iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

god I keep forgetting mensch had a web site even though I was instrumental in taking in down while I was laid flat out in bed with flu. what a time to be alive

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 13h

no group mounting a defence of david miller should be anywhere near a progressive left movement and it would be great if the green party took a more decisive line here

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 14h

the amount that my taste in games is directly attributable to him is just... yeah, disappointed doesn't cover it

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 15h

bsky.app/profile/minn...

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 16h

hmm what a trustworthy security company

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 16h

someone seems to have sent a legit "ring" (the surveillance doorbell people) invite to my email address. given this would grant me access to their ring devices, sending such an invite to an unverified address seems like a major oversight

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 22h

also a friend of mine once built a proglang on top of SAT solving sentient-lang.org

sentient-lang.org

Sentient Programming Language

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 22h

I might be being imprecise but I wouldn't consider this "brute force" in the sense that it has a well defined algorithmic solution

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 22h

I might be misremembering, please correct me, but doesn't SAT solving have an efficient (i.e. polynomial time) solution though? i.e. it's not just enumerating all possible states

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 01/10/2026

hey remember when computing was designing data systems and algorithms that actually fit the shapes of particular problems so you could deal with them efficiently. wow

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 01/10/2026

I guess I'd go along with that framing, c.f. how I've referred to it as "anti-computing" in the past. it's sort of meaningless to call something a technology when it "automates" tasks by applying an earth shattering volume of brute force trial and error to them

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 01/10/2026

this would imply AI is not a technology

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

all the furniture is behind a fake mirror implemented using an elaborate network of interconnected scripting triggers

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

daft punk is playing at MyHouse dot wad

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

another day volunteering at the lcd soundsystem and daft punk museum. people keep asking if I can show them the ropes. buddy,

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

(I've actually no idea if that's what was in the designers' heads, but it's how control read to me. everything about the setting does work if you look at it as "if videogame mechanics were literally real, what would the world need to look like")

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

level designers using light, colour and contrast to draw your attention to things is normal

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

the thing about these games is that they're designed around the idea "what would a setting have to be like for a videogame to make literal sense" and part of the result of that is that the yellow paint looks like normal scenery

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

LLMs are an information destroying weapon

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

many people rightly predicted that the spread of chatbots would lead to the supply of novel information that they need for training to dry up

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

bing bong bing bong bing bong bing... potato drone

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

fred flintstone ass posture

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

how is macos tahoe using 13gb of ram when I have 6 chrome tabs, slack and one iterm pane open

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

bells *and* whistles? in this economy?

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

the JS testing book also suffers from very quickly looking outdated b/c I wrote it in 2013/14, and then from 2015 JS itself started changing very rapidly, react-et-al started to comprehensively win over jquery, etc

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

there's still things I'd like to write about but there's no widely popular hook I think I could base them around, because all anyone is talking about any more is LLMs

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

i.e. people buy the git book b/c people still use git. it's really a book about lots of different programming topics, git's just a plot device the JS testing book did well initially b/c that was in vogue but tailed off quickly, even though its conceptual content is just as valid today

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

the one thing I will say about my books is that I have tried to write about concepts with a long shelf life but it's very difficult to communicate that when a book has to necessarily focus on a specific technology

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

books have never been my main thing, more something to do during periods I've been out of work, but if I made my living doing that I'd be toast. absolutely zero incentive for me to ever write another, clearly

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

my own sales are too low volume (150-250 copies a year) and noisy for me to see a distinct pattern though it does *feel* like sales are lower this year outside of months where I'm running promotions. to be honest I'm amazed a 7-year-old indie programming book is still selling at all

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

can someone explain to me how "abundant intelligence" correlates with "nobody is able to make a living by teaching people things"

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

and its meaning rapidly became "expensive trinket ostentatiously purchased by rich asshole who doesn't care about its actual content"

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

I guess that wu tang album was a rare example of an artwork made for an intended audience of one person

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

in theory, there are people who could do something interesting with the idea of music that atomises people, but it is not ai companies

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

I hate that suno owns songkick because it absolutely deserves to get sued into oblivion

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 30/09/2026

also, music is *communal*, it is an experience you share and have in common with other people, that is a huge part of how music comes to mean anything, the idea of "personalised music" just conceptually makes no sense

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

most embarrassing big tech rebrand incoming

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

I'm supposed to ask the guy that stole all my work how to do my job and pay him for the privilege. and I'm supposed to be excited about it

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

I resent the idea I'm supposed to spend my day asking for advice from the system that has decimated the demand for technical writing from people like me and everyone featured here molily.de/web-dev-educ...

molily.de

The death of web development education – Rescuing a field from disappearing

Rescuing a field from disappearing

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

the root access thing isn't a zero day, it's intended behaviour. stop making a face

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

do any JS minifiers shrink the names of classes/methods that aren't exported from the final module, as opposed to just shrinking local variables

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

build tool that just randomises the names of all internal bindings to make the code less legible to LLMs

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Reposted by absolute horses

absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

another day volunteering at the peter naur museum. people keep asking if they can have the theory of the program. buddy,

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

went to a new dentist earlier and it was decorated with illustrations that were literally teeth teeth teeth

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

40+ hour hidden-depths type game that's a fraction of your node_modules directory

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

we're 40 hours in and it feels like there's no bottom to how deep the well goes. was genuinely like "how did they put all this game in here" and went and checked and by filesize it is the smallest game I have installed. 8 megabytes?!

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

looked up a hint and the solution was a much simpler combo of several things we thought the clue meant. and on the other side of that HOW IS THERE MORE GAME HERE

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

I wouldn't make jokes about this given the tenure of his immediate predecessor

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absolute horses @jcoglan.com · 29/09/2026

the final phase of the tech industry's transformation into the finance industry

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