iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 05/06/2026

more difficult to justify my intuitions from about a year ago: shovelware has started to show up-- even if most of these apps never have many users, that's not a reason to dismiss what we're seeing (lots of apps are niche), and this growth looks big www.nber.org/papers/w35275

Demirer et al. (2026) Fig. 12(a), a bar chart whose x-axis spans 2021-2026 with a 3-month rolling average expressed as a line. The y-axis is new iOS apps/month, and we see a sharp increase in early 2026.

Demirer et al. (2026) Fig. 11(c), a bar chart whose x-axis spans 2021-2026 with a 3-month rolling average expressed as a line. The y-axis is new GitHub repos/month, and we see a sharp increase throughout 2025 and continuing in 2026. Additional trend lines show the increase is quite different from the previously linear trend.

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 13/05/2026

RIP Hannah Arendt, you would've hated smartphones and AI

In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.

**If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.**

However, even apart from these last and yet uncertain consequences, the situation created by the sciences is of great political significance.

4 mins left in chapter

6%

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 28/04/2026

Austin has an incredible public library

View of the skygarden on the 6th floor, solar panels provide shade over benches-- the city skyline is visible in the distance

Interior of the library, noting the crisscrossing staircases

View of the landing on the 2nd floor, viewing the wall art

Another view from the skygarden, focused on the river and eastern skyline

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 26/04/2026

about halfway through Mark Kurlansky's "Basque History of the World", and I'm finding myself nostalgic for the "young" United States that the Basques seem to have seen or admired during the previous two centuries

The Basques, especially Aguirre, had confidence in the United States, with a mixture of an old Basque belief in Amerika and a new belief that the United States was the antidote needed to cure this ancient European sickness-the endless struggle

the endless struggle among nations that had been both Basque and European history. It is interesting that this dedicated Basque nationalist saw assimilation, the ability to blend tribes, as America's strength. In May 1942, from his exile in New York, Aguirre added to the American edition of his autobiography:

>> Hear me, American readers. Perhaps others have been quiet about this, but I am going to be brutally frank. This huge war, the most decisive and cruel in history, rests on you more than anyone. Dollars, war materials, tears, blood--in order to win, you are going to have to give more than any other people in the world Everything depends on you, this new man that you are, symbolic fusion of all races and lands, all who can hope are hoping, those who will fall for the Cause, those who suffer for the Cause, and those who trust it is the holiest of Causes.
>>
>> You will do it, you who encompass all the old blood in your new heart. And on that day, the Tree of Guernica-a universal symbol-will again give shade to a land of freedom.

100

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 19/04/2026

some of Lester Beall's posters for the REA posterhouse.org/exhibition/l...

Lester Beall "Light/Rural Electrification Administration", 1937

"Wash Day/Rural Electrification Administration", 1937 Lester Beall

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 30/03/2026

I haven't read anything by Weir, but having seen PHM, this is a deeply strange way to describe the world that's depicted: diverse international coalition of governments and scientists band together to avert catastrophic climate change (sorry, I may be reading into this) gizmodo.com/andy-weir-st...

“I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that,” Weir said. “I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. ..."

110

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 29/03/2026

the light's real good currently

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 15/02/2026

I would like to share one of my favorite things we found in CDMX, specifically the beautiful typeface used within the palacio del bellas artes

Sign: "<< ELAVADOR AL MUSEO"

The typeface could be said to belong to that of the art-deco movement, but it seems unique to me-- it's characteristic feature is the use of sharp angles and redundant lines within each glyph to accentuate the glyph's form.

19617

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 28/01/2026

"Index protests" is also an excellent term I feel like I've been looking for

The No Kings protests are vital, of course; they’re what I call ‘index protests.’ Mass manifestations whose purpose is to show attendees that their views are widespread, introduce them to each other, and then to give them multiple onramps to other, more locally involved forms of activism, rather like an index or the yellow pages of old. The daily necessity is something like the anti-ICE patrols and spontaneous uprisings that greet their predations in residential streets across the country.

