iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Went looking for more information on this baffling image and found this, which really just underscores your point.

Screenshot of GQ page, titled "Behind The Scenes of Glen Powell's GQ Cover Shoot".

There's no video or pictures, just the following transcript:

[dramatic instrumental music] [heart monitor beeps]

[camera clicks] [dramatic music continues]

[oxygen hisses] [dramatic music continues]

[upbeat music continues]

[camera clicks] [upbeat music continues]

[patient as trainer exhales] [upbeat music continues]

[camera clicks] [upbeat music continues]

[arm whooshes] [upbeat music continues]

[patient as cowboy exhales] [upbeat music continues]

[camera clicks] [upbeat music continues]

[camera clicks] [dramatic instrumental music]

[bell dings] [dramatic music fades]

Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I first read LOTR before I ever read anyone's comments on LOTR (can recommend). The many complaints about the writing seem silly on reread. The language is not difficult; the descriptions of nature are beautiful and evocative. Merry encountering the Sublime is as core to the story as any magic ring.

Merry looked out in wonder upon this strange country, of which he had heard many tales upon their long road. It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist. He sat for a moment half-dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Pokémon belongs to The Pokémon Company, a joint venture owned 32% by Nintendo, and 32% by Creatures Inc., a privately held company that Nintendo owns an additional undisclosed stake in. Nintendo also owns all Pokémon trademark rights outside Japan. But no, they never owned Niantic (that was Google).

Wikipedia screenshot: "The Pokémon Company". Company type: Joint venture. Founded: April 1998. Owners: Nintendo, Creatures, Game Freak.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Yeon Sang-ho's The Fake (2013).

Poster for The Fake, featuring the world's most unlikable protagonist angrily staring down the viewer, as the two antagonists look on, one worried, one smirking.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Regrettably, @kohler.bsky.social's picture shows the AI has already mastered the craft of writing dialog that is punchy, yet natural, and laden with subtext (here, a subtle hint that the NPC is not a friendly villager, but rather some sort of killer robot wearing the dead villager's skin as a suit).

Photo of video game conversation, in which "Villager 1" says: "Right now, I am simply enjoying the quiet of the day and conversing with you. My daily routine often involves a stroll through the village, perhaps a visit to the market, and then […]"

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Feels like this old clip only becomes more relevant with every passing year.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Though umbrellas, at least, are ancient technology. The foldable Phrygian parasol excavated at Tumulus P dates to circa 750 BC, and yet is pretty much identical to a 20th century umbrella in construction.

A black-and-white photo of a finely carved parasol top-piece, in which is carved eight mortises, each with a tiny drilled hole for mounting collapsible parasol ribs.

Figure 3 from "A Parasol from Tumulus P at Gordion" (Elizabeth Simpson, 2014). Caption: "The parasol hub, after conservation and repair, 2004."

Figure 10 from "A Parasol from Tumulus P at Gordion". Caption: "Reconstruction drawing of elements of the Tumulus P parasol when open, E. Simpson,
2013. The shaft, runner, and supporting pin are restored in the drawing."

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

The Alters used AI for translating subtitles. That's not a decision made by a random member of the development team; their producers signed off on that shit. Moreover, the studio leadership is enamored with GenAI, proudly using it in marketing.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

There hasn't been growth since 2020, though. In fact, outside China, the audience for video games has been shrinking in favor of video.

Epyllion/Matthew Ball "The State of Video Gaming in 2025", page 10, showing World Real GDP (inflation adjusted) up 11% (and US GPD up 19%) between 2021 and 2024, while Video Game spending is down 12%.

Epyllion/Matthew Ball "The State of Video Gaming in 2025", page 11, showing that share of U.S. population regularly playing video games peaked in 2020/2021 at 76% and has since dropped to 71%.

Epyllion/Matthew Ball "The State of Video Gaming in 2025", page 100, showing Steam game purchases per user trending steadily downwards year over year since 2020, if not earlier.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

They sure do love their Photoshop.

Three screenshots from 2020 Fox News articles. One showing a real photo of a masked, rifle-wielding BLM protester, the other two featuring the same protester sloppily pasted onto other photos of Seattle "anti-cop anarchists". (https://www.reddit.com/r/FoxFiction/comments/h7ss1x/comment/fuoapds/) Beyond hasty photoshop jobs, Fox also pulled the old trick of simply falsely relabeling and reusing unrelated images from a different state. (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/)

2022 screenshot from Fox News showing an infamous picture of Jeffrey Epstein getting a footrub by Ghislaine Maxwell, except Fox has used a meme generator to replace Epstein's face with that of a federal judge that had offended Trump. (https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/fox-news-airs-fake-photo-of-epstein-and-trump-raid-judge-who-has-been-forced-into-hiding-by-death-threats/)

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

What if pressing X results in neither a sentence nor an explosion?

