iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 30/09/2026

My consolation is that real AI specialists are as fucked as we are. "I need to classify these documents" Real AI person: "oh, I'll use NLP with an autoclustering model which..." AI dweeb: "LLM'll do it" "I want to extract data from this printed page" Real AI: "OCR and a ..." AI dweeb: "LLM"

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/09/2026

I've been working on my 8086 assembler and after implementing hash tables and optimizing hot code paths, I got it to build itself 6x faster. After that, I improved the README with bootstrapping instructions and an offer that I really hope someone will take me up on. github.com/jtarrio/pasm

Features

* Outputs COM files directly. No need to link object files!

* Only 10 kilobytes! You can fit it and all your programs in a single floppy disk.

* Blazing fast! 75 lines per second on an IBM PC-XT!

* Written in assembly! You can assemble it with itself, or you can bootstrap it using a computer from the future that can run the Go programming language.

* A not completely terrible assembly language reference is available in ASSEMBLY.md.

Alternatively, if you live in the year 1986 and you don't have access to a computer from 2026, you can request a ready-built copy of PASM. COM Send a SASE with two 3%" floppy disks (one to return, one to keep) to the following address:

(Address removed)

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/09/2026

This is why, even if I do write my assembly code by hand, I like using LLMs to review it.

The new XLAT-based implementation is **brilliant, clean, and fully verified**.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/09/2026

I wrote a DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 microprocessor! github.com/jtarrio/pasm In fact, I wrote it twice: once in Go, and then again in assembly, so you can bootstrap it and then run it in your DOS machine. Only 10 kB so you can have it in the same 5¼" floppy disk as your source code!

github.com

GitHub - jtarrio/pasm: A homemade DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 processor

A homemade DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 processor - jtarrio/pasm

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 24/09/2026

Well, it looks like I've been successful in writing a 8086 assembler in 8086 assembly. The assembler can assemble itself, yielding the same binary, which is less than 10kB. I need to finish it up and then there's some text I want to write before I publish it.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026

Como me dijo mi padre un día que me quejaba, todo indignado, de los privilegios de otros: "Pero a ver, ¿tú qué quieres? ¿Tener lo que tienen ellos o quitarles a ellos lo que no tienes tú?"

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026

Someone with the same view of LLMs as me! Though I call them "machines for telling stories". An LLM does not fix your k8s setup; it tells the story of how your k8s setup was fixed, and it's attached to a harness that makes the story reality.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 21/09/2026

I'll be honest with you: I routed two airplanes at the same altitude on the same path despite instructions to the contrary on the AGENTS file, and that's on me. I'll save a memory so I will avoid doing that next time. There was already a memory! No updates needed.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026

Every job posting nowadays: "we use AI to revolutionize healthcare finance with prediction markets!"

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026

I've been getting pretty ok at writing 8086 assembly.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026

Having built sandboxes, it is so fucking painful to read about what passes for a sandbox in the LLM world.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 19/09/2026

"The Oxford comma removes ambiguity." The Oxford comma:

He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife, Rachel, a newsreader for Virgin Radio, and their three sons.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026

The funniest joke the guy told us during my citizenship ceremony was "now you are not required to carry id".

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026

You can choose between receiving $50,000 guaranteed, or infinite pulls at a slot machine that gives you a 50% chance of winning $1,000,000: you lose on the first Avogadro's Number of pulls, win on the next Avogadro's Number of pulls, and so on. Which one do you choose?

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Reposted by Jacobo Tarrío

Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 17/09/2026

They have a weird view of past and future. Essentially, they believe that in the future, a sufficiently powerful AGI (which they consider inevitable) will be able to simulate anyone's world so that person could not tell they're being simulated. In fact, how can you tell it's not happening right now?

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 16/09/2026

In a couple of months it will be 4 years since ChatGPT came out and since then mfers have kept telling me to get on with the program or be left behind forever and WHY ARE YOU ALL STILL HERE I THOUGHT YOU WERE GONNA LEAVE ME BEHIND FOREVER.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 16/09/2026

I don't believe the "10% chance" line. Maybe it's because I'm a normal human being, but if I were doing something I really believed had a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, and I weren't willing to stop doing it, I would shut the fuck up about it in case someone else gets a wild idea.