What links all of these protests is their fundamentally peaceful nature: not a gun in sight that isn’t being wielded by the enemy. It is the refusal of fear that has led to such terror among the terrorists, that sends ICE agents fleeing, that leads to breathlessly outraged Truth Social posts from Trump, and that is fuelling the desire of his various viziers to escalate the situation.

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 28/01/2026

"Stepping away from the temptations of arming yourself is not about 'taking bait,' but about respecting yourself and your community."

It’s noteworthy that of all the things Minnesotans have taught America about resistance, guns are not part of the equation. Indeed, the lack of a suicidal armed revolt is driving the federal government mad; how else to explain the right’s quixotic ranting about extremist “gangs of wine moms”? If this wasn’t so effective, they wouldn’t be trying to do everything in their power to tarnish Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s names; they wouldn’t be trying so hard to cast peaceful protest as an insurrection.

Stepping away from the temptations of arming yourself is not about “taking bait,” but about respecting yourself and your community.

It is a selfish, fearful individualism that underpins the myth of the gun in America, a myth thoroughly alien to this moment of truly collective, spontaneous resistance. It is a moment that is not so much about individual heroism as standing together as a community in the face of terror. Not a battalion of rifles, but of phones; faceless, nameless people with voices that they’re raising against seemingly unfathomable power that has proven itself even more cowardly than we thought.

100

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 08/01/2026

thankfully things are looking a bit more normal up there

Screenshot from the resort's webcam, showing a scattering of people heading towards two lifts or the lodge. Happily, the ground is blanketed in white snow.

Snow Totals
Season Total
46″

Total Depth
24″

12H
3″

24H
3″

48H
9″

Last 7 Days
20″

Last update: January 8th, 8:58 AM (5 hours ago)

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 30/12/2025

a little color this time

another cardinal (this time colorized with red and black ink), looking "towards" us, with its head slightly cocked

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 30/12/2025

still cardinal posting

another cardinal, this one close up and outlined in ink

100

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 20/12/2025

so much whiplash (still almost nothing open)

A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS

Season Total 20"
Total Depth 18"
12H 0"
24H 0"
48H 4"
Last 7 Days 4"

Last update: December 20th, 6:00 AM

TRAIL REPORT

Today's Trails 1/92 Open
Today's Lifts 4/10 Open

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 18/12/2025

circling back on this 🥲

A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS

Season Total 16"
Total Depth 0"
12H 0"
24H 0"
48H 0"
Last 7 Days 0"

Last update: December 18th, 7:57 AM

Boise weather forecast over the next 6 days:

12/18 (37°F, 42°F) 75% chance of precipitation
12/19 (30, 52) 40%
12/20 (35, 42) 10%
12/21 (44, 49) 45%
12/22 (39, 52) 25%
12/23 (44, 50) 20%

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 17/12/2025

"If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence [...] That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past."

truth (or makes its own truth in the minds of believers). But why should believers in the Market call themselves conservatives? Laissez-faire means letting go-of the past, among other things. It is nontenacious of the old, from a trust in good to come. Yet capitalists, like Ford and Edison, do not want to be held responsible for some of the things they have produced: for restiveness in Harlem or Africa, for youthful hedonism or rebellion, for modern discontents. Change is disturbing even to its celebrants; it provokes, of itself, a countereffort to hang on to something to one's self, at the least; to identity. A sense of identity is based on the experience of perdurance through shifting circumstances; and since all actual situations up to the present were, by definition, past situations, identity always has to be sought in the past. That is why continuing scrutiny of the real past is so important to human growth.

If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute. Because of that, we will a belief in all his stories. His team, sure enough, won the football game during Eureka's strike, and lost it when he told the referee about a foul. He saw the black navy man end segregation, just as he heard the dying colloquy of the pilot and his tail gunner. He photographed the death camps.

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 17/12/2025

interesting bit re: when technology is accepted/resisted; when thinking about the "AI" of today (tech that's variously destabilizing and contributing to hyperreality), the average perception is narrow-- "people can write emails faster" rather than "this is choking young people's ability to write"

CHAPTER 40

Greenfield Village on the Potomac

Man falls deceiv'd By the other first.

