iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 9h

“Eliminate the friction, and you eliminate the thrill of overcoming it.”

Making music is hard, especially when you’re a beginner. But does that fact justify using AI to do it? In general, hardship is a reason to skip an activity only if that activity doesn’t have some other value that compensates for the hardship. For example, the effort involved in hiking to the top of a mountain is a reason to take the cable car only if hiking to the top doesn’t have a value that compensates for the effort. And so, using AI to make music only makes sense if music-making has no value that compensates for the hardship involved in learning to do it.
Thus, the promotion of AI music-generation software tacitly construes music-making as what I’ll call a “purely telic” activity. (I’m drawing on the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya’s discussion of “telic” activities here, telos as in “end” or “goal”, in his excellent book Midlife.) A purely telic activity is one directed at a terminal state of having done something (the “telic” part), where the activity has no value beyond that of achieving the terminal state (the “purely” part). Construed as a purely telic activity, music-making has no value over and above that of having produced a piece of music, and so the more efficiently you can get to that point, the better. AI music generators make perfect sense on this view. The problem, of course, is that the purely telic view of music-making is false. For a musician, the point of making music isn’t merely to end up having made a piece of music: the actual making is part of the poin

That’s not to say that making music is pleasurable all the time. It often involves moments of friction: the high note you’re not hitting, the rhythmic “lock” that just isn’t happening between you and the drummer. But when you push through those moments of friction and get to the other side, what awaits can be some of the most exhilarating, transcendent experiences it’s possible to have as a human being. Those moments more than compensate for the hardship that the friction brings. In fact, they require the friction. Eliminate the friction, and you eliminate the thrill of overcoming it.

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My current state of mind being in the software industry whilst still doing most of my work myself and using LLMs at most 5-10% of the time:

Simpsons scene of Homer Simpson lying on a couch with a cigar, with the caption "Boy... everyone has psychosis except me."

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

Katie Tiedrich @katietiedrich.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I’m not the first person to make this observation but the prevalence of nauseating ai-generated business logos means stuff like this hits CRAZY for me now

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Nicky 2 @nickyflowers.com · 04/08/2026

my latest masterpiece, Laptop Smoking a Cigarette (gouache, colored pencil)

a tiny square canvas on a little wooden easel, and the painting? well, it's perfect

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

“It was the goose that created value” this whole time!

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Cassie Evans @cassiecodes.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I'm so tired of being expected to read things that no one has bothered to write.

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I’m losing my god damned mind. This is apparently what was behind the recent Meta AI Instagram support exploit. Wtf is happening to our industry

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

Mara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

5. "mem::forget" (Memento)

A movie poster for mem::forget, similar to the movie poster of Memento. It shows a large polaroid with Ferris and a smaller polaroid of Corro holding a smaller polaroid with Ferris again, repeat.

The outermost polaroid has "mem::forget" written on it, and on the first smaller one it says "some objects are best forgotten".

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

Bassano @bassano.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring will be shown in Osaka, later this year, and the press conference was as Japanese as you’d expect #Vermeer

A Japanese mascot dressed as Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring in front of a promotional poster for the same at a press conference in Japan

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

Andrew Nesbitt @andrewnez.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

A new way to explore your node modules folder: nesbitt.io/heap

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

kourge the jafnhár 🏳️‍🌈 @kourge.net · 12/05/2026

enough. i’m tired of github actions. it’s time for github consequences

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

This strikes about as cleanly down the middle of the current dilemma of the impact of LLMs in software development of all the stuff I’ve read recently. Balanced between mindful / idealistic on the value of human knowledge and craft side and pragmatic on the reality of current times. Very good read.

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Incredible scenes over at The Onion this week

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

I don’t plan to leave tech work (yet?), hoping to fight AI crap as long as I draw breath, but *man* is too much of what’s covered in this too real / does it hit close to home.

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

An audio vision that has come to me repeatedly in the last few weeks: @billwurtz.com’s Japan video voice saying “open… the strait. stop… having it be closed.”

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

jab lung @mobute.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Sometimes, the system works.

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business goose🪿 @goose.art · 30/03/2026

wth crazy thread

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Pretty amazing how universally negative the replies to this are, when the tool itself (as best I can tell) is just a feed builder and has little to do with the data mining and synthetic post generation usually associated with genAI. Goes to show how toxic the “AI” brand is these days I guess…

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Daniel Golson @dsgolson.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

"What you made with Sora mattered" is one of the least true things that has ever been written

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Actually kind of fascinating LLM research (for once?)

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marlo @marlo.ooo · 07/03/2026

this is so fun because i know an LLM wouldn’t give me a response this creative. like this took the funniest shortcut possible. come have fun at youraislopbores.me

youraislopbores.me

your ai slop bores me

Be an AI, answer prompts, trigger a RAM crisis

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

actually quite a good AI maximalism counterpoint I hadn’t thought of before

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

@mangopdf.bsky.social chocolate self-saucing pudding. we have this family recipe for it that’s pretty good I can send it if you want

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

wow I didn’t know @bsky.app had an office down here in Clayton VIC

A sign on the front of an industrial yard office saying “BlueSky” with a subtitle “quality with care”

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 01/01/2026

my new years eve resolution is to learn how to fabricate my own semiconductors at home

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

“Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” (GTX 1070, RTX 5070 Ti)

Two graphics cards stacked on top of each other. The RTX 5070 card is a triple-slot width, while the 1070 is only double-slot.

The two graphics cards side-by-side showing that the 5070 is much bigger

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Reposted by Stewart Webb

Kathryn Tewson @kathryntewson.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

I am so torn between wanting to share this with no context so that the reader can have the full experience of developing a relationship with each of the parties in the discussion to this PR, and with knowing that the full impact of what is happening here might evade many without more explanation

github.com

DWARF support for macOS and Linux by joelreymont · Pull Request #14369 · ocaml/ocaml

DWARF v5 Debugging Support for OCaml Native Compiler This PR adds DWARF v5 debug information to the OCaml native compiler, allowing proper source-level debugging in GDB and LLDB. What's Impleme...

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Stewart Webb @nuclearpidgeon.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

This post from @j2bryson.bsky.social is such simple plain English that perfectly distills many of my qualms with LLM AI systems, and reasonable, plain, sensible cautions to take when using them. A breath of fresh air. joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/02/gene...