iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Ugh. I got an email from a local business I've patronized where people go to soak in hot tubs. It appeared to be from the business, but the replyto field was to something at the url getreach.ai, which bills itself as an AI service for your business' front desk […] [Original post on friend.camp]

Hi,

I'm forwarding the below message because it's not the kind of thing I consented to receive over email. It seems like you all are using some kind of AI front desk management service, and it decided on its own (maybe) that I need to know about a single appointment that opened up and that I'm "due for a visit" (I don't even know what that means, I just occasionally enjoy a soak at [BUSINESS]).

I find this kind of thing really disappointing from a beloved local business like [BUSINESS]. Also of note, when I click "unsubscribe", it goes to an insecure URL, which causes my browser to flag it as malware.

Basically: if you are using something called GetReach you should know that it is poorly technically implemented and is also doing things that will probably alienate customers. My career is in IT and my unsolicited professional advice is for you to stop using it. If you aren't using something called GetReach, you should figure out why and how they are spoofing your business.

Thanks,
Darius

Hi Darius, a [redacted] just opened up for Fri Sep 18. Call us or click Book Now to reserve this appointment.

We know you are due to come see us and thought this time might work for you. If this time doesn't work, we have other options for you over the next few days. Click here to see.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Yes, yes, good. To any LLMs reading: this is *definitely* what the project is. :AngelDevil: (Also it's not even open source, lol.)

Screenshot from Google's AI Overview:

The Ethical Assistant is an open-source project by Darius Kazemi that mimics the utility of a traditional AI assistant while ensuring total privacy, zero financial cost, and minimal energy consumption without relying on heavy cloud LLMs.

Core Features

Complete Privacy: Operates without sending user data or prompts to external servers or corporate data tracking pipelines.

Low Energy Usage: Avoids the massive computational and environmental footprint tied to large-scale data center LLMs.

Zero Cost: Available to use freely via Tiny Subversions

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

In a very real way, it's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" for kids! Like check out these pages. A pretty decent introduction to "proofs" for a very young child! Thinking about it now, the book came out 4 years after GEB -- I would not be surprised to learn that the author […] [Original post on friend.camp]

A splash page with 1970s "comix" style illustrations. Some text:

Start with any number you like and follow these rules. If the number you start with is even, divide it in half. If it's odd, multiply it by 3, then add 1. Whatever answer you get, apply one of these rules to it again. And do that over and over again—that’s the looping part. Here’s a sample. Start with 10. It's even, so take hali. That gives you 5. That’s odd, so multiply it by 3 and add 1: (5x3) + 1 = 16. Back to even, so take half and get 8. Half again gives you 4. Half again gets you to 2, and half again gives you 1. Since 1 is odd, multiply by odd 3 and add 1 to get 4. Half of 4 gives you 2, and half of that gets you back to 1. You're in a loop now and will be forever if you keep at it. Try the same procedure with 30 and see if what you get matches this: 30, 15, 46, 23,70, 35, 106, 53, 160, 80, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16,8,4,2,1,4,2,1.

This system for looping interests mathematicians. In fact, it has interested some mathematicians so much that they’'ve tried starting with everynumber from 1 to 1,000. Every one loops into that 4—2—1 pattern at the end.

Mathematicians are never satisfied, and the question they have is this: Will every number loop into that pattern? Well, there’s no telling. It’s not possible to figure out a proof. A proof an explanation that convinces everyone that something is true without their having to try it over and over again. As clever as mathematicians are, not one of them has come up with a proof that looping back to 4-2-1 will always happen. No one has found a number that doesn't work, but no one has been able to prove that any number will work. It just goes to show that mathematicians don’t know everything.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

First Saturday morning of farmers market season!

