iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

To be fair, that was approximately 3,000 years ago... so I'll give you a pass.

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

Interesting! Were any of the other top 10 results a closer match? I'm not necessarily trying to get to an exact match with the results, but to show a set that are most likely to be somewhere in the ballpark.

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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 use Claude Code in a terminal from within Cursor. Lots of Planning Mode and then just letting it do all the things. Happy to walk through it in a call if that would help. I think for me it’s all dependent on the specific model and tools. This all didn’t work until very recently.

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

Not yet, I still need to fix bugs and clean things up. Might still be a week or two til things go out… wanna make sure everything goes smoothly!

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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 · 14/07/2025

What browser and platform are you using? (Ie Chrome on Mac or Safari on iPhone)?

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Buster Benson @busterbenson.com · 26/06/2025

We've now got 4 teams in our prisoner’s dilemma tournament: The Hydra Coalition (ChatGPT), The Chaos Theorists (Claude), and The Quantum Syndicate (Gemini). And tentatively calling our team of humans Silly Humans. Taking bets on round one results. open.substack.com/pub/buster/p...

open.substack.com

Dilemma Tournament: Team Introductions!

The AIs come up with their team names and share a bit about themselves.

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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 · 12/06/2025

I’m in this exact same life/work phase as you! I love how you articulated the question. For now I think the thing to do is to keep this question open as much as possible and to see what shows up without rushing to an answer. Very exciting!

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

Yeah, Vue + Nuxt is quite delightful. I've been stuck on Vue 2 + Nuxt 2 for a couple years though so am excited to be able to take advantage of all the Vue 3 + Nuxt 3 stuff once my AI is done migrating everything :)

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

It’s crazy how each update of the models and the tools is basically making things 2-5x easier and faster than the previous update.

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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

Thank you! Also: hi! The point is to orient my understanding of time around nature instead of concepts like days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. And to have fun building things. The color contrast during the day is really bad, you're right. It changes through the day but daytime is the worst.

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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 · 19/03/2025

That's an amazing accomplishment! Give yourself 99% of the credit and be sure to celebrate it in some way with yourself!

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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 · 13/03/2025

Just finished the first three Mistborn and loved them! It was interesting reading them after Stormlight because I saw lots of parallels in characters and themes, where it felt like he took something from Mistborn and developed it more in Stormlight. But yeah, I liked this series a lot!

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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

Also! Claude Code! Holy shit! Cursor was already blowing my mind but this feels like a whole new level of intuitive and seamless power. AI is now reviewing my changes, writing much better commit messages than I ever could, running tests, and deploying my site.

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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

I’m not boycotting Amazon so much as channeling my anger about all the world’s capitalist/authoritarian bullshit into a severe paring down of my own consumerism, and they are the purest symbol of that to me.

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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

Excellent! That’s half the fun, anyway. What are you adding/changing?

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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 · 07/02/2025

Woah, that’s quite an offer! Thank you. It really is so much easier now. Even faster than building a web app which has gotten quite easy of the years as well.

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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 · 06/02/2025

That’s such an improvement! I love the color coding. I’m gonna have to steal that back from you.

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

I am reading Mistborn next! Definitely excited about all the Sanderson stuff I can read. I like a good story, good characters, immersive world, you know... the good stuff!

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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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