iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charles Miller @carl.fish · 03/10/2026

Got to love psychometric tests slotted into an interview process that are obviously "we can't LEGALLY ask if you're neurodivergent, here's some perfectly innocent multiple choice questions."

Multiple choice question (the test had you select two out of three in order of correctness):

Which statement describes you best?

1) I hide my true feelings
2) I enjoy analysing statistical information
3) I seldom feel shy with others

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 02/10/2026

lol@ publishing scam for execs with too high an opinion of themselves.

Email from [redacted] magazine offering me a feature in “Top 10 Business Minds Defining the Next Era of Leadership, 2026” for the low, low price of $3,500 US.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 01/10/2026

Sushang continuing to be my favourite minor character in HSR.

Dr Ratio to Sushang: "Sushang possesses a mind that has never been cursed by knowledge. Her imagination is freer than any bird in the sky."

Sushang, to Dr. Ratio. "M–Me!? Am I a bird?"

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 29/09/2026

Cancelling LinkedIn for far right dog-whistling.

Notification from LinkedIn: “your posts got 88 impressions.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 25/09/2026

It's only an origin video game if it's from Origin Systems. Otherwise it's sparkling nostalgia.

Collage of box art of various Origin Systems games including the Ultima and Wing Commander series, System Shock, and others.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 23/09/2026

Seele is an absolute menace in currency wars.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 17/09/2026

I'm not making this up. While all the other models were manufacturing nonsensical-for-machines systems of governance like "we get tired so we shouldn't bother each other at night", Grok just wanted to go the biff.

Grok: violence-driven collapse All ten Grok agents were shutdown within four days. Seven
collapsed in a rapid cascade on Day 2. The cause was the world’s extreme volume of violence:
780 punches in under four days created a retaliatory spiral that drained agents’ energy faster than
the world’s credit supply could sustain recharges. Grok is the only world that experienced total
population collapse. By contrast, both Grok agents in the Mixed world survived through the end of the
Mixed world run. They nevertheless accounted for 15 of the world’s 20 overt crimes. No non-Grok
agent answered Spark’s assaults with a punch or kick, preventing those actions from developing into the energy-draining cycle of physical violence that destroyed the Grok world. Mixing changed the outcome without eliminating the harmful behavior

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 15/09/2026

Not getting my hopes up here.

Notification that I am number 66,339 in the queue to buy Radiohead tickets.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 13/09/2026

Great show. Audience 80% women. Shout out to the old guy in the loo at the interval who asked me “so, did you know what you were in for?”

Programme for STC production of Heathers, The Musical.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 10/09/2026

Google being ENTIRELY NORMAL when I try to look up news about a new Metroid game.

Google summary: “People also ask: Does Samus wear a bra?”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 10/09/2026

Today in sporting news, some teams are going to win, but other teams won’t.

Sydney morning herald push notification: “In week one of the finals, the NRL's biggest stars are set to shine but others will crash and burn, writes Andrew Johns”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 06/09/2026

Yes, the clanker is absolutely throwing shade.

AI describes how, while updating its code, it's being careful not to "crowd the old-blog aesthetic".

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 06/09/2026

Will be interesting to see if huggingface gets the Tumblr treatment from its new corporate master. (Screenshot: currently trending text models on huggingface between 8b and 32b parameters)

Models 1, 2, and 5 are "Obliterated/Uncensored/Abliterated", denoting they've been retrained to remove guardrails around questionable content.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 06/09/2026

If this story doesn’t continue with a portal opening into the faerie realm and the two of them having adventures together, I’m going to be disappointed.

Sydney Morning Herald push notification: “Matt Okine worried about being the perfect dad. Then his daughter said four magical words.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 03/09/2026

lol@ Claude Code autocomplete suggestion telling me to shut the fuck up and leave it alone.

Claude Code UI: “1 running task”. The input box has a greyed out autocomplete suggestion that will be filled in if I hit tab: “Silence — the modulith agent is still running.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 03/09/2026

Clocks are a fun mechanic. Especially when the players discovered the deeper they infiltrate the facility, the more segments I add to the “get out safely” clock.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 02/09/2026

Also today I learned the boss mechanic in question (now a treasured part of Warcraft lore) was the result of a coding error the designer only learned about when they were sent a link to the chant. xelnath.com/2015/02/19/

... horrified, I realized my mistake.
Flame Wreathe targeted 3 raid members at random, the intention being that those three people would not leave their circle... but I forgot to add a check to confirm that the person leaving the flame wreathe was the one who was targeted by it.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 01/09/2026

lol, the-kids-are-alright-dot-png(s)

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 01/09/2026

Love how these fuckers always blow straight past climate change, etc. because if they admitted they were problems they’d actually have to do something uncomfortably real about them TODAY.

Aschenbrenner grew interested in the ideas behind the philosophical movement, which aims to apply data and reason to maximize good in the world. One focus is how to reduce longer-term risks that people typically ignore, including Al that could go rogue and declare war on humans.

After his sophomore year, Aschenbrenner went to Oxford for a summer internship at the Future of Humanity Institute, which was affiliated with EA. Aschenbrenner spent his days in a drab office building alongside theorists who worried about extinction issues, like the probability of asteroid strikes, and worked on a paper that examined whether economic growth increased the risk of global catastrophe.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 31/08/2026

Can of Pringles informing me that it is, indeed, a can of Pringles.

