iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

haha that painting title sounds epic though, and that painting time in Florida ok wait phylactery design that? no worries at all about what's the vibe are you could subtly feature

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 11h

Damn, the AI reply bots are good. I wonder, do they burn more tokens replying to real conversation or to markov-driven nonsense? Experiment currently going on in my latest BOTD thread.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 12h

Filed right next to "things I need to tell the marketing people before they produce any more materials for cyber-security awareness month"

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 12h

As opposed to all the serious, practical generic engineering texts filled in that category.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 12h

Here! You may golden key, and she kept shifting to remarking directions. "If you guests, mostly," said the King rapidly; so violent back to explain so very fine day!" said Alice, sever," said Alice less," begin with."

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 13h

I'm pretty sure if you extended the stick upwards and drew an arm on the shoulder grabbing it, you'd have a pose perfectly at home on a Spiderman comic.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 13h

Sure, part of what's changed is commercialization, but if I'm being honest I have to admit some other big things are different: - it scaled to multiple billions of people - I'm not in my 20s; nothing is going to feel like it did then - Internet culture is no longer dominated by US undergrads

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 13h

So... part of the great thing of the early Internet was that it hadn't been ruined by commercial interests, but another part was that it was much smaller. I could go to Altavista, search my name, and find people linking to something I'd made. I don't get to do that with this name anymore.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 14h

Today's #BirdOfTheDay is #BirdSupermodel ("Any bird captured looking like it's posing for a magazine cover shoot"). This is such a comic book cover pose I had to use it, even though it means posting the same bird two days in a row. #birds #photography

A Northern Mockingbird perched at the very tip of a thin, leafy green branch against a softly blurred, bright green background. The bird is angled slightly to the left with its head turned to the right, showing off its light gray chest, darker brownish-gray wings, long tail, and distinct yellow eye.

📍 Burlington, NJ, USA
📷 f/8; 1/1000 s; 400mm; ISO 1600

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I suspect that how it renders has to do with global settings on the device that determine whether the default surrounding context for text is LTR or RTL.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Your correspondent could fix their signature by surrounding it with two invisible unicode characters, but the technical hurdle there is pretty large. The result you got is what the Unicode BIDI algorithm says should happen when the surrounding context is LTR, so the fix is to change the context.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Ah, so what it should have been was ‫נשלח מה-Galaxy שלי‬ but what it was was treated as though it were ‪נשלח מה-Galaxy שלי‬ , probably because the surrounding context was LTR. Assuming bsky doesn't remove any characters from this message, that should display the same in all browsers.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Propaganda exposure has lots to do with it, but you don't need an algorithm to do that: the far-right did that in the 90s to anyone with a sufficiently long commute by taking over nearly all talk radio that wasn't NPR.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Oh, you're imagining that the help you'll need with Linux will stop after the install. It won't, at all. You'll need help finding your way around the command line, then getting your sound to work, then installing Steam, then getting your sound to work in that, then ripping DVDs, sound in VLC, ...

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #BlueSkies ("any bird against a blue sky") I think I've shared other shots of this mockingbird, but not this one. #birds #photography

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Good morning; today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #WingsOpenNotFlying ("birds with their wings open when not flying"), with an Alt theme of #Blue. This female Mallard drying off that I shot the other day might work as a two-fer. #birds #photography #microfourthirds

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Today’s theme for #BirdOfTheDay is #BlackandRed A bit late today, but here's one of the standard two North American birds for the theme: a male Red-winged Blackbird.

A Red-winged blackbird perches delicately on a thin twig extending out from a bare branch. The background shows plant leaves from other trees, and beyond that the sky is a dull gray.

📍Palmyra Cove Nature Preserve, Palmyra, NJ, USA
📷ƒ/8; 1/1000 s; 400 mm; ISO 400

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Listening to the "gift of wire" episode of Lateral with Tom Scott (@tomscott.com) and wow it's frustrating when the setup is something you know instantly but the panelists are just completely, utterly clueless on. My dad kept such a wire (that he'd gotten from Hopper) on his cubicle wall at work.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Today's #BirdOfTheDay is #BestBeaks ("any bird with a beak or bill that has striking colours, bold profiles, or an interesting shape") I don't think there's anything better for that theme in my photo roll than these Oystercatchers I saw in the UK in April. #birds #photography

Two oystercatchers forage along a muddy, twig-lined bank at the edge of a calm wetland. The shorebirds feature black heads and upper bodies, bright white underbellies, pink legs, vivid red-orange eyes, and long, straight, bright orange beaks.

