iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

my general stance is that most organizations were already bad at process, but it didn't matter as much because so much time and effort was tied up with mechanical work that you could get away with bad process. when the mechanical work happens ~instantaneously, bad process bites you much harder.

you're not wrong that the technicians can often brute force their way there, but what you get is often going to be fragile to exceptions. part of good process is durability when things go wrong. the human scale version of this is why process tends to be broken in more organizations than not.

in fairness to tech: cribbing notes from industrial process is a pretty good idea! modern industrial process is one of humanity's great achievements and has a century plus head start. but we are very much relearning old lessons and in constant danger of cargo culting it.

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but robots taking over the assembly line doesn't mean they're making the decisions on when and how things roll down the line. that work still requires somebody that knows what they're doing making thoughtful decisions about why things should happen a certain way.

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one of the things we're learning is that tech as a field is incredibly immature when it comes to process. the great innovation of the last 25 years in software development was agile which, at a high level, is an attempt to replicate assembly lines for knowledge work. robots just took over the line

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process is something you don't solve permanently. there can be best practice guidelines, but in practice doing process well means bespoke application that's constantly evolving. getting that right means having experts driving the ship.

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one of the reasons why I'm critical of "bigger models will solve this" is that cranking the output velocity of technician work sharpens the need for process work, which is the domain of expertise. process is incredibly hard to get right. most fields are bad at it. and it's *gaining* importance.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 24/09/2026

I think that a lot of my frustration with the AI space right now is that we are still very much in the nobody actually knows what we're doing yet phase, but even adaptable humans don't really like change and enough new shininess has worn off that people are settling into premature comfort zones.

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There are some screaming deals on off lease Polestars right now, but that's definitely complicated by the fact they've pulled out of the US market. The claim is service will continue to be available through sister company Volvo dealers, but it's definitely a dice roll.

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(editor's note: the chinese labs slot somewhere closer to true neutral, but this is funnier)

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the number of people that not only give Anthropic a pass for that but continue to insist that they're the *ethical* AI company drives me up a wall

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(it also probably says something that this would make the guy TSMC literally laughed out of the room for being delusional about the physical reality of making things rank higher on attachment to reality than many of his peers)

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I've been saying for a minute now that sama jumping on the "yeah we should totally slow down development lol" train has far more to do with the fact that he has openai's internal projections for how much compute they can *actually* bring online in the next 18 months than anything else

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 22/09/2026

the definitive AI alignment chart

a D&D alignment chart.
Lawful Good: Xi Jinping
Lawful Evil: Anthropic, Oracle
Neutral Evil: OpenAI, Meta
Chaotic Evil: Grok
Somewhere in the middle of Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Lawful Evil, and Neutral Evil: Google

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it really is amazing how thoroughly you can blow somebody's mind right now if they talk about using Sonnet to save money. "step outside the Anthropic ecosystem and meet GPT-5.6. and if you're feeling *really* spicy, here's our friend GLM."

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 21/09/2026

the problem is that they think they *are* modeling best practice. it's just that nobody there has a clue about how to actually run product and doesn't seem interested in thinking about it any harder than "what if we just let the bot make more decisions for itself?“

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 20/09/2026

link works. just making sure you're aware: GPT includes the name on the account in share links - wasn't sure if that was intentional

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 20/09/2026

me: robot, find me some interesting places to shoot photos today. maybe old mill towns with interesting industrial architecture. robot: sure, start in this town with nothing in it then take this highway where you will pass an abandoned space telescope and continue on to-- me: hol up

a blue Volvo V90 sitting in front of A FREAKING SPACE TELESCOPE

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 19/09/2026

IT is a cost center for most businesses. Headcount tends to get slashed to the bone accordingly. That said, infrastructure work isn't going away. Infosec isn't going away. The wider field will be fine. Getting your foot in the door initially has *always* been the hardest part.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 18/09/2026

I think you can simply drop the word strategic there for many of them.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 18/09/2026

all the boring, detail-oriented "how does this all fit together" work becomes incredibly important when you're less bottlenecked by being able to implement bad ideas. if you don't have process sorted, you're just cranking the chaos knob to 11. which is what we're getting many places.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 18/09/2026

one of the things I'm losing my mind over is the way the executive set believes LLMs are a magic box that just solves all your business process problems. no, if anything, business process is more important than ever. you *have* to have definable objectives or you're going to crash into a mountain.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 16/09/2026

sky, you and faine dropping cursed knowledge on the normies at the same time is not a fair fight

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 16/09/2026

so, what if I told you that Yudkowsky, the intellectual anchor for a lot of these people, literally came to prominence in part on the basis of writing Harry Potter fanfic for rationalists?

