iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Allen @markallen.io · 29/09/2026

Two new AI tells I'm seeing everywhere lately: • "Two x, One y" (e.g. "Two Sources, One Shared Trait") headlines. • "Eyebrow" text above every headline (e.g. "The Studio" text in the attached screenshot).

Screenshot of a AI-generated web page layout.

Eyebrow header text: The Studio

Header text: Hive was built for the kind of unhurried appointment that's becoming hard to find — a quiet room, real coffee, a conversation before scissors ever touch your hair.

Body text: Founded by Ava Marin in a converted bungalow off Plant Street, the studio takes its name from the small, devoted teams of artisans she trained with in Milan. The work is collaborative. The room is calm. The clients are seen by name.

Everything we use — from the low-ammonia color line to the bond-building treatments to the chairs themselves — was chosen for the long view. Hair you can grow out gracefully. A space that ages well.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 24/09/2026

I'm a bit of an anxious patient at the dentist, so I tried doing breathwork during my appointment yesterday. Ended up so relaxed that Oura thought I was taking a nap.

Oura app screenshot showing that it detected a nap during the time I was in the dentist's chair.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 23/09/2026

You haven't lived until you've loaded software off a cassette tape.

A vintage RadioShack TRS-80 desktop computer, featuring a silver monitor displaying a video game, an integrated keyboard, and an external cassette storage device on the left.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 22/09/2026

OK, Siri is really good now.

A screenshot of a conversation with Siri. The user asks, "When did I buy my iPhone?" and Siri responds with the purchase date and location of an iPhone Air. The user then asks, "What was the previous iPhone I purchased?" and Siri correctly identifies it as an iPhone 15 Pro, providing the purchase date. (This alt tag was also generated by Siri)

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 21/09/2026

I'm sorry but this show is criminally under-appreciated. Easily in the top 10 of the century so far. I should start a rewatch in protest. www.nytimes.com/shared/v1/cl...

A screenshot of the NY Times Top 100 Shows of the 21st Century list.

96 HALT AND CATCH FIRE
2014–2017

This drama began in the early days of the personal computer revolution — before social media, before FOMO, before A.I. angst — to tell the story of a quartet of tech pioneers who looked at those clunky beige desktop boxes and saw a kaleidoscopic future. Computers were “the thing that gets us to the thing,” the latter thing being connection, empowerment, even a new kind of art. What began as a familiar tale of business-suite intrigue — “Mad Men” with processors — became a rich, heartfelt, human exploration of the costs and rewards of work and the necessity of failure. Its portrait of ’80s and ’90s techno-optimism may seem quaint now, but its rendering of the love of creation remains bleeding-edge. — James Poniewozik

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 21/09/2026

Found an AI slop genre that infuriates me even more than AI restaurant images: concert posters. Even though this is only a local bar band of middle-aged dudes likely happy to just get out of the house, concert posters have such a rich history. It would be sad to lose that to slop.

Very obviously AI-generated concert poster for a local rock band.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 18/09/2026

Good rules by Robin Sloan for using AI to build personal software (which everyone should be doing, it's a lot of fun). www.robinsloan.com/lab/ask-for-...

Rules for personal software produced with the help of AI agents:

1. You must actually and consistently use anything you build for two months before posting about it.

2. Ideally, never post about it. (I know I am breaking this rule, but my purpose is pedagogical, and anyway, I’ve got more apps I didn’t tell you about.)

3. Don’t let the AI agent name the app. You pick the name.

4. Don’t distribute the app, not even for free. Don’t post the code on GitHub. This is not software for glory; it is software for you.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 13/09/2026

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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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 12/09/2026

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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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 · 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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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 06/09/2026

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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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"

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 05/09/2026

You really have to hand it to mitochondria’s PR team. “The powerhouse of the cell” has to be one of the most successful branding campaigns of all time.

NYTimes article text: Psilocybin, they found, protected the microscopic nerve endings that detect touch, pain, temperature and pressure. At the same time, psilocybin preserved the ability of mitochondria, the “powerhouses of the cell,” to deliver energy to far-flung nerve endings, ensuring their survival.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 30/08/2026

I haven't been able to do any prequalifiers for Paris Brest Paris this year, so I have a bribe prepared in case I can't register for a spot when they open up next year: For some reason I own both paris-brest-paris.com and parisbrestparis.com (the event uses .org). Maybe they would trade?

Domain registrar page showing the domain names "paris-brest-paris.com" and "parisbrestparis.com"

"Trade Offer" meme.
I receive: a starting spot in Paris Brest Paris
You receive: Your dot com domain

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 28/08/2026

If we've learned anything from the US/Iran war, it's time to start mining the Welland Canal.

