iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 29/08/2026

my hotel put up a bunch of pictures from a high school art contest this amazing dog band should have gotten 1st place, I absolutely love it too bad I could not get a photo without a bunch of glare :(

a picture of a bunch of dogs (or wolves?) having a great time playing in a band

there is a puppy with big eyes dancing in front of the base drum

crazy it only got 3rd place, it was totally robbed

the label on the bottom of the frame credits it to "MHS Damion Ceniceros" from 12th grade

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 21/07/2026

I found the neighborhood crow nexus

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 11/07/2026

there is nothing new under the sun, etc, etc

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 10/07/2026

new neighbor paid me a visit

A little black cat intently looking at me through a narrow side-window next to my front door

A zoomed-out photo of my front door with a little black cat looking in through a side-window

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 16/06/2026

had a little visitor this morning

zoomed out view of a black cat looking into my foyer

zoomed in view of a cute little black cat looking into my foyer

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 01/06/2026

oh, you'd probably enjoy this book I found at a little free library in Berkeley

the "computer dictionary and handbook" by charles j. sippl with a delightfully retro-futuristic 60s cover

the title and author are all lowercase, typeset in a sans-serif monospace typeface

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 29/05/2026

We have a whole floor dedicated to UB here

An elevator panel where, apart from numbered floors, we also have UB, LB and G

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 16/05/2026

how'd they know what my working directory looks like?

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 14/05/2026

a screenshot of the delightfully web 1.0 India e-visa page, with a marquee tag near the top and some straight-up clip art graphic design? clearly India's passion

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 13/05/2026

action shot from Fun OCaml 2025 in Poland great conference in a lovely place to visit

a dramatically lit shot of me waving my hands around behind a podium, with an oddly concerned expression on my face

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/04/2026

man, the little free library is pretty judgemental about JavaScript totally relatable, little library

Two books leaning on each other in a little free library, spelling out "Deep Learning in JavaScript Smells like Dog"

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 13/04/2026

I just saw a picture of him with a bunch of cats and that's a pretty good endorsement too

Peter Magyar sitting with a cat on his lap, with a black and white car yawning in the background and a dark gray cat sitting right in front of the camera, moodily

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 22/03/2026

I ordered some hair product on Amazon, and for some reason they included an extra 5 pounds of pecans with the order :P I have no ideas of what to do with them, so would love suggestions!

a 5 lb bag of shelled Georgia Pecans from the Hudson Pecan Company

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 05/02/2026

I randomly came across an IBM office in Vienna :P

A metal sign for the International Brotherhood of Magicians in Vienna.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 12/01/2026

I miss living by a real river :( closest thing I have is Strawberry Creek :P

a view of Strawberry Creek in Codornices Park, Berkeley

remarkably sylvan for being in the middle of a residential area, just a few blocks away from my house!

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 12/01/2026

met my parents' new neighbor

a slightly scruffy desaturated tortie scratching her ear and looking super content

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 14/12/2025

Berkeley has some amazing little free libraries

A little free library made up of 8 separate tree stumps, each with its own book container and a little peaked roof. They're arranged in a semi-circle around some stone steps, and have colorful little doors and windows.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 13/12/2025

legitimately brilliant use of pumpkins

Two decorative snowmen made from three pumpkins painted white and stacked on the porch stairs in front of a house

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 15/07/2025

actual function coloring: in colorForth,runtime code is green and compile-time code is yellow comments are white, definitions are red and I don't recall exactly what fuscia or blue represent (screenshot a GreenArrays document: www.greenarraychips.com/home/documen...)

a screenshot of the colorForth editor, with a program written in a mix of garish colors

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 14/07/2025

for folks in the east bay playing at the rialto in elmwood on aug 2nd and aug 3rd at 1pm

a poster for Cat Video Fest, playing in Elmwood on Aug 2nd and Aug 3rd at 1PM

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 14/07/2025

has corecursive programming finally hit the mainstream? (no)

A display from a book store, featuring a yellow book title "A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design".