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correct - IMO that's symptomatic of "municipal level is probably the wrong way to organize law enforcement."

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this is something the state of GA gets right. the state puts a cap on the ticket revenue a dept is allowed to generated as a percentage of municipal budget. if they go over, GADOT can and will pull their license to operate speed detection equipment. a dept around Macon lost their license ~5yrs ago

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Note: this is not saying a department being big is inherently good or can't have corruption issues. Just that scale *tends* to stamp out certain classes of issue.

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Even 30 is a *tiny* department. Small departments tend to mirror small businesses in easily becoming fiefdoms for abusive leaders. Size introduces its own problems, but forces a degree of organizational professionalism. The "are you big enough to have a real HR dept" test applies.

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in total fairness, I should also add: some OT partners have made it in in the 5mos since that post. That said, I think it's still telling of perspective if your opening salvo in a claimed existential crisis is "I would be sad if the website went down and banks are important too I guess."

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(tbc: rhetorical you there, not you you).

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It's just so incredibly difficult for me to take the current AI safety discourse seriously when it just completely ignores things you'd learn if you spent even half an hour talking to someone working in the OT space. And those are things that we *know* can hurt or kill real people now.

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It's pretty much an open secret that the OT world is a dumpster fire of underfunded, disjointed orgs that just aren't equipped to deal with this. That said, the majority of the tech world suffers from living in a bubble that results in "AWS is critical infrastructure." bsky.app/profile/jsla...

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I've been thinking this may be one of those situations where Dario actually believes it and sama has OAI's projections for how much compute they're *actually* going to be able to bring online in the next X months. why admit to being bottlenecked by stupid physical reality if you can blame safety?

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 13/09/2026

I've been saying for some time now that I want him to have a sudden, unexpected, revolutionary breakthrough solely because Zuck being wrong about everything is an incredibly funny bit. it's unlikely, but it'd be so funny.

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it's interesting that even the self-filtering of communities and extremely soft quarantine of warring groups having to actively seek each other out made reddit functional in a way bsky isn't

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 13/09/2026

tbh, given the audience using the web interface some level of curation makes sense to me. the flip side of that is Anthropic locking actual power users into Claude Code. it's kind of bonkers that people are as accepting of that as they are.

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idk how you can make that comment when none of those photos features a barn door THAT MUST BE DESTROYED

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it's frankly pretty predatory how the gig services will convince someone "you can stretch for the nice euro luxury car and make up the difference with gig work" and then that person just completely loses their shirt financially.

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if anything, it's a financial trap for a lot of people. I watched a Volvo V60 sell for way under market on one of the auction sites - the owner had put 130k miles on it in 3 years doing gig deliveries. between maintenance and accelerated depreciation, they had to be deep in the red on the work.

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it reads convenient to me. the entire industry has hit the brick wall of physical reality in acquiring compute hardware, building DCs, and powering it all. and current models are at a level where they can back off on dev and still have a product worth selling. so sell the situation as a choice.

grew up next to ft. benning. if you wanted to hang out with a friend that lived on base, you just drove on base. you'd be more careful about speeding because bored MPs love writing tickets, but otherwise the same as driving anywhere else. place locked down overnight and has been since.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 11/09/2026

companies are already loathe to invest in development pipelines. most of them pay lip service to the idea, but hiring managers are only interested in people with experience as a matter of survival. there simply isn't room for someone growing into a role on a team that's been cut to the bone.

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there is a very cantankerous Kiwi well known in the RC and drone communities whose early claim to fame 20 years ago was "lol, I could easily build a cruise missile in my shed." he never finished it, but it's easier and cheaper now.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 11/09/2026

most of it is ultimately control systems engineering which is both dual-use and incredibly well-trod territory. fertile ground for the bot.

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Reposted by @jslaker.net

Ed @ed3d.net · 11/09/2026

tbh, anybody who wants to tell me that open source isn't on the ropes is going to have to answer why there are millions of dollars for Dotfile DHH but github sponsors mostly emits cobwebs and a faint wheeze for people who are making stuff we all use every day at work

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 09/09/2026

yeah I think this is more perspective than fundamental disagreement the key thing for me is that it's become about attacking the symbol of a problem rather than the problem itself. historically, that's a very mixed bag. I empathize with it, I just wish humans were better at getting to brass tacks.

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jslaker.net @jslaker.net · 09/09/2026

I mean, this is me less than 24 hours ago lol but that's also orthogonal to "this topic has been glonzo'd to the point that people are protesting an aging warehouse that has been there for a very long time without incident" bsky.app/profile/jsla...