iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/06/2026

This simulation project has been quite a journey so far, with plenty of fixes and features ahead, but what a great feeling to see these little phenomena emerge from a careful, systems-driven design.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 14/05/2026

Enjoying my last matcha before The Event

Foreground: glass of iced matcha out of focus
Background in focus: theories on a whiteboard of what The Event will be. They include Every Vessel Emits Noxious Tetanus, toilets stop working, sleeper cells that make you sleepy, all spoons become slotted, computer virus with charm, ocean baddies, and no more Arbor Day

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 02/03/2026

A military intervention is a surprise party for countries who have regimes. And you get in their face, and you explode at them and you make them feel really upset about all the people you killed. And then they stop.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 29/12/2025

Speed and Politics by Paul Virilio, introduction to the 2006 edition

This is also the Cruz of the wonderment and awe provoked by the event of catastrophic failure. It is not only horrific, it is mesmerizing, and because it is, the accident is also a critical source of solidarity, a binding exception that is the real condition of acceptance. The carnival of accidents is revealed as technology's own exceptional bacchanalia, staged at our expense and on our behalf.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/12/2025

This seems to be the key, active engagement and friction. I had a good experience of that when using Gemini's "guided learning" mode to understand Rust's paradigms and borrow checker as a C++ developer. It gave me an example code snippet and asked *me* to explain the dangling reference problem,

Why did the use of LLMs appear to diminish learning? One of the most fundamental principles of skill development is that people learn best when they are actively engaged with the material they are trying to learn.

When we learn about a topic through Google search, we face much more “friction”: We must navigate different web links, read informational sources, and interpret and synthesize them ourselves.

While more challenging, this friction leads to the development of a deeper, more original mental representation of the topic at hand.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/12/2025

The way he unflinchingly brings this energy throughout

Steven Crowder meme where he's sitting at a table with a banner that says "I'm not wasting your time—change my mind"

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 21/12/2025

You're in the danger zone

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 18/11/2025

The waxing gibbous moon over my head. A thought bubble, it shines blankly.

The old man in a tuxedo from Paranoia Agent standing on the moon

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 16/11/2025

This is a more characteristic thumbnail

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 06/11/2025

It's so brutal that this is one of the scam ads

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/10/2025

It'll be just like this forever

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 13/10/2025

It's in reply to a quote reply that says "packages being destroyed," but completely whiffs because he says "UPS destroying packages" in the OP!

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 04/10/2025

Very cool, the economy is booming and investors are more optimistic than ever!

US cumulative Wicksell misallocation as percent of GDP now nearing 70%, 4x the peak before the mortgage crisis

Buffett indicator of total stock market capitalization to GDP sharply surpassing 200%, the dot com bubble peaked around 140%

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/08/2025

"if balrogs have wings why don't they fly" I'm thinking they're heavy, they need solid footing and a good jump to get up maybe 10m at a time, like turkeys or chickens. The wings are mostly for menacing, like a goose.

Goose wilding out with its wings, darting its head forward with mouth open

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 21/07/2025

Scranton Area Computer Intelligence ChatGPT Apologizes to Valued Client Some Robots Still Know How Self Awareness is Done

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 19/06/2025

This doesn't contest the fact that the word means "uprising" (or more literally "shaking off"), it just demands illiteracy by begging the question. For comparison, acts of terror pictured here were described by their perpetrators as "liberation" and "democracy." Are you disgusted by "tahrir" too?

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 03/03/2025

Controlling an object's orientation in Roblox with an ESP32 and SparkFun 9DoF IMU. Axes are swapped in this example but you get the idea.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 22/01/2025

Not bad for a phone camera

The night sky appears in an opening surrounded by forest canopy. The constellation Orion is near the bottom. A few other stars are scattered and an especially bright star (or planet?) is at the upper right.

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 27/12/2024

"What...is a man!" —Hamlet Hamlet

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 15/12/2024

Oh balderdash, hither approach that chap

Victorian illustration of a toad wearing a stovepipe hat and a purple suit jacket while operating a Penny Farthing bicycle

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 11/12/2024

Bailing out the banks was Bush

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 09/12/2024

It's just the uploader's file name

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 28/11/2024

Terrible idea. The identity of the OP is often half the meaning. Just end the riff with, "no hard feelings, I actually think this person is cool," etc. I actually think this person is cool

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Alex Mason @freemanonthe.land · 25/11/2024

Imagine this setup where the drum is a rotisserie, microwave air fryer up top, you push a pedal to pressurize a steamer, a pullcord turns on the food processor, piano enters the settings for everything