iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A big part of the cost of those things is they are cross cutting the entire engineering surface. Updating libraries across your entire set of services and verifying there are no regressions is a lot of work for humans. Turns out that AI scales very well in that area.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I think (ex the human coordination part) a lot of those are a *much* cheaper than they were. Maintenance, auditability, security, etc - all technical aspects - can be largely delegated to the harness if you know what you’re doing today - and should come batteries included soon enough.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Once companies realize they can build *faster* than buy, they will.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This sounds crazy until you actually use current gen stuff. My personal AI setup is clocking 100+ meaningful tickets completed per day, for an investment of about 30 minutes of my cognition daily. About 2/3 of the tickets come from the AI itself.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Yes, short term. That’s a low end market offering long term because mid-large companies realize they can take software engineering in-house instead. Pure play B2B SaaS largely exists down a layer vs today - providing utility functionality in house developers build on.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Big incumbent software companies are *deeply* rooted in, and leveraged to the old economics, as has been true in every major economic transition in history.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The most aggressive startups are completely rethinking how they offer software - every customer gets something unique, precisely tailored to their use case - leveraging the set of core functionality.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Uniform software product offerings are rooted in economies of scale: divide high dev cost over large customer base. That works as a competitive moat when cost is high. The customer accepts an awkward fit because it all they can get in the market. Not any longer.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Not like this! What I’m seeing is products themselves are melting down.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That can certainly happen! I think the load bearing part of your story is the deal size. Big money is the only thing that gets a big company to move. Meanwhile, dozens of “small today” deals are going to the startups, and those are the big deals of tomorrow.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The difference between execution at companies with thousands of engineers and big bureaucracies vs companies with dozens to small hundreds of engineers and a lean management layer is night and day right now.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Big companies are at a huge disadvantage right now. Many of them get in their own way - demanding employees use their (clearly inferior) internal models for political reasons, cap usage at silly numbers, and have huge overhead preventing their most productive folks from doing their best work.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Famously, the Civil War was called “Civil” because of how polite everyone was at the time.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Famously, the Civil War was called “Civil” because of how polite everyone was at the time.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is peak BlueSky You may not like it, But this is what it looks like.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

For a second I read this as “sweaters tucked into socks”. Welcome to your new nightmare.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

But 9 is not nearly enough! Time capsule right here. My 9 games #My9Games my9games.net/en/share/fa6...

my9games.net

My 9 Games | Shared games picks

A shared 9-panel games collage.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I mean, he did introduce himself. Were you not listening when they gathered round?

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yeah, I have a library project that I had my LLM implement in 50 different languages - just for fun. For C I required it target embedded platforms - no libc or other dependencies at all. Verifying correctness across that surface area was a fun exercise.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If the real rate of return is guaranteed what is the thesis behind the higher premium?

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Does that function as a proxy for default risk?

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Agreed, and when I see these kinds of things I wonder: is there a reason we aren’t seeing? A-propos of nothing - if your data center is in space - what jurisdiction is it in?

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

EQ2 did fine, especially in the context that WoW launched basically on top of us.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Among other things they are behind. Apparently.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The frontier is famously policed by MBAs a few years out of an Ivy League school. In sure there are a bunch of old westerns to that effect.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

No one is stopping you from doing that right now. If anyone asks, you can tell them I gave you permission.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It’s not extravagant at all. I’ve been doing multi-language codegen to solve these issues for 20 years.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

That doesn’t really narrow it down 😂

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

And they might also want to know that 3 pounds of gold is worth almost $200,000!

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

If you think about it, untying a Gordian Knot is really simple. Just find the ends, undo each crossing in order, and don’t create any new loops!

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

You wanna break down that decompile step? Because if you’re going from an actual binary to source what you’re maybe seeing is what your Claude is calling things, symbols in released binaries are typically stripped.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Junk removing? In this economy?

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Leopards: Why are you asking me? I haven’t seen his face. I haven’t seen any faces anywhere. I would never eat a face. Don’t ask me any more questions.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

A couple of guys take a job so they can buy gas for their Winnebago.

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Reposted by Don Neufeld

John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Many years ago, I wrote down this bit of a speech Obama gave to an audience in Silicon Valley. Because it absolutely NAILED the difference between government and business.

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences then I think those suggestions are terrific.

That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked.

No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Dolly Parton and Tim Curry were both younger than my parents are. Feeling lucky to still have them today.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Yeah, I have come to see Subscribe & Save as a borderline scam that makes all its money from non-consensual price hikes after the fact. I still buy things on the program, but always on a 6 month subscription which is immediately cancelled.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

If you’ve never spent any time in -40°, you should try it. It’s hard to *breathe* air that cold for very long.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I’m not kidding about that, last time I visited my family over Christmas two people froze to death during the two weeks I was there. And it’s not a big town.

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Don Neufeld @dnf.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Being nice to the people around you is an asset. You need them when the weather will kill you dead-dead. It certainly doesn’t make you a sucker.

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