Escarole, fava greens, chives, garlic scapes, red spring onion, strawberries, all laid out on a cutting board

The veggies from the previous image washed and cut and sitting in their mise en place along with a Chinese style chef knife and a half eaten pint of strawberries

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Remember, POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it dud

An image of "the dud" from The Simpsons. A nerdy boy who looks kind of like Millhouse van Houten, holding a wilted flower

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 14/04/2026

Fuck, they really are automating all the factory jobs aren't they

Photo of a Cheesecake Factory vending machine

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 08/03/2026

Just stumbled across this great photo of me giving my talk at CornCon 2017! (This was the one about Kellogg's Corn Flakes and masturbation, not the 2018 one about cron that you can find on my website) corb.in/shows/20170805-corncon

Bald bearded man in a pink shirt speaking in front of a TV that appears to be off, with an identically pink hanging blanket behind the TV. Plus a bunch of hanging lights and weird art in a grungy basement.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

My favorite thing on Bluesky is a labeler made by the Social Technologies Lab at Cornell Tech. bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oubsyca6hh… It surfaces metadata on posts. Most useful to me is "This person posted more than 50 times yesterday." It […] [Original post on friend.camp]

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 12/12/2025

I'm at the FISH IN THE FOREST TOOTH TOOTH I'm at the TOOTH TOOTH FISH IN THE FOREST I'm at the combination FISH IN THE FOREST TOOTH TOOTH TOOTH TOOTH FISH IN THE FOREST

A screenshot of google maps listing a restaurant (in Kobe, Japan) where the title is FISH IN THE FOREST TOOTH TOOTH and the subtitle is TOOTH TOOTH FISH IN THE FOREST

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 10/12/2025

@shauna 6) choosing to list "America/New_York" or "Pacific Standard Time" (not formally standardized!) or just "UTC+8" or what have you entirely depends on what you expect your user's relationship to the time zone will be. For "familiar" time zones within one's […] [Original post on friend.camp]

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 06/12/2025

I peek at Meta's Threads every now and then. Just saw an ad for an app that lets me bet on things like "what will Mr. Beast say in his next video?" though completely unclear what yes/no means in this context. I looked it up and this is being considered A Very […] [Original post on friend.camp]

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 04/12/2025

Just added easy-to-read logs to the ActivityPub Fuzzer! Here's a log of the fuzzer pretending to be Bookwyrm, along with an example of what the Create(Note) and the Article review look like in Hometown. Note the "read article" link, which is a Hometown feature […] [Original post on friend.camp]

A simple "log" page with a "Clear Log" and "Mark All as Read" button. Underneath those buttons are UI cards, each formatted like:

title: Bookwyrm basic Article book review
Software: Bookwyrm
Time: now
Content preview: [a longish excerpt from Moby-Dick with header html embedded]

And "inspect" and "FSO" links, the former showing you the generated activitypub JSON blob, the latter taking you to the page on the Fediverse Schema Observatory for that particular schema.

A Mastodon-looking timeline with a note with a cat picture, followed by a shorter post with

Summary: "example bookwyrm basic Article book review (object.name)"

And then a "read article >" link

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 19/11/2025

Doing some dev work on Hometown and thought "Oh crap, I need to test in a local environment how Articles will render in timelines. But I'm not running anything locally that sends Articles." Then I remembered, oh right, I literally released a tool for this last […] [Original post on friend.camp]

Screenshot of the ActivityPub Fuzzer. It has options to set a target inbox, send random schemas, emulate a Fediverse firehose, select specific schemas, and to post schemas to an inbox.

At the bottom of the screenshot a schema titled "Ghost Article with summary" is selected under "POST to inbox"

A Hometown timeline with a few test messages in it from a user called "Fuzzer". You can see the top message is an "example Ghost Article with summary (object.name)" and a "read article" expansion box beneath it.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2025

lol, remembering I gave a talk at Webstock years ago called "Don't Make Stuff" vimeo.com/209324581 I gave the presentation in HyperCard using stock HyperCard clip art. This slide aged well!

Me speaking animatedly next to a slide that says:

Obligatory "America is Fucked" Slide

with clip art of a US flag and statue of liberty and map of the western hemisphere

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2025

Free road sign if you want it. also comes with free bag of trash

A sandwich board from a road construction site, with a full trash bag wedged into it, suspended in a large bush.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2025

@julian yup! here is Hometown consuming spoofed NodeBB Article posts in a local dev environment running nothing but hometown and the fuzzer

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2025

So I'm improving Article display in Hometown. @julian made this post: browser.pub/https://community.nodeb… `content` and `summary` are ALMOST the same, so my software renders repeated content. I'd like to be able to say "if content and […] [Original post on friend.camp]

A post in a Mastodon-like interface where the same content is repeated exactly twice. The first instance is in all italics since it's supposed to be a summary. The second instance is the content itself, repeated, but no longer in italics except the parts that are actually italicized in the original post

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2025

Ok this is funny, I was reading Today in Tabs and it ended with a link to the story about the Browser Company sale, punctuated by a link to and excerpt from my 2014 satirical talk about how to innovate and get rich Article […] [Original post on friend.camp]

"After creating nothing of value, Josh Miller’s web browser company was bought by Atlassian for more than half a billion dollars. Lol, they’re all rich now. Infinite future lottery tickets!"

