iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It's called Ladbrokes because it makes a lad broke

·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

One of the things I like is seeing the vast array of languages and alphabets people use in this very international city. From the kid who's graffiti tag is his name in Berber, to the Syriac signage in front of that church on Keizersgracht. Today's Fun with Scripts was a car I saw that had old […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

LLMs are bad for search, example 67: I tried searching "keeping your children's teeth" and the next-word predictor went with "keeping your children's teeth healthy" as opposed to what I actually wanted, which was to read about people who keep their children's teeth

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Reject modernity (SI) Embrace tradition (klunky regional units of measurement based on the Pharaoh's forearm)

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

In today's episode of Do Not Build the Torment Nexus, I just made the connection between OpenAI's Dots and the Doctor Who episode Dot and Bubble

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Corporate Memphis implies the existence of Corporate Nashville

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Reposted by ·J Mopp

Allen but one of the bad ones, woooo @uastronomer.mastodon.monoceros.co.za.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

If you ever want to explain the concept of Technical Debt to a linguist, just tell them "It's like why English is the way it is"

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Cursed thought for today: what would L. Ron Hubbard have thought about generative AI?

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

What the fuck is Google's spellchecker smoking that it thinks "disadvantageising" is a word

A screenshot from an email draft. The text reads "...while disadvantaging smaller players". Google's spellchecker has a line under 'disadvantaging' and is suggesting the word 'disadvantageising'

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

On this Heritage Day I'm wearing a shirt with a hadeda on it because Haaaaaa!

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

The thing I miss most about being a kid is having an eidetic memory

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Separated by a common language: I say 'plum' but because I speak Seth Efrikan my teammate hears 'plem' and doesn't know what I'm on about

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

People who contribute more to open-source than I do: Is there a licence that says "you can basically do what you want with this, except train AI"?

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

git config --global alias.shove 'push --force'

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) mentaliteit

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Ran out of turpentine? Did all the paint thinners end up in your lungs instead of the cleaning bucket? You can also clean paintbrushes with cooking oil! Sign up to my newsletter for more arts and crafts tips

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

One of the strangest scents I encounter whenever I walk around the city is the smell of cut grass mulching, which for some reason smells like tofu being fried with a hint of tyre fire

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

"Piddington" doesn't sound like a real place. It sounds like a made-up name from an ordinary dystopia

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

"Coalition wants an open marriage; Opposition wants monogamy" has to be the most 21st-century way of describing minority-government budget issues. #NLpol

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

The dream of European Integration will be complete once I can return a German statiegeldfles in the Netherlands

A German 1l water bottle. In frame is the barcode, the German text 'Pfand-flasche'- literally 'deposit bottle', and a label saying the deposit is 25 cents

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

I did a bunch of Good Things™ today: I went on a hardware store/paint/fish-heads-to-turn-into-garum adventure with my friend, I helped a stranger with some CAD, and I worked a bit on the horn headband that I'm making for Elfia. A few more days like this and I'll klap depression straight into orbit

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

One of Ten Plagues sent to ravage Egypt was frogs. The original Hebrew has 'frog' in the singular. Rashi wrote that a single frog was summoned, which then split into two frogs when it was struck, and each of those frogs split in two when struck, and so on

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

On a scale of 0 to Blatant Misinformation, how inaccurate is it to describe PLA as 'basically polymerised yoghurt' in an attempt to justify my 3D printing obsession

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

I love a sea robin. Little fishy with creepy spider legs, ready to give an unsuspecting diver a jumpscare

A sea robin: an orange fish whose pelvic fins resemble spider's legs that it uses to walk on the reef

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

The thing I really love about Virgil Donati's music is the way he uses rhythm in the same way that other musicians use melody. It's not just a single rhythm, or a polyrhythm, or 5 bars subdivided in the most beautifully off-kilter way. Those 5 bars tell a story: there's build-up, climax, and […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

Economics is sometimes called the dismal science, owing to the very doomer view of early economists, that there's basically no way in improving the lot of the majority of people, and the masses are destined to live in an eternal state of squalor. I wonder whether this is because early economists […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

Fun discovery of the day: Bern uses the same Combino trams that Amsterdam uses

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

If I do come and live in Zermatt it would be to run a coffee place that opens at 6am. I mildly dislike that there's basically nowhere in Europe to get nice coffee soon after I wake up

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

I love Swiss German because it's nice to be able to mumble a bunch of Afrikaans-accented German and still be understood

