iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 12h

AI is super nice for VR because it's making pretty good VR mods plentiful. Not quite as nice as full native, but we are starved for content.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

So 1 week into having steam frame and 3 things jump out to me: 1. Controller tracking seems a bit better quest, I think. 2. Performance on Beat saber is worse than on quest. 3. Battery drains a bit too quick when not in use. Determined after 1 song with frame in 10% battery.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Just finished jury duty. Nothing will convince you of just how incompetent Seattle Police are like seeing the results of their investigation. Like not even taking pictures of the crime scene, only gathering the knife for evidence? No statements from victims? What the hell?

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Just bought my steam frame and then today Meta announces it's new VR device, which looks cool... Meta is moving in the opposite direction and I don't want their new device. It has a small FOV and a clumsy compute puck. Yeah lots of cool stuff with it, but those are some bad fundamentals for games .

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

As I look forward to maybe one day purchasing a steam deck, I'm reminded of all the really cool games that were exclusive to Oculus PC store from Meta's brief deep investment into PC VR. I miss regular, high quality VR games and I wish I had easier access to the old ones.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Now that the steam frame has been unveiled, I'll be honest, I'm not super excited by the value prospect. The hardware is all quite dated, and it's near enthusiast device price. I still plan to get it because it's somehow still the best headset for how I use VR.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Steam frame has finally, *released*. I plan on getting one. Overall, still a bit disappointed that the screens aren't better and the battery isn't bigger given the price. But I've been wanting a more reliable steaming headset to try with my VR treadmill, so I'm getting it.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

In America there are three widely accepted genders: Straight Man, Woman, Gay Man. Gender is a social role related to sex and sexuality. Society more or less decides what the buckets are. Of course you may not fall neatly into one of these buckets. But some things are not in the culture.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I can't sleep and staring at the glowing rectangle has not helped. Help me sleep glowing rectangle.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I will say: I don't miss the fold from old phone at all (screen broke on z flip 4), but I DO miss the camera preview screen on the back. That should be a standard phone feature

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Kind of want to build an AI context management system with recursive, hierarchical compaction with a backing file store in case full chat segment must be retrieved. I also want to pair it with an intelligent, targeted compaction that can discard irrelevant context in line.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I have a really over engineered infinite mirror I'd like to make. Essentially the idea is to make an endless field, but don't have one way mirror extend to the floor (that would cause too much light dissipation!) Instead use high quality mirrors for all sides EXCEPT for a window.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Now that we have killed pennies, let's kill nickels and quarters. I personally like quarters, they are a nice size coin for a coin. But as we move away from currency, dimes are the cheapest to print, most convenient, and a reasonable resolution to divide dollars by.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

AI has officially made me sad now. I watched a funny video about code compiling on the first try, and people in the future won't understand any of those jokes.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Found out Samsung just removed the sd card on their a50 line. Congratulations Samsung, you lost your only competitive edge over Google (in this price range).

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I think there is still a lot of improvement to be made in AI agent tools. I think we are incredibly wasteful with tokens, and smarter compaction rules could make things a lot cheaper, and a lot faster.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I used to think that there wasn't a lot of space to innovate in the AI coding assistant space. I changed my mind. All the tools are doing the most basic context management you could imagine. No built in context reuse for subagents. No message auto compaction to save context.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

With shows like jaadugar a witch in mongolia and ascendance of a bookworm, it's looking good this season.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Not everyone who joins ice is a criminal. Like any gang, there are often survival reasons to join. But like other gangs, their main purpose is to commit crime and we should not tolerate it. Most of its members, especially the high ranking ones organizing the crimes, should be put in jail.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

If it's worth $1 for your AI to search the web, it's worth 20 cents to pay the publishers of those sites.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Train: we are having mechanical issues, please wait. *Doors shut* Train: we will take you across the river and then stop 3 miles short of your destination. Leaving you stranded. We could have told you before we left this station, but that wouldn't suck as bad. Can’t leave now.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Sometimes I wonder how far back in time I could be sent and I would be able to massively upgrade all technology vs be killed for being a political dissident.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Just looking at how we do chemistry on quantum computers and, darn, even with a quantum computer it's STILL lots of approximations on approximations.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Datacenters aren't bad. If we have reasonable noise limits and laws about how you update grid capacity (and generally require renewable on new products), then they wouldn't be an issue. But America has a proud tradition of letting businesses screw us over instead of making rules.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Not gonna lie, the "weird" route in deltarune is one of the most disturbing narratives I've seen. I played undertakes genocide route for the sans fight. I'm not doing the "weird" route. That is too much for me.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

