iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV? Person who wrote the layout engine for Microsoft Word: absolutely not

(I think it's because after years of cursive drilling you can't help but add some idiosyncratic ligatures to your print letters, and that isn't following any kind of standard so it looks a bit weird to anyone but you)

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 15h

Yeah, I was in/near the last classes in my elementary/high schools that did lots of mandatory cursive, and then after that it became optional for tests etc. Me and my younger sister's handwriting are good anecdotal evidence of the end product before and after the switch--similar, but hers is nicer

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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Australopithecus 3 million years ago:

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Adam Ragusea @aragusea.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

You can’t say the newspaper business didn’t try to modernize.

A used Nintendo DS cartridge selling for $5: “USA Today Crosswords”

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Bob Chipman ("MovieBob") @bobchipman.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

In 7 months time, the world will officially cross the Austin Threshold - the point where the number of years since the release of the original "AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY" will equal and begin to exceed the number of years Austin Powers was frozen in the film (1967-1997) 😳

static.klipy.com

Austin Powers in Red Suit

Alt: Austin Powers in Red Suit

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James Kelleher @jameskelleher.pilcrow.ie · 11/10/2026

One step closer to the ur-treat, the treat that contains all treats within it

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Typical of incremental advances...ControlNets were intended for single-frame interventions, but temporal consistency is an ongoing challenge. Similarly automated puppet animation shares a limitation with the manual version: lots of prep work (in this case, creating and labeling the sprite sheets)

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mcc @dryad.technology · 09/10/2026

Drawing a political compass where three of the quadrants are Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein, and Ezra Klein, and then using the fourth quadrant to derive the hypothetical political interests of a hypothetical "Ezra Wolf"

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Kasey Feral Smith @kaseysmith.net · 09/10/2026

Let this be your warning -- if you damage the cap on your lava lamp it will turn into an algae soup lamp. 😬

A hand holding up a lava lamp bottle in front of their garden door. The water and wax in the lamp are both yellowish and murky.

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Moon @softmoon.world · 08/10/2026

Y'all. Please check out the new @processingorg.bsky.social foundation fellowship: processingfoundation.org/programs/fel... Apply by November 1st, 2026

processingfoundation.org

Fellowships

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Glendon Mellow @flyingtrilobite.com · 08/10/2026

Do we know who has the contract for this work yet? #biketo #TOpoli

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The ragefarm-y adversarial framing around so many of these projects is a shame; it obscures some interesting experiments. Could agentifying old-school waterfall technical writing (imo the most plausible theory of what ArtCraft did) actually make good software? Probably not at first, but why not try?

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Cris (without an H) @ambignostic.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I tried to wreak iron but then I found out the present tense of wrought is work

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Kimberly Scaryne @kimberlydairine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

CS improv troupe who realizes they can build any scene out of "Yes NAND"

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I'm actually really encouraged by these malformed things. Not like the output is usable today, but if tiny teams are learning how to automate massive waterfall projects by trial and error, eventually we'll find out who the Centaur Knoll Bros are

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qdot @buttplug.engineer · 07/10/2026

Last week: math is god’s beautiful letter to the universe This week: we live in a universe that resembles a pug with several severe medical issues but is kinda cute in its own way nonetheless

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

B.R.E.A.M., tertiary, intangible goods y'all

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There's a really important distinction here, which I think the Godot governance rules have made nicely explicit, between using agents as a solo coder (imo default good, go experiment) and using agents in collaboration with other humans (imo exponentially increasing bad based on the number of humans)

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

de minimis = a small enough atomic piece of a copyrighted work can be considered no longer novel enough for protection moral rights = in some countries a living artist can sue to prevent a use of their work on the grounds of reputational harm, regardless of the copyright situation

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Right, that's the ethical dilemma at the heart of the legitimate transformative use debate--but it's not the maximalist view, that it's ok to use forensically identifiable chunks of an artist's work. (imo we don't need to reinvent the wheel here, de minimis and moral rights should be our guardrails)

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Right, afaik the big cloud services haven't done that kind of comprehensive fine-tuning, and with essentially infinite resources to defend against lawsuits, they haven't got an incentive to. (The only folks I know who do it are us individual artists with local models, and some smaller VFX companies)

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

imo at this point you can get the legitimate fair use benefits (statistical relationships) from indiscriminate training, then remove all but your own licensed material from the actual output (fine-tuning). But claiming rights in identifiable chunks of the original corpus material is just plagiarism.

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Max Woolf @minimaxir.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

1,012 bytes, make everyone happy.

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Golan Levin @golan.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

#Opportunity! The Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology has announced its 2026-2027 residency program, focused on "AGENCY", providing both local-to-NYC as well as virtual residencies for US-based artists. Deadline is Sunday, Oct 11! eyebeam.org/focus/agency

eyebeam.org

Current | Area of Focus | Eyebeam

Eyebeam supports artists who make radical, independent work about the way technology shapes our lives.

