iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yeah, the review/response is even still up maps.app.goo.gl/6a1EKQWiAniV...

maps.app.goo.gl

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mmm, there's Not Enough Popcorn for this one :)

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(Never heard of Blackstone before but it's right on the MA border with RI, just north of Woonsocket)

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This is not how I usually find new places for icecream.thok.org but apparently they just opened August 1, so it hasn't percolated through my other sources (it's also made cbs news, boston 25, patch... so maybe I should hold off a week before trying it :-)

icecream.thok.org

Ice Cream!

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 23h

Reposted by Mark Eichin

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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There was a kickstarter for .meow that apparently made it into this round. Expensive, but (maybe) doable.

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026

Great, another grudge to hold about GenAI: it caused me to be reminded that PewDiePie exists. (thanks fireship)

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Reposted by Mark Eichin

To the person noting there is not enough money in the world to license every piece of intellectual property stolen for "AI" training: you're sooooo close to the point, friend, keep going, you'll get there if you try

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I particularly liked the bit where the "descending" part of the trap lets them identify crawler name changing

Mmm, you mean it might have been a late edit to a "more interesting" city, without enough continuity checking?

Ah, that's why this sounds familiar, "Can you lick the science" was an epic Tumblr thread in a bygone era

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Like this? bsky.app/profile/ocea... (my reply at the time: "space savers jare getting fancy" :)

"most of those who did participate didn’t use their turn signals" and that they included space savers as part of the distraction challenge... they should totally do this in Boston, except they wouldn't get any finishers :-)

Kell Compost 😷 @compostwitch.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Reposted by Mark Eichin

This is delightful. Read the article. Everybody has a nickname and the whole thing was a Safer Streets fundraiser

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I dug into this a little after seeing them in Sweden of all places: they were popular gifts between royal courts! The swedish ones were a gift from a German court, and the current population (30k) descends from 5 individuals. (European royal levels of inbreeding too, confirmed by genetic testing :)

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Inside a Green Line shutdown: ‘a tremendous amount of activity'

Heh, when I commuted on the T I always used to joke about the "first underground" signs with some form of "yeah, they installed this in 1896 and haven't touched it since"... www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeyM... when they pull plans for a relay cabinet dated *1946* :-)

youtube.com

YouTube video by NBC10 Boston

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Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I forgot if it was IETF or Usenix, but the driving directions were "go back to the airport and return your rental car, then follow the T directions" :)

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Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

11 new pix flic.kr/p/2sEbMY1 [Assabet River NWR,Massachusetts,Sudbury,Reflections,goldfinch,mallard,turtles,sunset,ducks,painted turtle,canada goose,woodpecker,In flight,formation,scenery,camera,colors,autumn,fluffy,geese,flock,nest]

I think this was sunset orange light hitting upper cloud layers which were then visible through gaps in the lower ones. Kind of looks more like oil paint "happy accidents" than a real scene though :-)

Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The inverse of this is why a public observatory I worked with built a fiber optic eyepiece extender so kids in wheelchairs could see the "actual light" and not be stuck with screens. (Of course the Real Work was mostly done on screens, it was about making the "sense of wonder" more accessible)

Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just to close the loop on this: maps.here.com?map=45.66387... now shows "Lake America". So it looks like the theory that "they were just slower than everybody else about processing NGIA/NGP updates" held up.

Partial screen shot of maps.here.com showing "Lake America"

Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oh, is the "we should air-strike competing model trainers" rhetoric back? That's been the "diplomatic" approach since the 1940s...

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Reposted by Mark Eichin

Dave Kellett @davekellett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

TODAY'S COMIC: Crabby

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8 new pix flic.kr/p/2sDMX75 [Acton Arboretum,Massachusetts,flowers,duckweed,frog,sunshine,berries,scenery,leaves,autumn,holly,bees]

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I sometimes do the "right place for the wrong reason" thing - they're not in the place for what they *are* but they're in a staging area for the project (or what I thought was one except I accidentally two staging areas and it's in the other one.) When I find them, it makes retroactive sense...

