iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jay Gruber @jays.name · 19/07/2026

Hopper and Molt show us the importance of family. He promised his mother!

Hopper threatening Molt (scene from A Bug's Life)

Jay Gruber @jays.name · 19/07/2026

Scar showed us the importance of loving yourself and betting on yourself. Disney Villains. Just got to overlook the evil bits.

2 frames of Scar from the Lion King performing the song Be Prepared

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Trail 6 Electoral Area A, BC ★★★★★ Went down a lot of stairs elsewhere to get to beach, came back up stairs here beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

Wooden stairs on the way down to a beach

More wooden stairs on the way down
Background: beach

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Museum of Anthropology 6393 Northwest Marine Drive, Vancouver ★★★★★ Worth strolling around back here beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

The rear of the museum
Floor to ceiling windows with a stepped roof. Inside, some carved poles are lined up with each step change in the roof by height.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Rose Garden 6301 Crescent Road, Vancouver ★★★★★ beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

A rose garden with the paths laid out on a geometric sort of star pattern, water and mountains in the background

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Reconciliation Pole Main Mall, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ Really impressive carving on this pole. Worth reading indigenous.ubc.ca/indigenous-engage… beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Pacific Museum of Earth 6339 Stores Road, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ Look at all them rocks beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

A wall with cross sections of several different types of rock

A wall with cross sections of several different kinds of rock

My favorite rock cross section (meta-conglomerate)

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

Update: the E is for Engineering, and Engineers do stuff like build projectile launchers and gather data. Awesome

Some sort of projectile launcher mounted on a wood pallet made with a metal track and resistance bands. These folks were using a ballpoint pen as a projectile. They had a target with a grid set up and were measuring I don't know what.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Engineering Cairn Main Mall, Electoral Area A ★★★★☆ It's a big E, but there's cherry blossoms so that's nice beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

A big rock with an uppercase E painted on every side

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Beaty Biodiversity Museum 2212 Main Mall, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ I want to go in there and learn stuff. But it is closed beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

Foreground: some tall windows with a bit of glare
Inside: a whale skeleton, hanging from the ceiling

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 28/03/2026

📍 Musqueam Post University Boulevard, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ More exploring campus beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

A carved pole, looks like a person gripping a snake by the tail

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

📍 Victory Through Honour Pole East Mall, Electoral Area A ★★★★☆ Here I learned that if you start a beacon bits post and walk away before you finish, it doesn't let you upload once you are out of range. Take 2. beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

📍 Ladner Clock Tower Learners' Walk, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ Took a takeout lunch here for a little quiet time. There are some 1-sided lunch table benches. The world needs more of those. There's a water feature. beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

A bench with a large back, with a table in front of it. The bench is set up facing a pedestrian walkway

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

Near home I visit this Camperdown Elm in Port Gamble, WA sometimes. This thing only exists as a graft. So curious.

Closeup of an informational sign:

State Champion Camperdown Elm

It was in 1640 that the "Earl of Camperdown" in Dundee Scotland noticed a branch growing on the floor of his elm forest. He grafted it to a Scotch Elm tree and it took hold producing the first Camperdown Elm. The Scotch Elm is the only root mass the Camperdown Elm will grow on. The tree is a mutant and cannot self produce.

Every Camperdown Elm tree in the world is part of the original and they must be grafted to a Scotch Elm tree to get started. When the graft starts to grow, the Scotch Elm branches are cut off leaving only Camperdown Elm. This magnificent tree depends on humankind to keep it as a species.

This Camperdown Elm is the State Champion.

This tree was planted in 1875. It measures 20 ft. in height with a 26 ft. crown and a 7 ft. circumference

A Camperdown Elm with an informational sign in the foreground

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

📍 Upside-Down Tree Agricultural Road, Electoral Area A ★★★★★ Grafted elms are such interesting trees beaconbits.app/beacon/vtp52kel3fhn2… #BeaconBits

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

I wonder if it's As and Fs, regardless of the details. I checked mine, but that many all As made me want a control group...

A screenshot of blackvotewatch.org. It shows cards (letter grade, picture, name, party) for 3 WA Democrats: Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Emily Randall. all have As

A screenshot of blackvotewatch.org. It shows cards (letter grade, picture, name, party) for 1 PA Democrat: John Fetterman (A), and 2 Republicans, Dave McCormick (F), Brian Fitzpatrick (F)

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 27/03/2026

darth there were no sunbeams on the deck for a long time and now there are sunbeams again that's it that's all that happened

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 20/03/2026

The shook keeper is what did it for me

A goalkeeper sitting on the ground after a stoppage-time goal, thinking about the days when stoppage time did not regularly approach double digits.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 23/01/2026

Somehow the placement of this speech bubble is entirely unsurprising

A group of four standing outside, presumably a nuclear family. Man with a miner's helmet, his wife, son and daughter. They are accompanied by Coalie the Lump of Coal. Coalie has a translucent speech bubble that is in front of the faces of the mother and daughter, obscuring them.