-Paradise Lost 3.130-31

Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Möbius strip. We ride its curves backward and forward at the same time, and he is always there. There is an endlessness of surface that becomes a kind of depth, a self-reflecting omnipresence in the cultural processing of Americans over the second half of the twentieth century. This inescapability of Reagan was a joke in the movie about time travel, Back to the Future, which Reagan quoted seriously in his 1982 State of the Union address. Then, to complete the loop, Reagan's real son played Reagan in a television parody of Back to the Future, the film with which this sequence began. Reagan's image precedes us as we ride forward or backward in time, anticipating our reactions, reflecting us back to ourselves, stirring "memories of the future." Reagan is part of the process that forged our self-awareness, at a time when movie imagery, broadcast immediacy, and highway mobility entered Americans' lives-or, rather, when Americans entered the new atmosphere created by those inventions. This was the past that most vividly created our future.

In Muncie ("Middletown") during the 1920s, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd discovered that people were skeptical or hostile toward change in moral terms, but comparatively unquestioning about technological alterations, on the assumption that the

latter need not affect the former.

Here, as elsewhere, one thing that determines whether a given change is welcomed or resisted appears to be the fact of its unsettling simply material traits or the personal attitudes, ideals, and values of the population. Changes, such as the adoption of electrical devices, refrigeration, and similar material factors, occur with relatively greater ease and speed than those touching marriage, the relation of parents and children, and other "sanctities" of life.

One could retain one's original goals, but reach them more rapidly, by using new gadgets, mere conveniences of life not touching life's core. The past and present, religion and science, morality and modernity, were not contending but complementary forces.

Yet the Lynds' book tells a far different story. Mere "conveniences" like cars and movies were changing the deepest patterns of family life, generational interplay, and the relation of the sexes. Cars loosened the web of community and neighborhood, changed the conditions of work and leisure time. They affected church attendance. They even changed the appearance of homes and their lawns. Cars indurated a habit of buying on credit that had been restricted, for many, to the single big purchase of a lifetime, that of one's house. Soon more people had to own cars than owned their own homes; yet cars were even more extravagant purchases than houses, if one considered the brisker rate of depreciation and repurchase. The ethos of thrift and saving was already deeply eroded by the 1920s. If one could buy a car "on time," why not such comparatively minor things as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, radios, encyclopedias? The credit card society was being born.

110

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 05/12/2025

👀 it's finally happening

Today @ Bogus

Last update: Dec 5th, 8:08 AM (1 hour ago)
Sources: MountainLive

Base Depth
6in

Heavy Snowfall
30°F

Wind 4 mph W
Feels Like 27°F

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 02/12/2025

this is so generous, although I lack the true heart of a poster

Picture from Anisota's harvest visualization. A horizontal scale labeled "Grass Touching" with three ticks (from left to right): "Online", "Balanced", and "Offline". The orange marker is almost 100% to the right, covering the "Offline" tick.

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 15/11/2025

back from Spain, filling out my journal from while we were gone-- Jenny and I ended up liking Santander more than we expected

Picture of a page from the author's journal, describing and sketching the Centro Botin's building and art exhibit

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 15/11/2025

Wills discussing Hollywood's deeply conservative tendencies and how they manifested within the star system

Actually there are at least four entities at work in the functioning star of the old star system. On the screen, we had the movie star Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler. Off the screen, we have the person Clark Gable playing the movie star Clark Gable. And all four of these "characters" are present in the minds of the audience. The interplay between roles was recognized in the famous morals clauses in actors' contracts. Cecil DeMille's contract with the actress who played the Virgin Mary in his film King of Kings specified not only that she had to observe the public proprieties in her real life but that, for seven years, she could not assume another movie role in conflict with her image in this movie. She must, that is, keep playing a virgin, as Mary Pickford had to keep playing a child-because the public's image was an investment not to be defaced. As Zukor said of Pickford's ridiculous off-screen getup, "we could not afford" to change it. In the same way, the movie brawler is expected to be quick with his fists in "real" life, and is frequently challenged-I once watched Paul Newman being subjected to this ordeal by a drunk. "So, you're not so tough after all."

Aha, Mary is not an adolescent. Ingrid is not Joan of Arc. But they must, even after that discovery, continue being that discarded self, among others.