It's the "Press F to pay respects" meme, except it's the console version, so the prompt says "Hold X to pay respects" instead.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Not sure if 'sql' qualifies as an "otherwise good API", but Rows.Err. For over two years, GitHub had this Copilot demo on their front page, showing the bot generating buggy code (not checking rows.Err after iteration), presumably from being trained on thousands of human examples of the same error.

Screenshot from github.copilot.com (2021 to 2023) showing AI generated code using the built-in sql package and forgetting to check for errors after iterating over the results of a database query. The database connection could drop halfway through the query, and the code would just return an incomplete result rather than an error.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

It's hard to explain *why* the examples work in 300 characters, but "The Fake" (2013) does something of what Jon's describing, and I always liked the tagline of the movie "Gravity" (2013) for the same reason.

Poster for the movie "Gravity" (2013), showing an astronaut floating helplessly in space under the movie's tagline, "Don't. Let. Go." Suffice to say, while Gravity sells itself on its disaster spectacle, it is more than that, and so is the tagline.

Poster of Korean animated movie "The Fake" (2013), a deeply unpleasant story of a group of con-men ensnaring a doomed village, and only being opposed by the world's most unlikable protagonist.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

The rest is very Hedjet, though.

Painted relief of pharaoh Mentuhotep II, wearing the "hedjet", or White Crown of Upper Egypt, which takes the form of a very tall white hat.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 17/08/2024

Between letter 219 and the cats of Queen Berúthiel, it would definitely seem that he wasn't a cat person.

(from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)

219. From a letter to Allen & Unwin, 14 October 1959

[A Cambridge cat breeder had asked if she could register a litter of Siamese kittens under names taken from The Lord of the Rings.]

My only comment is that of Puck upon mortals. I fear that to me Siamese cats belong to the fauna of Mordor, but you need not tell the cat breeder that.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 04/08/2024

When the ISS got its projector in 2015, the first film they screened was Gravity, so…

Scott Kelly on Twitter (April 25, 2015): #Movie night in micro #Gravity aboard #ISS on our new HD projector which we use for conferences tech software etc.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 27/07/2024

West Germany wasn't stomped that hard. Nazis went straight into the post-war government, and there was little reckoning with the crimes until decades later, when a generation of post-war Germans came of age and collectively went "What the fuck did you do?!" at their parents' generation.

Wikipedia on "Denazification":

In late 1945 and early 1946, the emergence of the Cold War and the economic importance of Germany caused the United States in particular to lose interest in the program, somewhat mirroring the Reverse Course in American-occupied Japan. The British handed over denazification panels to the Germans in January 1946, while the Americans did likewise in March 1946. The French ran the mildest denazification effort. Denazification was carried out in an increasingly lenient and lukewarm way until being officially abolished in 1951. Additionally, the program was hugely unpopular in West Germany, where many Nazis maintained positions of power.

thelocal.de, October 10, 2016 (excerpted and abbreviated):

Between 1949 and 1973, 90 of the West German Justice Ministry’s 170 leading judges and lawyers were former members of the Nazi party.

Of those 90, 34 had been members of the Nazi party’s original paramilitary SA group, which helped Adolf Hitler rise to power and participated in the bloody Night of the Broken Glass (the Kristallnacht) that killed an estimated 91 Jewish people.

In 1957 alone, 77 percent of senior ministry officials were former members of Hitler's party, a higher proportion even than during the 1933-45 Third Reich.

The fascist old-boys network closed ranks, enabling its members to shield each other from justice – helping explain why so few Nazi war criminals ever went to prison.

The report noted how the former Nazis' actions while in the justice ministry still have an impact on the present day such as continued discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 13/07/2024

Gabriele misread the study though. It's 142 murders in 9 years, not 40. Still, that's a homicide rate of ~20, about that of Houston, Texas. On par for an excessively armed society, perhaps.

The Guardian writes:

The new map is based on coroners’ rolls from the time, for which copies covering nine separate years between 1300 and 1340 survive. “Neither before nor afterwards are there records that describe violent events in such detail,” said Eisner, adding that the coroners recorded unnatural deaths ranging from suicides to murders and unfortunate accidents.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 12/07/2024

I'm personally fascinated by the possibilities of differential privacy. But ultimately it is a cryptographic system that I need to trust is 1) secure in theory, 2) secure in practice, and 3) designed to serve my interests. And the technical documentation do not inspire confidence about this.

Yes, I snipped some context, but this quote from Mozilla's "explainer" doc is literally from a section titled "End-User Benefit":

Meta famously reported USD10 billion of losses as a result of Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency feature, which resulted in them being unable to perform attribution for a sizable portion of iPhone users.

Our assessment is that these benefits justify the costs.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 12/07/2024

No, you see, it's fine, because "PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone." Instead, Firefox merely "submits a report" if you "visit a site and do something", which is totally different from "sending data" about "browsing activities".

