iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I made multiplayer Windows 98 Solitaire. It's called Solitaire Alone Together. You can play together, with the whole internet, but you can't chat or talk. solitairealonetogether.com

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

they're running DOOM in the language we made up for our programming contest

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

i'm running a programming contest next week! we've spent the last few months thinking about how to make a fun contest in a world with agents. I think we've got a good answer :) Starts next friday. Give it a try! and mutuals dm if you wanna test or chat about this

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

the internet has lost *legibility of effort* - the ability to easily whether something took meaningful human work It's why we all catalogue vibe-code tells. And I bet that we'll find new ways to show our humanity through our work eieio.games/blog/legibil...

Screenshot of blog post. Full text:

So:

Lots of work is easier because of LLMs, and
Lots of heuristics we used to gauge effort are broken because of LLMs, so
Conveying effort to others is harder because of LLMs
And:

“Someone spent time on this” is a proxy for “this is worth engaging with” and
I appreciate projects that take a lot of effort and
I like it when people appreciate that I spent effort on something
But also:

Making a good thing still requires making lots of decisions, and
Making lots of decisions is still very hard, despite LLMs, so
Making good things is still very hard
As a creative technologist I’ve found this paralyzing. And as someone who loves novel internet projects I’ve found it frustrating. I’ve heard similar things from many of my friends.

What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Bobbie did a great job with this and getting to be interviewed for it was a ton of fun!

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I'm speaking at my favorite event - Wordhack - next Thursday! I'm gonna show some unreleased work and talk about how the internet is good, actually. come by! say hi!

wordhack event poster. Nolen Royalty (me), Lizz Thabet, and Chiku Komiya are speaking. The event is hosted by Todd Anderson. It is Thursday June 18th from 7PM - 10PM at Wonderville (Brooklyn)

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

some of my favorite eggs from the marc andreessen egg gallery - thank you builders

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

announcing Marc Andreessen Egg Game - a game where you draw on eggs to make them look like Marc marc-egg.eieio.games

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Reposted by nolen

Ben Holmen @benholmen.com · 04/05/2026

The intrusive thoughts overwhelmed my last two brain cells

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Loved this reasoning behind using custom hardware over a phone app

screenshot of Adrian's blog post. Highlighted text is "Smartphones are anti-enchantment devices."

Full text of screenshot:
Wouldn’t it be easier to use cheap smartphones instead of going to the trouble of designing entirely new hardware? That depends. Putting aside their hardware limitations (lack of long-range radios, displays that suffer in direct sunlight, etc.), the problem with smartphones is that people inevitably expect to interact with them like smartphones, which is to say, instantly and effortlessly. If we gave players smartphones, they would expect to be able to use Google Maps to navigate and instant messaging to communicate, rather than dealing with the orienteering-esque challenges of paper maps and walkie-talkies. Even with those functions disabled, we’d have to deal with potential confusion and disappointment.

Smartphones are anti-enchantment devices. All too often during interactive theatre and ARGs, I see participants fixated on their glowing screens, to the wider experience’s detriment. Smartphones, as traditionally used, have no place in an immersive experience that seeks to bring participants together and get them to talk and argue and deliberate with one another. Instead, we’ve designed our devices to appear closer to scientific instruments, with a custom user interface to match.

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

I am designing this year's ICFP programming contest! if you've got strong opinions on what makes a good programming contest I would love to chat. Bonus points if you've done the ICFP PC before. Or if you've got ideas about making a good contest in the age of agents!

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

document.querySelector("paper") (this is all live in the browser)

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

they're calling it the strangest triple feature of all time

screenshot of letterboxd. I watched 3 movies on March 27th - Sherlock JR (from 1924), Interesting Ball (2014), and Rap World (2024). I gave Sherlock JR a 5/5 rating and Rap World a 4.5/5 rating. I did not rate Interesting Ball (it was bad).

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

made my terminal explode when i close it

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

terminal to terminal communication prototype

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

made a bouncy ball that lives in my terminal and on my desktop

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

parseword is very very good

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Reposted by nolen

Adam Aaronson @aaronson.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I made a crossword

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I made yt-browse, a youtube channel search TUI Filter by date range, use regexes, order results by views/duration/date, find playlists, and ignore shorts. Everything is cached; search is instant after an initial load. it's like search, but for youtube github.com/nolenroyalty...

