iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

PC Paintbrush, 320x200 in 256 colours... ah, those were the days.

010

It is true that we never had this problem with ASP.NET web forms. We had many, many, MANY other problems - but never this one.

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Today Microsoft Azure asked me for some feedback. Pretty sure we solved "circles" back in the 1990s. I remember radio buttons working just fine in Netscape Navigator. But maybe AI decided it's better this way. 🤷🏻‍♂️

a feedback form. There are five radio buttons. They are oval, not circular, and the labels above them are badly formatted, don't fit in their enclosing boxes, and in several cases are obscured by their own associated control.

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Not this time - it's MTV-era Genesis. (Which suits me just fine - I think both Genesis *and* Peter Gabriel recorded their best material after Gabriel left the band - but I realise purists consider that heresy... 😉)

100

You leave my boy Jassachusetts alone! He didn't hurt anyone!

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I'd rather they automated it. I already give them money. I like giving people money and getting good products in return.

You know how dumb it feels every single month logging into @dropbox.com to download the invoice for my Dropbox subscription so that I can save it... into my Dropbox? What if the invoices just appeared by magic in a Dropbox folder linked to the billing account? Wouldn't that be something, eh?

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 25/09/2026

I'm playing a gig. An actual Serious Gig with Proper Musicians and no comedy songs about JavaScript. You should come. It'll be awesome. Hope & Anchor in Islington, Friday October 2nd, doors 19:30, music starts 20:30. Tickets £8 in advance / £10 on the door. www.eventbrite.com/e/angel-stor...

ANGEL STORM: ALL STAR LIVE ROCK COVER BAND

Demon, Rory Gallagher, Billy Idol, Peter Frampton, Rush, Cream, Genesis, Soundgarden, Aerosmith, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, Scorpions... and many more.

(The typography on "Peter Frampton" is particularly exquisite.)

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My workstation is a Ryzen 9050 with 128Gb of RAM, an RTX 5070 and three NVMe drives, and it is running Adobe Media Encoder like a very tired tortoise trying to suck treacle through a paper straw. Could we stop dicking about with AI models and get back to making computers faster and betterer please?

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 23/09/2026

I think that @househouse.com - the studio behind Untitled Goose Game - should make a game based on the Sheep Detectives movie. There’s an actual murder mystery you have to solve but you can only control the sheep. 🐑

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Reposted by Dylan Beattie

Niels Leenheer @html5test.com · 18/09/2026

Two weeks from now Fronteers Dark Mode will happen in Dordrecht in The Netherlands. There are still a few tickets left. Be quick ⚠️ Join us for an afternoon and evening of great talks. With a spectacular line up: @anjana.dev, @tunetheweb.com, @cydstumpel.nl, @csswizardry.com and @heydonworks.com

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 16/09/2026

“You remember Stack Overflow? Trying to get gold badges? All that work for a few pixels?” …I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. 🤣

“Almost everything we used to signal "i'm a real developer" was a tech related hill we had chosen to die on.”

070

Reposted by Dylan Beattie

Alex Winter @alexwinter.com · 16/09/2026

True story.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 16/09/2026

“In a world where everyone uses the same tools, trained on the same data, we all end up being the same person… and that’s not a world I want to live in.” - @nickchapsas.com kicking off #NDCOslo

A conference expo hall full of people and exhibitor booths. Nick Chapsas is on the expo stage underneath a bank of giant projector screens.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 15/09/2026

Nah, you're fine. I feel sorry for whoever's in the adjoining room with the rest of the bear. (I got a sheep in mine.)

Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 14/09/2026

All iPhones are foldable. Some iPhones are only foldable once. (with apologies to @terrypratchett.bsky.social)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 14/09/2026

I've said for a while that the road to sustainable open source is royalties levied by package managers and distributed directly to maintainers: freeasinweekend.org/open-source-... Now @seldo.com, co-founder of npm, has published an excellent article along similar lines: seldo.com/posts/nobody...

seldo.com

Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com

Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix:...