You totally can use AI to help you write, but it's like having your biggest fan (not the one that's necessarily most knowledgeable, just likes you as a person) write for you. Can be good to bounce ideas off of, play characters, etc. But it'll do a bad job without a lot of scaffolding and feedback.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Knowing the technical superiority of one product and its potential use cases DOES not mean it will win in the market. Lots of other bullshit can make it lose. Take Optane. Great tech for LLMs, faster than nand, cheaper than ram. Reduces ram-pocolypse largely. Died because it was 8 years early.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

If any version of the metaverse is going to succeed, it will be absolute bottom of the barrel roblox style, or extreme top tier, professionals create this content like epic. Solutions in the middle don’t serve anyone, but are vastly more expensive. Hope no one blew billion dollars on the middle way

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Now that rec room is shutting down, I'll admit I had a lot of fun with it early on. When it was all adults, pictionary was fun. And their first party quests were solid. But as kids came in, and they moved to crap user generated content, I lost interest. I have already mourned its slow death.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Would dehydrated shower gel just be soap? Because I feel like shower gel rinses off cleaner than bar soap.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

I honestly don't understand how companies can be so consistently bad at making their flagship products and stay in business. Like Microsoft and Oracle are still huge businesses despite being terrible at making their main products. I just don't understand why companies buy bad products.

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Reposted by Joshua Otti

Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

every mushroom foraging guidebook: This is Woodland Pot Roast, a tasty little mushroom that adds a delightful flavour to soups and stews. Note that it is often mistaken for Satan’s Fistula, a mushroom that erases the last 9 generations of your family from God’s ledgers.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Got a flight on Friday, 7 hours total. Great opportunity to try out the steam frame... if it had came out in Q1.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I started a sentence to my wife "I don't mean to shame you for your ice cream habit, but...", and then I felt an overwhelming compulsion to say "SHAME" 3 times. Somehow she was only mad at me for about an hour. She's a good one.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Today I learned about backoff with decorrelated jitter. And to whoever invented this: Why? Probably on accident. But why do we keep using it in purpose?

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

The thing about interest rates is that if banks REALLY had confidence, interest rates would go down, they would already be down. Them being higher is a sign that they aren't sure they will go down / a hedge in case they go up.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

What is the most western holiday? Easter.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

I realized my basic sampling distribution approach would fail for some probability distributions: an unacceptable result for our use case. I had to rewrite my whole design for confidence distributions. AI made it faster, but I don't have enough time to proof read it.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

New episode of invincible is a friendly reminder that the right way to strangle someone is with your arm, not with your hands.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

I always knew that modern statistics is sort of build on shakey assumptions, such as PRGs existing and working, with working scientists being a bit overruling on unfounded normality assumptions. But it is worse than I thought. Wild that we haven’t fixed this.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Know about bayesian bootstrapping? I've been thinking about making rigorous, nonparametric sampling distributions for statistics like trimmed mean and I think my current "best" technique is similar to a fine grained Bayesian bootstrap that outputs confidence intervals. Anyone want to talk?

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Not having objective measurements for rules allows selective enforcement. This amplifies people's worse biases and causes unfair discrimination. Charging more for people who need two seats makes sense for airlines, but without an objective standard it causes unfair discrimination.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I think gambling and drugs should be legal, but inconvenient. Smoking in public, illegal. Sports betting on your phone, illegal. Gambling in a casino with spending limits, legal. Clearly labeled weed snacks from a dispensary, legal.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I'm not a fan of the US attempts at making democracies. They tend to be unsuccessful, and we end up with ineffective, cruel, sycophantic leaders whose governments typically collapse. But that's better than our current strategy of just removing the leader and keeping everything else the same.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

If you can't be friends with a copy of yourself, you are a jerk.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Experts also use bad metrics because they are easier to understand or measure. They just have a slightly higher tolerance for complexity and understand the shortcomings better.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

The past couple days I have been engineering a gnome language in my freebie, along with an associated, 6 bit awcii-esque encoding. Basic idea: English with more consistent grammar, phonetics, and easier to pronunciation. Kids have trouble making two distinct noise. One is gone, done.

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Joshua Otti @joshuaotti.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Hot take: different cultures have pros and cons. And some cultures could reasonably be argued to be better than others. And to the extent it exists, white culture sucks. It's antimeritocratic, classist, sexist, violent, and not fun. Trying to do whollistic cultural comparisons is very white.

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