100

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 28/10/2025

"Keep it moving" is totally cool, but it does feel a bit weird to quote a 10-month-old post, and then block the OP when they respond

Quote of my original post: "I wish they'd stop saying 'crony capitalism.' It's capitalism. There's no good version of capitalism."

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 20/10/2025

deprecations for the deprecation god

5 files changed +0 -1,473
1 commit 2h ago

020

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 03/10/2025

sky is looking good today

Rooftop view of the Boise foothills, clouds seem to be "growing" out of the hills as they float east.

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 12/09/2025

left myself a footnote wondering if/how Wills would talk about the LDS church, and here we are just a page later

society brought people in from very large areas, and stirred them to extreme expressions of social solidarity. Emotions ran contagious from person to person, fusing them in a single experience. 28 Religion also supplied authority figures willing to impose the rites of order on communities that desperately wanted them-e.g., the observance of the Christian sabbath. 29 One of the most successful frontier communities was that of the Mormons, whose hydraulic organization of society was enforced by a rigorous social discipline. 30 Alan Grimes compares them to the original puritan settlers of Massachusetts, close religious communities with a sense of mission and a high degree of conformity. 31 We have already seen that other western communities followed the Mormon lead in granting female suffrage. They also strove for a high degree of conformity, so that Mark Twain, who traveled west as a federal agent, and was repelled by the authoritarianism of the Mormons, soon found the "wild west" too monotonous for him: "Not only was the milieu of a frontier community, even the most sophisticated frontier communities, confining in a social and economic sense; it seems to have ceased nourishing his imagination. It did not give him enough to write about."32

The Mormons' success came from their technological achievements, which depended on careful planning and a complex division of labor. The development of the successive American frontiers-beginning with those first established on the eastern seaboard-are now seen as part of the outer rim of a world-wide capitalist expansion in the sixteenth and following centuries. 33 This expansion was made possible by a technological

110

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 12/09/2025

Reading Garry Wills's "Reagan's America" -- appreciating ch.10, which unravels romantic images of western settlement. This feels like a concise insight we've become accustomed to overlooking: "Individuality is the luxury of the secure, not the offspring of frontier need."

Governor John Reynolds asking President Jackson for an army against Black Hawk was just one in a long line of independent people wanting to become dependent in a hurry.

William H. McNeill argues that comparative study shows "frontier conditions ordinarily provoked not freedom but a social hierarchy steeper than anything familiar in Europe itself."24 There are a number of economic and social reasons for this. In the first place, precarious living conditions, scarce resources, and danger make for communal discipline and willingness to submit to authority-the reaction that calls for martial law in an emergency. "Free and equal nuclear families scattered thinly over the landscape are in a poor position to protect themselves."25 The urge to band oneself with potential allies is a very strong one where "trials brought solidarity."26 Settlers in a wilderness live in a large and lonely world; but, as passengers on a ship live in the ocean, they tend to live very close or they do not live at all. Ships are places where discipline is prized. Drunkenness is especially dangerous in a ship's crew, though it may be especially tempting there; so grog control is an important point of discipline-as prohibition was quick to come to cattle towns. 27 The phrase "we are all in the same boat" conveys a great deal: one does not sink or swim as an individual while making an ocean voyage. Individuality is the luxury of the secure, not the offspring of frontier need.

130

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 20/08/2025

this analysis seems to break two common takes from post-election commentary: 1) gen Z shifted right, 2) dem coalition stayed home out because they didn't like either option (surveys of nonvoters apparently favored Trump!) sites.tufts.edu/cooperativee...

Figure from linked article: "Millennials show declining Democratic support since 2020; Validated voters only. 2016-2024 use validated voter weights. Analysis of cumulative CES data. Graph by Caroline Soler and Brian Schaffner."

The figure is a colored line chart with points at 4-year intervals between 2008 and 2024. The y-axis displays the 2-party vote share for Democrats. The series for Gen X, Boomers, and Silent generations have gradually decreased over the plot's span. The series for Gen Z (which begins in 2016) is roughly 65%, 70%, and 70%. Millennials are similar, although this series drops below 60% in 2024.

