iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

First, stop developing software on a Toyota.

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Rich is from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and curses in Arabic, and I'm from outside of Philly and say "wudder," so we might be contenders.

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Will you make a video and record yourself saying this? We will absolutely answer it.

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On The Aboard Podcast, Rich Ziade and Paul Ford discuss how AI is changing software development—and everything else. We're introducing a new segment, "Ask Aboard," where listeners send in questions ...

My cofounder Rich and I are making a bold attempt to become the Car Talk of software (enterprise or not, AI or not) which means we need YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING CODE AND CAREER QUESTIONS (anonymous is fine). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Ask Aboard

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People are reclaiming the computer

Been going to lots of events to read the room and figure out what people are thinking about bots and otherwise aboard.com/people-are-r...

aboard.com

Observations from a few recent tech meetups.

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Mine loves AI AND legal weed. I'm probably going to die.

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If you take AI away from doctors they will slice your throat with a scalpel.

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Taking Back Pajama Time: Sutter Health

(You likely have already seen stuff like this but if you search for "pajama time AI" you'll find tons of ads and products focused on doctors, like www.abridge.com/blog/pajama-...) Pajama time!

abridge.com

Watch how Sutter Health clinicians are reclaiming pajama time, one note at a time—reducing burnout, and enhancing patient care.

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Welcome reminder for me to go look at real data too—thank you! On the last pt—in public, the more I talk about AI the more people want to talk about craft and disciplinary boundaries. IMO the people most in love with bots are...doctors. If a trade guild can set policy, AI's all upside.

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I pretty firmly believe that consciousness is best defined as transmissible interiority.

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Even in software it’s mixed. It’s generating a lot of work, in good and bad ways. Bosses were excited to fire but now they’ve stopped talking about that. There’s change—juniors aren’t getting hired (may not be AI tho); jobs that involve cutting and pasting from PDFs will go. But no single outcome.

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My personal Turing test is that I will accept machine consciousness when I can internalize that consciousness to the same degree that I can internalize Eliot’s voice in Middlemarch. Until then it’s text generation.

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THE NICE LADY FROM NORTH CAROLINA

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 28/09/2026

WAIT GODDAMMIT MELODY

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“There is a lot of malnutrition going on in these raccoons due to a diet that is very, very high in tortilla chips,” said Nessie O’Neil, a raccoon biologist and lead author of the study. —https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/science/raccoons-toys-cozumel-mexico-research.html

nytimes.com

On This Mexican Island, Raccoons Make and Play With Toys (and Also Sip Margaritas)

Scientists observed a family of pygmy raccoons near a Cozumel beach club learning from one another how to craft balls from paper, an indication that the animals have a culture.

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 26/09/2026

whatever is going on inside large language models I no longer want to know about it

Claude output: I found the causes: the hand job's visibility was flickering based on momentary input backlog, and stored items weren't persisting on reload, while the wagon never retired because cheap old buildings always beat newer ones on output-per-dollar. Now I'll check what the test asserts about hiding before changing the logic.

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 25/09/2026

@jolivingstone.bsky.social is such a spectacular writer. I read half of this and realized I wanted to save it for later and start over really pay attention to it. feeld.co/magazine/ple...

feeld.co

Contemptus Mundi by Jo Livingstone

The writer Jo Livingstone on self-repression and the cell.

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Reposted by Paul Ford

Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s our time friends

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Reposted by Paul Ford

Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 23/09/2026

Yes! Build a website today! aramzs.github.io/build-a-webs...

aramzs.github.io

Single Serving, Portfolio, and Blog Sites; Fast

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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 23/09/2026

I’m muting “polls” on here because I am tired of the Pavlovian humiliation of hope that occurs whenever I see blue dots.

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And she feeds it avocado toast! (Not really.)

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The kids here all use Zillow to check on their friends.

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When I was eight near Philly my dad showed me the Sunday NYT and explained how ridiculous the people and sums involved are. So I genuinely see this as a cherished tradition. This was my all timer: bsky.app/profile/ftra...

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I need to look into its peculiar line breaks tho.

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Tbh you tell the robot and it kind of happens it’s not a huge deal.

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No there’s now way currently. I am thinking maybe you could draw a little rectangle or something.

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local news is good even when it’s bad

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That’s a good idea. I don’t know how to do it! But it’s a good idea.

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“I did some dumb shit for cheap to see how it would go and it turns out that I kind of love humanity” is my favorite genre of personal essay.

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I Took the E Line From Southdale to St. Anthony Main and Watched 4 Movies in Less Than 12 Hours - Racket

And this classic about taking the bus around Minneapolis to watch four movies in one day, which is just the real spirit of America racketmn.com/i-took-the-e...

racketmn.com

Bus Rapid Transit is a gift to Minneapolis filmgoers.

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