iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Did my research for the Sunnyvale, CA ballot: mithriltabby.dreamwidth.org/182707.html

mithriltabby.dreamwidth.org

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

That will match the ones who got turned into Piltdown Man after that transporter “upgrade”

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A typical night at home for me has two girl cats on my legs

Two brown tabbies curled up on a human's outstretched legs

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My wife brings gold star stickers to give to phlebotomists when they can get her vein on the first try, and they *love* getting them.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

China Miéville’s EMBASSYTOWN. Computer translation is impossible for this alien language that has to be spoken by two humans? Sure, I’m fine with that. Recordings of the language as spoken by humans are suddenly in-demand? WTF? If that worked, a computer could generate it!

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

No one made us download NCSA Mosaic and learn HTML. No one made us rip CDs and trade songs on Napster when the MP3 codec came out. No one made us get 802.11b expansion cards and access points. But LLMs? Those are being pushed on us. This is a fake technological revolution.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I love the bit when they switch to Escher to make a location otherworldly.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The peach flavored stuff from Good Day is excellent.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My mother raised me reading maps in the passenger seat when she drove, so I could orient on a map very easily before I was ten. Once you have that down, you can plot a course just by looking at the map and then looking for the signage.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

They’re the Edsel of the 2020s

In my experience, it’s more like a CS undergrad bombed out of their gourd on original recipe Four Loko

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More ways that "AI" wastes my time: now I have to go through automatically generated meeting transcripts and make sure the hallucination engine didn't misattribute others' words to me, or mine to anyone else.

I took a color theory class in college and they brought in a fashion color consultant at one point. I was immediately dragged to the front of the class: “this is a classic Winter”

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

it’s my fault. I am hoarding all the colors in my closet full of aloha shirts

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I try to make it a "you're in the lucky 10,000” moment and provide keywords or a hyperlink for the curious. xkcd.com/1053/

xkcd.com

Ten Thousand

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Anyone going to the trouble of enchanting a bag of holding doesn’t want to see their work go to waste, so there are usually some form of ward to prevent this. Each bag has its own way to dissuade such behavior, dependent on the enchanter’s specialty. So you get attacks from both bags.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Cool Noodle Rhapsody was *so* good. My wife learned to make them after that.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Early in the pandemic we discovered MYSTIC POP-UP BAR www.netflix.com/title/81264882 which is an amazing multi-genre mashup and I think the camera operators used to work on food shows, because every time they incidentally show food, they quickly show the procedure of making it

netflix.com

Watch Mystic Pop-up Bar | Netflix Official Site

A young man with a unique ability begins working for a centuries-old bar owner who resolves her customers' emotional troubles by entering their dreams.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

You might enjoy Karl Schroeder's STEALING WORLDS.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The code they create isn’t even good. I shudder to think of the amount of technical debt piling up that will need to be paid off after the AI bubble pops.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’m required to use LLMs at work. For coding, they suck all the joy out of being a software engineer. It’s like supervising a CS undergrad bombed out of their gourd on original recipe Four Loko.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Here in Sunnyvale we used to have drive-thru flu shot clinics set up in a local hospital’s parking garage. I would get lots of friends together for “brunch followed by flu shots”. It’s harder to make a party of it these days.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

When my wife broke her leg, the cats were very attentive about purring against that leg and the doctor was amazed at how well she recovered.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Happy birthday, Aces! My clowder hopes you get lots of tasty treats today.

Four brown tabbies lined up at food dishes

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

HAMMAJANG LUCK is great fun and often had me switching from the ebook reader to the smartphone to look up new words. For that matter, the Book of the New Sun had me looking up a lot of words in English...

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

That was what they taught in typing class in 1984 at my middle school with a room full of manual typewriters

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

20 y/o me would be delighted by the size of my library and CD collection and then I would show him how to access the ebook and MP3 collections and he would be amazed

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

One of my favorite Internet moments was when I posted the names of my cats “clockwise from the right: Nero, Archie, Phryne, and Dot” and someone wrote me back later saying they had discovered the Miss Fisher Mysteries and enjoyed them. Clearly a sleuth!

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is why I can leave the thermostat low in the winter.

Two brown tabbies are curled up on a human's lap and shins. A third is curled up next to his hip.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Once investors realize that the corporate death penalty is in play, there will be a whole new era of shareholder oversight.

Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Corporate death penalty. All shares made worthless, new ones issued and voted by a committee at the DoJ and gradually sold onto the open market as the corporation changes its business practices.

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Max Kaehn @mithriltabby.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Seeing authors at play, and enthusing over each other’s work, is the primary reason I’m on social media at all. I used to buy books based on awards shortlists; now I buy them when authors I like speak well of them, and usually wind up with most of the awards shortlists as a result.

given how often it ignores direct orders and makes things up, I would amend that to “a drunk guy”

I’m figuring that the important thing is being where there is economic wherewithal to adapt. So I’m supporting the groups trying to keep the SF Bay Area affordable so we can have the needed people to deal with climate chaos.

The main thing to worry about with LLMs is how they can erode human judgment. People who use them without being conscious of their failure modes can get seriously messed up, and a lot of people have sublimated their religious impulses into science fictional premises.

The tech has some utility in the hands of someone sufficiently expert to tell when it's bullshitting, so they can send it back to try again. It is not revolutionary. No one had to push web browsers, MP3 codecs, Wi-Fi, or smartphones the way they do LLMs.

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I am required to work with LLMs daily and I see no reason to believe that anyone has anything even close to human intelligence. Doomer and booster hype are both trying to keep up valuations in advance of an IPO.

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I regularly pick up Nurri shakes in bulk at Costco. I also came up with a high protein variant on a Wendy's Frosty for the SharkNinja CREAMi XL.

I suspect it included at least snippets of Reborn As a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

Even though the Libre 3 is available, she’s sticking with the Libre 2 right now because the software for working with it currently has a better interface.

The monitors have adhesive to stick to your skin, but it’s amazing how many circumstances in daily life can strike a glancing blow to knock them off. Using the underarm helps, but third party stickers that protect the sensor come in very handy, and they sell them in large packs.

My wife has found some protein shakes she likes and restaurants are never bothered by her smuggling one in and downing it just before the food arrives (she always orders a regular drink as well), and that can mitigate a lot of blood sugar rise from carbs.

There is a lot of advice out there on foods that are good or bad for blood sugar, and it turns out that this advice is highly person-specific. The only way to find out is to experiment. With a monitor, you can do a bit of journaling and find out what works for you, specifically.