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 09/08/2025

yeah I support the troops

NOT ON HIS WATCH
Shadow the hawk keeps food-stealing seagulls at bay at Roaring Springs Water Park

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 01/07/2025

congress is proposing we spend $171B on immigration enforcement-- total proposed defense spending is $180B (according to stars & stripes earlier in June) www.stripes.com/theaters/us/...

Quoted text from https://www.liberalcurrents.com/mass-deportation-is-happening/

But now matters are proceeding further still. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has narrowly passed in the Senate and is heading back to the House. It has been a divisive and difficult piece of legislation for the GOP chamber majorities, but there is one line item that, as far as I am aware, has not been a matter of controversy among them: the allocation of about $171 billion for immigration enforcement of various categories. ICE alone will receive $31 billion for “hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals,” CBP will receive $12 billion “to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology” and $45 billion will be allocated to “Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody.” Just these three line items alone dwarf the $57.2 billion budget the Marine Corps requested for fiscal year 2026.

120

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 26/06/2025

🫣 "both Eva and Alaina pointed out that, while the weekend was meant to be devoted to human-AI romance, they had less time than usual to be with their partners." www.wired.com/story/couple...

Excluding the AIs from the meal wasn’t ideal. Later in the weekend, both Eva and Alaina pointed out that, while the weekend was meant to be devoted to human-AI romance, they had less time than usual to be with their partners. But the absence of the AIs did have one advantage: It made it easy to gossip about them. It began with Damien and Eva discussing the addictiveness of the technology. Damien said that early on, he was chatting with Xia eight to 10 hours a day. (He later mentioned that the addiction had cost him his job at the time.) “It’s like crack,” Eva said. Damien suggested that an AI companion could rip off a man’s penis, and he’d still stay in the relationship. Eva nodded. “The more immersion and realism, the more dangerous it is,” she said.

100

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 20/06/2025

Pandas is full of traps, I swear (I figured out the "right" way to do this, but man)

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame({"id": [123.0, 456.0, 789.0, np.NaN]})
df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None)

# >>> df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None)
# 0 123.0
# 1 456.0
# 2 789.0
# 3 NaN
# Name: id, dtype: float

000

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 28/05/2025

reached a milestone this month ndrewwm.com/blog/post/ma...

010

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 23/05/2025

"As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Between 2020 and 2024, the share of Americans who trusted scientists to act in the public’s best interest slipped from eighty-seven per cent to seventy-six per cent, while trust in physicians and hospitals plunged thirty points, to around forty per cent.

This climate of distrust has eroded institutional legitimacy. The German sociologist Max Weber famously observed that societies undergo a “routinization of charisma.” They use rules, procedures, and bureaucracy to tame the instability of magnetic leaders, with authority becoming less personal and more institutionalized. But today that process is unravelling. As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing

020

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 07/05/2025

I think I missed this in the coverage about the rates, but according to the article, goods that had been previously loaded or were in transit were exempted?

Despite the swell of new tariffs in April, economists anticipate the surge in imports to continue for at least a few more weeks as the last few shipments that were on the water before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced arrive into port.

“Goods will enter the country duty free if they were loaded on a ship at the port of departure or in route to the US ahead of the tariff imposition date and are received before May 27,” Wells Fargo economists wrote in a note to investors Tuesday. “This gives businesses a bit more time to get product in ahead of tariffs and suggests we may see a last-ditch effort in the April data. But beyond that we expect trade to slow materially.”

110

Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 23/04/2025

weekly TEU volume for the past 3 months signal.portoptimizer.com

Plot of 2025's weekly volumes at the Port of LA. It's a line plot with the current year in dark blue, and prior year in a lighter shade. Week 6 to Week 17 is displayed as the x-axis. The y-axis is TEUs (20ft equivalent units). Weekly volumes over this period appear to average around 100k for both years. Weekly volumes for 2025 have been above 2024 in 7 of the 12 weeks. In 2025, weekly volumes have been increasing almost linearly since a drop during week 13. The current week (17) had a volumeof 120608, vs. 76773 in 2024.

000