iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

{passing out pamphlets in the lobby with the fervor of a union organizer}

Vimeo was bought by private equity, fired a huge fraction of their employees, and now have doubled their prices. Google brings up any number of Vimeo alternatives, but does anyone have personal experience with video hosting that you like (or dislike)?

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(This probably reads as grumpier than intended. I think at least the second one would be VERY funny, *and* force arts leaders giving pre-show speeches to not reach for cliché crutches.)

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 03/10/2026

Two things I'd like to see in theater, from audiences: 1) stop giving standing ovations unless you've had a transcendent experience 2) every time someone trots out that "how's everyone doing? (mild cheer) you can do better than that!" sequence, do not respond at all

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oh I would love to hear how that goes; I have a pal in that production and have been trying to decide if I should drag my self up from Baltimore to see it

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 02/10/2026

back in my day I didn't have robots to set up my jokes for me! i had to make them spontaneously, during real human conversations! without any help at all!

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 02/10/2026

ok but also bsky.app/profile/chri...

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 02/10/2026

water bottle this, water bottle that! back in my day, you got until the count of 3 to drink from the water fountain after PE and that was the total amount of water you got in a day

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Saw this whiteboard in a therapist's office, so I decided to compare it to Jev's answer. Whiteboard tally: Yes - 21 No - 79 Taco - 1 (Extremely coincidentally, Yes + No votes add up to 100.) The human answer to "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is 79% NO. Jev's answer to that question is 77% YES.

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gashed my finger while stress-cleaning about AI, how's your morning going

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i would so love to have a chance to sit in a real life room with you and be curious together about what is happening

I haven't checked the references, but fwiw I was curious and:

Oracle: "a little while after you navigate a global multi-year pandemic will come the onset of a world-altering technology that Bill Gates describes as 'the most dangerous thing humans have ever created', & the climate begins to collapse in earnest." me: "…" O: "but they do fix the ozone layer!"

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 29/09/2026

this Ezra Klein & Bill Gates AI interview. woof.

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i don't want to know ANY more information about this; this post is the perfect amount of information

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Hey I appreciate that, thank you. Like you, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. While I don't claim it's straightforward, I also don't even remotely share your conclusion that it is flatly & obviously unethical. Since we don't agree on that, I imagine how I talk about it will be frustrating.

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Also these; self portrait under stars in West Virginia

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i haven't been practicing my picture-making nearly as much this year (it's been a year where a lot has been disrupted), but here's a few photos from recently

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Prior to smartphones with GPS, I had multiple bad experiences with professional taxi drivers. In addition to all the many other benefits, phones+GPS created a far better taxi. Gig work lacking health care? Not great. But that's a failure of our political system, not a failure of the GPS satellites.

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I'm not a genius but I have spent years automating tasks in design, which made them more accessible & less expensive, which empowered lower-skilled people to do it at all and higher-skilled people to move beyond tedious tasks and focus more on the interesting parts of design. Which is relevant here.

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I'd ask you to consider, in our exchanges, which of us has been expressing contempt. I'm interested in exploring this complex topic that is affecting all of us but it's unappealing to do so when the start of the conversation is being yelled at and cursed at.

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Scott, it sounds like you may not want to follow me. For the record, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I find this a deeply offensive interpretation of my perspective which I do not agree with at all.

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Each of the three design templates can be exported in one of four social media layouts (2 x Instagram / 1 x TikTok / Square), with different safe zones applied per layout. I've been using this stuff for 9 months now and it still keeps blowing my mind.

It can generate three kinds of templates, including one for a review quote. I can customize the focal points of each image and adjust timing of the elements. I can choose variations of the brand colors depending on the content. All just asking Claude on the web; not even Claude Code.

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 25/09/2026

I heard Opus 5.5 got good at motion graphics. I gave it my PDFs of the brand guidelines for my theater and asked it to make a tool to help me generate clips for social media. It gave me back a ~1MB standalone HTML file that accepts photos and videos and generates stuff like this:

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There's no doubt that Meta is tremendously successful as a company, but *how* they do it gives off such loser vibes.

Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 25/09/2026

Hilarious to me that they spend more than 80 billion (!) dollars on the metaverse, change their whole ass company name to "Meta", and the first time they do something interesting is when they finally decide the metaverse isn't actually cool and the REAL future is AI.

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 25/09/2026

Meta's current focus on their new AI agent is (ironically!) much less interesting to me than their new VR glasses. Meta is a gross company that I don't like, but good VR at an affordable price is intriguing. I think it's the one thing that could clearly change the game for the economics of theater.

I should try it again, because it sounds very appealing. (Perhaps I have been reluctant because it sounds... _tooooo_ appealing... nice to not be tempted...) We've also been proceeding extra cautiously about containerization & sandboxing, so it's not even turned on as an option for our company yet

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I'm so old-fashioned that I'm still at the "only programming while physically at the computer" stage 😆 (well, that and our product is macOS-only which makes it less suitable for remote coding). But yeah, since we're completely in control of the pace and the goals, there's so much upside.

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Ha, I was going to go link to that Expertise paper when I first saw this post – and then realized your subsequent follow-up credits the Expertise paper 😆 Such a helpful paper for thinking about this moment!

I've been wondering if there's room for a new job title that is a mix between domain expert, product management, process management, coding, etc... I've been loosely thinking of it as "operational engineering".

Ah, I understand better now. I don't have experience in big companies (I've basically only ever worked at my own <20 person company) so I haven't had to experience that dynamic. I would say I'm still conservative about how I use it, but gosh does it let me focus more on the parts I enjoy.

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I see this reaction a bunch and I find it kinda puzzling tbh — for devs who really deeply love the act of programming, that makes sense, but if programming is the means to an end (a product, a tool, etc), I personally tend to find more pleasure in designing the system vs the details of typing code.

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i auditioned fair and square. but there was a funny moment when the director figured out on set that i made QLab and i guess he knew what that program is and was surprised that the guy playing the priest also made QLab

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 23/09/2026

i'm, uh, in this movie? i might go see it next Friday night? i haven't seen it yet, so i don't know if i did a good job newnextfilmfest.com/film-2026/li...

newnextfilmfest.com

Little Doors

Preceded by "Roterfluss"

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I don't think I understand the call here. Is it "seriously, though, we're in trouble, someone really change something this time"?

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 23/09/2026

one nice thing about using @qlab.app to run your doorbell is that, when you discover how package delivery guys tend to be Very Impatient and like to Mash That Doorbell A Lot, you can just adjust the cue programming to prevent them from triggering the doorbell sound faster than your desired rate

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Reposted by Chris Ashworth

The Voxel @voxel.org · 22/09/2026

Nevermore, from Orange Grove Dance October 1 – 18 voxel.org/events/never...

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 22/09/2026

We have reached the point in software capitalism where @qlab.app is now getting support requests from people who assume they need to "renew" every year and are wondering if they need to pay us again for the program they bought last year. (They do not.)

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Chris Ashworth @chris.ashworth.io · 22/09/2026

yeah - operational engineers would need solid, vetted building blocks. foundational blocks with invariants that are hard to break, so the custom stuff on top can rely on them. (right?)

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Train people for "operational engineering". Let companies and organizations of all sizes confidently hire someone who can translate their needs into tools. This job could exist almost everywhere.

With the right infrastructure in place, and some accessible foundational education, every company and organization in America that does not currently employ a coder could employ this new kind of job – something between a domain expert and a coder.

I think this example hints at a new job category. The whole deal with AI is that it does not take as much training as I have to translate organizational needs into software. Companies and orgs have these needs and don't know they can now be solved. Relatively little training opens up new jobs.

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i love food. and i even like cooking! but *planning* a meal is an unbearable task. mental agony.

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sometimes you and your partner are making them dinner and they try to dress and serve a bowl of compost as a salad. twice.

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