The Welland Canal, which connects Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, bypassing Niagara Falls.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 26/08/2026

Every episode of Netflix's Love is Blind UK season 3 could be an I Think You Should Leave episode title.

Episode Titles:
Gotta Stop Telling These Girls I Love Them!
You Can't Even Remember Her Name!
Is This Too Good to Be True?
Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow!
I'm Anything But Boring
If You Need to Walk Away, Walk Away
No-one Is Butthurt
I Look Like a Clown

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 22/08/2026

Manifesting this out into the universe: One year from today, I want to be on the starting line for Paris Brest Paris.

Graphic showing a map of the Paris Brest Paris route across the Brittany region of France.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 18/08/2026

Earliest example I’ve seen is John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil.

…part of the Standard Oil gospel was to train your subordinate to do your job. As Rockefeller instructed a recruit, “Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No? It is this: nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it.… As soon as you can, get some one whom you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”

Titan (Ron Chernow)

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 17/08/2026

Interesting point from @ramez.bsky.social, who I wish would post here instead of X. I never assumed that "alignment" meant aligned to ME, but rather some larger, generally agreed-upon set of values. But maybe that's completely wrong.

Tweet from Ramez Naam: "This is AI misalignment. If your AI isn't aligned to you, it's aligned to someone else."

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 17/08/2026

I'm not a published author, so I have no idea if this comment is complimentary or insulting.

Facebook comment from user Jay Readey:

@martin as you know from our correspondence, I am actively reading your book “Masters RAAM” in the basement lav near where I do so many workouts. Having qualified for RAAM in 1991, I am now not likely to race it - but you never know. I have 10 other books with RAAM in them - Shermer, Haldeman, Hughes and on…I would love to see it come back but I am also comfortable that RAAM IS FOREVER!!!

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 16/08/2026

Spotted in Cleveland today. An official city sign! Ohio City is such a cool neighborhood.

“People Over Cars” sign mounted on a utility pole in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood, illustrated with pedestrians, cyclists, children, and a wheelchair user, above a lively pedestrianized street.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 13/08/2026

Key part of my summer: reading Moby Dick in hospital waiting rooms. I think I finally realized that I love long boring books. Let me spend countless hours in another world meditating on the minutiae of life on an 1840s whaling ship.

Me reading an e-reader in an empty hospital waiting room On the screen is the last page of Moby Dick.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 12/08/2026

One example of great AI implementation: the auto-dubbing feature on YouTube where it creates a convincingly close version of the speaker's voice and translates it into a whole bunch of languages.

Screenshot of someone speaking in a YouTube video, with the YouTUbe audio track settings menu open. Visible options include: English (original), French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, and Italian.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 10/08/2026

Surf's Up is the quintessential Beach Boys album. Scattered sublime moments from Brian Wilson, a few great songs from Carl, album art that goes harder than it has any right to, and a godawful Mike Love song in the middle of the album that nearly ruins the whole thing (Student Demonstration Time).

Cover art of the Beach Boys album Surf's Up, featuring a nighttime painting based on James Earle Fraser's sculpture "End of the Trail," depicting a weary Native American man, wearing only the remains of a blanket and carrying a spear. He is hanging limp as his weary horse stops to observe the ground before them.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 09/08/2026

Mollie is my Jimothy. www.runnersworld.com/news/a733551...

This pet hamster is probably logging more kilometres on Strava than you

Mollie averages 10 km a night, with a personal best of 11.15 km

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 09/08/2026

One of Bluesky's worst features is that you can see who blocked you and what blocklists you are on. I wasted a solid five minutes of my life wondering why this person added me to such a ridiculous blocklist before realizing my time could be better spent doing anything else.

Screenshot of a block list I was added to by a Bluesky user.
List name: a very epsteineien bigotry
List description: these users may not be monsters like the late JEE and his billionaire friends, but they fell hook, line, and sinker for the same hateful nonsense jk rowling did

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 04/08/2026

"Don't be a meat proxy" gruhn.me/blog/2026-08...

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 03/08/2026

It's probably good that there's only one season of The Prisoner, because I'm halfway through and seriously reconsidering my anti-cape stance. These are dope, maybe I should get one for the autumn.

No. 6 and another woman in The Prisoner wearing jaunty, color blocked capes.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 02/08/2026

Sol LeWitt would have done amazing things with generative AI.

Diagram of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, including a visualization of the final output and these text:

This is a diagram for the Sol Le Witt wall drawing number 70. It should
accompany the certificate if the wall drawing is sold or otherwise transferred but is not a certificate or a drawing.

A signed Certificate of Authenticity for Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #70, including these instructions to create the image:

Straight lines about six inches (15 cm) long, touching and crossing, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.

