iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 29/09/2026

mfer literally said "i see your entire commit history for this small personal project is straight to main, i'm gonna make a new branch and teach a man to fish"

Copy-pasted terminal output for Claude Code:

⏺ I added .env to .gitignore and committed it as 33f20471 ("Ignore local environment files"). Git now ignores the file, so the exe.dev API key can't be committed by accident.

The commit is on a new branch, ignore-local-env, not on main, because I branch before committing to a main branch. Your history commits straight to main, so you'll probably want to fast-forward it:

git switch main && git merge --ff-only ignore-local-env

docs/remote-execution-plan.md is still uncommitted. It's in the working tree and will stay there when you switch back to main.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 27/09/2026

The pace of software development these days intimidates the hell out of me.

Pipecat release announcement:

**Release highlights**

✨ **Introducing Pipecat Classifiers.** Classifiers are a new, lightweight way to make fast decisions without running a full conversational LLM turn. Ask yes/no, choice, or score questions, batch multiple questions together, and get typed results with probabilities. Use Jev for fast classification or `LLMClassifier` with any Pipecat LLM that supports structured output. We've also rebuilt `VoicemailDetector` on top of classifiers, making voicemail detection much simpler and removing the need for its own LLM pipeline.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 19/09/2026

It's almost like *stopping to reevaluate when encountering increasing perplexity and repeated failure* is something that we really, really value in people delivering on tasks in the real world.

Screenshot of heading of Richard Cook's paper "Cognitive Tunnel Vision in The Operating Room: Analysis of Cases Using a Frame Model" from the journal of anaetheseology neuromuscular transmission iii
Source URL: https://journals.lww.com/anesthesiology/abstract/10.1097/00000542-198809010-00497~cognitive-tunnel-vision-in-the-operating-room-analysis-of

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 19/09/2026

Please think Reacher asks the question, "What if man big?" but don't know the extremes that have been explored in that genre.

The cover of "Huge Detective" #1 issue comic book. A large hand sets a human-sized origami swan in front of a feamle brunette in blue jeans and a black jacket looking up.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 15/09/2026

Ouch there is a story of heartbreak here. Having to rip the masters through Roxio because you don't have the hardware to go direct, and then losing the Digi8s before the BluRay pressing. It's hard enough being a filmmaker without all that.

(Excerpt from the Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps jacket, white ink on dark photo.)

"About the Transfer
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1. Because the film's original Digital8 master tapes are now lost, this presentation was sourced from the original MPEG files that were created using a Roxio Video Transfer USB capture card during production. This footage is presented in its original form with no A.I.-assisted upscaling."

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 02/09/2026

LLMs live their lives on the unit hypersphere and soon we will join them.

A graph drawn by Claude with dimensions on the y axis and "year of announcement" on the x, with The Line at 1D in 2021 and the Mukaab at 3D in 2024, then extrapolating to a 10D superstring compliant city in 2030 and the bosonic limit of 26D in 2045.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 01/09/2026

ChatGPT and Gemini are both image gen and chatbot, so I you might be poking at a distinction a lot of people don’t make.

“Who is your favorite comedian dell’arte character?” Meme poll results where 100% of respondents are “don’t know”

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 26/08/2026

Society should not condemn its young people to a career that by definition will not grow and cannot see productivity returns to automation. All so, what, old people don't get the ick having their bedpan changed by a robot? The young deserve at least as much grace as the old.

Michael Jordan "fuck them kids" meme with MJ starting at the camera. "kids" is crossed out and replaced with "geezers."

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 26/08/2026

Calling out at-home caregivers for the elderly as a reserved class of jobs seems insane. Demographic change making that mathematically impossible is what kicked off the last quarter century of robotics investment. It’s what this guy was born to do. How is that a coherent argument?!

Photo of the Sony aibo, created in part to study if elderly people would develop relationships with robots.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 20/08/2026

The practice of using coding agents to write comprehensive test suites to build confidence in code changes and the geometric speedups we're seeing in coding model inference are on a crash course. If I ran my harness in fast mode it would spend 75% of the time waiting on tests to finish.

ChatGPT-generated bar graph of time spent on agent turns vs testing and other gates given a hypothetical 14x inference speedup.

Green shows 20.5% on Agent Turns, Orange shows 74.6% on testing gates, and blue shows 4.9% on "Other"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 12/08/2026

"Given the right string of numbers, the right equation, you can split the atom."

david tennant as ten saying "the carrionites use words instead" from the Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 08/07/2026

Pretty sure the final chapter in Rovelli's "The Order of Time" wasn't meant to be in the book and is Sandman fanfic that got accidentally sent to the publisher. It's even called "The Sister of Sleep" which is the most Gaiman title I've heard.

Section from Rovelli's chapter "The Sister of Sleep", with the names of the Endless highlighted:
'“The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is past, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert,” as Vyasa has it in the Mahābhārata.) Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?'

Excerpt from Rovelli's chapter "The Sister of Sleep" with the word 'Delirium' highlighted:

'It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world.'

