iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I would never willingly choose to use it, it's only because my $dayjob is wall-to-wall Microsoft, so everything has to be done via Microsoft apps. It wastes *so* much of my time...

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"Try removing your account from the app and re-adding it", the docs tell you. Great, except you can't remove it without entering the code... from Authenticator... which isn't working.

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Want to set up 2-factor authentication? Good luck. Authenticator will add your account, take you through several doom-loops and then proudly inform you that "there's been a problem" and now you're locked out.

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Colin Hoad @colinhoad.com · 21h

Microsoft Authenticator must surely rank as the single worst piece of software ever developed. It is so, so, so bad. Worse, even than Teams.

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They're also gunning for regulation that protects their position and closes the door on local models, I suspect.

If I light a fire in a dry forest and then go home, we don't say "oh my goodness, FIRE has escaped containment, SUPER INTELLIGENT FIRE is going to destroy us all" - we say, rightly, that *I* was negligent and that *I* should go to prison.

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If you feed an LLM prompts generated by the responses from another LLM and simply leave it for days at a time in an endless loop, *of course* things like this will happen. Throwing up your hands and going "oh, look what the AI did!" is obfuscation. YOU did it, OpenAI.

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I am sick and tired of this kind of reporting. Journalist, please, I am begging you, stop taking the press releases from these ghouls as literal fact and DO SOME ACTUAL ANALYSIS. Nothing has escaped, the people running these AI experiments are simply being grossly negiligent.

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Reposted by Colin Hoad

we have control mechanisms for this. it's called The Law. these guys should be held personally liable for these harms. the suicides, the thefts, the intrusions into computer systems. they should be sued and prosecuted as appropriate. problem immediately solved

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Well if he's a professional programmer of 40 years, he's up for retirement soon, so that is indeed true.

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Nobody has ever been helped by the suggestion "why not use AI?"

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Or bedside power sockets.

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That clown is so, so out of touch that I'm not convinced he's fully human. He says he sometimes forgets his zip code or his telephone number... I mean, sure, if you're as obscenely rich as he is, why not? There's always a flunky around to remember those things for him.

Indeed. Information mediated solely by big tech companies, giving them even more power than they already have, free to memoryhole whatever they like with total impunity. Which would be depressing enough, but the fact we know they're all run by the very worst kinds of people gives zero room for hope.

I'm fairly sure that's the case, yes. Build in a dependency on AI then jack up the prices (because we all know the current subscription plans are hugely subsidised and loss-making...)

It's just galling, really. In just a few years we've leapt from universal agreement that every child should learn to code to, now, nobody needing to code ever again. I'm struggling to comprehend the mentality. It's like the world has been brainwashed by a few very evil, very rich men in America.

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026

Reposted by Colin Hoad

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

nyti.ms

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

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Eben Upton said recently that being able to read and write code should be considered part of computer literacy. These are core skills, still, regardless of what LLMs can do. I fear that abandoning them will usher in another era of tech illiteracy, and we will all be poorer for it.

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I am a self-taught programmer. The O'Reilly series, SAMS Teach Yourself and even the good old Dummies Guide were my bibles early on in my career. I still love nothing more than reading a good programming tome or reference manual. Throwing all of that away feels very, very wrong, to me.

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I saw a humble bundle deal on C++ programming books advertised on Facebook this morning, and there were several comments underneath saying "why bother, just use AI" and "who needs books for coding, we have Claude" etc. and I must admit it was gut wrenching.

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It sounds *amazing* to me! 😋

(possibly my most middle aged post ever)

*idly fiddles around with retirement age online calculator* *gasps* *increases monthly pension contribution*

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I'd not heard that before - yes, it's *far* too good for a ringtone!

Ooh, hearing them both side by side it's really hard to choose. Am reminded of the Brig's line, "wonderful chap, all of them"... but I *think* the Win '95 one just edges it, ever so slightly.

Grady Booch @booch.com · 28/09/2026

Reposted by Colin Hoad

To assert that any contemporary AI can think or is conscious represents a particularly emaciated meaning of those words, and suggests that any author of such assertions has a profound misunderstanding of the exquisite nature of what it means to be human.

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Colin Hoad @colinhoad.com · 25/09/2026

The humans on the spaceship in Wall-E, basically

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(whispers) they weren't even particularly good books

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They're both excellent, I love the original too... but the carrot power-up edged it for me 😁

020

Kane's face melting was hands down the *best* bit of Dragonfire, though.

000

It was a lot of fun, and the voice cast (the likes of Eric Idle, Jon Pertwee etc.) were brilliant

Many Acorn folks rate Citadel higher, but POM is my first love 🥰

Oooh, seeing Monkey Island there reminds me I forgot to find space for Discworld! Too. Many. Games.

Honourable mentions: Prince of Persia, Duke Nukem 3D, Worms, Sonic The Hedgehog, Tekken 3 and Mario Kart

Had to be really strict on Civ, could easily have put Civ I, Civ II, Civ Call To Power and Civ IV in here... but ultimately Civ II is my favourite in a very competitive field.

My 9 games #My9Games my9games.net/en/share/be3...

Imogen (BBC Micro), Palace of Magic (BBC Micro), Final Fantasy VIII (PS1), Doom II (DOS), Civilization II (Windows 98), Super Mario Land 2 (Gameboy), Minesweeper (Windows 3.1), Lemmings (DOS), Half-Life (Windows 98)

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Judging by the image, are we to assume you also slept in your hat, Nick?

Colin Hoad @colinhoad.com · 23/09/2026

Good. Should be a swift trial, there's video footage *that he took himself* of the incident.

060

I've had people explain to me that WebP is in fact a superior image format for the web, but I still maintain it's pants.

Colin Hoad @colinhoad.com · 23/09/2026

The auto-captions unfortunately managed to mangle the point at which the racist said "I can't show you stats on anecdotes" (it rendered it as "I can't show you stats or analytics") Even by their own admission, these idiots are confecting outrage off the back of made-up stories they've heard.

Colin Hoad @colinhoad.com · 23/09/2026

"Less talkin', more phone" Superb.

I'm so glad to know I wasn't the only one! I did a little squee of delight when Bit showed up 🥰

020

Legacy was essentially a Daft Punk music video. Visually beautiful but without any real story to tell. Ares felt a bit more philosophical. Still not a patch on the original, of course.

I'm stating this now, Brown is 100% making a cheeky self-reference to his own much-derided social media YouTube efforts during his stint as PM. That grin is the same rictus he pulled in those videos.