iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 17h

I benefit, I think, from having better intuitions about probability: I thought this article by Chris at xkqr.org is a great grab bag of practical intuitions about it: entropicthoughts.com/what-is-probab… (the blog is great on other topics too — I just sent him $5 on […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

so, candidly: I'm one of those people who is, at heart, ridiculously excited about the current generation AI, and see it as the culmination of vast chunks of not just my own work, but of the many people who have inspired me and I have worked alongside i understand why you might disagree, and I […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

If you're a #sanfrancisco artist or creator who wants to explore freeing yourself from digital monopolies @grayareaorg 's Beyond Big Tech course is great. You'll learn everything from the politics of decentralized tech, to setting up a Raspberry Pi with your own services […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

I am spending too much time thinking about Usenet. Haven't had that problem in a few decades...

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

What I like about @seldo’s plan to remunerate open source devs is — apart from it hasn’t been tried and might actually work — it acknowledges that companies actually struggle to pay for FLOSS even when they would be fine doing so […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

man i chose the wrong month to switch from crypto to effective altruism

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

For reasons, I've been looking at my earliest blog posts -- here I am 25 years ago, trying to deal with the sudden bandwidth demands of hosting the original Steve Ballmer "Developers! Developers!" video www.oblomovka.com/wp/2001/08/06/tue…

oblomovka.com

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

This excellent history of Autistici/Inventati fills in a /lot/ that I didn't know. cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/1008… . Before the democratisation of translation, it was particularly hard to perceive what was going on on the ground wrt digital activism in some countries -- I'd say […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 15/04/2026

@gruber re: daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/1… -- success (or even just "shipped features") has many parents, but @lisamelton thinks she and Steve Jobs simultaneously came up with the progress bar in the location field trick, not Steve Lemay […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 13/04/2026

i don't talk about AI because i don't want to be run out of cybertown, but in the secret chats you mustn't know about, it's i 50% how to organize your CLAUDE.md and 50% how to brush the hair of your smol language tolpa so that xe looks xer best at the next digital fae wedding

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 27/03/2026

@lizzard dared me to reveal on mastodon that I go to sleep listening to an audiobook of Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", but I have explained that I still have some dignity left

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2026

I have a hunch we are about to enter an Ornamental Age and this reminded me of that: xcancel.com/instance_11/status/2034…

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2026

Sad inditement of my Britishness: my American spouse leaves for a week and my treat is to boil some vegetables

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@metabrainz/1161244… This is such a great loss. Robert worked all his life for open data, and turned that project into a stable, persistent institution. Best wishes to everyone who knew him, and to the board for working to continue that vision.

mastodon.social

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pandoc @pandoc.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

“pandoc for the people”, the pandoc wasm web-app, is now available at pandoc.org/app It allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the browser. The documents never leave the computer, thus ensuring *full privacy*. Conversions to pdf are done via Typst […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 21/01/2026

Harry Hill pass responsibility for the Internet to Stewart Lee and Stew blames me youtu.be/GhJxiU1_5o0?si=aMqZOxTLLn7… (not really)

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2026

realising that old people get old people things just by inheriting them from the last batch of old people

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 07/11/2025

trying out another terminal emuulator, which is *fast* but I'm like ohh but it feels kind of ... soft? Turns out it is fast at rendering but isn't as good at input latency, and ... I think maybe I felt that? i must be very special and sensitive. or just dislike change

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 04/11/2025

Hello! I am looking for a Governance PM at the Filecoin Foundation! This is one the most fascinating places I've had the good fortune to work at, and if you have a background in open source or decentralized organizing, I think you might think so too […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2025

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ^G

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2025

every "let's discuss the impact of AI" and "let's share tips on using AI" group chat I eventually descends into a competitiokn to see who can make the most hilariously or inappropriate AI content

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2025

Oh, this rings true for much of (the small part of the world) I see: "Why can I, a middle-aged person with very firm opinions I will defend with the sort of withering sarcasm I learned during the golden era (and only the golden era) of The Simpsons, not make friends who share my exact opinions […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2025

liz just asked me what a lollipop lady is and conjectured it was a person who was in charge of giving children candy at school

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2025

weird moments from my life, #272 -- explaining Noisebridge to John Cusack (with @micahflee ), from boingboing.net/2013/09/04/john-cusa…

A very bearded danny with John Cusack in an EFF hat and Micah Lee not in any hat, at the Noisebridge hackerspace.

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Bruce Elrick 🇨🇦 @virtuous-sloth.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2025

Pareto-optimal non-market-based agricultural planning using a local and regional hierarchy of combined religious and pragmatic water temples. www.damninteresting.com/the-ancient…

damninteresting.com

The Ancient Order of Bali

In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2025

One of my favourite new thinkers, Frank Miroslav (@mutual_ayyde ) just dropped an absolutely fantastic barnstormer of an essay: "Technically Radical: On the Unrecognized Potential of Tech Workers and Hackers". I'm going to be quoting bits of this for /years/ […]

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Simon Phipps @meshed.cloud · 03/07/2025

Would you like to end the constant drumbeat of ill-informed legislative proposals that threaten to destroy end-to-end #encryption in #OpenSource #software? Are you from #Europe? Can you demonstrate your expertise? Then why not apply to join the European Commission's Expert Group for a Technology […]

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2025

starting any writing work session doing 'apt update; apt upgrade' or 'brew update; brew upgrade', and then silently praying to the gods of procrastination that something will break

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2025

i feel like statements like this are going to age ... strangely: lithub.com/against-ai-an-open-lette… “We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 28/06/2025

proof that @lizzard is not the only one being cute-d at by khaaan! and fizzbin #CatsOfMastodon

khaan! and fizzbin, two siamese cat sisters, 5 months old and still kittenish, crammed into a basket with feets and front paws sticking out

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Danny O'B @danny.mastodon.spesh.com.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2025

the percentage of my life covered by GPT3, GLP1, and GPL3+ is terrifying

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