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 06/07/2025

I met a cat who was good, but not great, at hiding in fact, I've never seen a cat that was great at hiding

a gray cat peeking out through some dense foliage; hard to spot, but still totally visible

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 23/06/2025

in the meantime, here's a photo of a few alice books in situ, with bonus cat

a picture of a bunch of picture books displayed in my living room, in front of a Miro painting reproduction

there are a few different editions of alice in wonderland in the middle, with a number of other books around

there is also the belly of a black cat with a white paw poking out

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 16/05/2025

"But in all these cases, what you would never do is exactly what you should have done." amazing sentence just started reading Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned and it's already dropping bangers

the cover of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, with some kind of chaos theory butterfly visualization on it

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 12/05/2025

just got back from a great week visiting the University of Arizona math department I gave a little seminar about the probability monad, and had a great time meeting with some students and professors the folks there were amazing hosts :)

the courtyard of the ENR2 building on the University of Arizona campus, a modern design out of concrete and rusted steel shaped to look like a slot canyon, with plants growing down the sides

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 03/05/2025

the novel is Splendid City by Karen Heuler no idea if it's any good, I just can't resist a sharply designed cover with a cat holding a gun

the cover of splendid city, designed to look like a face card with a gun-toting cat and a witch

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/04/2025

I love whoever decided to tag this quote from 2666 as "optimism" :P (that whole passage from the book is great, this is just the very end)

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/04/2025

little free library find: computer dictionary and handbook from 1966 absolutely lovely cover design and typesetting perfect resource for learning about time-sharing operating systems and QUICKTRAN

white book cover titled "computer dictionary and handbook" by charles j. sippl, with all the text lowercase, and an abstract digital-looking pattern of blue squares and white numbers on a black background

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 20/04/2025

one of my neighbors decorated their house with hand-drawn tiles made by their children or, maybe, students this bird has the place of honor and is 100% my favorite too :P

a bird drawn out of a circle taking up most of the tile, with a small bird head, tail and two tiny feet protruding out in the slivers of remaining space

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 11/04/2025

Probably the best time of year to visit Berkeley: the cherry trees are in full blossom, and the whole campus is coming alive for spring

A few cherry trees in full blossom with Moffitt Library in the background

Some students walking on a path next to a number of blossomming cherry trees, with the Life Sciences Building and Dwinelle Hall in the background

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 07/04/2025

oh, I picked up a used copy of that book recently, exclusively because that particular edition had a wild cover

The cover of the old edition of Lud-in-the-Mist that I picked up recently. It's a colorful, vaguely medieval design of a young person pulling an apple out of a river full of floating apples, with a medieval city and rainbow in the background.

The overall aesthetic is pretty wild, different from "normal" fantasy covers in a way that's hard to pin down in words.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 25/03/2025

Richard Scarry is ever relatable

Illustration from a Richard Scarry book of words. The word for the illustration is "hole".

A Scottish terrier is contentedly sitting in a house with a hole in the roof while it's raining. Then, when it's sunny, the terrier climbs up a ladder and pokes his head out of the hole to enjoy the sun.

Text under the illustration:

Haggis has a hole in his roof
He never fixed it because
on rainy days it is too wet to work.
And on sunny days it doesn't need fixing.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/03/2025

I found this story about Armen on HN that captured the feel for me but this is just one story that is not dispositive—the key is the culture supporting this, not doing this specifically when I think "high trust", I think being able to do this, having it work and feeling great for everyone involved

I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember)

Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. Ok bye.

"Installing python on the train" meant pushing it out to all the computers globally in the securities division that did risk and pricing. Within 30mins every computer in goldman sachs's securities division had python and I was the guy responsible for keeping the canonical python distribution up to date with the right set of modules etc on Linux, Solaris and Windows.

Because it was unapproved technology I had a stream of people from technology coming to my desk to say I shouldn't have done it. I redirected them to Armen (who was a very important dude that everyone was frightened of).

The core engineers from GS went on to build the Athena system at JP and the Quartz platform at BAML.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 09/03/2025

I finally got around to writing a blog post I've been thinking about for months... ...until I got distracted by adding pull quotes to my blogging system :P I think both the post and pull quotes are turning out well :)

A screenshot of my work-in-progress blog post with a pull quote that says "They see experts as 'beginners with more knowledge' rather than people whose expertise allows them to operate in a categorically different—and more effective!—manner."

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 10/02/2025

blog.railway.com/p/incident-d... Go: taking Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake to new heights there's more to the incident than this, of course, but it's a great illustration of how PL ergonomics *matter* h/t @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com

An info insert from the linked article saying "Terraform, being written in Golang, makes no such distinction between “empty array” and nil."

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 10/02/2025

without any additional context, I want to believe that this screenshot implies the tool would try to DDoS the entire internet if no IP addresses were supplied

A screenshot of part of a config file showing `ddos_ip_addresses = [...]`

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 30/01/2025

stealing my own joke from Twitter:

Abusing Unicode characters as operators in order to get to-do list notation in Haskell. The whole thing uses a Writer, so running it actually creates a list of Todo and Done values!

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/01/2025

aropos of the recent discussion I saw about metrics to evaluate programmer performance, here's a legitimately insightful book @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com recommended the contents were great, but the cover and title were just brilliant :P