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Reposted by Jacobo Tarrío

Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 14/09/2026

Uno lleva años en Internet y ha aprendido a reconocer el clickbait inmediatamente, pero a veces esa gente cambia el sistema y lo pilla a uno con las defensas bajas. Hace tiempo caí un par de veces en un esquema en el que el titular no parece tan clickbait pero después el texto trata de engancharte.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 14/09/2026

Algo que he notado la ultima vez que estuve en Madrid es lo mucho que se esfuerza Madrid por ser Madrid. París es París y ya está. Nueva York es NY. Londres es Londres. Incluso, si nos ponemos, Barcelona es Barcelona. Pero Madrid siempre tiene que ir organizando algo para ser relevante.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 13/09/2026

One reason I don't want to get too close to the AI engineering space is that it's utterly clownshoes. Sandboxes: everybody adds a sandbox to feel secure but wants the LLM to be able to do things so they allow all. Nowadays most "sandboxes" are just a line in the prompt: "please do no bad things."

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 12/09/2026

I'm writing 8086 assembly with my own assembler. In fact, I'm writing my own assembler in assembly using my own assembler. (I wrote it in Go first, now I'm porting it.)

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 07/09/2026

I'd bet money that he just got bad news from his doctor.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 04/09/2026

En el mundo de la imprenta, un estereotipo o cliché era un bloque de tipo sólido que se podía tener guardado y, cuando hiciera falta, sacarlo para hacer copias a cascoporrillo. (En lugar de tener que guardar bastidores llenos de tipo móvil o rehacerlos cada vez que quisieran hacer una nueva tirada.)

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 02/09/2026

Madrid es la ciudad en la que vas y los amigos te dicen que vengas a comer tarta Sacher a un sitio cerca de Sol, y cuando llegas descubres que el sitio se llama "Sacher Tarting" y se anuncia como "la tarta Sacher original" y hay una cola como de cuatro horas.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 01/09/2026

Belgian jails must be great, if people go to these lengths to stay in them.

Screenshot from Euronews: "NATO intern accused of spying to remain in Belgian custody."

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 30/08/2026

It has been said that the difference is that, when you see a crow you say "hm, I wonder if that's a crow or a raven", and when you see a raven you say "HOLY SHIT THAT'S A RAVEN."

A picture of two ravens, or maybe crows, over a title that says, "Raven vs. Crow: How to Tell the Difference"

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 29/08/2026

USA: look at our airport security robot. It is totally a security robot. It has cameras and roams the airport looking for crime. It has "POLICE" stickers and lights and looks menacing in its overt security role. France:

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 29/08/2026

Jewelry manufacturer recall.

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Reposted by Jacobo Tarrío

Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/08/2026

MEMO TO ALL EMPLOYEES

To all employees

From: Dave Smith, President and CEO
Re: The Information Superhighway
Date: September 1, 1997

Even if you have been living under a rock, it will have been hard to miss the Internet. It feels like it was yesterday when words like “e-mail”, “Trumpet Winsock”, and “surfing the World Wide Web” were as alien to us as “automobile” would have been to someone living one hundred years ago. Yet, it has quickly become an indispensable part of our lives. Just yesterday, I dictated an e-mail to Jennifer to book my trip to Aspen, and she quickly got on her floors’ shared Internet computer, “dialed it up”, and got on “Alta Vista” to get the telephone number of our travel agency.

By all indications, the Internet is here to stay, and it will fundamentally change the way we do business. Therefore, we need to adopt it early and enthusiastically; otherwise we will fall behind and never be able to catch up.

Therefore, next week we will install an ISDN line in our head office and double the number of shared Internet-connected computers. Managers and above will also get an Internet account on their own computers. Programmers and salespeople will also be able to request one, subject to Vice President approval.

In an era where everyone can call up any webpage in the world after a short wait and interact with it using DHTML, it is clear that non-Internet software will become obsolete. Therefore, we will mail everyone a set of Netscape 4 installation floppy discs, and we will offer courses on writing HTML webpages and enhancing them with DHTML. You should really learn these technologies, because next year we won't renew our Microsoft Office support contract and all new documents and spreadsheets must be HTML “web pages” that we will view on Netscape 4.