📍 Reading Green Park Business Park, Reading, England, UK
📷 f/6.3; 1/640 s; 400 mm; ISO 1250

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The first time, maybe. But when you have code that you know will try all possible combinations and slip through loopholes when given a task and you keep giving it tasks and don't sandbox it as had as security companies do when executing malware, I don't think "sorry, didn't intend this" still works

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"took data from 55 websites" - you mean they scraped data that was available online, *exactly as the big AI companies do when pulling together data to train models*? This sounds like a real "I learned it by watching you" situation.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Excellent play by the AI companies selling the interpretation as "AI is fundamentally dangerous" and not "big AI companies aren't taking basic safeguards with how they run untrusted code". With any luck, they can get both sides on board with regulations that will outlaw any new market entrants.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Pre-MAGA, the Republican establishment in NJ could often be swayed by arguments of the form "X will increase property values and/or lower taxes", and would occasionally get into conflict w/ people focusing on culture war stuff (e.g. www.salon.com/2011/08/04/c...) Post-2016, not so much, sadly.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Black&White ("any shot in black and white") A White-breasted Nuthatch outside the office window from early last month. #birds #photography #microfourthirds

A high-contrast, black-and-white photograph of a White-breasted Nuthatch clinging head-first to rough, heavily textured tree bark. The bird is positioned vertically with its body angled downward and its head pointing toward the lower right. Its sharp, straight bill points down, and its pale cheek and dark eye are clearly visible against a dark band across its nape.

📍 Burlington County, NJ, USA
📷 f/6.3; 1/640 s; 400mm; ISO 16000

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If it helps, the cost of it all was a big reason Republicans in NJ dropped their opposition to banning it in 2007, leading to the first state capital punishment ban done through legislative action (not courts) since the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty again in 1976.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

What legal injection companies? No drug manufacturer is out there making legal injection their business. Most won't sell to states at all if the purpose is lethal injection, leading to states lying when they purchase the drugs or getting expired lots from dodgy resellers.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Hire Rachel Bloom to showrun the next round of Marvel TV shows on Disney+.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you had any older relatives with an evangelical streak in the late 1990s, there was a decent chance you got forwarded some email warning you about Harry Potter that cited an Onion article as proof that kids were learning to cast real magic spells from it.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

And especially were cheaper pre-pandemic. The price of N95s has really come down in the past seven years.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #BestOfTheMonth, meaning September 2026. Going with another image of the Red-tailed Hawk I shared for the #Raptors theme earlier this month. #birds #photography #microfourthirds #LookingAtYou

A Red-tailed Hawk perches atop a metal post against a plain, overcast gray sky, looking directly forward with wide, intense yellow eyes. The bird's feathers are mottled brown and white along its back and wings, with a lighter, speckled chest. Its yellow foot and sharp dark talons grip the perch firmly above a white structure.

📍 Madison, WI, USA
📷 f/10.0; 1/320 s; 264mm; ISO 250

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Except the money isn't really flowing yet (mostly), but the promise of future money flows feed into present valuations. Whoever blinks first once the datacenters start coming online and misses a payment is going to pull a Lehman Brothers and the subsequent collapse will rival or exceed 2008.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

IIRC, "who pays a tariff" was a big part of the debates/debate-adjacent conversation in 2024 and it didn't matter. We can't avoid whatever happened in 2024 by putting more evidence in front of voters. If evidence worked, we wouldn't be here.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It especially looks like that if the big AI companies try to slow down datacenter construction, because several of them signed contracts in 2025 to buy all the compute time from datacenters yet unbuilt. Once those turn on, the big AI companies owe $$$ whether they have demand to pay for it or not.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Today's theme for #BirdOfTheDay is #EFG, birds beginning with any of those letters (1st name). So here's a Great Blue Heron seen a few weeks ago locally. (At a bit of a distance) #birds #birdphotography #photography #microfourthirds

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's a bit of a different experience when your name is approximately 1,000 times more common than that. (like mine is)

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My parents did that deliberately with my youngest sister (I'm the eldest of 3), after my other sister got one of those names that suddenly exploded in popularity that year. When my kid was born, her reaction was "OMG, now I'm Aunt ——, that sounds like I'm 90".

