iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

To my sensibilities these are both excellent humans whom I am delighted to call friend. The obvious tie breaker is the life path that brings you the most satisfaction and happiness, which it seems like you have figured out. Would that everyone could be so clear eyed about how they wish to be.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is something I’ve been wishing for for years, and baffled by them not doing it. They’ve had all the building blocks in place almost since the birth of the iPhone.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Ok, so we’ve persuaded the machines. Now we need to persuade the humans.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

In our house we refer to this sort of thing as Applied Murphyism. It has a surprisingly good track record.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Also: habits you develop in one context have a way of bleeding into other contexts. It’s an ugly kind of person whose interactions with others start with assessing if it’s ok to be rude to them or not.

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Reposted by Chip Morningstar

Terrible Toybox @terribletoybox.com · 30/07/2026

We have good news and bad news! The good news is that we just started production on Thimbleweed Park 2, due out in early 2028. store.steampowered.com/app/4932120/... Now the bad news... there is no bad news, it’s all good news! P.S. Thimbleweed Park 1 is on sale on Steam, Switch, iOS and Google.

The cover image from the video game Thimbleweed Park with a bright red spray-painted number 2 on the corner of the words, announcing the game's sequel coming in 2028.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

That is a remarkably Hayekian critique.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I think some people treat "efficiency" as an objective, dimensionless quantity, rather than something deeply entangled with the particulars of what they're seeking. People often think about ROI while being weirdly obtuse about what return they actually want & what investment they're actually making.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

If you put grapes in a strong, airtight container with some dry ice and then wait a few hours for the dry ice to sublimate, you’ll get carbonated grapes, which are amazing.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

There was also once a BBS in Ann Arbor during my student days with the unfortunately named pair of operations `signin` and `logoff`. It's possible that the operator was trolling his users, because he was kind of a jerk. But also possible that he wasn't, because he was also kind of dumb.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Sound advice, though I fear you are tilting at windmills. With respect to runoncase, it is worth considering the cautionary tale of the Italian battery company Powergen Italia, setting up their first website at the dawn of the web.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Yes. Investors like to see success, so maybe debugging prior to telling them about it would have been prudent.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Setting aside for a moment the overly rapid rollout in the face of grossly deficient testing, I have to wonder at the mindset behind elevating a strictly internal operations process into a very public PR/marketing exercise.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I’m constantly making typos and leaving out words, because I think faster than I type. After I hit return I discover that what I typed wasn’t what I knew I’d typed. I have to resist the compulsion to correct; it’s scary good at understanding what I meant. I also have to resist the urge to apologize.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Good thing it’s spring, then.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Hey, I just saw them in concert in San Francisco two or three years ago. They’re still pretty great. Old, my ass (yeah, we/they are old, sigh).

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Some people seem to genuinely lack capacity to tell potential from reality. In the early VR days we had an industry luminary who I at first took to be an outright fraud. After closer contact I realized he just couldn't distinguish among "we know how to do X", "we plan to do X", and "we have done X".

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I think I had this same conversation with Janice in, like, 1979.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Years ago I had a company that was an early adopter and heavy user of Java. I got pinged by a JavaSoft product manager about what we’d most like from them. My answer was “a two year moratorium on new APIs”. This was very much not the answer they wanted to hear.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

My take is that companies would like to make their stuff better, but often don’t know how. “Better” doesn’t lend itself to process. But they do know how to make *more*. Since it’s common for improvements to manifest as new features, it’s easy to fall into thinking that an addition is an improvement.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

My first Habitat Chronicles post in a very long time: After a year and a half using AI tools for software development, I have Thoughts. habitatchronicles.com/2026/02/adve...

habitatchronicles.com

Habitat Chronicles: Adventures In LLM Land, With Thoughts On The AI Revolution

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

For personal projects, the Claude Pro rate limit actually makes a nice balance - it only takes me 20-30 minutes before having to wait til the next 5 hour window opens. Then I go for a hike or spend time with my family. Yet I'm still knocking away tons of stuff from my vast unfinished projects list.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Annoying business jargon: don't call a cascade of filters a "funnel", e.g., N million ad impressions, 50% read, 2% clicked, 5% converted = 5N thousand sales. Dude, that's not a funnel. In an actual funnel, everything you pour into the big end comes out the small end. That's literally what it's for.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

That metaphor has always bothered me because lasers mostly don’t need to be focused. It’s one of the things that make them useful.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

It’s the paradox of the Internet. Nothing ever goes away and nothing ever lasts.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

That’s awesome. The Garamendi family name carries a lot of weight in the Sierra foothills country.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

At first I misread that as “eradicate fiction” and my mind went all kinds of weird places.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

I’ve known a number of military people who emphasize the importance of having empathy for the enemy, as understanding someone’s emotional reality is critical to being able to fight them effectively. This perspective is definitely not about being “nice”.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

This was fabulous, but now I really want to see Chihuly’s Cthulhu.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Or can that can only be revealed at a risk to the oh-so-flammable flag?

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Is your drunken gender different from your regular gender?

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Tom Lehrer’s passing called up a high school memory—I had a chemistry teacher who offered extra credit to anyone who could memorize and perform Lehrer’s song The Elements. That was 50 years ago and to this day I can still recite it if you allow me a few minutes of mental rehearsal. RIP sir.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

This has real Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote vibes, but with the coyote in the role of the Roadrunner.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Dallas Fort Worth has today replaced Frankfurt as my least favorite airport.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

The Sensory Order is definitely the most difficult read of anything Hayek ever wrote, but it prefigures the entire field of cognitive science quite accurately.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

This mode of misreading Hayek seems to be very common among certain segments of the left, for reasons I find entirely baffling. However, in this case the author makes a number of ahistorical accusations that smell to me of bad faith rather than common misunderstanding.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Very reminiscent of what one of my longtime colleagues, Rich Mironov, refers to as The Software Development Deli Counter mironov.com/deli/

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

I can’t help but be reminded of the old saying that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggy, nice doggy” until you can find a rock.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

My preferred formulation is “Nihilism should commence with one’s self.” That covers a lot of useful ground.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

I have to deal with at least 3 of these: Navan: corporate travel agency Navant: M&A firm Naven: women’s clothing brand Navent: property mgmt company Navian: FSA admin Naviant: mgmt consultancy Navien: tankless water heaters Navient: student loan servicer I know naming is hard, but seriously?

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

You *could* provide a simple system with a programmable escape hatch, but that would require people to program it. By instead having an ultra sophisticated configuration mechanism you can make believe you aren’t making users write code.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

This seems to be a recurring pattern. Most users’ needs are simple, but many still have 1 or 2 edge case complications to deal with. Products trying to appeal to the largest possible market end up subjecting each user to the zillion irrelevant complications of all the other users.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

It’s a good thing that most musical instruments were invented before modern design sensibilities took hold.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

This is a really good point. It captures a key disconnect between those appalled by all the slop and those seeing real transformative potential. This article by an AI researcher friend of mine on using AI for software development might be of interest zerothprinciples.substack.com/p/the-mythic...

zerothprinciples.substack.com

The Mythical AI Minute

Who Needs a Man-Month?

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

I once fixed a dead DVD drive with a saw. That was a pretty awesome experience.

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Chip Morningstar @epopt.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

I’ve noticed successful platform businesses (e.g. Microsoft in many cases, Sun/JavaSoft in its heyday, many others) want to spend the fruits of success to improve the product but they don’t know how, so instead they just spend on making more of it. Thus you get perpetually growing APIs and the like.

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