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Animators have argued for decades about which aspects of animation are the "medium," the "genre," or the "process," mostly pointlessly because by the time an argument starts to congeal into conventional wisdom, the production technologies have all changed. Now live action gets to have a turn

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

ELIZA broke the fooling-humans barrier in 1966; the Turing Test didn't last 20 years and its heir, the Chinese Room, starts by assuming that humans can be fooled. imo if Turing had still been alive then, age 53, his response to ELIZA would've likely radically changed the course of computer science

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The first time I ever heard a real capybara rattle call in a zoo, sometime in the late 2000s, it took me right back to the ROUSes. Turns out they do exist

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Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · 04/10/2026

has someone tried to write a 95 Theses style text on all the computer problems yet

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mcc @dryad.technology · 04/10/2026

In my opinion it is very good when a game has a color palette of size exactly 3

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Recently I keep thinking about, what if the transition from assembly to high level languages had been turned into a geopolitical football making headline news for years on end, instead of remaining a niche subject interesting to like 100,000 people in the whole world

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Dylan Reid @dylanreid.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Shawn's coinage of "agitslop" for AI political slop is perfect (derived from the old term agitprop - agitation propaganda). Let's make that a new standard term for that kind of garbage.

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I like both, but I do really agree about the similarities: they've got a strong connection to Jewish theology, Good Place more explicitly of course. Maya Rudolph is playing a nerfed Book of Job God, and unfortunately for Carol, Karolina Wydra's God is the original version

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

My go-to source of animal language wonder is sperm whale travel planning. They drop calves off with pod members before going on a dangerous squid hunt, gather at a birth to lift the newborn to the surface--suggesting they not only have concepts of speed, distance, time but can also communicate them

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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

from 2001. no one’s doing product testimonials like this anymore. t.co/PEswCtbEZz

Toyota's unease at being associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda is evident. In its September statement, the company said,
'Toyota does not have a sales or distribution channel in Afghanistan, and we do not export vehicles to that country."
Somewhat less laconic was Wade Hoyt, Toyota's spokesman in New York, who put the best corporate spin on the situation this week.
"It is not our proudest product placement," he said. "But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability."

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 03/10/2026

Another day working at the frontier AI lab. Everyone keeps asking me if the models have qualia. Buddy, I don’t even have qualia.

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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent

Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads:

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

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Yifat Shaik @yifatshaik.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Hate to sound like a grumpy old person but I might have to now ban asymmetrical two player co-op games from my classes until the students get some new ideas Thanks big walk

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

NYIT/ILM/Pixar house style has remained the default for two historical cycles of animation technology, for opposite reasons. The first time it worked the best with extreme compute constraints; the next time those constraints were gone and there were millions of hours of it available for training on

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mcc @dryad.technology · 02/10/2026

I think that parrots in the wild legitimately engage in use of language in a way which is recognizably human & I wonder (presumably there's research) how many animals are doing the same it's just harder to recognize because they're physically incapable of being crosstrained into speaking human words

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Corey Brotherson (open for new contracts/work, drop me an email) @coreybrotherson.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Not being able to publicly disclose which companies I currently work for turns every message on LinkedIn into a hilariously useful Voight-Kampff test. No, Mr 'I clearly used a bot script to send my request and didn’t read your profile', I don't think your pitch will be "relevant for NDA" at all

A screengrab from LinkedIn showing a connection request saying they might send me a pitch which may be "relevant for NDA"

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Brandon Sheffield @brandon.insertcredit.com · 01/10/2026

Several weeks ago, Phil Tippett's legendary animation studio in Berkeley, CA closed. An anonymous hero noticed a folder of CDs. This turned out to be hundreds of unseen hi-res images and videos from Star Wars, Robocop, Jurassic Park, etc. ~90 isos for you to browse: archive.org/details/tipp...

A casual Star Wars alien fella at the cantina, in a sun faded, reddish photo. Someone will be mad at me for not knowing who this is.

Phil, a balding Caucasian man, poses a model of the garthok, an antagonist from the Coneheads movie.

Phil, a balding caucasian man, points at some CG on a CRT computer monitor, as a younger man looks on. The screen shows a model of a dinosaur attacking a jeep, while there's an actual physical model of that event in the foreground for reference.

an isolated shot of a star wars vehicle. Sorry, I don't know star wars lol

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Nick Fisher @hydroxide.dev · 01/10/2026

Blender really should ship with a wasm runtime for add-ons, it would be a perfect fit. The python env is nice but it's very limited, for high performance or custom operations you really need to drop down to compiled code and targeting multiple architectures/platforms really is a pain.

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Samperson @samperson.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

you can automate the production of aesthetic objects, but i don't think you can automate cultural movement the same way. you can manipulate it, but that's more dynamic like warfare, territorial capture of attention.

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I recall someone saying that if European religious and folk-magic traditions had happened to settle on multi-part souls, like chakras, instead of the homunculus--would we then find the idea that human consciousness requires more than one system a bit less strange

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Nick Fox-Gieg @n1ckfg.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

imo maximalists want everything to happen in the model, but what they're waiting on is a breakthrough in the harness. The model by itself is human-like memory (information indexed with language) but not human-like cognition (language is a map to thought; thought is not made exclusively of language)

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