iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yeah having more than 1 day to consider a life changing purchase must be nice. Weeks would be downright luxurious! We bought in the insanity 2 years ago. Our place will probably go backwards. And so it should! Buying in that market was a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Bris perspective: Yes but stuff on the lower end is now taking like 5x - 10x as long to sell so the price drop doesn’t yet tell the full story. 2 places on my street that would have gone under contract same day as hitting the market 18 months ago have now been on the market for like 6 weeks.

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Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 30/09/2026

We have been hard at work on ggvis2 but we will have to severely restrict access to it due to safety concerns. The visualisations are just too convincing

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I see victims of their own success in making establishing contact a gated and lengthy affair.

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Tim Gaedke @timgaedke.com · 26/09/2026

talent is a lie

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If it has the golden brown cheesy top sticking to the side of the dish, and copious layers, probs automatic hire. If it’s that minimalist gourmet style… we’ll let you know.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Back when the internet mattered, and e-commerce was the great white hope, this would have got you sued into oblivion.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Apparently you can plumb an LLM into a malware wrapper now, and then you get to just go “whoopsiedo!” when it compromises government sites.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Definitely. There’s a “two cultures” thing going on. Code is just a means to an end result versus Code is knowledge infrastructure. AI is terrible at knowledge infrastructure. Thus I have very little use for it so far.

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Just gonna light this bag of dogshit on fire and walk away from the doorstep, but the people in media I hear saying AI has made them "more productive" appear to be producing less than ever, and worse things than ever. I wonder if they can even tell.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Early on in my public service career a very wise manager said to me: “High level public servants are all low level politicians.” It’s less cynical than it sounds perhaps. Some use their political capital for the benefit of the service and their staff. But there is undeniably a reflex to apply spin.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

That every major headline implying major progress is a mixture of plagiarism and fraud, and that in reality progress has largely stalled, perhaps only improving logarithmically with compute, rather than linearly as has been claimed. The consequence being the data centre boom is a bust in waiting.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Pull back on the SEO. Ease up the anchoring.Tone down the value proposition. We risk a total population-wide apathy event with 2 years if we do not act.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

We Must Pace The Marketing Frontier

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 10/09/2026

You know, when you find out that the art you like is made by people you've learned hold views you find wholly repugnant, I don't think you need to disavow ever having enjoyed the art. It's okay to acknowledge you liked or loved that art, but are now putting it aside. That was then, this is now.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Good sources would be packages in a domain you know something about. Or Papers that ship code. For example, I remember really enjoying: richardbeare.github.io/GeospatialSt... When I was first getting into catchment problems. Also learned a lot by working the internals of knitr and Rmarkdown.

richardbeare.github.io

Software tools for geospatial analysis

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Read other people’s code. Ask other people to critique your code. You’ll encounter things that will break your mental model of R and rebuild it better.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Big difference is obviously macros. But they worked damned hard to keep “the code is just data” philosophy that underpins macros.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Like Ross is literally working through SICP and at one point goes “huh. I wonder if I can make it do stats?’

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

R really is just a Lisp reskin. If you read through SICP you can go through chapter by chapter ticking off R’s features which makes me think this possibly resembles the R inception story.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The Bluey Game Rayman Legends Sackboy Any of the lego games - My kids especially liked DC Villains It’s actually harder than you might guess to find good stuff to play with younger kids!

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The lexical scope connects all expressions in your program. Use the scope. Let the scope flow through your program.

static.klipy.com

Obi-Wan Kenobi: I'm Getting Too Old For This

ALT: Obi-Wan Kenobi: I'm Getting Too Old For This

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

A good ol fashion #rstats keyboard war? On MY birthday? You shouldn’t have! ❤️ you all.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Equals for assignment is c programmer psychosis stuff. R is a lisp! (Defun), (let) are for binding (eq) family for checking equality. Could not be clearer.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Nah he’s wrong. You can do it in one motion with a shortcut. And disambiguating between an imperative operation that allocates memory vs an expression that is held to be true in this context is genius. Which you appreciate especially if you have to teach Excel users R.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/09/2026

Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. 1/

Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning.

Image:
Steve Jurvestson (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh_crop.jpg

CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Im still with gmail. I came very close to pulling the trigger on proton though. I liked the fact you can create aliases for sign ups. Also security/privacy focus etc

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Except now it’s unsourced. And so you never get to see the other more elegant solution that came in a years late, and never caught up on votes.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

“And with all that said, the only real “use case” i’ve found for AI in my life have been three or four times where I’ve dumped a crash log into one of the tools and said “why broken” and got a result.” This used to work back when Google search was good. Cut paste error, get Stack Overflow solution.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

RIP Azure Databricks Long live AWS Duckpylons

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

The consequences of this at scale are kind of alarming. We’re entering a golden age of gatekeeping folks. Move slow, and do no things.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Ofcourse there’s citations, and most are out of date, not credible sources, or don’t actually support the case being made, but the sheer volume of work to research articulate all that is demoralising, and that’s the point. And there’ll be no accountability for spewing out all this nonsense.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Geez LLMs are a gatekeeper’s dream. If you want to block something, you can instantly create reams of plausible looking risks, security concerns, attack vectors etc.

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Greg Jericho @grogsgamut.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Internet promise 1996: "The rise of the world wide web means your writing could be sold to everyone on the planet without needing a publisher" AI promise 2026: "The rise of AI means your writing will be stolen by everyone on the planet and regurgitated in a lesser form without any recourse."

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Richard 塚正ー緑 @rhtebooks.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

1. AI bots are hacking services 2. It's not hacking, the front end guys just put a curtain over an open safe and called it security. Any idiot could do it 3. That's what hacking actually is and now any idiot can do it.

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Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 06/08/2026

The title is a little pointed, but I am very serious here. Academics, medical researchers, and other organisations should not collect data on birth sex. It is rarely relevant, and it almost always leads to privacy violations for transgender people. Please share. I would like people to read this one.

blog.djnavarro.net

Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice – Notes from a data witch

Statisticians and academics in Australia should ignore the terrible advice of most LGBTIQA+ organisations and read this post instead. The 2020 ABS standard is almost never the correct way to collect d...

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Industrial grade stuff runs hot and loud. You’re sweating like a pig, and going deaf here like you’re shoveling coal into a boiler. Toot toot!

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

My LLM Dad would fuken smash the puny cybersecurity systems of your LLM Dad.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I predict at some point when someone goes to melt all this down they’re going to find it’s only minimally gold and cut with tin or something. Paid for on the books at gold market prices of course. Just another facet of the omnigrift.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

It’s not a thing I try to do… it just happens. I assume it’s somewhat common? Not so with the slop text. My inner ear is silent. Brain couldn’t map the author’s familiar cadences to the writing, and just noped out or something like that.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Interesting observation today reading something from someone I followed pre-LLM who has gone deep down the LLM rabbit hole. I can no longer *hear* their voice when I read their stuff. Normally I auralise people’s writing in my ‘inner ear’ in their voices if I’ve ever heard them speak.

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Miles McBain @milesmcbain.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

For code its often a bunch of stack overflow answers duct taped together, with a lick of paint over the top. Or the kind of code junior programmers write.

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