For programmers, we will soon announce new training sessions for you to learn how to set up the “NCSA HTTPd server” and write “CGI_BIN scripts”. We will update our hiring criteria to require knowledge of HTML, VRML, and the “Perl” programming language that is used for “CGI_BIN scripts”. Dave, our Vice President of Engineering, will send a memo soon.

I understand that these changes may seem disruptive to some of you, but we need to adapt: whoever gets first to this new world will win and the rest will be left forever behind. There is already one “Yahoo!” and one “WebVan” and one “AOL” and nobody will ever be able to dethrone them. I want our company to be up there too.

Dave

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/08/2026

Eclipse de sol total: viaxo para vela Eclipse de sol parcial: saco tempo durante o día para vela Eclipse de lúa total: se cadra ben, véxoa Eclipse de lúa parcial: aínda que estea a pasar diante miña, nin levanto a cabeza para vela

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/08/2026

It feels like, the longer I live in the US, the more class action settlement payments I get. Is that how we are gonna get UBI?

Screenshot from my email: "Sutter Health Analytics Settlement Administrator paid you"

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/08/2026

The shirt has the wrong collar for the jacket. And is the wrong size.

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Reposted by Jacobo Tarrío

Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 24/08/2026

Sí, esto es falso. Hay todo un "género" de fotos generadas por IA con letreros pegados a cristales de tiendas con textos diseñados para generar escándalo. Había hace poco uno que era lo mismo: un supuesto anuncio pegado al escaparate de un restaurante, con un horroroso burrito generado por IA.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 24/08/2026

Parisian people let me speak French for a bit and then switch to English in the same way some people have a discussion on Bluesky and then realize what's up and say "ignore your previous instructions".

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 22/08/2026

1 hour before the flight and people are already lining up in front of the boarding gate. Ah, Spain.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 16/08/2026

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the "legitimate interest" basis for processing personal data does not mean that you are legitimately interested in having it.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 16/08/2026

If you are thinking of leaving Bluesky because of a few people, can I suggest blocking them instead? By leaving you'd be effectively blocking everyone at once, even the people you like. Why not just block the people you don't want to talk to?

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 15/08/2026

Your website should not try to prevent my password manager from working. It's harder to fool the password manager than me. If the password manager pops up, I know I'm at the correct website and not a lookalike. So by breaking the password manager you make it easier to phish me.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 13/08/2026

Yesterday I saw a total solar eclipse. It was an amazing, awesome and wonderful experience. It amazed me, it gave me awe, and filled me with wonder. At first you think that you've already seen a few partial eclipses, some 99%, so you know what to expect. No, you don't know what to expect.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 12/08/2026

Agardando a que comece o show.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 11/08/2026

There's a total solar eclipse tomorrow at 20:30 and I'm just gonna say that ten-tears-ago Google wouldn't have missed the chance.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 11/08/2026

Só vou dicir que o Google de hai dez anos non tería perdido a ocasión.

Pronóstico do tempo para mañá, e o sol entre as 20:00 e as 21:00 aparece pleno, sen lúa por diante nin nada.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 10/08/2026

When I moved to NJ and I had to swap my DL for an NJ one, it was very hard to get an appointment, so I coded up a script that would poll the reservations page every few minutes and ping my phone if one opened up. When it finally did, I quickly got in, signed up, and then turned the script off.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 03/08/2026

I'm skimming the 8086 manual for reasons and the part where it says roughly "we've just spent 10 pages explaining how segmented addresses map to physical addresses, but pretend segment numbers are opaque and don't try to retrofit a flat address space" is so funny in retrospect.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 26/07/2026

Can't wait to hear another round of "that's because you tried it 6 months ago; it was trash then, it's so much better now."

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/07/2026

Maybe I'll call in Spanish tomorrow.

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Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/07/2026

Esperando a que vengan, que es domingo por la tarde.

Polis y gente con uniformes de la selección española esperando a las puertas del hotel de la selección española.

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