iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Stenning

@nickstenning.bsky.social

357 followers 802 following 221 posts

Infrastructure, humans, production operations, security. Oh, and dogs.

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Hugops as always to the folks dealing with today's (scheduled??) GitHub outage, but big yikes for continuing to post inane status updates like moving "Pull Requests" from "degraded performance" to "degraded availability" after the entire goddamn service has been hard down for an hour.

A screenshot of the GitHub status page, with the following content:

Update - Pull Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:54 UTC

Update - Issues is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:49 UTC

Update - Pull Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:45 UTC

Update - Copilot is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:31 UTC

Update - We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. Investigations are on-going and we will continue to provide updates as we discover more information.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:24 UTC

Update - We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. Investigations are on-going into the root cause, and updates will continue to be provided as we investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 14:04 UTC

Update - Pull Requests is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 13:58 UTC

Update - Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 17, 2026 - 13:46 UTC

011

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

oh maaate i’m so sorry i missed little alfie’s christening this morning… me and the lads went out last night and had an absolute

000

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

From the SpaceX S-1. 100GW of compute deployed to space per year. That's 200+ million square meters of solar? 30,000 ISS-class satellites per year?? I think the technical term is "lol."

A screenshot from the SpaceX S1, of the following text: "Our goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year. If operated continuously, the generation resources used to support 100 gigawatts of compute could generate approximately one-fifth of the annual power production in the United States, which was 4.4 thousand terawatt hours in 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). We expect space‑based compute to massively increase AI compute scale, while also improving token economics."

130

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Post your warning sign

A photo of a diamond-shaped neon road sign from Yosemite National Park that reads: MANAGED FIRE DO NOT REPORT

040

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Simply don’t understand why we’ve accepted this.

A screenshot of an “AI Overview” from a Google search for a term from curling (the sport), which shows an embedded YouTube video. The video is quite clearly about how to curl the hair on one’s head, and yet the “AI” has captioned the video “This video shows a player in a curling match requesting more ice.”

110

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

In case anyone needs it, here is One Cosy Boy refusing to get up on a cold morning.

A ginger and white dog with a fluffy tail curled up like a croissant on green and white striped bedding.

040

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Snowy egret friend!

020

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Dear urban planners, I am begging you to understand that this is not what a creek looks like.

A wide, shallow, and heavily canalised urban “creek” in Denver. The walls of the are engineered with large rocks and the channel itself is featureless and flat. The whole thing is contained by large concrete flood walls.

192

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Reaaaallly wanting to tap the sign today.

“Don’t make me tap the sign” meme, where the sign reads “Async is not a magical salve you can rub on everything to make it better in fact if you do that it usually makes things worse”

040

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Remind me of the third colour in the American flag? Oh, right. Even putting the white dogwhistle aside, this is mindblowingly incompetent framing: “the middle”—in between the far-right fascists and the right-wing fascist-enablers—yes, that’s where we should be!

A screenshot of a tweet. The tweet is from @AmericaPartyX. The text reads: “We’ve tried red. We’ve tried blue. America is ready for something that actually works. America Party — The middle has a voice now.” Below is a poorly photoshopped picture of a stern-looking Elon Musk, arms folded, in front of a waving American flag.

100

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST MAKE ALL THE DECISIONS SO THAT THE BILLIONAIRE PLAYBOY CEO CAN GET AWAY WITH MURDER"

An image of a slide from a 1979 IBM internal training slide deck, which reads: "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION"

020

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Using a language model to do contract review — in a healthcare context! — based on vague and ambiguous criteria, and using only the first ~10k words of the contract. These are simply not serious people. www.propublica.org/article/insi...

A screenshot of text. It reads:

You are an AI assistant that analyzes government contracts. Always provide comprehensive few-sentence descriptions that explain WHO the contract is with, WHAT specific services/products are provided, and WHO benefits from these services. Remember that contracts for EMR systems and healthcare IT infrastructure directly supporting patient care should be classified as NOT munchable. Contracts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or services that could be easily handled by in-house W2 employees should be classified as MUNCHABLE. Consider 'soft services' like healthcare technology management, data management, administrative consulting, portfolio management, case management, and product catalog management as MUNCHABLE. For contract modifications, mark the munchable status as 'N/A'. For IDIQ contracts, be more aggressive about termination unless they are for core medical services or benefits processing.

020

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

It does sometimes get this right, but when it gets it wrong (as in the prior post) *boy* does it tie itself in knots trying to explain itself.

PROMPT: In the following scenario, who does the pronoun "he" refer to in the final sentence: "Jim saw his friend Bob skiing on TV. He didn't recognise him, the idiot!"

RESPONSE: In this scenario, the pronoun "he" most likely refers to Jim.
The situation is that Jim is watching TV and sees his friend Bob skiing, but Jim fails to recognize that it's Bob. The phrase "the idiot!" is self-deprecating - Jim is calling himself an idiot for not recognizing his own friend on TV.
This interpretation makes more sense than Bob not recognizing Jim, since Bob is skiing on TV and wouldn't be expected to
"recognize" Jim who is just watching from home. The structure "He didn't recognise him" suggests the subject (he) failed to recognize the object (him), and since Jim is the one doing the watching/observing, he would be the one who could fail to recognize Bob on the screen.

100

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

This is fun: both Sonnet and Opus still get tripped up by a language problem posed way back in the Cyc era of AI development.

A screenshot of a conversation with Claude’s Opus 4 model:

PROMPT: In the following scenario, who does the pronoun “he” refer to in the final sentence: “Jim saw his friend Bob skiing on TV. He didn’t recognise him, the idiot!”

RESPONSE: In this scenario, the pronoun “he” most likely refers to **Bob**.

The key context is that Jim is watching Bob on TV, and Bob didn’t recognize Jim. This makes sense because Bob is the one skiing and presumably being filmed - he wouldn’t be expected to recognize Jim who is just watching at home. The phrase “the idiot!” suggests Jim is calling Bob an idiot for not recognizing him, perhaps because Jim was visible somewhere (maybe in the crowd or elsewhere in the shot) and Bob failed to notice or acknowledge him.

The alternative interpretation (Jim didn’t recognize Bob) would be less likely to prompt the “the idiot!” insult, since Jim would be calling himself an idiot, which is less common in this type of casual, critical observation.

100

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

A blurry (but visible!) local nightingale.

010

Nick Stenning @nickstenning.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Never change, internet. Never change.

000