iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 18/05/2026

Low tide so low some boats are sitting on their hulls.

Picture of Shilshole marina in Seattle with a boat tied up to the dock that is actually resting on its hill. Exposed dirt and rock are just a few feet to the right of the boat.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 14/05/2026

Morning team. Slack issues, how you doin?

Tall statue of Leif Erikson with a dramatic blue cloudy sky background.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 12/05/2026

Briefly signed into Xitter today. 🫠

Enshittified X screen that's simultaneously trying to upsell me and also agree to new ToS.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 11/05/2026

Looks like crabbing season opens today. 🦀

A bunch of boats at a dock loaded with crab traps.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 20/04/2026

Fair point. :( Here's a /context from a completely fresh Claude config dir. *poof*

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 20/04/2026

Fired up aperture by Tailscale...instantly alerted to the fact that my starting prompt is 40k tokens. Not terrible and I think it's par for the course as most of it is system prompt type stuff, but the insight is so nice.

Screenshot of "Metrics by Model" from the aperture dashboard showing claude-opus-4-6 model with 3 requests and 43,605 tokens estimated at $0.27.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 15/04/2026

Olympic mountains but from a sliiiiightly different perspective than usual.

A view of the Olympic mountains from Victoria, BC. A small Canadian flag waves in the distance.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 03/04/2026

f you see this, I implore you to post a picture from whatever device you're using with no explanation.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 21/03/2026

I had prompted it with that combo initially because it had come up elsewhere. That said, it used previous discussions to drive the convo in that ultimate direction, which was interesting.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 21/03/2026

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is over here pitching me a DuckDB-backed RRDTool. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

💡 Bonus idea (this is actually interesting)

You could build:

“rrd-lite” backed by DuckDB

fixed retention policies
automatic rollups

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 10/03/2026

Turns out AI still hasn't learned to deal with daylight savings...

A status update from status.claude.com indicating that "Users with scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork or Claude Code who are in a timezone that observed daylight saving time last night were affected by an infinite loop."

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 02/03/2026

Claude over here roasting me on my HA/Tailscale/K8s setup. To be fair...it's warranted.

A screenshot of the text:

Ha, yeah. The "I just want to run Home Assistant" starter pack:

- 5 control plane pods (the price of admission)
- 4 Fleet pods (so you can GitOps the 1 app)
- 1 local-path-provisioner (so HA can save files)
- 1 Tailscale operator + 1 proxy pod (so you can reach it)
- 1 ExternalDNS pod (so it has a nice name)
- 1 Home Assistant pod (the actual thing you wanted)

13 pods of infrastructure, 1 pod of value. That's the k8s tax.

The good news is the overhead is basically flat — adding the next 10 apps costs ~1 pod each (plus a TS proxy if you expose them). The bad
news is you could've done this with docker run and a Tailscale sidecar in about 5 minutes.

But hey, now you have GitOps.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 18/02/2026

Definitely not me waiting for my limit to reset.

A screenshot of a Claude Code status line showing the 5 hour limit at 97% usage with 14 minutes left until it resets.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 17/02/2026

Also, luckily have an old app so I can make my simple "brain" project this evening that aggregates my likes, stars, and saves across different platforms.

Screenshot of a simple web UI with a search box and results. The search box contains "claude" and there are 3 UI pills underneath labeled "bluesky", "github", and "reddit". Below that are search results from my saved content.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 15/02/2026

That was actually pretty easy with Talos Linux...

Screenshot from (an old and busted version of) k9s of running kube-system pods in a kubernetes cluster.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 03/02/2026

Not sure whether to be blown away in delight or terror at Claude's approach to extracting Python methods from multiple files into one.

A section of python code with a dictionary of section names and their start and end lines, and a method titled "extract section" that joins content based on a start and end line.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 16/01/2026

I have so much random shit backed up from literal decades ago. 🫠

A screenshot showing a treeview of a "backup/Download" folder showing files like "GeoShell 4102" (a windows explorer replacement in early 2000) and "Strongbad" (an animated Flash web series from 2001) and "Trillian Skins" (a freeware IRC client first published in 2002).

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 16/01/2026

Ironically was going to complain about their website ("over 57000 faced"??) and then made a typo in my post.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 09/01/2026

I don't always hop on zoom calls, but when I do...

A screenshot of OBS video with 4 different videos arranged in a grid.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 08/01/2026

Really hating everything lately so here’s some non-AI generated slop that might make you smile.

A plate with two bagel halves and a banana in the shape of a smiley face. Blueberries are used for pupils.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 16/12/2025

My gosh, man, is that just stock Opus? That made a sweet rust repl before I could blink!

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 27/11/2025

I don't always build RAG pipelines, but when I do I use "campfire" chats from 2012 as my dataset.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 25/11/2025

I realize that some of the talks are not titled with specific products ( like "Optimizing Apache Spark workloads" )..but still. Where even is Lake Formation?!

A summary of the different talks in the referenced blog post:

Highlights by Product

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio (Most sessions - 22)
- New unified platform for data & AI
- Visual data pipeline builder
- SageMaker Catalog for governance & discovery
- Agentic AI and natural language development

Amazon Redshift (11 sessions)
- Multi-warehouse architecture scaling
- AI-driven Serverless scaling
- Materialized views optimization
- Data sharing and monetization

Amazon QuickSight / Quick Suite (10 sessions)
- AI-powered BI with conversational AI
- Agentic AI chat experiences
- Embedded analytics for revenue

Amazon OpenSearch Service (9 sessions)
- Vector search and hybrid search
- Intelligent observability
- Low-cost logging solutions
- MCP integration for AI-powered search

Streaming (Kafka/Flink/Kinesis) (10 sessions)
- Batch to real-time migration
- Apache Flink stream processing
- Event-driven architectures
- Kinesis deep dives

Apache Iceberg / Lakehouse (8 sessions)
- Open lakehouse architectures
- S3 Tables for Iceberg
- Data interoperability
- Streaming ingestion to Iceberg

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 25/11/2025

Heat pump vs. fireplace...fight!

A temperature chart over the past 24 hours. On the left-side, the chart is sawtooth-shaped but on the right-hand side it's a smooth slope upwards.

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Damon Cortesi @dacort.velocipig.com · 25/11/2025

Literally just ran into this. An entire page of results, only 1 of which was an actual organic result. 🫠 And its even worse than in the picture – the result was almost 2 scrolls below the fold and there were *more* sponsored results below it! Source: www.instagram.com/p/DDbmv-yNij...