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

RE: hachyderm.io/@datarama/117214107554… Ever printed a Dymaxion map and assembled it into an icosahedron? It's a fun exercise and you have a little d20 globe at the end of it

hachyderm.io

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Normal people: I see that users are updating their WhatsApp status for the longest possible period of time, and then updating it to the same status once the old one expires. Maybe we should add an option to set a WhatsApp status indefinitely. Meta product managers: I see that users are updating […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

This weekend I'm sleeping in a modest, sparsely-furnished room that is giving Poustinia vibes. I wish I could stay here for like a month and come out of it with a finished manuscript or a solid understanding of generative pretrained transformers

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

Pros to living in Zermatt: all this walking up- and downhill will keep me fit as a fiddle Cons to living in Zermatt: it's fokken moeilijk as is to get residence in Switzerland, even without taking into account my comparatively bad passport. Plus I think I pissed the one waitron off by coming up […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

Climate doom for the day: the fact that this glacier monument is next to the church and the graveyard makes it seem like a grave for glaciers

A Japanese-Swiss friendship monument. There is a big mountain-shaped stone that says 'Patrouille des glaciers: Zermatt, Arolla, Verbier'

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

In Switzerland to watch the Ig Nobels, and I just realised how much I miss walking up and down hills. Why is Holland so flat

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

About 500 years ago, the English language underwent a phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift. Starting from about 40 years ago, Dutch has been undergoing its own Great Vowel Shift, and from what I glean listening to spoken German, it recently began its Great Vowel Shift. I would love to be […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Hare-brained idea for the day: yeast made from cancer cells

Another solution at a more fundamental level would be to change cell metabolism or reduce energy requirements. Over a half century ago, the German physiologist Otto Warburg investigated cancer cells in mouse ascites from a thermo-energetic perspective. These ascites cells were not transferred to Ringer’s solution but were maintained in ascites serum with glucose and bicarbonate added. Warburg mentions “the cancer cells can obtain approximately the same amount of energy from fermentation as from respiration, whereas the normal body cells obtain much more energy from respiration than from fermentation”. He further stated “cancer cells require much less energy to keep them alive than they do for growth. In this they resemble other lower cells, such as yeast cells, which remain alive for a long time in densely packed packets—almost without respiration and fermentation.” This metabolic flexibility or plasticity of cancer cells has attracted great attention as one of the major findings in cancer-related fields

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

L-glucose tastes the same as regular right-handed glucose, but can't be metabolised by the body. In theory, this makes it the perfect sweetener. In practice, it's expensive to manufacture, and I feel like your gut flora will eventually evolve to metabolise left-handed sugar and it will open the […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

If I were wise, I would have rescheduled my appointment to tomorrow. If we were wise, we would have properly optimised the journey for both duration and cost, maybe taking a train part of the way and picking up a car for the last mile. But if we were wise, we would not have bought a broken X-ray […]

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

"What's with the bruise on your right arm?" I got botsed a bit hard while playing rugby 😏 "What's with the bruise on your left arm?" I walked into my door handle 😶

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Advice from a recovering fashion coward: don't discount the top that reminds you of your topology lectures in university. It might end up being the winner

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

Just used the word 'control' in the Euro-English sense of 'to check or validate'. Tune in next week when I accidently use 'eventual' to mean 'possible' and 'actual' to mean 'current'

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

Why were they called Internet Screamers and not Scareware

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

'Mould' meaning 'fungus' and 'Mould' meaning 'to fashion into a shape' really feel like they should be spelled differently, not spelled the same two different ways

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

As I stand in front of the stage, watching a skinny guy with long hair wearing a Gorguts shirt, playing an hypnotic arpeggio with a clean tone and heavy chorus on his electric guitar, I think to myself, do you know which aesthetic I would love to see more of? The Death Metal Twink aesthetic

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

I don't know how it is that in the year of our lord 2026 a self-proclaimed race realist can have a postdoc position at a prestigious university without being laughed out of the faculty

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Sadly, the Silly Party has held Clacton #ukpol

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

Headline today: French nuclear reactor shut down due to jellyfish infestation Sounds like the beginning of a bad horror film

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

There's an alternate universe where Isaac Newton's heterodox Christian beliefs were not tolerated, he went to America, and played a role in starting Yale University

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·J Mopp @jmopp.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

I see the grass is Cape Town Summer colour. Wat leuk

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