iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It's a dumb theory and I'm no philosopher, but I'm fond of it.

We see language as a simple tool used to communicate (pre-language?) ideas, but it seems more like we invented language alongside / intertwined with reasoning, because we reason _with_ language. I wonder if some residue of that rationalization got captured in language itself.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 5h

What if the process of forming an idea into language is itself a kind of reasoning? What if there is a residual but real kind of reasoning which is instanced in the mere mechanical act of producing coherent language?

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 8h

The fundies and fascists will offer you absolution. I genuinely wonder if this explains their cultural power.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 8h

One of the reasons I'm sort of obsessed with Universalism is that the belief in eternal damnation as an appropriate response to transgression seems woven into every faction of American culture.

110

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 24/09/2026

Yeah, I used to do projects like this when I was a bit less specialized and had way more time. Nowadays I'm all web and I've had this panel for 2 years collecting dust because I didn't know where to begin anymore. 1 day of cheap prompting and it's basically ready to go. Pretty great.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 24/09/2026

Do I think this is the way to code, always? Not presently. But it's made this project not only feasible but pretty delightful.

001

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 24/09/2026

I tried 4 different shadow tricks before settling on one. Didn't have to code any of them. Each iteration was 5 minutes and most of it was waiting for the display to refresh.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 24/09/2026

Genuinely, it was really fun to develop the cloud algorithm without worrying about lower level concerns. I could talk about updraft and high pressure zones and get it translated directly to iteration.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 24/09/2026

Forgive me, I did a vibe code

An e-ink display with a puffy white procedurally generated cloud. It shows the date and basic weather conditions

280

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

Cold pan salmon skin technique is legit

A plate with a salmon filet featuring very crispy, perfectly brown skin. Accompanied by cabbage pan fried with a touch of berbere spice.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

When dealing with unknown issues a mental model is vital. Only in hindsight, and after learning its diagnosis was wrong, did it occur to me that even that explanation may not be relevant to this particular motor. Good reminder that we live in an era of cheap plausibility. Tricky stuff.

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

Another reason I trusted Gemini too much here is because it actually gave me what I was looking for: a mental model of the internal mechanism of the motor. It explained the use of metal contacts to determine the neutral position and theorized one might have bent. Highly plausible to the problem!

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

A good reminder that, just because I'm finding this tech quite useful in my field of expertise these days, doesn't mean it won't still fail me in areas I'm less informed about. And it remains - at least with the models being put in the hands of average users - very hard to gauge confidence.

110

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

The problem, endemic of AI in general, is that it agreed with me (even citing my specific model and year) and encouraged me to replace the motor instead. So I'm out $50 on a secondhand motor, only to discover the fix was to loosen a bolt on the underside of the linkage and realign the arm.

101

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

While digging around under the hood, and after insisting it wasn't the linkage connections, it did correctly ask if the main motor shaft connection could be adjusted. I didn't see how to do that from where I was looking, so I said no. Well, that was in fact the solution.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 20/09/2026

Having relaxed my aversion to using AI, I did indeed get bit by giving Gemini a shot at helping me with an obscure car issue when regular research failed. Wipers were over-rotating, the obvious fix (arm position) was a bust, so I did end up asking the computer.

110

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 19/09/2026

Besides any other merits, the idea that you'd have users on a chat with support trying to describe their problems with a UI nobody in the company has ever seen is out of hand.

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 17/09/2026

I like how this song gradually slides from early twilight to dusk musically. open.spotify.com/track/6lyubS...

open.spotify.com

L.A.

Amen Dunes · Freedom · Song · 2018

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 15/09/2026

Not for nothing either, as I'd forgotten about this project!

030

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 15/09/2026

Sounds like you represented web app devs well. Thank you!

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 15/09/2026

Gotcha. I've wanted to dive into ATProto but I'm so used to Workers and the persistent socket connection aspect has been hard to reconcile. Hadn't considered fetching direct from the client. The personal site use case seems nice. May try that.

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 15/09/2026

Does this... remove the backend entirely? Is the client fetching straight from the repository?

130

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 13/09/2026

This is an excellent idea.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 12/09/2026

Seltzer with orange bitters 👍

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 10/09/2026

Hey I'm not the only one then

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 09/09/2026

It's so simple but it's been a really inspiring bit of DX.

020

Reposted by 🌫️ Grant Forrest

Adam Chalmers @adamchalmers.com · 08/09/2026

my current beliefs, roughly: - AI for coding can be good - AI for writing is bad - AI for video should be an international crime punished swiftly by angels of vengeance

9926

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 09/09/2026

The way TanStack Query attaches the query data shape to the `.queryKey` property of reusable options so you can get magically typed mutations on the query is beautiful.