The speech bubble text:
"Coal miners have powered America's growth, and each year OSMRE transfers over $1 billion to support health care and pension benefits for eligible miners and their families"

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 22/01/2026

Very interesting...

Highlighted text from an ebook, Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation by Zaakir Tameez:

Sometime around October 25, the Vigilance Committee attorneys deployed their strategy. They managed to persuade local officers to arrest the hunters, and they were detained for several hours before being released. When the hunters left the court-house, an interracial crowd of thousands of protesters stood outside hissing and flashing pistols, then followed them to their lodgings.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 14/01/2026

It's like looking at the big bang

A screenshot of a post on docs.surf. The site is styled to look like an Internet Explorer browser in front of a classic Windows desktop background. The post:

Domain Steal

I've been messing around with the idea of building a feed of all standard.site documents and evolving it into an aggregator, and omg, it's going great...

Steve Simkins
1 day ago

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 13/01/2026

"[...] decisions about future resourcing and deprecation of associated capabilities will principally be made on the basis of these metrics." Other important, successful projects and orgs will either get starved for resources or will pivot their attention to stop working on their important thing.

Competition > Centralized Planning. As America's AI ecosystem demonstrates,
robust competition by small teams, with transparent metrics for results, is the engine of
commercial AI leadership. We must bring this model into the Department and encourage
robust competition to spur faster military AI integration. Small, accountable teams will win
over process in a race characterized by dynamic and unpredictable innovation. We will
measure success through continuous field experimentation: putting AI capabilities in
operators' hands, gathering feedback within days not years, and pushing updates faster than the enemy can adapt. I direct CDAO to establish AI system usage and mission impact
metrics for evaluating the success of these AI acceleration efforts. To enable market
dynamics to drive resourcing, decisions about future resourcing and deprecation of
associated capabilities will principally be made on the basis of these metrics.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 13/01/2026

"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW" ... Just say you've already bought the Grok licenses, we get it

Clarifying "Responsible AI" at the DoW - Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological "tuning" that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts. The Department must also utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications. Therefore, I direct the CDAO to establish benchmarks for model objectivity as a primary procurement criterion within 90 days, and I direct the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to incorporate standard "any lawful use" language into any DoW contract through which AI services are procured within 180 days. I also direct the CDAO to ensure all existing AI policy guidance at the Department aligns with the directives laid out in this memorandum.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 14/11/2025

Bluesky, seeing the cultural pendulum ready to reverse swing: You Should Care About Other People!

Miley Cyrus sits astride her wrecking ball, like a Napoleonic era general upon a horse

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 10/10/2025

I hope they have all watched the Antifa training materials

Foreground: a man dressed in furs running across the ice.
The text: Hundreds of Beavers

Background: Hundreds of people dressed in cartoonish anthropomorphized beaver costumes. They are angrily chasing the man.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 03/10/2025

What do you have to do to win this challenge coin, wrong answers only. ... Win a staring contest with Kash Patel

FBI Director Kash Patel staring directly into camera, serving his best Clockwork Orange gaze

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 23/08/2025

The Doug really is a fantastic flag

The Doug (the flag of Cascadia)
Background: top to bottom - blue, white, green horizontal bars
Foreground: silhouette of a Douglas Fir

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 29/05/2025

I think I have visited all the big wooden trolls that are nearby now. I guess I must travel to Portland, OR for the next nearest one. Why not, here's some more trolls from past excursions:

A wooden troll statue. The troll is standing with hands on two trees. The troll is in Issaquah, WA

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 29/05/2025

Big wooden trolls are fun. Visited another one over the weekend

A wooden troll sculpture. The troll has a beard. The troll is seated. The troll is on Vashon Island, WA

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 18/05/2025

My thoughts about genAI from working with it every day are that I have not yet found any productivity gain from it that outweighs the effect of "you cannot trust anything" it produces. Anyways, here's a dog baking in a sunbeam

A brindle dog laying on a reddish deck in the sun.

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 05/05/2025

Like most days, today is a good day to sit outside and work

Two dogs sitting in the grass in the sunshine, with tree branches and leaves in the foreground

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 06/04/2025

> You study how prior generations of Americans survived their own dark times. You pay tribute to their sacrifice Alright I'll get to reading and not skeeting at some point but this is my mailbox today too real

Two books side by side:

The Last American Road Trip - Sarah Kendzior

A Southern Panther, Conversations with Malik Rahim. Edited by James R. Tracy

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 29/03/2025

I have 2 dogs but last week I was watching my brother's dog as well. So here you go, bonus dog included

3 medium sized dogs sitting and looking at the camera (indoors)

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 20/03/2025

I tried making kimchi for the first time recently and this was a good idea

A top-down view of a glass jar full of kimchi

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 18/03/2025

My brother's dog is visiting so this week we have 3 dogs

3 dogs sitting at attention on a wood floor, all 3 looking just off camera

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Jay Gruber @jays.name · 01/03/2025

"Have you even said thank you today?"

A scene from the film A Christmas Story, showing neighborhood bully Scott Farkus and Grover Dill, Farkus' crummy little toady. Dill has his mouth open to speak

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