iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 31/08/2026

I thought initially the Globe and Mail must have been Canada’s answer to the Onion, or like the Betoota Advocate www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/ma...

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 15/08/2026

Is this the miserable future we’re condemned to?

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 13/08/2026

We’re entering a new renaissance age of mysticism with AIs , we’ve never had the ability to synthesise unrelated esoterica on this scale before

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 10/08/2026

Trying to work out what size of beer to order is where it falls apart - SA and WA being absolute chaos merchants (I need this printed on a card when I travel interstate)

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 03/06/2026

One reason to love OCaml: all the package name tangentially related to camels

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 29/04/2026

Give the gift of seafood this Mother’s Day

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 09/03/2026

me using Claude to investigate a nasty memory leak

A screenshot of a Claude CLI session that reads:

* Sauteed for 51s

> for the love of god do not run it

Noted. I'll only edit the file, no execution.

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 11/02/2026

Finally got the stone path effect I wanted in my garden (and to think I was avoiding native violets because I didn’t think they could tolerate the heat)

Photo of a stone path with viola hederacea growing in between

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 07/02/2026

Clearing out some really old shit

A picture of a corner of an old travel brochure that says “Ansett Australia Holidays”

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 16/01/2026

I'm like "how is capital intensity so low" and then it's there in the next sentence. They don't fab.

text: "At Nvidia, which is a tier-one buyer of TSMC’s output, the data is more stark. Capital intensity was just 2.5% for 2024, while depreciation was only 5.7% of the cost of revenue. As a fabless chipmaker, it can enjoy gross margins of over 70%."

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 25/12/2025

If I had to provide a very specific example of Australiana, that would only make sense to any millenial of genx who grew up here, it would be this (satirical) Twitter account

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 17/12/2025

Especially with AI, which threatens to make our infrastructure even more dynamic and inscrutable. The DevOps era is really just beginning.

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 17/12/2025

This does seem to be leading to some kind of simulator or REPL for IaaC, which to be honest, is natural evolution of IaaC to something more parseable (IaaC being a concept that developers seem to struggle with), so I guess, great?

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 17/12/2025

We've been deploying databases, caches, auto-scalers and the like through IaaC for as long as it has existed, and we never expected it to deal with the state inside of them, just the state around them. None of this is emerging.

"Day 2 operations are everything that happens after a system works once. Restarts, rollbacks, migrations, credential rotations, capacity adjustments, and emergency fixes. These are not statements of desired state, they are actions driven by context, timing, and urgency. IaC tools can describe what the world should look like, but they cannot reason about what is happening, why it is happening, or what should happen next. IaC was never meant to manage these type of operations.

As the world evolved, IaC accumulated workarounds instead of capabilities. Imports, plan diffs, state juggling, and partial applies all point to a model trying to describe systems that change themselves. Databases, caches, and storage layers introduce real state and history that declarative syntax cannot safely express. Automation becomes brittle at the edges, and teams fill the gaps with scripts, runbooks, and ad hoc workflows."

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 17/12/2025

No, this is literally the world that many companies still occupy. There are developers who think their docker-compose.yml file is IaaC and still configure their cloud environment through click-ops.

"When IaC arrived, the big problem was consistency. Environments drifted constantly. Servers mutated by hand. Deployments were unpredictable or outright dangerous. IaC answered that moment with a single description of infrastructure that could be versioned, reviewed, and reapplied anywhere. It perfectly fit the early DevOps era, when the goal was standardization and stability.
The World That Outpaced IaC

Cloud infrastructure today behaves very differently. It rarely stays still long enough for a static description to capture it. Auto scalers replace machines every hour, cloud providers adjust resources behind the scenes, pipelines deploy continuously, and security systems rotate credentials automatically. When something breaks, the fastest path to recovery is often for a person to open the console and fix it directly."

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 01/09/2025

A camel and the rock (pun intended)

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 18/08/2025

amazing. I can now write code and get hideously drunk on mulled wine and call it the same thing

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 23/07/2025

A good loaf (thanks 15 year old youtube)

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 25/05/2025

We created *American Psycho* as the machine, able to churn hundreds of the same soulless music reviews that separated its chapters.

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 22/05/2025

oh that might explain why I can't use zig to build an OCaml cross-compiler for Mac (from this completely unrelated article on yak shaving www.dra27.uk/blog/platfor...)

“this test fails on macOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD” to “this test fails if the assembler is LLVM’s internal assembler [which happens to be the case on macOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD]”

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 22/05/2025

Reading between the lines: loans are backed by dozens of smaller loans *to similarly indebted businesses*, which will maximise exposure in the case of a severe economic downturn. (from ft.pressreader.com/v99c/2025052...)

Quote: "Financing for private credit funds is still deemed safer than the buyout loans banks provided before the financial crisis when they might supply billions of dollars for a single deal.

Today, loans are backed by dozens or hundreds of smaller loans, minimising exposure to any one business.

The Boston Fed also noted that credit facilities banks were providing tended to be among private credit funds’ “most senior liabilities”, meaning that they would only be dealt losses in “severely adverse economic conditions such as a deep and protracted recession”.

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 22/05/2025

The same debate being had with the loss of junior engineer positions and the increased use of AI in software development

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 17/03/2025

when you check in on the other languages

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 13/02/2025

A little ironic that more than 30 years after the Soviet Union collapsed and the "red menace" has long died, the real ideological threat from Russia is crony capitalism (from www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...)

quote: “There is a radicalisation on the left and right,” he said. “Die AfD and [far-left] BSW [Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance] are pro-Putin, fighting against democracy, and against Europe. [It’s because] we have severe problems, with the war in Ukraine, and a weak economy.”

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Chris Armstrong @chrisarmstrong.link · 24/01/2025

my mind makes associations in strange ways www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgAs...

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