iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 24/08/2026

Dave's at a disadvantage here because never needed to hone his PR acumen. Whereas Sammy is a polished corporate animal by nature.

The "aww you're sweet" / "hello, human resources?" meme. Top panel is Dave in the Cradle Will Rock video 1) wearing shoes that make it look like his feet are being devoured by two ferocious malamutes and 2) backed up by Eddie. Bottom panel is a more recent photo of Dave.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 18/07/2026

Real estate people when legal letterhead enters the chat

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 19/06/2026

This dude somehow botched bribing the famously corrupt James Traficant

November 2002: Sentenced to 15 months' probation and fined $150,000 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to bribe U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. regarding the aerospace company.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 05/05/2026

Really missed my calling

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 31/03/2026

Hear me out what if there were security that weren’t theater, jobs other than shampoo cop, and agendas other than neoliberal

Screenshot of Vox Today Explained podcast episode called “Should we privatize TSA?”

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 20/03/2026

snakebite haters HATE him

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 10/03/2026

Stopped at 32 creative AI+'s but I could have had at least 128. Is heatsinks even in the game? smh

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 30/01/2026

Finally getting some scholarly attention

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 25/01/2026

Longtime observers know how insane it is that these stories are neck and neck

A story on HN about ICE racing up behind a story about DOOM being ported to a pair of earbuds

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 21/01/2026

The recent Meta layoffs came up and I remembered that I wrote this whole email about the Severance goat people that incidentally, totally called it

There was some discussion on your last episode about whether the goat room was too far out there. I think that your relative lack of familiarity with biggish company jobs might be showing here, although of course I’m overjoyed for you both that you have apparently never had to deal with people like this in real life.

I worked at a well known tech company a few years ago where there was an entire team of networking guys who were much bigger freaks than the goat herders. They communicated in idioglossia. They had lost contact with what the rest of the company was even for like a decade prior. They routinely brought the publicly-visible product down intentionally for their own obscure reasons. They sent only their most polished emissary to communicate with outsiders, a la Gwendolyn Christie. Nobody really understood a word he said.

Product initiatives at tech companies like this can absolutely be as disconnected from reality as the goats. Half of Meta is currently working on a virtual reality project which is absolutely doomed. Its original sponsor lost interest in it years ago, but left it lavishly funded. Who knows what it looks like now, but we can be sure that the user experience lacks legs (literally and figuratively). In another year or two they’ll lay off thousands of people who have been up to this, and those people will be as shocked by this absolutely obvious outcome as the goat people would be.

For every example like that, there’s a copycat team at every competitor trying to do the same thing to avoid being left behind. But those teams have only the mandate of trying to imagine what the Meta VR team might be up to and copying it. Well you can just imagine how fucked up those scenes are. Every company has a boring thing that generates revenue, and everyone else is tending goats.

Anyway, strong work on the podcast but I think Severance should be interpreted as cutting satire at least as much as a mystery box.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 09/01/2026

A dominant factor is going to be health care: we pay much more for it and the quality is worse. The answer varies by age. A $100K check at age 65 or older is a windfall, since even in America you won't pay that much in premiums before you qualify for Medicare.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 09/01/2026

After seeing this I was curious: morality aside, what should a rational consumer accept to join a dysfunctional fascist empire? www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Jan 8 (Reuters) - U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, said two of the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 22/12/2025

One nice thing about AI backlash is the backpressure it exerts on this phenomenon mcfunley.com/the-guerilla...

"All of which is to say that once you work someplace, your cool factor has a brief half-life. Did they hire you to do ML? Sorry, they need 'AI' now, and they are going to hire someone else on a really fantastic, different white horse for this."

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 12/12/2025

(per @themountaingoats.bsky.social) there should be more songs in the Euripides cinematic universe

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 05/12/2025

This actually worked lol

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 03/12/2025

Since winning runs take the longest there's some skew towards Watcher, because Watcher is by far the easiest. I started playing in strict rotation back in May or June and rapidly got good enough at Watcher that it's dominating things now, and maybe I should do something else.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 01/10/2025

Decided to start getting quant about Slay the Spire

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 25/09/2025

New model benchmark proposal

Screenshot of a GPT5 session where I am asking it to identify what took a dump in my pool. I have given it a photo.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 24/08/2025

Everyone at courage trying to get cream cheese out of a little plastic ramekin with a hunk of torn bagel

Homer squeezing orange juice with his face

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 23/08/2025

The person behind me on this flight reached up into my space and wordlessly closed my shade. (I am already in a fight with the right wing conspiracy theorist in front of me and can’t multitask.)

A closed plane window shade, my headrest visible clearly behind it

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 11/07/2025

Doc Brown jumps out of the Delorean and frantically tells 16 year old me that we’ve got to stop Yngwie Malmsteen’s workout supplement company from using AI generated labels before GuitarTok finds out and starts dragging him

Screencap of Yngwie Malmsteen supplement bottles with gibberish labels that look like “Rospotticg” and “Ericy Worrout”

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 20/06/2025

freelance fascism entrepreneurs

Instagram post from The Hermosillo in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Text:

Last night 6/19, we were visited by agents presenting ID’s from the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), and they cornered some patrons without our knowledge, in an intimidating and uncomfortable way. To our best understanding, this was not ICE, but we are actively working to confirm this with ABC officials.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 19/06/2025

Hey Ben what was John Lewis known for? What is this book about?

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 19/06/2025

Ben Chestnut made $6B pretending to be progressive so that his employees would buy into his cult without demanding equity. Honestly the worst part about it is that he has nothing better to do with his life now than punch down on the social network for bland airheads (LinkedIn).

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 22/05/2025

Please imagine me reading all of this including the alt text in this voice

Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig as The Californians on SNL

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 22/05/2025

If you think Hollywood Bowl to Barham is bad, Google maps routinely advises me to commit seppuku by crossing two lanes of 70mph 101 on-ramp traffic within 100 feet to make the Temple exit from the 110

A tiny section of the 101/110 interchange, 100 feet between the on ramp and Google’s suggested exit which is two lanes away

Street view of the exit ramp from the on-ramp

The view over your shoulder as you are about to die

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 30/04/2025

I guess you could have gotten here faster by just asking "what are the odds that the geniuses who thought this was a good idea can design a sound experiment?"

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 30/04/2025

They added a box plot and ✨statistics✨ to distract from this being a ludicrous comparison. This is selection bias, so their claim to be able to be 6x more persuasive than humans is total nonsense

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 25/04/2025

People want gold dust badly enough that they'll make it up themselves or believe in miracles, so the temptation to frame chicken feed as such is always there.

John Hurt as Control in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy saying "Smiley is suspicious, Percy!" Percy Alleleine has shown up with some tantalizing intel whose topicality makes it suspect. Smiley thinks we should tend to discount it, because it's exactly what we were hoping for.

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 21/03/2025

Say what you want about the tenets of AWS information architecture but at least it stands still

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 18/03/2025

Was going to be handing these out in Santa Monica this weekend but @chuckschumer.com chickened out on the book tour. I’ll be at a #teslatakedown though. @primary.every.democrat

A business card for https://primary.every.democrat

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 07/03/2025

Bonus one of shutting down the original Etsy office

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 07/03/2025

Making this one was so intense and I got so far into the zone that neither Cal Henderson nor I realized that we’d been standing in my dog’s pee the entire time

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 01/03/2025

They were right all along

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Dan McKinley @mcfunley.com · 21/02/2025

thinkin' about the Lyceum Address again

How then shall we perform it?—At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?—Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

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