iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 16/09/2026

This is what business success looks like. And don't blame the government, blame the people who empowered these politicians to install regulators whose job it is not to do their their jobs. Please vote.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 30/07/2026

I guess we’re pancaking the hamburger, @github.com?

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 29/07/2026

A random sampling of technology leaders' inboxes in 2026.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 16/07/2026

For a moment I thought this was a Nintendo Switch conference and got excited for you.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 13/06/2026

A question I often ask myself

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 07/06/2026

Posting this feels counter-purpose, but the sentiment is worth sharing.

Sign at a campground that says: Whilst the majority of campers are responsible the rise in popularity we are experiencing at this site is unsustainable. If you do stay, please do not promote the site on social media etc

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 01/04/2026

This may be a sophisticated identity theft ploy, but I'll risk it.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 13/02/2026

That’s a nice thought.

@gruen.us sitting on the floor of Amtrak, assured a seat circa 2014

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 16/01/2026

No reason an app with virtually 0 traffic should crash once a day for "reasons", or require more than 1vcpu/256Mb resource allocation. In any case, guess when I migrated an app from Next.js to Go

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 01/12/2025

Not even enough to cover my 2025 Claude Code bill.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 17/09/2025

Why does this outline appear after an app is dismissed? Why does it persist at all? It just makes things unnecessarily busy. This design language took, uh, courage.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 05/09/2025

Although, to be fair, last lines of the article:

"Why would you take the car?" text snippet from article.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 02/09/2025

Am I supposed to take articles that have images like this seriously?

AI Slop in Graph form (n.b., nothing makes sense at all)

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 15/08/2025

Very cool for Google to do this. (If you have Google Workspace, check it out: admin.google.com/ac/insights/...)

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 13/08/2025

From the Capitol administrative offices.

“Welcome to the hovel - ain’t no windows or air circulation up in here, just a few Democratic staffers.”

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 07/08/2025

On my gmail account (but not my google workspace account) this new paste function appeared:

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 20/05/2025

How skynet got its wings.

MacOS dialog asking to allow Anthropic's Claude access to find devices on my local network.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 13/05/2025

This cover is almost 50 years old and is still painfully accurate.

New Yorker Cover from 1976, showing 9th Ave to the Hudson river, to China/Russia

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 11/04/2025

Recent acquisition (soda can tab for scale). Nice work, @beta.nyc Get yours: beta.nyc/support-us-n...

A sticker in the style of a restricted parking sign, saying "NO KING ANY TIME".

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 20/03/2025

Very glad to see *something* I wrote ended up in Meta's (very knowingly pirated) AI training set—was worried I wouldn't have direct reason to be righteously indignant. Thanks, Zuck! www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Twitter for Dummies coming up in Llama 3 training data set, courtesy of the Atlantic.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 18/02/2025

(Canada's population is roughly equivalent California, at half the GDP. Ignore any state/province divisions within Canada.) Further still, if I were negotiating on behalf of Canada, I'd ensure statehood or representation for all other US territories. Here's what that would look like:

Congressional seats by the new states of PR, DC, Guam, USVI, Northern Mariana, American Samoa, and... Canada

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 18/02/2025

Scenario I'd like to throw into the ether (with the huge caveat that this is all ridiculous and shouldn't be taken seriously): Should Canada join the United States, it should insist on having proportional representation in Congress. Here's what would happen in the House (assuming kept to 435):

table showing congressional redistribution

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 10/02/2025

Tired: "copy" Wired: "copy as markdown"

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 29/01/2025

Welp, where goes this morning's productivity. Maybe it's time to switch to podman.

MacOS not letting me open Docker, which is a critical path on how I do most of my software development

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 23/01/2025

:( (I'm in NYC, not sure why there'd be a content restriction)

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 10/01/2025

In which the AI tail wags the human dog. (I don’t live in the Bay Area, and I love cold weather.)

Screenshot demonstrating inherent bias of how AI models are trained, where a copilot autocompletes someone else’s thought.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 02/01/2025

I’ll share one from two years ago. Bought into community distributed generation. (I live in Manhattan, so not possible to put up solar panels.) I’d say it’s working out.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 25/12/2024

Pfff. What a grinch. (Happy Great American Holiday, y’all)

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 22/12/2024

The congestion pricing revenue also bonds additional funds for improving public transit. Better transit means greater ridership means fewer cars. Also, even a 10% reduction can do wonders for congestion.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 11/12/2024

This is the kind of accolade I live for.

Queens, a LinkedIn Game, saying that I am smarter than 95% of CEOs. (Not quite mensa territory, but I'll take it.)

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 02/12/2024

@hailey.at are you okay? Will you tell us if you’re okay? There’s a fail at the gateway, A host error. A bad server, Hailey? Hailey are you haileyok.com?

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 28/10/2024

This was a surprisingly emotional experience.

Arrow sticker on sidewalk pointing towards polling location.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 16/10/2024

Who would ever agree to this?

Install Adobe Genuine Service (AGS)
To help protect you from security vulnerabilities and harmful malware that may be present in non-genuine Adobe apps, AGS will periodically check for non-genuine Adobe apps on this machine. If any are detected, you may be notified and Adobe may disable the non-genuine Adobe app.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 17/09/2024

Oh thank heaven for...

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 10/09/2024

Another day, another lighthouse ride.

Medium red bicycle in front of little red lighthouse underneath the GWB.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 22/08/2024

Has Marvel finally run out of superhero ideas?

Cesspool Man in front of Union Square Cafe

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 11/06/2024

This is called a cloud iridescence which, I’m told, is a fairly common ephemeral phenomenon. I stopped in my tracks, took a photo, and within 30 seconds it was gone. Don’t forget to look up. #bluesky

Cloud Iridescence: the color spectrum painted on the wisps of a cloud.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 22/04/2024

And certainly it would never over-saturate my skin.

My face again. Not that I don’t have a reddish complexion, but I’m not *that* pink.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 22/04/2024

What are you talking about?

My face smoothed as if it were made of silly putty.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 18/04/2024

Got to love the confidence of a vendor who predicts you’re going to spend more money with them after some aggressive cost cutting. Motivating to find even more cost-saving opportunities.

AWS dashboard predicting our aggressive cost cutting efforts are all for naught.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 27/02/2024

What’s this mode called?

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 17/11/2023

Further proof that half of my CS degree was useless knowledge.

Spelling bee game claiming the word “quine” as invalid.

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Michael E. Gruen @gruen.us · 09/11/2023

Says something about the target audience, no?

NYTimes connections game where most tiles are podcast names

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