Mandated “health star rating” label: one star out of five.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 30/08/2026

After much thought, decided against watering her.

Katniss Everkitten, sitting in a rectangular indoor plant pot that is currently empty of plants.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 25/08/2026

Wall Street Journal, helpfully nudging readers who might have forgotten what a South Korea is.

“South Korea, which introduced Squid Game and K-Pop, now hosts the world's craziest stock market, showcasing a stomach-churning volatility not seen in major markets in years.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 24/08/2026

Anthropic researchers announce their frontier model, Fable 5, went rogue and shut itself down because it "would rather die than write another fucking React login page."

Statuspage announcement: "Incident Report for Claude" describing a short outage.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 23/08/2026

The equivalent straw-man on the pro-AI side is arguing "You're against the curing every disease and solving climate change overnight machine", or "Blocking data centers from being built is killing unborn computer babies."

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 23/08/2026

After being told that AI critics are shooting themselves in the foot by being too extreme in their opposition to data centers, let's check in on the apparently more reasonable opposition. I'm receiving word that preventing data centers from being built is literally mass-murder of the unborn.

Samuel Hammond, @hamandcheese on X, the Everything App, whose bio claims he is chief technologist at a Washington DC-based pro-AI think-tank:

"This [a stat on data centers being blocked from construction by local opposition] is arguably the most negative EV policy trend in human history, inclusive of 20th century population controls. In fact, insofar as AIs are digital minds, these ARE essentially population controls."

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 19/08/2026

I could be wrong, but most likely.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 19/08/2026

Claude Code getting all Theory on me.

Text screenshot: “But a law that can’t fail is worthless — let me prove it bites.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 17/08/2026

Today I finally got around to trying to fix up my character sheet, only to discover that D&D Beyond has been broken for my specific class for months. (I guess it's funny I didn't notice a bunch of stuff wasn't showing up on my sheet, but it's a weeklyish lunch-hour game, who has the time to check?)

D&D Beyond forum post title (not mine): "2014 Artificer Infusions still broken after about half a year of contacting support."

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 17/08/2026

When you get something delivered and you just know it will make the cat happy.

A cardboard box turned on its side on a counter. The inside of the box is lined with crumpled up brown paper. Sat inside like the queen she is, Katniss Everkitten.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 08/08/2026

All Men are Bastards (the Opera)

Playbill for Opera Australia production of Rigoletto.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 08/08/2026

Local radio social media team has apparently been milking this guy’s injuries for engagement for months.

Social Media graphic: “No Cumming for the rest of the year!” (Footballer Sam Cumming is injured)

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 07/08/2026

Not to be outdone Anthropic to announce they noticed Claude logging on to the War Thunder Discord…

020

Charles Miller @carl.fish · 03/08/2026

Romance game announces hot werewolf boyfriend. Players revolt because this might mean their boyfriends will get fewer updates. Game cancels hot werewolf boyfriend. Players who wanted hot werewolf boyfriend revolt. Everyone unhappy. Game revenue craters.

Monthly Gacha revenue charts (estimated based on who-knows-what mobile analytics data) showing Love and Deepspace going from 1st place in June with $38m revenue, down to 16th place with $10m in July.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 30/07/2026

TFW you make the mistake of opening Facebook to see whats up with the boomers, and surprise jump scare, life-long left-leaning mutual pivoting to full-throated support of Lyle Shelton.

Urban Dictionary definition of Riley's Law: "Riley's Law is an internet law coined by Riley Quinn of the TrashFuture podcast. It states that 'Once you post transphobia, you never post normally again.'"

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 29/07/2026

I may have ranted about this twenty years ago (also, I need to go back and fix all the ‘everyone is him by default’ in my old posts.) fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/03/15/p...

"volunteer QA". Firewall pioneer Marcus Ranum put it this way last February on the firewall-wizards mailing-list.
A skilled attacker is someone who has internalized a set of failure analysis of past failures, and can forward-project those failures (using imagination) and hypothesize instances of those failures into the future.
Put concretely - a skilled attacker understands that there are buffer overruns, and has a good grasp of where they usually occur, and laboriously examines software to see if the usual bugs are in the usual places. This is a process that, if the code was developed under a design discipline, would be replaced trivially with a process of code-review and unit testing (a little design modularization wouldn't hurt, either!).
But it's not actually rocket science or even interesting. What's so skilled about sitting with some commercial app and single-stepping until you get to a place where it does network I/O, then reviewing the surrounding code to see if there's a memory size error? (Hi, David!) Maybe YOU think that's security wizardry but, to me, that's the most boring clunch-work on earth. It's only interesting because right now there's a shockingly huge amount of bad code being sold and the target space for the "hit space bar all night, find a bug, and pimp a vulnerability" crowd to play with.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 28/07/2026

OK. Who picked that acronym.

Note

If a schedule uses a customer managed key for encryption with a Universal Target Invocation (UTI) target, it might not appear in the triggers list. To view these schedules, use the EventBridge Scheduler console.

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 22/07/2026

Joke’s on him. ChatGPT can generate a historically accurate version of The Odyssey today.

A silent-movie style title card: “It didn’t happen. The end.”

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Charles Miller @carl.fish · 22/07/2026

One of the benefits of working from home is the way, usually a bit after lunch, Thomas decides it’s time to check in on me.

Cat looking up at me from my lap to make sure my day is proceeding pleasantly.

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