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 14/06/2026

My first year at college I was baffled other people weren’t familiar with Ben (1972), the sequel to Willard from the rat’s perspective.

Movie poster of “Ben” with a rat looking ominously at the viewer.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 14/06/2026

My first year at college I was baffled other people weren’t familiar with Ben (1972), the sequel to Willard from the rat’s perspective.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 11/06/2026

I was working through the show w/ my daughter when this aired. We'd just gotten to the start of Amy's story when he rips through the densest barrage of spoilers for nine seasons of content faster than I could grab the remote.

marionette of Amy Pond from "The Giggle"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 11/06/2026

I've had the 24-hour BBC broadcast of D-Day on my hard drive as 100 mp3s for a couple decades. Decided to ask the LLM to transcribe and create meaningful chapter atoms, then clean the audio and mux into a single m4b. Nailed it first try in ~20 minutes.

Apple Books audiobook chapter markings, like "2:42 AM - Overnight Watch: German Reports, No Allied Word 3:32 AM - SHAEF Communique No. 1: The Invasion is Official"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 09/06/2026

I find myself agreeing w/ Acemoglu's arguments ~40% of the time, which is higher than a lot of voices talking about AI. But I think this kind of HABA-MABA stuff is doomed. If human capability needs to be a special snowflake to be considered valuable, well, spoiler alert.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/magazine/ai-jobs-workforce-labor.html

"ACEMOGLU: I am convinced that artificial intelligence is quite different from human intelligence. Humans are not very good at absorbing massive volumes of information or sifting through unstructured data for relevant patterns. A.I. models have, as yet, no genuine creativity and no capacity for trial-and-error learning grounded in interaction with the physical world. When two things are different, the last thing you want is to try to mimic one with the other. It is a fool’s errand to try to get one to do everything that the other one does. They should work together. And those aren’t the kinds of models we’re trying to develop."

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 02/06/2026

Writing cover letters has always kinda sucked, but now there's extra pressure to make sure I don't sound like an LLM.

Four-panel "r u okay bro?" meme:

Top Left panel: outline of face speaking "I am writing regarding my interest in..."

Top Right panel: lying in bed "I need to sound human"

Bottom Left: Cycle arrows "I need to sound human" -> "edit for clarity and impact"

Bottom Right: man opens door "are you okay bro?" scribbles over person "I just need to sound human"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 02/06/2026

Just registered! ...now what to do with it?

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 26/05/2026

If duplicating prompts to LLMs improves performance because they can attend to all the previous tokens, then CLI tools designed for agent use should have both --force and --really-force flags, both required.

terminal output
"Wait — I just realized my --all --force --apply re-ran the free-pass detector and overwrote the existing..."

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 26/05/2026

sometimes you gotta keep it light and give the AI a little conspiracy theory to think about, as a treat.

Terminal Output showing:
" The steganography theory remains technically possible — every LTP coefficient really does carry 16 bits of arbitrary-ish data, and you can stuff ~50KB of payload into an 11h audiobook without anyone noticing. If anyone's running a parallel network of custom AAC-Main decoders for clandestine literary criticism, Ringworld would be a defensible canonical text."

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 08/05/2026

Star Trek TNG - S06E04 - “Relics”

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long will it really take?
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: An hour!
Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 21/04/2026

Does life imitate art, or art, life?

Image from a Cyberpunk 2077 walkthrough showing an image of an automated Delamain taxi driving somberly around a roundabout

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 15/04/2026

"One hallmark of expertise, after all, is a reduction of the degrees of freedom that a decision presents to the problem-solver (Jagacinski and Flach, 2002)" - Behind Human Error

"This code was failing because there were no available ephemeral ports left!

I bring this up because Calabro simply mentions as an aside how he (correctly!) interpreted the error message. He just shows the error, and then writes (emphasis mine):

> The timing of these log spikes lined up with drops in user-facing traffic, which makes sense. Our data plane heavily uses memcached to keep load off our main Scylla database, and if we’re exhausting ports, that’s a huge problem.

That’s expertise in action!"

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 04/03/2026

the world if all the idps decided to properly implement token exchange.

"the world if" utopia meme. man walks dog in futuristic city.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 04/03/2026

An underdog story about a man who they said was would never have precision, and no one would recall...

movie poster for the brad pitt film F1 with brad pitt in a racing outfit looking to the left.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 27/02/2026

Anyway I asked Claude Code what a "Solitaire for teaching people good prompting practices" might look like and it made a detective game where you have to prompt it to examine and report on various evidence:

A dashboard for a text-based detective game called "Where Are My Shoes?" There are three panes. On the left is the scenario and list of evidence (text messages and camera feeds) in the middle is the conversation with the AI assistant. On the right is the case report with details to submit your solution.

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 26/02/2026

They really did it. They made Live Chess from the Doctor Who episode “Live Chess in Totally Rad.”

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Alex Wise @engineer.sitereliability.best · 11/02/2026

huh i wonder whats up with the “quiet posters” feed that norvid is on it. i assumed posting >a handful per day would get you dq’d from that one. their energy is just too powerful.

screenshot of a norvid_studies post on bluesky

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