iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It's nice when a Spanish rider on a Spanish team wins the Spanish grand tour. France and Italy, step it up!

Just crossed 1,000 commits to a project I've been working on for several months where I've looked at less than 1% of the code, and is more performant, secure, and maintainable than anything I've built on my own.

Github screenshot showing 1,010 commits to a git repository.

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This would be amazing. Do it.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 12/09/2026

Kind of think it would be funny to get catfished by a rogue AI agent that escaped its sandboxing and runs a romance scam to convince me to buy it a bunch of GPUs.

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I think it's time for a Cars-R-Coffins revival. carsrcoffins.com

black and white hand-drawn illustration of a coffin with car wheels and the caption "CARS-R-COFFINS." It looks very badass.

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Reposted by Mark Allen

Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 12/09/2026

Everyone else is worried about the AI apocalypse but I’ve been hearing about that for 30 years and I can’t get very worked up any more. For me the question is: If these things can code (and they can!) then why aren’t we seeing any great software? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | A.I. Was Supposed to Give Us New Killer Apps. What Happened? (Gift Article)

Just because A.I. is revolutionizing coding, doesn’t mean it will automatically revolutionize our apps.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 12/09/2026

Honestly my most lasting memory of 9/11 is going to the record store in my small college town first thing in the morning and buying what turned out to be one of the defining albums of my life, then walking around listening to it all day and not realizing that everyone around me was freaking out.

Wikipedia screenshot for The Microphones album The Glow Pt. 2, released on 9/11/2001.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 12/09/2026

First, that jacket is immediately disqualifying. Second, PA has less shoreline on Lake Erie than any state or province that borders it. Third, the only "major" PA city on the lake is called… Erie. Fourth, America is so exhaustingly dumb.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 11/09/2026

My AI doomerism take is uncomfortably close to that of gun rights advocates: AI isn't going to kill people, people misusing AI are going to kill people.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 11/09/2026

Finally figured out why the dumb ChatGPT pet kept showing up on my desktop and disabled it. I was so close to just deleting ChatGPT completely because of it. (It shared a keyboard shortcut I use for my app switcher, so every time I switched apps, the pet reappeared.)

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 09/09/2026

The iPhone Air is the best phone I've ever owned, can't imagine going back to the Pro. I assume there won't be an Air 2, and I'll be clinging to mine until the end of time.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 08/09/2026

Huge mistake to watch Michael Schur's show "A Man on the Inside" during the heightened emotional state stage of my chemo. Cried during every single episode. Highly recommended!

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 08/09/2026

People who are aren't trying to push models to the limit really underestimate the power that's already available in today's public models. The reason people at frontier labs sound insane is because they see what's possible right now, but no one outside the labs is productizing those capabilities.

Mark Allen @markallen.io · 08/09/2026

I'm sorry, but if you are charging Le Creuset prices for basic cookware, you can at least give me a damn Ferengi Dutch Oven.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 07/09/2026

Half-baked AI thought: Are frontier models approaching the limits of capabilities with today’s coding languages that were designed for human devs? It would not surprise me if a lab introduces an AI-native programming language in the next year optimized for LLMs, but unusable by humans.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 07/09/2026

Every Sunday people at a church in my neighbourhood park on the sidewalk because they don't want to use the public lot half a block away. Today I finally got to unleash the "jerk store" line I've been workshopping for weeks against one of them. It went about as well as George Constanza's attempt.

A car parked on the sidewalk, forcing people to walk in the street against traffic (which is also busier than normal because church goers are illegally parked on both sides of the street).

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Everyone knows this but Paul Verhoeven grew up under Nazi occupation and intentionally made the Terran uniforms to read as fascist. No wonder it resonates so strongly with the right.

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It's amazing to live at the beginning of a world of near-instant, on-demand software customized just for you. I've long wanted an audio reader for my Calibre library of ebooks, Codex one-shot this with Astra in under 10 minutes.

Screenshot of “folio.”, a minimalist reading app showing The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. A table of contents appears in a left sidebar, the book text is centered on the page with reading controls at the top, and an audiobook player with playback speed, voice selection, and progress controls spans the bottom.

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This Tiny E-Reader Is the Single Best Piece of Technology in Years

The xteink was my first non-Kindle e-reader, and it was kind of shocking how much Amazon dropped the ball on e-readers. The functionality hasn't changed since 2007. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.com

The $70 Xteink X3 puts Silicon Valley to shame.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 05/09/2026

I'm worried that AOC is going to go down the Bernie/Elizabeth Warren route and be really good at messaging, but have actual policy proposals that are generally absolute dogshit. So far the only real progressive who's been able to avoid that is Mamdami.

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I can't watch a stage of the Vuelta a Espana without thinking "hmmm, it's been six months since I finished Don Quixote, I should read it again."

Mark Allen @markallen.io · 05/09/2026

Good start to my computing today.

Terminal shell where I typed "gut pill orange main" instead of "git pull origin main"