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 11/09/2026

Yes, 90% is not 100%. Yes, treating em-dash as a signifier of lazy AI writing is frustrating for the 10% of people who use em-dashes on purposes. But if somebody loves em-dashes so much yet still doesn't know how to type one? That's gotta make actually writing anything really frustrating.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 11/09/2026

More likely. I will bet good money that 90% of the em-dashes that appear in CfP submissions are copy-pasted AI slop, and the people pasting them never used an em-dash before the advent of AI writing tools because they have no idea what an em-dash actually is or how to type one.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 11/09/2026

Got a feature request for the folks at @sessionize.com...

A modal dialog over a Sessionize CfP submission form:

"Just One More Thing...

You used a lot of em-dashes in your submission. Type one in this box. Copy/paste is disabled. You have five seconds."

with a text input field and a button "Submit (5)"

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I have just reviewed 150+ "AI-assisted development" talks for a conference agenda. Precious minutes of my one and only life reading AI-generated abstracts for talks about how we don't need humans any more. Do you think the folks who submitted these talks would be happy with AI-generated rejections?

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Ashton Kutcher: NO 'AND THEN'!

Now THAT movie is a stone-cold classic of modern American cinema, and no mistake.

static.klipy.com

ALT: Ashton Kutcher: NO 'AND THEN'!

000

Italian men have resumed shooting each other.

000

I was wrong. There's another wedding.

...yeah, I'm out. I'm guessing the remaining 90 minutes of this movie consists of Italian men talking about shooting each other, then shooting each other, and then talking about it some more, but I'm not going to stay up to find out. The Godfather is not my thing. Glad y'all like it though.

410

The entire plot of this movie is the McGuffin. It's not a movie about stuff happening, it's a movie about people talking about stuff happening, and if something completely different happened the same people would be in the same room having a slightly different conversation. The cars are still cool.

...it's the pacing. Vito Corleone gets shot; blink & you'll miss it. Somebody reverses a car out of a driveway? Better dwell on that one a long time and mention it in the dialogue so everybody knows there's a car reversing.

45 minutes in and for the first time I'm actually genuinely wondering what's about to happen...

100

Robert Duvall is basically carrying the picture for me. Brando's Don Corleone is too close to caricature. Maybe just 'cos I've seen it parodied so many times before actually seeing the real thing? But Duvall's great. Apparently they're going to get into narcotics. Or something.

200

...there isn't a horse any more. Not a whole one, anyway. Poor horse.

330

HORSE! Horse. There's a horse. I have a bad feeling about the horse.

130

OK, the old cars are quite cool. And I briefly saw an aeroplane, which was interesting.

100

This is as far as I normally get with this movie. 20 minutes in, there's no mystery, no intrigue, no threat. The only reason I'm still watching is that everybody always talks about what a great movie this is - but there's absolutely nothing on screen to suggest it won't just be two hours of wedding.

220

Now somebody's singing a song.

100

...we're at a wedding. I don't know any of the people at the wedding. There's a lot of dancing. Oh, hey, it's Robert Duvall! I know him.

100

"I believe in America" Well, that first line aged like milk in a hot car.

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"The Godfather" is just starting on BBC4. I have never seen it. Let's see how this goes...

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Wait, "study" is an option? Like, instead of stealing cars, you can study dogs? Trade a life of crime for a meaningful and fulfilling career in veterinary medicine? NGL that sounds like the kind of game I could get into.

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...there I was, thinking "do I need to spell out the joke? Nah, my lot are smart enough to appreciate the humour inherent in the mutual exclusivity implied by this phrasing of their taxonomy"... I think we've all learned something today.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 26/08/2026

Today I will be mostly enjoying the fact that according to the Schema.org type system documentation, there are four categories of person: alive, dead, undead, or fictional...

Person

A Schema.org Type

Thing > Person

A person (alive, dead, undead, or fictional).

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“To come up with a lyric for it, [David Lee Roth] remembered seeing a TV news report the night before about a suicidal jumper. Roth thought that one of the onlookers at such an event would inevitably yell "go ahead and jump".”