iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

That aspect of it is definitely fun. My lower back disagrees about the level of fun involved. 🙃

Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I got the two end tables built tonight, and I'm happy with how they look. But *wow*, your body sure does remind you you're 64 when you spend a couple of hours wrestling with large furniture pieces! At least my smart watch is impressed by my unexpected Friday evening cardio workout. 🙂

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Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I'm replacing my furniture incrementally. This weekend it's the coffee table and end tables. I've scheduled a junk pickup to haul away the old ones tomorrow afternoon, so this evening I finally had to stop procrastinating and assemble the flat-pack replacements.

130

Woooooot!! That's phenomenal! Or maybe noumenal! 🙃

Reposted by Catherine Berry

It's state terrorism, designed to intimidate opponents. For the the same reason, the Romans crucified (designated) enemies of the state in public view.

061

I actually (for real!) booked them to haul away some of my dead furniture on Saturday, so your mind palace job will just have to wait until Sunday. 🙃

Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's state terrorism, designed to intimidate opponents. For the the same reason, the Romans crucified (designated) enemies of the state in public view.

061

I just reached that point in my day. 🙂

Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Danielle Froom 🏳️‍🌈 @danifroom.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Reposted by Catherine Berry

"Democrats aren't abandoning trans people! Maybe just one or two..." Here's every Democrat who's either voted to strip human rights away from trans people and/or has campaigned on anti-trans propaganda in the last year.

Amy Acton
Jamie Ager
Colin Allred
Angela Alsobrooks
Tammy Baldwin
Beau Bayh
Xavier Becerra
Richard Blumenthal
Lisa Blunt Rochester
Sherrod Brown
Chris Coons
Catherine Cortez Masto
Henry Cuellar
Don Davis
Dick Durbin
John Fetterman
Cleo Fields
Shomari Figures
Aaron Ford
Ruben Gallego
Sarah Trone Garriott
Blake Gendebien
Lauren Gillen
Kirsten Gillibrand
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
Vicente Gonzalez
Adam Gray
Maggie Hassan
Martin Heinrich
John Hickenlooper
Mazie Hirono
Jeffrey Hulum III
Ben Ray Lujan
Tim Kaine
Marcy Kaptur
Mark Kelly
Angus King
Amy Klobuchar
Susie Lee
John Mannion
Seth Moulton
Gavin Newsom
Jon Ossoff
Mary Peltolta
Gary Peters
Bobby Pulido
Jack Reed
Jacky Rosen
Rob Sand
Kim Schrier
Chuck Schumer
Terri Sewell
Jeanne Shaheen
Elissa Slotkin
Tom Suozzi
James Talarico
Josh Turek
Eugene Vindman
Mark Warner
Raphael Warnock
Sheldon Whitehouse

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O brave new world, that hath such videos in it! 🙃

Yeah, if that were in a novel I'd roll my eyes. 🙄🙃

0100

Got mine on Friday, felt yucky yesterday, mostly better today. Take that, contagion! 🙂

"Perhaps if we ran away some more it would confuse them."

My dad was 11 years old and living south of London during the Blitz. He could never tolerate the use of "blockbuster" to describe things like movies and sales. To him, it would always be the slang name for the largest type of German bomb, which he could hear killing people off in the distance.

130

I understand. And it's also true that a lot of vivid imagery is factually inaccurate. I'm not saying you're wrong, but rather that there is a case to be made for both positions.

000

Interesting. I see the point, but I also fear that we are draining our language of vivid imagery.

Useful genAI applications certainly exist; for example, they help me write software. The open question is whether any such applications are economically viable in the long term. Right now essentially all genAI usage is heavily subsidized.

100

Exactly. Big tech made a fairly reasonable bet based on the astonishing early success and improvement rate of LLMs, and lost that bet. Now they're frantically making double-or-nothing bets to recover. I think we all know how that story ends.

0101

The Luddites were never anti-technology per se. They fought against uses of technology that harm individuals and communities. The Amish are also in this category.

042

"You'd better get in line now -- they're running out of Kool-Aid!"

110

I see few people saying that. The likely outcome is a crash big enough to damage the economy for years, with genuinely useful genAI applications crawling from the wreckage and becoming part of our daily lives. So basically the dot-com bubble turned up to 11.

121

But they want the guests to drive all the way up there to wait for them in the parking lot. In the middle of the desert. Such fun!

100

Yeah, I read the whole thing. Picture the mood of guests standing around in the hot desert sun in a dirt parking area in the middle of nowhere as they wait for the Chosen Six to hike back from the ceremony. Imagine the "fuck this" dropout rate as guests rush to events at 3 hotels and a club.

It reads like the winning entry in a "most inconvenient wedding plan" contest.

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Reposted by Catherine Berry

Some players have exactly one RPG character, which they'll shoehorn into any campaign in any game. They'll insist on playing their half-elf Druid in everything from Call of Cthulhu to Traveller.

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Some players have exactly one RPG character, which they'll shoehorn into any campaign in any game. They'll insist on playing their half-elf Druid in everything from Call of Cthulhu to Traveller.

3261

I've never played as one before. And, in fact, after that initial debacle things have been going much better. Knock wood.

000

As they fled, I pictured my leader on the smoke-filled bridge of the battered flagship sending a second transmission: "Resistance is, um, surprisingly effective! Prepare to be assimilated, eventually." 🙃

011

I rather quickly found out that I had greatly underestimated their strength. I found this out by way of having half my fleet destroyed and most of the rest damaged, while barely denting their ships. My surviving ships made a humiliating retreat.

100

After hours of economic development, tech research, and ship building, I finally felt like I was strong enough to attack a neighboring empire. So I sent my fleet into their territory, imagining my leader making the obligatory "Resistance is futile!" transmission to the defenders.

100

I'm in one of my occasional Stellaris phases. This time, I decided to play as a "driven assimilator" empire -- basically, the Borg from Star Trek. However, unlike the Borg, at the start of the game I was pathetically weak.

340

I got mine (plus flu) 25 hours ago. Fever's gone, but other mild flu-like symptoms are lingering. I think the dull headache is most annoying. Fortunately a marathon Stellaris session has kept me adequately distracted today. 🙂

000

"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." - Liber AL II:9

Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I got my flu and COVID vaccinations yesterday evening. I want the Nobel Prize in Responsible Adulting for voluntarily feeling like I do this morning. 😖

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Catherine Berry @isomeme.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Nearly every form of expertise manifests in the form of turning clear black and white categories into hopelessly complex fractal gradients. As one of my professors put it, the test for a true engineer is that whatever you ask them, the answer starts with "That depends..." 🙂

110

You can frame this differently, as the Nazis hurrying to get the job done while they had the chance.

Just based on my 40 year old memories I could go on for ten minutes about ways to detect stealth aircraft. Some of those have been countered since, some not. But on net, stealth makes the opponent's job sufficiently harder to be worth the effort.

People in the defense industry were already angsting about this when I worked at Rockwell in the 1980s. Like all defensive measures, the idea is not to be 100% effective; it's to make the opponent's task harder.

030

It's as misguided as saying that a program "throws" an exception.

That's why I am careful to write "genAI" when that's what I mean.

030

Only Tom Lehrer could make rhymes that bad work.

000

Yeah, I should clarify my meaning here. To me, "the tool" is the tech that allows us to use training data to twist vectors through hyperspace and end up with a preposterously good correlation and extrapolation engine. Getting the training data is part of the "how we use it" phase.