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 03/12/2024

I tried analyzing 11k testimonials from the first 15 years of 750words.com using ChatGPT and it mostly failed but then I did it by hand and it worked much better. Notes and results here: medium.com/p/9665c93814e8

medium.com

I analyzed 15 years of testimonials from users of 750words.com to learn how journaling helped them

And found that there four self-reinforcing things that kind of work together to improve our lives

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 02/12/2024

If anyone asks me which day of the year the sun sets right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from my bedroom window, I will now know to say December 1st. And, another day about 40 days from now when it’s headed north again after the WINTER solstice. Jan 9th or 10th?

Sunset in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 21/11/2024

Does anyone have high quality print shop recommendations for small batch printing with custom sizing (I'm looking for 15x15, or around there)?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 21/11/2024

My latest attempt at overthrowing the oppressive Gregorian Calendar with a nature-based calendar system I'm calling Moonths. Still in the playing-around-with-different-frameworks step, trying to capture the idea of time being connected to the phases of the moon and to the sky in general.

Image depicting a moonth from Dec 1st - Dec 29th in a spiral format

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 15/11/2024

Can we make this the social network for pretty sky pictures?

Photo of the sky facing west, dramatic clouds, fuzzy sunbeams

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