iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

TFW you search for where a bit of villain dialogue came from, and Google has some helpful thoughts for the cartoon villain in question

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

The official inflation number has been ~3.25% for the last three years. And yet, this very typical takeout dinner cost me $29 in 2023. I remember the number because I get this one a lot.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

www.playstation.com/en-us/state-...

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Possibly unpopular opinion, but I’ve always felt that tomatoes are unambiguously fruit. Not in the “🤓 actually *botanically* speaking…” way, but because they’re obviously berries. They’re sweet and they’re full of seeds and they look like berries because that’s what they are.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

PM: "Hey Elan, could you look at the load time in —" Me:

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Project Hail Mary: the hype is real. The book’s has been my comfort rereading for a while, and the movie hits all its feels. Sure winner for Best Performance By A Boulder. I give it five claws up.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

GDC: +200% to footwear durability burn

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Updated Visual Assist, now it nags me to make my code worse.

A screenshot of the "Code Inspection" setup dialog in Visual Assist, which controls which "helpful suggestions" pop up when you're writing code. The "modernize-use-auto" feature is highlighted; its default setting nags the programmer to replace properly typed variables with 'auto' assignments.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Dad shared that this was his job while working on the COMEX floor.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Everyone’s got a favorite Christmas movie.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

I keep a reaction gif on hand to clarify why I care so much about the availability of market-rate rental housing to urban professionals

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

I’d want to ask someone earning $100k whether they feel impoverished. A few other things stuck out to me about the article: - is the poverty line is higher when people spend less on food? - should fewer people pay taxes? - where are those housing costs coming from?

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

After the trial I looked up NHTSA experiments on low-damage rear-end collisions. For ΔV = 11km/h ≈ 3.06m/s they measured mean acceleration 3.2g. 3.06² / (2 *.07) ≈ 67 ≈ 6.8g so my math is an overestimate vs experiment. www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/ESV/Proc... (3/4)

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

An early encounter gets revisted at the climax with all of the protagonist’s skills leveled to max. There’s a running gag that’s very Kojima (you’ll know it when you see it). And “Predator: Badlands” stars a space creature with a wisecracking robot strapped to its back, so...

Poster from “Predator: Badlands” featuring the top half of a synthetic android strapped to the Predator’s back

Art of “Ratchet and Clank” showing the diminutive robot Clank strapped to Ratchet’s back

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

“Predator: Badlands” was much better than I expected. Story’s built like a video game: weapons are introduced, demonstrated, used with improvisation. There’s boss battles and a stealth sequence with Ghost-style chain assassination. A new tech tree opens in the third act. (1/2)

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Or you can use leading zero count (LZCNT aka __lzcnt64()) , which is defined as 0 → 64, and also 2 cycles faster than bsr. *undefined = on some CPUs it returns 0 and on other CPUs it return either 0 or garbage depending on flags and source operand type and who knows what else DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

x86 `bsr` opcode gives an undefined* result for input value 0. Windows intrinsic _BitScanReverse64()'s returns 0 for input 0 to handle this case. Use it in a ternary statement to generate branchless code. Hope this helps.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

That said, I mostly enjoyed Tron: Ares. It's not a great film, but it has a great soundtrack, and it was fun to spot all the quotes and references.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

AI as nascent lifeform is also core cyberpunk. But I think we're past that story being "Frankenstein" and need to start doing it as "Dr. Strangelove". The best movie we've had on the peril of overfit machine learning so far is M3GAN.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

But a lot of Tron: Ares is cyberpunk about cyberpunk. War between the corporations. Computer hacking is infiltrating a Futurist building in cyberspace, straight out of Neuromancer. The world is saved by a heroic video game developer 😁

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Tron isn't religious propaganda, it just uses allegory as a narrative device, and that allegory isn't 1:1. But allegory gives theme; the movie is *about* something, it's a parable of purpose and faith. Tron: Ares is mostly about Tron.

Screenshot from "Tron" : the scene where a dying RAM program looks at Flynn, realizing that Flynn is a user (effectively his god) there for him in his last moment.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

The rest is obvious. Tron, his faith in the Users unwavering, is a disciple. The I/O priests are conduits between the programs and their creators. Flynn sacrifices himself to restore that connection, then ascends bodily to the creators' world.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

But things in Tron's world *do* have purposes! The tanks and Recognizers are game entities. The solar sail is a research sim. The programs use these things without knowing why they exist. Flynn can work miracles because he has context.

Excerpt from an early draft screenplay of "Tron":
419 A SHOT FROM THE SIDE OF THE SAILER, RISING WITH TRON 419
AND YORI

We see that this vessel is a simulation of a futuristic spacecraft,
designed for travel in the real world using solar energy, with an
enormous metallic sail to catch the rays of sunlight like wind, and
move with the speed of light. The sail is at the bow of the craft,
and a long, slender walkway connects it with the deck area, which is
made up of several connected flattened box-shapes, giving it the
look of a dragonfly. In this world, the sailer catches data
transmission beams instead of sunlight, and is propelled along the
information paths to the Central Processing Unit.

TRON V.O.
Can it carry us?

YORI V.0.
The design is good... We don't know
why the User abandoned the project...

The elevator platform brings Tron and Yori through the center,
forming part of the deck as it reaches a level position, locked
into place.

Screenshot of the Solar Sailer simulation CGI in "Tron"

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

The same actors portray both programmers and their programs. AIs are made in their creators' images. So when Flynn gets abducted into cyberspace, he's literally The Creator bodily manifested among his creations, then condemned by Pilate.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Some programs believe they were created for a purpose by a higher power they cannot see. The local authority wants them to serve itself instead. So the ones who believe in The Users are sent to the games to die.

