iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 02/09/2026

Literally every single thing in this image is cursed.

A poster for an event entitled “Up For Debate” presented by Polymarket, Andrew Yang vs Marjorie Taylor Greene, underneath captioned “an evening with Charlie Rose” (presumably the moderator), Wednesday, October 21st, 7pm, Golden Gate Theatre, San Francisco, CA

Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 30/07/2026

Cursed Tumblr fake gif! Here’s a different one, enjoy it because we’ll never get another movie with these three all together 😭

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 30/07/2026

Film you’ve watched more than six times. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, any Marvel, Disney or Ghibli

Tim Curry, Bernadette Peters, and Carol Burnett dancing in the song “Easy Street” from the 1982 “Annie”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 30/07/2026

film you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. hard mode: no star trek, star wars, lotr, marvel, disney, or ghibli.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 06/07/2026

Lovely. And this guy is the rat who lived in the last Airbnb I ever stayed at.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 15/06/2026

I found BASIC programs I wrote as a kid on old CDs in my garage. My favorite was always this fractal I’d designed. With small modifications, it runs on qbjs.org (the calling conventions differ, and young Dave was undisciplined in modular state management). This brought back such joyful memories.

$Screenshot of the fourth iteration of my fractal, a bit similar to the Koch curve but more rectangular than triangular. Each iteration i has 9^i line segments, so this iteration has 6561 tiny line segments, and they’re small enough that the emergent shape begins looking more organic and wiggly.$

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 11/06/2026

My 90’s brain still says ooh Zip disks, I’m so modern The data transfer rate says something else

macOS file copy dialog that reads “Copying 419 items to ‘Key School Website 1996 - 98 and “7.8 MB of 87.7 MB - About 5 minutes”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 11/06/2026

Bought a used Zip drive off eBay and pulled a stack of disks from the garage. They’re almost 3 decades old but seem to have held up 🤞

A stack of seven 100MB Iomega Zip disks from 1999

A used blue Iomega Zip drive attached to a laptop

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 06/06/2026

I wish it weren’t the case that senior engineers didn’t confuse their authority with scientific objectivity, but it’s all too common. Power is seductive, as is fear of having one’s legitimacy questioned.

Emperor Joseph making up pseudoscientific facts to justify his opinion, captioned “there are, of course, only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 06/06/2026

This is especially true if you are the more senior employee or in some position of greater influence. Most junior engineers will be afraid to speak up, not to mention confused and demoralized by unfalsifiable feedback like “too complex.”

Mozart replying to Emperor Joseph with a confused look on his face, captioned “there are just as many notes as I require, Majesty, neither more nor less”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 06/06/2026

If your design review is just “it’s too complicated,” you are likely doing more harm than good. Yes, simplicity is important. You can probably help your colleague simplify things! But you have to show good faith curiosity about their motivations and not just dismiss them out of hand.

Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II critiquing Mozart’s music as having “too many notes”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 22/05/2026

Every time I introduce an algorithmic feed into my life, it eventually makes me so miserable that deleting it becomes easy. Bye IG, bye Threads. 👋🏻

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 27/04/2026

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, DC, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Spielberg, Cameron, Wachowskis, or Ghibli.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/04/2026

Not to mention erasure of the real cloud Bob

A screen capture of the Bob Ross painting show entitled "Best of Clouds (Part 1)" featuring a smiling Bob Ross, a friendly, smiling white man with his signature perm in the style of an afro, holding a paint brush in front of a painting of clouds.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/03/2026

I can just picture your conversation.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/03/2026

and they didn't even get to "Ralph Wiggum"

New York Times Magazine article with the headline "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It" and sub-heading "In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird." I have selected and highlighted that last "deeply, deeply weird" sentence.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 28/02/2026

Don’t really need the money but I can spare 10 minutes of my weekend to be petty to a bigco that might or might not fight for a government refund, and probably would pocket it anyway.