Red, yellow, blue, black pencil
First Drawn by: Ralph Holcomb
First Installation: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
February, 1971

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 31/07/2026

I think it’s cute that the Tour of Denmark has a “King of the Hills” leader instead of a “King of the Mountains.” Here’s the route profile for today’s Queen stage, where they go over the same two or three small hills several times.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 31/07/2026

Portland is the best basketball city in North America. The new owner is speed running the Donald Sterling playbook of malicious hostility towards the fan base.

"The arena is only a small piece of that bigger picture," Dewayne Hankins, the Trail Blazers' president of business operations, told the council. "Portland's current stagnant business climate, high income taxes, and divisive political environment make this a tough city to invest in. It makes it harder to sell tickets, secure corporate partnerships and ... recruit players."

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 31/07/2026

At the risk of wading into the "main character of the day" drama: As someone who was not aware that playing the spelling bee is now apparently considered transphobic, this doesn't feel like the most helpful way to get people on your side.

Screenshot of a Ken Jennings post where he talks about playing the NY Times spelling bee with his wife with a quote reply and a reply to the quote.

Quote post text: "I wish people who care about trans people could understand that playing nyt games is still an insult to trans people"

Reply to the quote post text: "well I guess we just found out he absolutely doesn't care and in fact thinks it's all a joke and we should lighten up because the nyt is an institution more important than our pain"

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 29/07/2026

Found the original text in another translation of the book, I think this is a very powerful idea.

Highlighted text from Sartre's The Communists and Peace:

Duality of Values
The skilled worker has always based his demands on the qualifications necessary for his work. He is the true producer, the sole source of all wealth: he transforms the raw material into social goods.

Highlighted text:

Since its rights flow from its merits, this aristocracy is not far from considering itself the sole victim of capitalism.

…

a peevish mind would conclude without too much difficulty that the exploitation of the unskilled workers is not, after all, so criminal. The working-class elite did not go that far: but it is true that it considered its helpers as "dead-weights." Did it acknowledge them rights? It is doubtful. Let us say that it saw in them the permanent objects of its generosity. This humanism of labor is ambiguous: one will readily admit that it goes a step beyond the humanism of wealth. And yet it is only a stage; if one stops there, the multitude will remain excluded from humanity. It is necessary, you say, to merit being a man. That is fine as long as one can acquire merit. But what are you going to do with those who do not have the means for acquiring it?

…

On what, then, will it base its demands? Well, precisely on nothing. Or, if you prefer, on the demands themselves. The need creates the right.

…

The humanism of need is, consequently, the only one that has all humanity as its object: the elimination of merit blows up the last barrier which separated men.

…

Today the two humanisms coexist and this coexistence muddles everything: if the former becomes set and establishes a position for itself, it becomes the enemy of the latter. The masses, on the other hand, are secretly contaminated by the ideology of the workers' elite. They have no shame before the bourgeois; for the best of them, no matter what he does, will never merit the privileges he enjoys; but the skilled workers belong to the proletariat, they are exploited just as the semiskilled worker is, and if they live a little better than he, this difference appears negligible as soon as one compares their standard of living with that of the bourgeois.

…

"superiorities" are mutilations, that the only human relationship is that of real, total man with total man and that this…

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 28/07/2026

I still think about the wine-drinking dog from season 1 of Love is Blind at least once a month.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 28/07/2026

I learned about this concept in Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book At the Existentialist Café. Her interpretation:

Why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to 'the eyes of the least favoured', or to 'those treated the most unjustly'? You just need to work out who is most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one. […] If something is not true in the eyes of the least favoured, says Sartre, then it is not true.

As an idea, this is astoundingly simple and refreshing. At a stroke, it wipes out the weasely cant indulged in by the advantaged – all those convenient claims that the poor 'deserve' their fate, or that the rich are entitled to the disproportionate wealth that accumulates upon them, or that inequality and suffering should be accepted as inevitable parts of life.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 28/07/2026

Trying to track down the source of Satre's "eyes of the least favoured" principle in his 1952 book The Communists and Peace, and the PDF I found online is missing the exact pages it appears on. Clearly this is a conspiracy to hide such powerful ideas from the public.

Screenshot of an open PDF of a scanned book. The pages jump from 179 to 182.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 27/07/2026

What is LinkedIn for if not posting things that would make you unhirable to the largest tech company in your country?

Screenshot of a LinkedIn post with the following text:

Hot take I almost certainly shouldn’t be posting on LinkedIn:

If you wouldn’t work for an Elon Musk company or use his products because you don’t want to support a billionaire abusing corporate power to advance their repulsive personal politics, it’s time for you to start applying that same scrutiny to Shopify.

Tobi Lütke has spent the last few years making it increasingly clear where he stands. Just take a look of his Twitter feed for a sampling of the edgelord MAGA-adjacent rhetoric our aspirational mini-Elon is spreading these days. At some point, turning a blind eye and pretending Shopify is an apolitical choice is going to become untenable for people who care about equality, democracy, and human decency.