Screenshot from a mealy-mouthed Firefox support page.

Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

[…]

2. If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. […]

3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

[…]

PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. […]

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

This is some fine pulp writing.

Excerpt from "The Edge of the Blade" by Patricia D'Orazio:

"You don't need the Vee-Kay. Only your gun. It IS the replicant."

She took her gun from its holster. She was going in shooting. Deckard's lips felt dry. He licked them, but it didn't seem to help.

"Did… did you ever retire a human by mistake?"

"Not by mistake," said the Ripper as the elevator doors opened.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 20/06/2024

B is a classic monster, ferocious, bloody. A… A is just a li'l guy, hanging out, in the sea, eating an even littler guy, as one does.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 04/06/2024

His license was originally suspended not for any kind of traffic violation, but because of a failure to pay child support. WTF? How is denying him use of a car gonna help make him pay child support? This is getting more absurd every moment.

Harris' license had been suspended during a now-settled child support case with Saginaw County Friend of the Court before it was ordered reinstated, court records show.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 01/06/2024

The Comex 10 dive experiment reached a simulated depth of 701 m without any special protective equipment (but using very special breathing gases). Seems the limit is entirely vascular, and that from a purely mechanical perspective, we could easily go much deeper. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...

COMEX diver Théo Mavrostomos inside the Comex Hydra 10 pressure chamber, celebrating having reached the pressure equivalent of 701 meters beneath the ocean surface. He's casually dressed in a white t-shirt and looks surprisingly relaxed for someone apparently experiencing 71 atmospheres of pressure.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 30/05/2024

That picture, however, is not history, but a (pretty blatant) forgery. FWIW, here's the real Sunday headline.

Chicago Sunday Tribune front page from October 18, 1931. Headline: "U.S. jury convicts Capone"

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 21/05/2024

Would not recommend! Because that definitely depends on the bike's value and location. Bicycle thieves will do a lot to get their hands on an expensive bike. (Also, leaving your bike unlocked is technically a traffic offense.)

Pictured: A Copenhagen street tree cut down with a chainsaw.

Not pictured: The expensive bike that was chained to the tree.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 14/05/2024

This is the satirical cartoon that she finds "anti-American" and argues warrants the killing of journalists: A run-of-the-mill satire drawing that correctly predicted that the war in Afghanistan would be followed by wars in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2014).

Palestinian Authority editorial cartoon, dated November 29, 2001.

A blindfolded George W. Bush aims missiles indiscriminately at a dartboard covered with the names of Arab states.

Translation by Israel NGO "Palestinian Media Watch":

Caption: “Bush: The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning”

In the bull's-eye: “Afghanistan”

Dart board, counterclockwise from 1:00 - “Iraq”, “Syria”, “Lebanon” “Somalia”, “Libya”, “Sudan”.

Arab Man: “The Other Arabs”

The missile-dart in his back: “by accident”

Commentary by Palestinian Media Watch: The Palestinians persist in their accusations that the United States is indiscriminate in its enmity toward the Arab world.

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 10/05/2024

Oh, but it's right there in the article. The intent during the shoot was for it to be a fake, but in the edit, the intent shifted to it being real, hence the discrepancy.

In fact, Johnson actually almost backtracked on that whole plot point, as he also revealed when he mentioned a deleted post-credits scene. "We also shot a little coda which we decided not to use," he continued, "with Blanc on the phone speaking French and getting a little affirmation of 'ah, oui, oui, merci' and cutting to an office in the Louvre where the real 'Mona Lisa' is, with the security guards saying 'well, back to work.' But that pulls a punch, I like that the real painting gets destroyed in the movie."

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 07/04/2024

This really hammers home what's been normalized in the last decade. "Sure, Facebook wiretaps its users, sells user DMs to partners, enables misinformation, genocide and the overall dismantling of democracy, but then, what big tech company doesn't these days? At least Zuck's not an out-and-out Nazi."

For Mark [Zuckerberg], Elon Musk’s incredible two year effort to light his own reputation on fire has also had the remarkably convenient knock-on effect of making him seem reasonable. “Yes, Zuckerberg’s companies ransack private data and tear apart societies, and he does openly thirst for world domination,” some reasoned, “but you also don’t see him promoting creepy eugenics theories, blowing up rockets in environmentally sensitive areas, or directly meddling in the Ukraine War.”

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Søren @kwi.bsky.social · 02/04/2024

But what if what you really need is a lasagna recipe while playing Madden NFL?

Snippet from a 2023 Axios article:

Sentis works generative AI directly into games. “You can essentially embed a ChatGPT into an NPC, a character,” Riccitiello says.

To prove how unexpected things could get, Riccitiello makes an intentionally “outlandish” suggestion: you could virtually sit in the stands in a Madden football game and ask a virtual fan for a recipe for lasagna.

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