With the exception of the Joan Jett episode, I'm in camp "Highlander: There Was Only One" :-)

Is "adversarial cinematography" a thing? It seems like it takes effort to push an actual human that far into the uncanny valley

They didn't go nearly far enough with that in Highlander, just had Connery throw him off the boat and make him figure out for himself that he could just walk to shore. Didn't even pull any swords from shipwrecks :-)

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16 new pix flic.kr/p/2sDLqD5 [Massachusetts,Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge,Concord,great blue heron,canada goose,feeding,In flight,mallard,ducks,fish,flap,parking lot,Whole Foods,camouflage,wood duck,formation,pouncing,tricycle,nest box,Bedford,berries,autumn,colors,leaves,shiny...]

Cut down from a 2 minute shot (also trimmed to fit flickr's 1G/1080p limits.) Heron pouncing on and eating a small fish. Loud aircraft noise, I recommend muting.

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I used to (was in a map search startup that Nokia bought, and ended up in Here.) It was interesting positioning (for car companies that didn't want to let google "own the dashboard") but they never really overcame the "who's on first" branding

Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Mapquest is at least making an effort; nokia(here.com) has remained as stealth as they always were

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Pepperidge Farm dude is riding a horse-drawn carriage, I'm guessing the software he remembers was on punch cards

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Reposted by Mark Eichin

Jurphenstein's Monster @jurph.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We have understood these principles for a very long time in network security. Giving a software-and-cybersecurity-genius-that-can-move-at-superhuman-speed a command prompt and a network connection is not a "sandbox" it is a "launchpad".

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Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Heh, I love worldbuilding where we have shapeshifting, magic, immortals, aliens... but someone turning off their phone is "hang on a second, what?" levels of unrealistic :-)

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Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Most people I know, know better than to use facebook at all, but just in case: Don't Use Muse.

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Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It was a long time ago, but I did "concentrations" in French Literature and German Literature (in French and German respectively) - and yeah, there's absolutely an argument to be made that CS majors should read Kafka :-)

Mark Eichin @eichin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I stopped listening to broadcast radio when Microsoft tried to do ads for FAT32. (Less than 25 years back but not a lot less.) Very small sacrifice for never hearing one of those ads again.

Arvind (computer scientist) - Wikipedia

It's definitely a thing at the faculty level en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_... but I can't tell if he was using the mononym as a grad student. (He shared an office suite with my undergrad advisor; I mostly knew about him as a living "things programmers are wrong about" example :-)

en.wikipedia.org

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Huh, this turned up in an entirely offline context, I'll see if I can trace what media it showed up on. (When I've run interviews, it was literally "oh good, you have a drink, I don't have to offer you one." Of course, it's new england, some people just always have a dunkues product in their hand:)

Mezentine @mezentine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The *real* reason it's a felony to point lasers at airplanes :)

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Reposted by Mark Eichin

Engineering ethics are complicated and imperfect, but I will always vividly remember how my Materials Science professor opened the course by showing us pictures of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse and then walking through the free body diagram diagramming the exact mistake that caused the disaster

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My theory is that Isaacman just wants some Mach 3 in his personal logbook. Still, if this is flying anywhere good for planespotting, I'm ready for a road trip!

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The only thing missing is their bluesky handle (because I'm sure I follow at least three of this person on here :)

But does the gallery gift shop have a desk-scale version! (Wouldn't be cheap but should be *doable*...)

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(it *resulted* in a thorough review, but not in a form you can usually motivate intentionally...)

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I love that this wasn't security research or formal audit, but [the author's] "deranged quest to run a Radicle node inside a browser tab" by "reading heartwood’s source(opens in a new tab) line by line and rewriting it in TypeScript, byte for byte".

Not exactly what you asked for but "look for it on lite.cnn.com and if they don't have it, reconsider" works out at least some of the time