I want to believe we are better than that, and you deserve better as an employee and/or customer.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 26/07/2026

Canada's mini-Elon is mad that democracy led to the cancellation of Toronto's waterfront airport expansion, making it slightly less convenient to hop in his private jet to fuck off to his little Galt's Gulch fantasy world.

Screenshot from X, the world's foremost neo-nazi platform. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke is responding to a tweet mocking a community planning input session featuring older adults (the meeting in question was not in Toronto).

Quoted tweet: 'Community input' just means obese old people never letting young people have anything.

Tobi's response:

Exactly what just happened in Toronto.

Retired, Unemployed, Unemployable, and useful idiots are the only people who go to these town hall sessions.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 25/07/2026

Trying to not make this a Carapaz stan account, but it's hard. What a great last week of the Tour for La Locomotora.

Richard Carapaz crosses the finish line as he wins stage 20 of the 2026 Tour de France on Alpe d’Huez. He is wearing the polka dot jersey of the King of the Mountains.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 23/07/2026

Watching Richard Carapaz attack in the mountains is such a delight. It feels like he's the purest embodiment of vintage climbers in the modern peloton, and impossible to root against.

Richard Carapaz climbs through cheering roadside crowds in the Alps on his way to winning Stage 18 of the 2026 Tour de France.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 22/07/2026

The Xteink X4 is super fun. aftermath.site/xteink-x4-ch...

An ebook on a tiny Xteink X4 e-ink reader.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 19/07/2026

One thing I didn't appreciate about Canada before I moved here was the absolute size of the place. Doing "forest management" in northern Ontario isn't practical because not only are there almost no people there, it's not even really possible to build roads there.

Screenshot of Google Maps, showing the lack of coverage Street View for most of the country.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 17/07/2026

This explanation from David Millar about why pro cycling is getting so fast is interesting: It's not just advancements in equipment, fueling, clothing, etc. It's that EVERYONE has access to the same information now. Caja Rural is more advanced than Team Sky was 15 years ago.

Why is it happening? There is no single answer. It is the bike, the body, the fuel and the way the race is ridden. Frames, wheels, helmets, clothing and riding positions are more aerodynamic. Larger-volume tyres, carefully matched to wider, deeper rims and run at lower pressures, roll faster over real roads. Training is more precise, recovery better managed and the overall depth of the peloton greater. Riders understand their fueling requirements and can consume enough carbohydrate to sustain huge power outputs for longer. Teams model routes, weather and race scenarios in extraordinary detail, while the riders themselves race more aggressively and from farther out.

But perhaps the most important change is that none of this knowledge belongs exclusively to one or two teams anymore. Once, a handful of teams knew more and could exploit that advantage. Now the equipment, expertise and data have become normalised and widespread. The performance floor of the entire peloton has risen. It is marginal gains applied to everything, by everyone, all at once.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 13/07/2026

I love this annoying banner on every Substack web article trying to push me to their app. Buddy, you created all the distractions here! It’s your fault the web view of every Substack post is annoying!

Banner above a Substack article saying “Read distraction-free on Substack”

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 13/07/2026

"You're absolutely right" is the new "rich corinthian leather"

Screenshot of the original iPad Notes app UI, with a heavily skeumorphic UI that Steve Jobs gushed over for having the appearance of "rich corinthian leather."

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 08/07/2026

Very grateful Jayco Alula has finally ditched these awful helmets. Made me irrationally upset every time I saw them, even more than the Visma riders who were wearing visor-less Giro Aeroheads.

Pro cyclist Luka Mezgec of the Jayco Alula team wearing a gray Giant Pursuit helmet.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 07/07/2026

Can’t see it behind the podium, but Pierre is absolutely wearing Beyoncé’s full Cowboy Carter fit under there.

Beyoncé performs onstage in a white rhinestone cowboy outfit and wide-brim hat during her Cowboy Carter tour, holding a microphone with dancers behind her.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 30/06/2026

Largely agree with my placement on the AI Compass spectrum, but Andreessen AND Pinker? Maybe I need to re-evaluate some things…

Screenshot of my results from the AI Compass quiz. Text:

The Optimist
patron saint: Marc Andreessen
AI cures diseases, teaches children, liberates workers, and democratizes expertise. You see the problems but you believe the trajectory bends toward good, and the only real sin is slowing it down. Your bookshelf has both Pinker and a manifesto you wrote yourself.

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Mark Allen @markallen.io · 29/06/2026

Love exploiting a good Duolingo glitch.

Screenshot of the Duolingo leaderboard where I have twice as much XP as the person in second place because the flash card feature only asked me to recall “coffee,” “tea,” “hello,” “sir,” and “please” for an entire week.

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