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

working on a task tracker for sisyphus (compatible with any boulder and hill)

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

made something i'm calling "really easy tetris"

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

a fun part of making an MMO that runs over ssh is that you can play inside your editor

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

really fun seeing snakes.run on a proper crt :)

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players ssh snakes.run to join!

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

I was up till 3 AM forking go's crypto library. Here's a fun lil debugging story for about why: eieio.games/blog/ssh-sen...

eieio.games

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke? · eieio.games

I made my next game twice as fast by forking go's crypto library

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Reposted by nolen

spencer chang @spencer.place · 20/01/2026

every time i moved my cursor in my browser today

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Wrote about how I like understanding code (featuring my dog playing with a balloon) eieio.games/blog/will-ai...

eieio.games

Will AI Pet My Dog for Me? · eieio.games

Sometimes I don't want to outsource work. Where should I draw the line?

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

idea: captchas that are ~impossible for humans to solve serve them to bots that you suspect are using AI models to solve captchas. if they solve it successfully they fail the test.

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

unicode braille characters are 2x4 rectangles of dots where you can arbitrarily set any of the dots. That's 8x the pixels you normally get in the terminal! anyway here's a proof of concept terminal SVG renderer using unicode braille:

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

ssh tiny.christmas a global christmas carol in the terminal :)

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

last-minute gift idea if anyone's still looking

namecheap search result for the domain merry.christmas. the price is 2 million dollars

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

You have two friends, Alice and Bob. They each lie 20% of the time. Bob flips a coin. Alice looks at it and tells you what she saw (lying 20% of the time). You make an educated guess. You're right 80% of the time. How much better can you do if Bob answers too? eieio.games/blog/two-hea...

eieio.games

Are Two Heads Better Than One? · eieio.games

A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

~new newsletter about fun weird internet stuff~ every month my friend justin and I: * write down everything our friends made * bother them until they write a little blurb the first issue features mads mikkelsen, kind of newslettergoeshere.substack.com/p/projects-f...

Screenshot of some of the links. Full text:

Turn your boring boarding pass into a big, beautiful bald JD Vance for airport checkin
From James: Turn your boring boarding pass into a big, beautiful bald JD Vance for airport check-in. The most surreal part was being contacted by Mads Mikkelsen, the guy who was deported and hearing his side of the story. He in turn said it was surreal to see a day of his life become one of those memes about current events he usually consumes.

The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million.
From Calvin: My trip to the Fed’s Money Museum went sideways when he discovered their $1 million cube doesn’t add up.

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

In SF next week. Where should I be going? Please send (or dm) recs / invites for demo nights, art/tech/games events, venues etc!

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

~How to run a million-board chess MMO in a single process~ An essay and video about how One Million Chessboards works: essay: eieio.games/blog/a-milli... video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF1E...

eieio.games

Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process · eieio.games

How one million chessboards works

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Reposted by nolen

NotNite @notnite.com · 12/06/2025

made a laser pointer on my desktop that my partner can control remotely to distract me while I work on things

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

installed the Chrome Developer Beta and now a little goblin keeps eating my URL bar? anyone know how to remove this

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

your cursor is a bow and arrow

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

???? if you share your work online enough someone will just show you the exact interface you should have for your next game????

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

your cursor is the gun from portal had to figure out how to add multiple cursors to an html textarea for this one lol

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

oh whoa javascript tells you where the text-insertion cursor is huh

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nolen @itseieio.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

One Million Chessboards v1.1 - fresh game, no stalemates, start restricting bots * You can capture between boards (once your target has moved) * Stricter rate limits, more bot detection (wip) * Reset the board state have fun :) onemillionchessboards.com

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Reposted by nolen

Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 08/05/2025

✨ It's new samwho visual essay o'clock! ✨ Reservoir sampling is one of my favourite algorithms. It allows you to sample from a set without knowing the size of that set. I try to assume no prior knowledge, and use no scary math notation. Just beautiful visuals. Let me know what you think! ❤️

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