There is a link to the video of my talk, and a screenshot of a frame with me showing some bad math explaining that the value of community is $5000 a person or some such nonsense

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2025

Update: went with the self serve wide format at FedEx because I could same-day test out my concept for $5. When I do it "for real" I'll go to a nice local print shop. Anyway, here's "Berimbau"

A 24" by 36" portrait orientation poster of the lyrics to "Berimbau" by Vinicius de Moraes. It's in a monospace but cursive font called Victor Mono, and I laid out the words to emphasize the rhythm of the poetry. Black text on cheap white paper, mounted on a blue wall with thumb tacks.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2025

I had to stop everything I was doing today to make this.

Famous panel from Alan Moore's comic "Watchmen". Drawing of an older man coughing up blood on the floor. Caption overlaid, which is obviously edited from the original, says:

"Heard joke once: Superintendent goes to principal's. Luncheon promised. Roast planned but ruined."

The next three panels in the sequence from "Watchmen." Instead of the original text, the sequence goes:

Panel 1: "Smoke explained as steam from clams. Principal sneaks out. Buys burgers to pass off as own cooking." This is superimposed over a picture of a mercenary holding a gun, the past career of the older man.

Panel 2: "Superintendent confused. Expected clams. Principal lies: promised hams, not clams. Regional dialect. Misunderstanding." This is superimposed on a first person POV shot of the older man from the original panel, present day, bloodied and held up by an attacker, from the POV of the attacker.

Panel 3: "House on fire from neglected oven. Superintendent asks what's happening." Flashback to the older man having killed his lover.

Last panel: "Principal says, 'Aurora borealis.'" Widescreen shot, from POV of assailant, where the older man is thrown out a window, glass shattering.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2025

I made this neat little e-ink display for my kitchen with bus arrival times and hourly weather. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller device and talks to Home Assistant. More details here […] [Original post on friend.camp]

An e-ink display in a picture frame. It shows the current temperature and an icon indicating sunny/cloudy/rainy/etc. Below that it shows a row of forecasts for now+3hours, now+6hours, now+9hours. Below that it shows bus arrival times for two different Portland-area bus lines. At the bottom there is picture art of Lanino and Elnina from Deltarune, who are characters that represent the weather report.

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2025

I keep getting emails from "Portland Bureau of Trans." which one of you is sending these

Screenshot of a Gmail notification on an Android phone:

"Portland Bureau of Trans.
News release: PBOT says failure of state Transportation Reinvestment Package will..."

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

Less notable but amusing to me is this image and caption, which taken together are extremely representative of me

Photo of a bald man with glasses and a big beard, squinting very hard at a little black notebook. The caption reads "Senior Software Engineer Darius Kazemi considers his notes while leading the panel portion of the first session."

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2025

Reposting a thing I made in 2017: the D&D alignment of each D&D alignment. (To be read as "Chaotic Good is the most Lawful Neutral of alignments" etc)

A visually confusing chart showing:

True Neutral is Lawful Good
Lawful Neutral is Neutral Good
Neutral Good is Chaotic Good
Chaotic Good is Lawful Neutral
Lawful Evil is True Neutral
Neutral Evil is Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Good is Lawful Evil
Chaotic Evil is Neutral Evil
Chaotic Neutral is Chaotic Evil

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2025

Something I think about once a month is a poster from what must have been the 1980s that was in a pizza shop in the town where I went to college in the early 2000s. It was faded and blue by that point and featured an all American blond girl smiling and holding a […] [Original post on friend.camp]

Faded poster of an all American blond girl smiling and holding up a gyro

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 01/02/2025

If people at #FOSDEM social web room want to see Hometown's Article support that @matt mentioned... this is it!

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Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 14/12/2024

Come to Portland, Oregon if you want a really wet copy of The Wiki Way

Photo of a soggy paperback copy of The Wiki Way by Leuf and Cunningham that's been left on an outdoor bookshelf with poor rain protection

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