Russell Crowe as the gladiator in "Gladiator"

Peter Jurasik as one of the disc game gladiators in "Tron"

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Tron's story asks what arcade games would be like for the characters in them, sent to fight in deadly sports on behalf of users they never see. Reach into history for a parallel and you'll find gladiators. The rest of the story flows from there:

Excerpt from early draft Tron screenplay:

Two other game warriors on the grid, this time throwing
glowing disks at one another like frisbees. We see the
one colored blue throw; his disk smashes into the second
warrior, and he dissolves into thousands of glowing lines.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Something that got lost between screenplay and screen is *why* the cyberspace of Tron looks the way it does: it's a world built from video games and simulations. The people are game avatars. The vehicles are CAD assets and research sims.

Excerpt from an early draft TRON screenplay:

6 ELECTRONIC WORLD 6

Futuristic tanks bearing down on one another in a flat grid-like
landscape. One FIRES, and the other disappears when it is hit, to
reappear, spinning wildly, in the distance. We HEAR a sound
like a crack of lightning.

7 REAL WORLD 7

A video game in an arcade. On the screen is a typical version of
Tank Wars with computer generated representations of tanks in a 2-D
maze.

Screenshot from Tron: CLU's tank faces down a Recognizer

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Tron: Ares is a very colorful movie in which many things happen. But it misses a big part of what made the original "Tron" work. Since no one asked, let's talk a bit about cyberpunk, video games, and religious allegory.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

In 426BC, Athenian politician Cleon prosecuted the comedian Aristophanes for making fun of him in front of foreigners. In response, Aristophanes produced The Knights, a play comprised entirely of slander against Cleon. It won Best Comedy in 424BC. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kni...

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

What the heck is going on here? Walter White?! I just asked it whether I should use Fantastik or Windex in my bathroom, and now it’s dropping hints about cooking meth.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

Copilot is alarmingly enthusiastic about this topic.

Screenshot of a Copilot answer that begins: “Fascinating hypothetical, Elan — swapping nitrogen for argon in the air supply would be a subtle but profound shift in the chemistry of respiration. Here’s what might unfold:”

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

The trouble is that yelling this has been extremely counterproductive.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

A letter to the editor of a Burbank newspaper is very concerned that letting people build low-rise apartment buildings along a major bus route would replacement single-family houses with rental units, making the neighborhood less affordable. The single-family houses:

Photograph of a house near Olive Ave, Burbank, selling for $2,495,000. The house has a palatial exterior and a manicured lawn.

Map of houses for sale near Olive Ave, Burbank. They cost between $1M and $2.8M

Photograph of a house for sale in Burbank. The photograph depicts the house's inner courtyard, with its garden and citrus grove.

"Letter to the Editor: Resident Says Passage of SB79 Will Destroy Neighborhoods Along Olive Avenue"

"Senate Bill SB79 is labeled “affordable housing” legislation but will produce little to no affordable housing. It appears specifically designed to destroy stable single-family neighborhoods and neighborhood commercial development, to the benefit of real estate speculators and developers.

SB 79 is currently before the State legislature. It has passed in the Senate and is now being considered by the Assembly. It specifically encourages the densification of residential neighborhoods and commercial property within one-half mile of major bus or rail transit stops. SB79 defines three types, or Tiers, of major transit stops with associated density targets."

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

And we’re back to The Big Short again. www.newsweek.com/map-where-fl...

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Pet peeve: when people hit enter on every pause in their thinking so a single sentence becomes a dozen messages stretched out in time over minutes but each one needing me to look if they're finally done and waiting for me to reply. I call this "Shatnerspacing"

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Years later, still the best assert message I've written.

Screenshot of a modal assert message. It has ASCII art of Gandalf alongside the text "YOU SHALL NOT PASS invalid parameters." Below this is text explaining that the caller to my function passed it NaN values, and the function is triggering an immediate fatal assert to ensure the callstack indicates the function supplying the bad data at the moment it's sent into the system. It's like a defensive moat at the interface between gameplay code and the engine system.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

On this day I like to reread the Declaration of Independence, which contains one of my favorite things: an itemized list of grievances. www.archives.gov/founding-doc...

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

When I see someone trying to waive a crash bug

A very determined Captain Lorca sternly saying "Not on my watch." (For the purpose of this post let's pretend he isn't from the mirror universe.)

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

It backfired immensely. It polarized California voters in favor of longer jail sentences. The slogan did immense damage to the cause, damage that has not yet been undone among the majority of people not out there defending their neighbors from the gestapo.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

🚨 if you use #ChatGPT: the New York Times got a court order forcing OpenAI to permanently retain every chat, including the ones you delete. Everything you send to the ChatGPT free/plus/pro app, and every call to the API, must be stored for discovery by the NYTimes' lawyers. (links follow)

Excerpt from court order: "Accordingly, OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of “numerous privacy laws and regulations” that might require OpenAI to do so."

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

A nonprofit wants to build 60 subsidized, low-income apartments near me. At a city meeting, locals objected to this project; they said it would add traffic to an already very busy street. So, the next Monday, I went there to record rush hour traffic.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

They say that investing in public transportation pays dividends for years. In the case of the San Francisco BART, that dividend is 5% per year.

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Adjacent in my YouTube recommendations.

Screenshot of two video thumbnails on YouTube's front page. The first one is a trailer for "Murderbot". The second is a Computerphile video titled "No Regrets - What Happens to AI Beyond Generative?"

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

This was the giveaway that Lorca was from the mirror universe

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Elan Ruskin @despair.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

#TacticalBreachWizards is such a masterclass in how theme, story, and gameplay are more than the sum of their parts. eg, level designs convey character beats & the character’s personality inspires the level design.

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