Email from (REDACTED) to dutytaxdisputes@fedex.com, dated 1:50pm today, with the text:

Hello,

I recently received, and paid FedEx in full, statements for the following duties due to the US tariffs that were struck down on February 20th by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional:

- Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $52.20
- Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $13.35

Since these duties were illegally imposed, I should not have been required to pay them and expect my money to be fully refunded. I am flexible about the manner of repayment; a physical check or a refund to my credit card are both acceptable.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter,

David Herman

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 08/01/2026

Goodbye to my 2002 PowerMac G4, a relic of an era where computers felt to me like cozy little self-contained but internally boundless playgrounds. 🪦

A picture of my 2002 PowerMac G4, whose hard drives I nuked once and for all tonight.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 04/12/2025

PSA: before you clean up the shards of the broken ornament, take the extra 10 seconds to find *something* to protect your hand. Ok just trust me

My thumb wrapped in gauze and blue medical tape after a procedure

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 18/10/2025

No Kings, Ocean Beach, San Francisco

No Kings 10/18: thousands of protestors getting in formation to spell out a human message on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach on a clear bright sunny Saturday morning

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 01/05/2025

I do :) One of my most active and longest running group chats is with a few dear friends from that era of my life 😍

Partial screenshot of a group chat entitled “Fireflower Friends” with an icon of a fireflower from a Mario video game.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 28/04/2025

It’s been painfully apparent for the last few years that reactionary centrists and tech bazillionaires were hyping each other up to create the backlash against the social change of 2020. Amazing to see so much of it revealed in a single article.

To the degree these chats strayed into politics, two participants said, they rarely mentioned Donald Trump. They revolved around the specific political challenges of Silicon Valley's leaders: In the chats, executives commiserated about how to handle employee demands that they, for instance, declare that "Black Lives Matter" or support policies they didn't actually believe in around transgender rights. And they strategized about how to defeat San Francisco's progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 20/12/2024

Chinotto would like a word…

A photograph of a bottle of the Italian chinotto soda.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 08/12/2024

You're so vain, I bet you think this search was about you

A screenshot of a Google search with the query string "where did the Tantivy search engine get its name?" and Google providing the AI Overview "The name of the search engine Tantivy is a reference to the mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeros." There is also a sidebar explaining the early history of the branding of Google.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 25/11/2024

<music nerd brag alert> I’m beginning to be able to pick out the use of Lydian and Dorian modes by ear!

Older brother character from Napoleon Dynamite pumping his fist and saying “YESSSS”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 23/11/2024

The 6th grader nailed her math test today!

An iMessage thread between my daughter and me. First line from me reads “How did your summative go today?” Her reply reads “Good! easy” My reply to that reads “Woohoo! I knew you’d do great.”

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/11/2024

I refuse to join Bluesky - I don’t want to become part of a Don Francisco Pérez Pacheco chamber.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/11/2024

I refuse to join Bluesky. I don’t want to become part of a Yucateco chamber.

Photograph of the Ek Balam Yucatec-Maya ruins

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 17/11/2024

I refuse to join Bluesky. I don’t want to become part of an El Greco chamber.

Self-portrait of 16th century renaissance artist El Greco, whose status as a skeeter is unknown

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 16/11/2024

an exploit was found in the temporary laundry day mattress protection scheme

A mattress covered by a single green sheet, with two cat-sized lumps poking up from the sheet

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 16/11/2024

So if I understand the rules of Bluesky, sadly I now have to block everyone on this list. Love you all!

A modified version of a meme of Kermit the Frog casually drinking Lipton tea, where the tea has been replaced by a cheap to go coffee cup.

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Dave Herman @dherman.dev · 03/11/2024

Inspiring evening hearing from San Francisco legends en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_... and en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick... at the 25th Annual Potrero Hill History Night. So many voices in this city arguing what we can’t do; these two leaders showed us what can be created with community & love

Poster advertising the 25th Annual Potrero Hill History Night, featuring former San Francisco supervisor Sophie Maxwell, and MacArthur Fellow and Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakāne

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