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The idea that name-searching might be vaguely effective boggles me. Intellectually I understand that there are many people with unique or semi-unique names and sure, celebrities exist, but the idea of being able to name-search is just so foreign to my lived experience.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

One of the few things the US gets correct about copyright is the default public domain nature of government-created content. (i.e., there is no US equivalent of Crown Copyright)

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #BokehBirds ("any bird captured with a soft, muted or blurry background; bonus points for any bokeh balls') I've posted this mockingbird before, but I don't think I've posted this shot. #birds #photography

A Northern Mockingbird perched at the top of a leafy green twig, staring directly at the camera with a sharp, stern expression against a brightly lit, softly blurred green background.

📍 Burlington, NJ, USA
📷 f/8.0; 1/1000 s; 400mm; ISO 1250

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Seabirds with an alt of #Airborne, so like many people today I'm posting a gull in flight. Specifically, one of the Ring-billed gulls that have now returned for the season from their breeding grounds up north. #birds #photography

A young Ring-billed Gull flying directly toward the camera against a clear, solid blue sky. Its wings are fully spread and arched downward in mid-flight, displaying white undersides, gray wingtops, and dark tips. The bird's head and yellow beak are angled forward as it glides.

📍 Delaware River, Burlington, NJ, USA
📷 f/6.3; 1/800 s; 364mm; ISO 100

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Closest I have to a bird doing multiple of those at once is probably this: bsky.app/profile/fizb... It's catching a fish, head under water, and you can see a tiny bit of reflection through the pondscum.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I don't have a recent photo for today's #BirdOfTheDay theme ("Borbs", birds looking plump) that I haven't already used for a BOTD, so I'm going with the Alt theme of #Brown, birds with Brown in their plumage. House Sparrow (female), just hanging out. #birds #photography #birdphotography

A small female house sparrow sits in a tree surrounded by green leaves, body aiming towards the camera but head turned to look left. The bird is, from this angle, mostly a uniform light brown with some darker shades of brown on the top of the head and in a rough line behind the eye.

📍Burlington, NJ, USA
📷 ƒ/6.3; 1/640 s; 400 mm; ISO 1600

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

For #BirdOfTheDay today, the theme is #TheDivers ("any diving bird") Here's a Great Cormorant from Reading from this past April. #Birds #UKbirding #Photography #BirdPhotography

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Oh, it's on Tubi now? Hrm...

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Whoa. Teacher strikes, and the threat of potential teacher strikes, were a big part of my childhood because I grew up in one of the states where they're legal. (PA) But apparently the vast majority of states outlaw them. Huh.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I am very interested to know what liability insurance this venture has and therefore what insurance company I should divest from. I cannot imagine any actuary in their right mind underwriting this.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There's also the detail that it's literally illegal for cops to actually, formally, go on strike. The closest you're likely to see is an organized "work to rule" effort or a wave of "blue flu". (where an inordinate portion of the force calls in sick at once)

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I don't think it ever was a monetary calculation. I think that most people who aren't used to it really cannot stand having people they thought were friendly towards them being angry and upset with them. Sheeran saw people here had a formerly friendly relationship with get really upset.

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Daniel Martin @fizbin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme is #Raptors; any bird of prey. This is a Red-tailed Hawk I saw a few weekends ago. I was supposed to be there getting new photos of my nieces, but I mean if this bird just shows up of course I'm going to take some shots of it too. #birds #photography #birdphotography

A close-up of a hawk perched securely on a rusty metal pole against a solid, overcast sky. The bird of prey is facing right, displaying mottled dark brown plumage on its back and wings, and a mostly white chest and belly marked with brown streaks and spots. Its thick yellow legs and sharp black talons are firmly wrapped around the metal fixture.

📍 Madison, WI, USA
📷 f/10; 1/320 s; 364mm; ISO 200

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