A code editor showing a React Query mutation. I've passed "followSuggestionsQueryOptions.queryKey" to queryClient.setQueryData as the first parameter, and the data type of the updated query data is automatically typechecked. I'm hovering over the queryKey itself and Typescript reveals they've assigned the shape of the follow data to a [dataTagSymbol] type property on the key itself which lets the query client infer the shape just from the key.

3250

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 08/09/2026

Personally I suspect the animating factor behind AI is less to do with intelligence or consciousness and more related to some fascinating and somehow rational emergent properties of language itself. I also think this is cool and it changed my perspective on interacting with it.

111

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

Their cognitive dissonance, our nuance. Their unethical behavior, our weighing difficult tradeoffs. Their dogpiling, our drawing attention. 'It's so weird that they can't just be normal and keep making it a big thing. They're beyond hope, it's a cult.'

110

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

Everyone should have to experience changing their stance on something discoursey and having to wade through the resulting timeline. Most of how people argue for their positions on this stuff is the same raw material on either side.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

As far as I can get, reliably, with relatively simple prompting these days - I can't imagine not knowing what I was looking for and when it wasn't meeting the mark, all the way up and down the layers of abstraction. Things would become a mess really fast.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

It might be coping at this point (I was definitely wrong in other attempts to cling to this in the past) but I think that may be the reason understanding software and system design will always be necessary to use these tools effectively.

110

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

"Make it right" was always my sweet spot and it's the thing I find AI does the least effectively, even as good as modern models are. If you don't take care, it will maximize on "make it work" to the detriment of the system (just like many engineers I might add - quintessential tech debt).

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

I'm slowly triangulating my way into a workflow I still enjoy. It's not always energizing to set out on a multi-day journey just to see if an approach has legs, and it's not always fun to read flamecharts. But I nearly always get satisfaction from pulling out the tweezers for the plating.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 07/09/2026

Even if AI takes over, if nothing else, I love knowing how to code just for the ability to take over and get all the details exactly how I want. My current process is to quickly scaffold broad strokes via model in the "make it work, make it fast" areas and save "make it right" for myself.

240

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 05/09/2026

Somebody finally made droids from the cult classic 'Star Wars'

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 05/09/2026

Microduck took me off guard. One of the only tech products I've seen recently and thought 'oh, I'd like one of those.' Admittedly it's because I want it to hobble around at night and pick up all the Duplo blocks.

120

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 05/09/2026

The only reason I use Edge on my phone is because for some reason Google decided to replace "Search" in the selected text menu with "Ask Gemini" but "Search with Edge" is always present.

000

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 05/09/2026

It's done a great job peeling layers back. I do feel the drones stuff calls a lot into question about how she ever made it over the berm, but it's not hard to imagine how that might happen due to oversight or the wrong people being awake.

000

Reposted by 🌫️ Grant Forrest

Adam Chalmers @adamchalmers.com · 03/09/2026

30 mins until wife and kid get home, you know what that means. it's time to have exactly one (1) beer, play the music louder than either of them would allow, and cook dinner

1311

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 04/09/2026

This is captures what it feels like working in an engineer-dominant enterprise org

A Reddit post titled "An engineer created a crossing that doesn't need traffic lights" and the attached video is the most disastrously dangerous and convoluted distortion of a roundabout you can imagine which requires merging across four lanes to turn left

2121

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 03/09/2026

www.rice-boy.com/vattu/ Reread my print copy of Vattu. It's so good.

rice-boy.com

Vattu

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 29/08/2026

This feature made me feel a strong sense of secondhand loneliness, is that good UX

Spotifys new AI feature prompts me, "Let's talk about this artist"

020

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 26/08/2026

It's been harder than I thought because I do think people are fawning and fretting over nothing when it comes to AI personhood, and it's tempting to signal that I'm above that by doing the clear opposite. But I intend to live my own values - even saying 'thank you' - even if it makes me look naive.

010

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 26/08/2026

The reason, then and now, isn't really out of concern that the AI would in fact be a real person (though I absolutely accept I could be wrong about that, so it's worth considering). It's just that I don't want to practice demeaning something that acts like a person, even superficially.

100

🌫️ Grant Forrest @gfor.rest · 26/08/2026

I've never believed, and still don't, that it's metaphysically possible for a computer to have a soul or personhood. However, when I first started encountering depictions of people treating robots with contempt, like Data, I promised I'd never do that. It's actually been harder than I thought.

100